At Home - Bill Bryson [163]
The carelessness of agents and merchants drove Americans half mad with exasperation. Colonel John Tayloe, while building the famous Octagon House in Washington, ordered a fireplace from the Coade factory in London, waited a year or so for its delivery, and was reduced to helpless sputters when he opened the crate and found that they had forgotten to pack the mantelshelf. Rather than waiting for the shelf to arrive, he had a new one made from wood by a trustworthy American carpenter. The fireplace—still with a wooden top—remains one of the few Coade pieces in America.
Because of the difficulties of supply, plantation owners often had little choice but to make their own bricks. Jefferson fired his own—altogether some 650,000 of them—but this was a difficult business, as only about half from any load were usable because the heating was so uneven in his home-built kilns. He also began manufacturing his own nails. As tensions with Britain increased, matters grew more difficult still. In 1774, the Continental Congress passed a nonimportation agreement. Jefferson discovered to his dismay that fourteen pairs of very expensive sash windows he had ordered from England, and really quite earnestly needed, could not now reach him.
This suppression of free trade greatly angered the Scottish economist Adam Smith (whose Wealth of Nations, not coincidentally, came out the same year that America declared its independence) but not nearly as much as it did the Americans, who naturally resented the idea of being kept eternally as a captive market. It would be overstating matters to suggest that the exasperations of commerce were the cause of the American Revolution, but they were certainly a powerful component.
III
While Thomas Jefferson was endlessly tinkering with Monticello, 120 miles to the northeast his colleague and fellow Virginian George Washington was facing similar obstacles and setbacks, and responding with the same kind of adaptive genius, with the rebuilding of Mount Vernon, his plantation home on the banks of the Potomac River near the modern District of Columbia. (The proximity is not coincidental. Given the job of choosing the site of a new national capital, Washington selected one that was an easy ride from his plantation.)
When Washington moved to Mount Vernon in 1754 after the death of his half brother Lawrence, it was a modest farmhouse of eight rooms. He spent the next thirty years rebuilding and expanding it into a mansion of twenty rooms—all elegantly proportioned and beautifully finished (and with many nods to Palladio). Washington enjoyed one brief youthful trip to Barbados but otherwise never left his “Infant Woody Country,” as he once called it. Yet a visitor to Mount Vernon was struck by its sophistication, as if Washington had toured the great houses and gardens of Europe and carefully selected the finest aspects of each.
He fussed over every detail. For eight years during the Revolutionary War, through all the hardships and distractions of battle, he wrote home weekly to inquire how things were going and to issue new or modified instructions for some element of design. Washington’s foreman wondered, understandably, whether this was a good time to be investing money and energy in a house that the enemy might at any moment capture and destroy. Washington spent most of the war bogged down in fighting in the north, leaving his own part of the country chronically exposed to attack. Luckily the British never reached Mount Vernon. Had they got there, they almost certainly would have spirited off Mrs. Washington and put the house and estate to the torch.
Despite the risks, Washington pressed on. Indeed, it was at the very lowest point of the war, in 1777, that Mount Vernon acquired its two most daring architectural features: its cupola and the open-air front porch, known as the piazza, with its distinctive rectangular pillars running the