Martha sometimes found Nelly a little unconventional for her tastes, but the president adored her. Far more trying was his relationship with George Washington Parke Custis, who recapitulated his father’s history of academic apathy. He had grown into a handsome teenager, crowned with curly hair, a broad face, and large, attractive eyes. When Washy entered Princeton in the autumn of 1796—the president thought the school had “turned out better scholars” and “more estimable characters” than any other—the president didn’t know whether he would adjust to the academic rigors or loaf his way through.54 As with Jacky, Washington smothered the young man with advice, warning him against idle amusements, dissipated company, and hasty friendships. Trying to instill his own prudent habits, he told him to “select the most deserving only for your friendships, and, before this becomes intimate, weigh their dispositions and character well.”55 Washington’s vague bromides about Washy becoming a scholar and a useful member of society seemed like so much wishful thinking.
Within six months of Washy’s arrival at Princeton, Washington was confronted by disturbing reports from the boy’s tutor. “From his infancy, I have discovered an almost unconquerable disposition to indolence,” Washington informed the professor in words that echoed his chronic dismay with Jacky Custis.56 Like Jacky, Washy apologized profusely for his misdemeanors and promised to reform. He assured Washington that “like the prodigal son,” he would be “a sincere penitent,” but such noble intentions lasted only as long as it took the ink to dry.57 However good-natured and ingratiating in his letters, Washy was, at bottom, feckless and incorrigible. He would say all the right things, then do all the wrong things, and he lasted only a year at Princeton.
THE TWO-TERM PRESIDENCY had taxed Washington in many ways, not least in his personal finances. In March 1795, when his friend Charles Carter, Jr., approached him for a thousand-dollar loan, Washington, always touchy about borrowing, burst into a recitation of his financial stringency: “My friends entertain a very erroneous idea of my pecuniary resources . . . Such has been the management of my estate for many years past, especially since my absence from home, now six years, as barely to support itself.”58 He protested that his government allowance barely covered the extravagant costs of entertaining and that he had resorted to selling western lands to escape debt.
As he meditated on the end of his presidency, he mused about the prospect of “tranquillity with a certain income” and decided to pursue his earlier scheme of selling his western lands and leasing out the four Mount Vernon farms, while retreating to the fifth, the Mansion House, with Martha.59 On February 1, 1796, he posted advertisements for the sale of thirteen tracts along three western rivers—the Ohio, Great Kanawha, and Little Miami—amounting to a whopping 36,000 acres. These ads were posted in Philadelphia papers and well-frequented taverns in western Pennsylvania. The properties dated from the distant period when the young Anglophile officer had received bounty lands for service in the French and Indian War and had cornered aggressively the rights of fellow soldiers. In undertaking these sales, Washington harbored a secret agenda, hoping to use the proceeds to help emancipate his slaves.
In recruiting able farmers to rent the four outlying farms, the Father of His Country had so little faith in American farmers that he placed anonymous ads not only in eastern newspapers but as far afield as England, Scotland, and Ireland. “My wish is to get associations of farmers from the old countries, who know how . . . to keep the land in an improving state rather than the slovenly ones of this [country], who think (generally) of nothing else but to work a field as long as it will bear anything,” he told William Pearce, Mount Vernon’s estate manager.60 He now resolved to introduce the crop-rotation scheme that he had worked out on paper but that his hapless overseers had never been able to put into practice. Having long known that tobacco depleted the soil, he wanted to plant corn, wheat, clover, potatoes, and grass in a scientific sequence.
Conscious that he would someday free his slaves, Washington wanted to avoid doing anything that might interfere with that plan. His letters betray growing disgust with slavery, as when he told Pearce that “opulent” Virginians were made “imperious and dissipated from the habit of commanding slaves and living in a measure without control.”61 However benevolent his intentions were, he remained a largely absentee owner, able to exercise scant control over his overseers’ harsh practices, as shown in one 1795 letter to Pearce: “I am sorry to find by your last reports that there has been two deaths in the [slave] family since I left Mount Vernon, and one of them a young fellow. I hope every necessary care and attention was afforded him. I expect little of this from McCoy, or indeed from most of his class, for they seem to consider a Negro much in the same light as they do the brute beasts on the farms, and often treat them as inhumanly.”62 Washington mentally divided his slaves into productive ones who warranted favor and those unable or unwilling to work. When Pearce distributed linen to slaves, Washington instructed him to provide the good stuff “to the grown people and the most deserving, whilst the more indifferent sort is served to the younger ones and worthless.”63
Whatever his shortcomings as a master, Washington continued to refine his plan to free his slaves someday. So long as he was president, the subject was taboo; Washington told David Stuart that “reasons of a political, indeed of [an] imperious nature” forbade any such action.64 He wrote these words during the brouhaha over the Jay Treaty, when southern planters were especially upset over his policies and he could not afford to antagonize them further. Starting in 1795, Washington’s letters reflect a growing preoccupation with knowing who were his dower slaves, over whom he had no control, and those he owned outright and could free.
Washington’s plans to lease the four farms and simplify his future life came to naught. Adding to his nagging economic uncertainty was the regretted departure of William Pearce due to an “increasing rheumatic affection.”65 For the demanding Washington, the seasoned Pearce had been a godsend, a man of reliable industry and integrity. In October 1796 Washington replaced him with James Anderson, a native of Scotland well trained in agriculture, who would take the operations at Mount Vernon in some unexpected directions. The switch, which came as the president contemplated retirement, could only have exacerbated his worries about the situation that awaited him at home.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
The Master of Farewells
IN 1796 GEORGE WASHINGTON was often in a somber, pessimistic mood. One visitor who encountered him on his sixty-fourth birthday that February said “he seemed considerably older. The innumerable vexations he has met with in his different public capacities have very sensibly impaired the vigor of his constitution and given him an aged appearance.”1 He had long fathomed the peculiar dynamics of fame, the way fickle crowds respond first with adulation and then scorn to any form of hero worship. From partisan quarters, he was experiencing the rude comeuppance he had long known hovered in the background. Patrick Henry was shocked at his slanderous treatment: “If he whose character as our leader during the whole war . . . is so roughly handled in his old age, what may be expected of men of the common standard?”2