Washington [315]
Before Peale had finished the portrait, Washington decided to quit town; he left Philadelphia on December 15 with a diminished retinue. As he slowly shed the trappings of power, he retained only two aides, David Humphreys and Benjamin Walker, and a team of slaves. For a short stretch of the journey, one of his companions was John Dickinson, Pennsylvania’s chief executive, who anticipated a problem that was to harry Washington in his postwar incarnation. Washington had negotiated neither a pension nor an expense account to entertain the hordes poised to descend upon Mount Vernon. Dickinson had privately warned Congress that “the admiration and esteem of the world may make [Washington’s] life in a very considerable degree public, as numbers will be desirous of seeing the great and good man . . . His very services to his country may therefore subject him to improper expenses unless he permits her gratitude to interpose.”24 Congress failed to take action, and it would prove a serious omission in the coming years as the pilgrims to Mount Vernon imposed gigantic expenses.
On December 19 Washington approached the outskirts of Annapolis and was greeted by a delegation of dignitaries that included Horatio Gates. Both men must have been struck by the totality of Washington’s triumph and Gates’s demotion. Accompanied to George Mann’s Tavern, Washington arrived to thirteen blasts of cannon fire, a cliché of which Washington surely tired. The next day he submitted a letter to Thomas Mifflin, his former aide and disloyal critic during the Conway affair and now president of Congress, asking whether he should submit his resignation in writing or in a public ceremony. Washington wanted to do everything in his power to dramatize his humility before civilian power. Congress decided that, after being feted with a magnificent dinner on December 22, he would return his commission before that body at noon the next day.
Several hundred people attended the celebratory dinner, which exuded a mood of uproarious good spirits. “The number of cheerful voices, with the clangor of knives and forks, made a din of a very extraordinary nature and most delightful influence,” James Tilton wrote.25 After suffering through the obligatory thirteen toasts, Washington made a toast with a pertinent point: “Competent powers to Congress for general purposes.”26 The toast suggested that Washington’s mind still fretted over the inadequate Articles of Confederation and that his postwar retirement might be short-lived. The message, in many ways, foretold the rest of his political life. After the dinner Washington attended a brilliantly lit ball, dancing first with twenty-two-year-old Martha Rolle Maccubin, a prominent local belle. With women fawning all over him—the fashionable style dictated thirteen curls tumbling down the neck—Washington never left the dance floor and must have grown slightly giddy from the adulation. “The general danced every set, that the ladies might have the pleasure of dancing with him, or, as it has since been handsomely expressed, get a touch of him,” reported Tilton.27
The next morning Washington squeezed in a last personal letter to Baron von Steuben. Among