George Washington by John Rhodehamel

Author:John Rhodehamel [Rhodehamel, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300219975
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

9

“The Destiny of Unborn Millions”

AMERICA’S FIRST CITIZEN returned home after an absence of eight and a half years to find his private affairs in disarray. Mount Vernon was run down. A major renovation of the mansion house Washington had begun a full decade earlier remained unfinished. The roof leaked. The farms were unproductive. Eighteen Mount Vernon slaves had escaped to seek freedom when a British warship had put in at the plantation. Many debtors had paid Washington off in vastly depreciated Continental currency. Others had not bothered to pay at all. Years of rent on his western lands remained uncollected. The republican commander had refused any salary for his military service. He promptly submitted his wartime expense account for reimbursement. It came to $64,335.30, or about $7,500 a year. (This actually amounted to more than he would have gotten if he accepted Congress’s proposed $500 a month salary.) But the government paid him off in devalued certificates, some of which he was forced to sell at one-twentieth of their face value. Family and friends soon came with their hands out. Washington often had to tell them he had no cash to spare.

Despite it all, he was overjoyed to be home. “I feel now,” Washington wrote one of his generals, as “a wearied Traveller must do, who, after treading many a painful step, with a heavy burden on his shoulders, is eased of the latter, having reached the Goal to which all the former were directed, and from his House top is looking back, and tracing with a grateful eye the Meanders by which he has escaped the quicksands and Mires which lay in his way.”1

He took up again the agricultural experimentation that had so fascinated him before the war. He particularly admired the new scientific agriculture then practiced in England. He read English farming journals and books and copied out long passages. He devised elaborate crop rotation schemes. He tried new crops. He spread Potomac mud and even fish on his fields to enrich the soil. He tinkered with farm machinery. In designing a seed drill—a device that opened a furrow, dropped in seeds, and covered them in one pass—he needed to calculate the number of individual grains in a bushel of timothy. (13,410,000.)

Meanwhile, hundreds of uninvited guests were turning up at Mount Vernon, eager to see with their own eyes the most famous man in the world. Some came with letters of introduction. Some were Continental Army veterans. Others were complete strangers. Washington felt that Virginia tradition obliged him to entertain them, give them dinner, put them up for the night, and take care of their horses. (The nearest inn was miles away.) Washington complained. He was spending himself poor, and his slaves and servants were run ragged. The strain on the whole family was considerable. At the same time, a procession of artists arrived to paint and sculpt the hero.

Martha Washington’s rich and feckless twenty-six-year-old son, John Parke Custis, after sitting out the war, had elected to visit his stepfather’s headquarters at Yorktown to be in at the kill.

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