Martha viewed marriage in a similarly pragmatic light. When her niece Fanny contemplated marriage to George Augustine Washington, Martha tried to coach her in sizing up marital prospects. She recommended that Fanny look at a man’s character and worldly prospects—whether he was honest, upright, hardworking, and likely to be a good provider. She didn’t mention looks or charm or compatibility or any of the other romantic prerequisites that might preoccupy a modern woman.
When Fanny and George Augustine decided to get married, the Washingtons were jubilant about the match of these two young favorites. Before the October 1785 wedding, Washington paid for his nephew to spend time in the West Indies in an attempt to repair his health. Although the Washingtons invited the young couple to share the Mount Vernon mansion with them, the suggestion came loaded with one big caveat. As Washington told Lund, the young couple had been urged to “make this house their home till the squalling and trouble of children might become disagreeable.”34 By this point, the Washingtons had probably had their fill of the responsibility of caring for children.
Just as Washington’s postwar years were touched with many intimations of mortality, so Martha had many somber occasions to reflect on life’s brevity. In April 1785 an express messenger arrived at Mount Vernon bearing a double dose of dreadful news for her: her mother, seventy-five-year-old Frances Dandridge, and her last surviving brother, forty-eight-year-old Judge Bartholomew Dandridge, had died within nine days of each other. These deaths lengthened the already-long list of family losses Martha had endured, starting with the demise of her first husband and all four of her children. The death of her younger brother meant that, among her seven siblings, only her youngest sister, Betsy, was still alive. Like the Washingtons, the Dandridge clan seemed doomed to suffer untimely deaths.
The following year George Washington suffered two tremendous blows. He had always delighted in the bright young men in his military family, often finding it easier to befriend these protégés than his peers, and he had felt special warmth for Lieutenant Colonel Tench Tilghman, who handled his business matters in Baltimore. “I have often repeated to you that there are few men in the world to whom I am more sincerely attached by inclination than I am to you,” Washington had assured him.35 Genial and unassuming, Tilghman had entered fully into Washington’s confidence, and the latter was grief-stricken when the younger man died at age forty-one in April 1786. In a mighty tribute, Washington told Jefferson that his former aide had “as fair a reputation as ever belonged to a human character,” and he speculated that he mourned the death more keenly than anyone outside of Tilghman’s own family.36
Perhaps more consequential for America’s future was the demise of General Nathanael Greene at forty-three. Just as Washington and Greene had seen eye to eye on war-related matters, so they had viewed the country’s postwar turmoil with similar apprehension. Like Washington, Greene had developed a federal perspective and feared that the total autonomy of the states would culminate in feuding and anarchy. As he warned Washington, “Many people secretly wish that every state should be completely independent and that, as soon as our public debts are liquidated, that Congress should be no more—a plan that would be as fatal to our interest at home as ruinous to it abroad.”37 Unfortunately, Greene’s personal finances were in no less disorderly a state than those of the country at large: he had accumulated such heavy debts guaranteeing contracts for the southern army that it gave him “much pain and preyed heavily upon my spirits.”38 He also revealed to Washington in August 1784 that for two months he had experienced a “dangerous and disagree[able] pain” in his chest, which sounds like heart disease.39 In June 1786, while at his estate near Savannah, Georgia, he was seized at the table with a “violent pain in his eye and head,” followed by his death a few days later.40
Washington mourned Greene’s death for many months. Beyond personal grief, he knew that the country had lost a man cut out for bigger things. He had counted on Greene as a political ally and kindred spirit and said he regretted “the death of this valuable character, especially at this crisis, when the political machine seems pregnant with the most awful events.”41 It seems likely that, had Greene lived, Washington would have chosen him as the first secretary of war in preference to Henry Knox. Greene died in such dire economic straits that Washington volunteered to pay for the education of his son, George Washington Greene. It was yet another example of Washington’s extraordinary generosity in caring for the offspring of friends and family, whatever his own financial stringency.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
A Masterly Hand
FOR A MAN WHO EMPHASIZED HIS DISCOMFORT when posing for artists, George Washington dedicated an extraordinary amount of time to having his likeness preserved for posterity. As shown by his constant attention to his papers, he guarded his fame with vigilance. Sensitive to charges of self-promotion—charges that seemed to ring in his ears alone—he preferred sitting for artists when he could cite a plausible political excuse for doing so. Such was the case in the late summer of 1783, when Congress commissioned an equestrian statue of him and gave the prestigious assignment to artist Joseph Wright, who had the perfect pedigree to appease Washington’s strict conscience. His mother, Patience Wright, a Quaker sculptor from Philadelphia, specialized in waxwork portraits. While mother and son were based in wartime London, she had patented a unique form of espionage by relaying secret messages to Benjamin Franklin and American politicians at home through messages sealed inside her waxed heads.
After studying with Benjamin West in London, Joseph Wright returned to America and received the coveted commission for the Washington statue. He began with an oil portrait of the general that many deemed “a better likeness of me than any other painter has done,” Washington conceded.1 Washington was then residing at Rocky Hill, outside Princeton, giving him time for this diversion. Protective of his image and afraid of appearing pretentious, Washington rebuffed Wright’s request that he don a Roman toga. As a result, the painting is plain and powerfully realistic, showing a uniformed but unadorned Washington who eschews the standard props of power. Wright caught the weighty toll that the war years had exacted on Washington, whose face is long, gaunt, and devoid of animation; his eyes lack sparkle or luster. The nose is thick and straight and blunter than in earlier portraits. As Washington commented justly about Wright’s style, “His forte seems to be in giving the distinguishing characteristics with more boldness than delicacy.”2 The painting also pinpointed an important quirk of Washington’s face: the lazy right eye that slid off into the corner while the left eye stared straight ahead.
To prepare for the equestrian statue, Wright crafted a life mask of Washington’s face with plaster of paris. Cooperating with artists brought out a certain drollery in Washington, and work on the mask led to a charming comic vignette with Martha Washington. As Washington recalled, the artist “oiled my features over, and, placing me flat upon my back upon a cot, proceeded to daub my face with the plaster. Whilst [I was] in this ludicrous attitude, Mrs. Washington entered the room, and, seeing my face thus overspread with the plaster, involuntarily exclaimed [in alarm]. Her cry excited in me a disposition to smile, which gave my mouth a slight twist . . . that is now observable in the bust which Wright afterward made.”3 Although Wright constructed the preparatory bust, he never completed the equestrian statue.