As proof of his unswerving commitment to the city, Washington purchased lots in various locations to avoid accusations of favoritism toward any section. After hearing criticism that the neighborhood near the Capitol would lack housing for congressmen, he bought adjoining parcels on North Capitol Street, between B and C streets, and constructed a pair of attached three-story brick houses designed by Dr. William Thornton. Boasting that they stood upon “a larger scale than any in the vicinity of the Capitol,” he said they would be capable of housing “between twenty and thirty boarders”—an excellent example of Washington’s take-charge spirit.
Much as its backers had intended, the new capital was a southern city that would be hospitable to slavery, and it continued to owe its existence to slave labor. Noting the arduous work involved in draining swampland, one commissioner admitted that the project “could not have [been] done without slaves.”9 Five slave carpenters now labored over the President’s House, and future presidents who lived there, starting with Jefferson, would enjoy the residence in undisturbed possession of their human property. When Julian Niemcewicz toured the Capitol in 1798, it pained him to see slaves hard at work: “I have seen them in large numbers, and I was very glad that these poor unfortunates earned eight to ten dollars per week. My joy was not long lived. I am told that they were not working for themselves; their masters hire them out and retain all the money for themselves. What humanity! What a country of liberty.”10 For many decades, Washington, D.C., would qualify as a work in progress. George Washington never lived to see John Adams occupy a still-unfinished, sparsely furnished President’s House. As he had feared, congressmen complained about the incomplete Capitol and inadequate lodgings, and the huge Capitol dome was completed only during the Civil War. For a long time the Capitol and President’s House stood out as splendid but incongruous fragments in a still barren landscape; only later would the city expand to fill the spacious contours of Washington’s buoyant dream.
DESPITE HIS CHILDLESS STATE, Washington had enjoyed a happy, abundant family life, having first stepchildren and then stepgrandchildren while also serving as guardian for numerous family orphans at Mount Vernon. After his sister, Betty, died, he had brought her son Lawrence, a childless widower, to Mount Vernon to aid with surplus visitors. Like most males, Lawrence fell instantly in love with Nelly Custis, only this time she reciprocated the attention, producing yet another union of the Washington and Custis clans. So that Nelly could marry at age twenty, Washington made official his position as her legal guardian, enabling him to sign the marriage license. In a tribute to Nelly’s love for her adoptive grandfather, the wedding was celebrated by candlelight at Mount Vernon on February 22, 1799, Washington’s sixty-seventh birthday. Deferring to the bride’s wishes, Washington appeared in his old blue and buff wartime uniform. Martha “let all the servants come in to see” the wedding, one slave recalled, and gave them “such good things to eat” as part of the celebration.11 The newlyweds stayed on as Mount Vernon residents after Washington gave them the vast Dogue Run farm.
Washington’s history with Nelly’s brother, Washy, remained problematic. Despite Washington’s constant exhortations and the boy’s eternal pledges to reform, the latter dropped out of Princeton, and in 1798 Washington enrolled him in the smaller St. John’s College in Annapolis. “Mr. Custis possesses competent talents to fit him for any studies,” Washington promised the school’s president, “but they are counteracted by an indolence of mind, which renders it difficult to draw them into action.”12 For Washington, who felt keen deprivation at having missed college, his grandson’s apathy must have been frustrating. The boy was never less than affectionate or respectful to him, but like his father before him, he was simply incorrigible.
When young Washington posed the question of whether he should not drop out of St. John’s as well, the former president threw up his hands in despair: “The question . . . really astonishes me! for it would seem as if nothing I could say to you made more than a momentary impression.”13 Bowing to the futility of pushing the boy any further, Washington had him tutored at Mount Vernon by Tobias Lear. When Washy then contemplated an inappropriate marriage, Washington tried to prevent it by getting him appointed to a cavalry troop. He ended up with a fatalistic attitude toward his trying adopted grandson as someone who meant well but suffered from a congenital inability to make good on his pledges.
A deeper source of discontent in Washington’s last year was the continuing financial worries that preyed on his mind, reaching their nadir in the spring of 1799. Even when he rode off to Philadelphia in November 1798, cheered by the adulatory multitudes, he gnashed his teeth over his finances, bewailing that “nothing will answer my purposes like the money, of which I am in extreme want, and must obtain on disadvantageous terms.”14 Never able to economize, he confessed that “I find it no easy matter to keep my expenditures within the limits of my receipts.”15 Another drought during the summer of 1799 ruined his oat crop, threatened his corn, and left his meadows barren, only aggravating his long-standing woes.
With mounting desperation, he badgered people for overdue money and dished out tough lectures to deadbeats, telling one, in the tone of a surly bill collector, that “however you may have succeeded in imposing upon and deceiving others, you shall not practice the like game with me with impunity.”16 While horrified at sending people to debtors’ prison, he believed that he had no choice but to summon sheriffs to collect the money. For the first time in his life, he took recourse to bank loans, renewed at sixty-day intervals and set at what he termed “ruinous” interest rates.17 His sales of western lands for emergency infusions of money scarcely kept pace with his insatiable demands for cash.
Two incidents underlined the gravity of his economic predicament. In October 1799 he decided to sell the houses he had built in the new capital—a terribly public blow to his pride as well as harmful to the project’s hard-won image. That fall he also declined two months’ salary as commander in chief. In thanking Secretary of War McHenry, Washington was frank about his embarrassing predicament: “I shall not suffer false modesty to assert that my finances stand in no need of it.”18 He complained of applicants for army appointments who came “with their servants and horses . . . to aid in the consumption of my forage and what to me is more valuable—my time.”19 While public life forced Washington into expenditures beyond his control, during his entire adult life he had exhibited an inability to live within his means.
Hard as it was for him to admit, he could no longer supervise alone his far-flung operations, whose inspection had always formed part of his daily routine. In March 1798 he hired a clerk, Albin Rawlins, whose duties went beyond keeping accounts and drafting letters. Even though Washington still strode around in blue overalls and mud-spattered boots and was every bit the master of Mount Vernon, for the first time he alluded to difficulty in riding his horse. As he told a relative, he had hired Rawlins, in part, because he now found it “impracticable to use the exercise (on horseback) which my health, business, and inclination requires.”20
Washington had never made Mount Vernon the thriving productive enterprise he wanted. In his last months, he kept saying that the “first wish” of his heart was to simplify and contract operations and live “exempt from cares.”21 To this end, he planned to rent out his mill, distillery, and fishery businesses and dispose of one of his farms. Three of the farms—River, Union, and Muddy Hole—he decided to manage himself, restoring their exhausted fields through the scientific crop rotation that had long tantalized his imagination. The simple truth was that he had spent too many years away from Mount Vernon ever to attain the modern, advanced plantation of his daydreams. Sadly, the date he set for the new dispensation that would free him from onerous managerial duties was New Year’s Day 1800—a date he would not live to see.