Washington [284]
Within twenty-four hours Washington’s and Rochambeau’s entourages had arrived at Mount Vernon, ready to chart the Yorktown siege. For these battle-tested veterans, the mansion was a refreshing oasis. It was a tribute to Martha Washington’s talents that she could entertain in style amid wartime conditions. Colonel Jonathan Trumbull, Jr., complimented the gracious and well-appointed reception lavished upon the visitors. “A numerous family now present,” he wrote in his diary. “All accommodated. An elegant seat and situation: great appearance of opulence and real exhibitions of hospitality and princely entertainment.”16
The French officers appraised Mount Vernon and its hostess with considerable curiosity. After the frippery of the French court, Martha Washington struck them as the pattern of republican austerity. “Mrs. Washington is . . . small and fat, her appearance is respectable,” wrote Claude Blanchard. “She was dressed very plainly and her manners were simple in all respects.”17 In surveying the estate, Blanchard detected the tarnished glory inflicted by neglect. “As to the house, it is a country residence, the handsomest that I have yet seen in America . . . There are in the places around many huts for the negroes, of whom the general owns a large number . . . The environs of his house are not fertile and the trees that we see there do not appear to be large. Even the garden is barren.”18 Baron von Closen found the house’s relative modesty suitable for America’s hero: “The spacious and well-contrived mansion house at Mount Vernon was elegantly furnished, though there was no remarkable luxury to be seen anywhere; and, indeed, any ostentatious pomp would not have agreed with the simple manner of the owner.”19
Washington must have been distressed by the creeping signs of decay everywhere. Whatever the war’s outcome, he would be left a poorer man, which weighed heavily on his mind. That June, in a letter to William Crawford, the steward of his western lands, he broke down and confided his concern about his wealth withering away as the war progressed: “My whole time is . . . so much engrossed by the public duties of my station that I have totally neglected all my private concerns, which are declining every day, and may possibly end in capital losses, if not absolute ruin, before I am at liberty to look after them.”20
Among the pleasures of his return was the chance to see the mansion’s new north wing and the stylish dining room where he would entertain state visitors. It was likely here that he held a dinner for his guests on the night of September 12 before departing for Williamsburg the next morning. Jacky Custis prevailed upon his stepfather to take him along as a personal aide, a belated stint of service that must have awakened mixed feelings in Washington.
Arriving in Williamsburg late on the afternoon of September 14, Washington settled into the two-story brick home of George Wythe, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and Thomas Jefferson’s old law professor. Washington moved about the town in a casual, unobtrusive fashion. “He approached without any pomp or parade, attended only by a few horsemen and his own servants,” observed St. George Tucker, a well-to-do young Virginia lawyer and militia colonel.21 Although Washington eschewed the swagger of power, his self-effacing presence sent an electric jolt through the ranks of soldiers.
As Tucker discovered, Washington had a retentive mind for detail and a politician’s knack for remembering names: “To my great surprise, he recognized my features and spoke to me immediately by name.”22 The young man also witnessed the fervent reunion between Washington and Lafayette, conjuring it up in a letter to his wife the next day. The marquis “caught the General round his body, hugged him as close as it was possible,