Washington [110]
Even though more than thirteen years had passed since Washington resigned his military commission, he still prided himself on a military identity, and people often greeted him as Colonel Washington. The brouhaha over the Stamp Act and the Townshend duties also raised the distant prospect of a recourse to arms. So as the industrious Peale settled in at Mount Vernon, Washington donned a uniform—a blue coat trimmed with scarlet and a scarlet waistcoat—that called forth memories of the French and Indian War.
Never comfortable with self-exposure, Washington was alternately restive and sleepy in posing for Peale, as he described whimsically to Boucher. He seemed to sense what a baffling, enigmatic subject he was. “Inclination having yielded to importunity, I am now, contrary to all expectation, under the hands of Mr Peale, but in so grave, so sullen, a mood—and now and then under the influence of Morpheus, when some critical strokes are making—that I fancy the skill of this gentleman’s pencil will be put to it in describing to the world what manner of man I am.”22
This serene painting has a storybook quality. Instead of presenting Washington as a prosperous planter, it offers a nostalgic backward glimpse to the Washington of the 1750s. With one yellow-gloved hand thrust into his waistcoat, a musket slung behind him, and a golden sash hung diagonally across his chest, Washington gazes poetically into the distance. His face is smooth and innocent, his blue eyes clear, and he might be listening to bird whistles in the tree above him rather than live bullets. His facial features are mobile and animated, not yet etched with the strong character engraved there by the Revolutionary War. The picturesque scene pretends to capture Washington being summoned to battle, with an Order of March protruding from his fob pocket. Washington was so fond of the painting, which captured him in his prime, that it hung in the Mount Vernon parlor for the rest of his life. It seems to foretell his eagerness to resume his military career.
The artist spent a week at Mount Vernon and painted miniatures of Martha, Jacky, and Patsy along with the three-quarter-length portrait of George Washington. The picture of Martha was done at Jacky’s request, and one wonders whether he made a point of demonstrating his love for his mother or perhaps implicitly rebuked his stepfather for not having included her in pictures by this visiting artist. It must be said that the picture of Martha Washington, in a mauve dress and pearls, is not especially flattering. Her face is cold and humorless, the tight lips primly disapproving. Nevertheless this was probably the miniature of Martha that her grandson later meant when he said that George Washington always “wore around his neck the miniature portrait of his wife. This he had worn through all the vicissitudes of his eventful career . . . to the last days at Mount Vernon.”23
IN MAY 1773, hoping to put a safe distance between Jacky and his intended bride, Washington accompanied him to New York City and enrolled him in King’s College. This sociable trip exposed Washington to personalities who were to be prominent in the coming conflict. It was almost the last moment when Washington could still mingle easily with people of differing ideologies. In Philadelphia he dined with Governor Richard Penn and in Burlington, New Jersey, with Governor William Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son and soon to be ostracized as a notorious Tory. At Basking Ridge, New Jersey, he stayed at the opulent estate of Lord Stirling, whose extravagant ways had already landed him in debt; before too long, Stirling would emerge as one of Washington’s favorite generals. In New York he met with James DeLancey, shortly to command a Loyalist cavalry, and attended a dinner in honor of an old colleague from the Braddock campaign, Lieutenant General Thomas Gage, now commander of British forces in North America. It is amusing to think of George Washington drinking toasts to this future bugbear of the patriot cause.