Washington [319]
For more than a month Washington postponed the trip to his mother due to inclement weather. When he at last set out for Fredericksburg in February 1784, he allotted a full week to his sojourn, which soon became enlarged into a state visit. The Virginia Gazette hailed his arrival in town “on a visit to his ancient and amiable parent.”7 Washington could not avoid a public dinner and elegant ball in his honor, capped by a twenty-one-gun salute from local artillery. As best we can tell, Mary Washington skipped these festivities, but her son voiced the obligatory pieties to town dignitaries, touting Fredericksburg as “the place of my growing infancy” and expressing pleasure at “the honorable mention which is made of my revered mother, by whose maternal hand (early deprived of a father) I was led to manhood.”8
Try though he might, Washington couldn’t completely extricate his thoughts from politics and feared that the still immature country would blunder into errors before arriving at true wisdom. As he affirmed, “all things will come right at last. But, like a young heir come a little prematurely to a large inheritance, we shall wanton and run riot until we have brought our reputation to the brink of ruin.” Only when a crisis materialized would the country be “compelled perhaps to do what prudence and common policy pointed out as plain as any problem in Euclid in the first instance.”9 This statement tallied with Washington’s often expressed view that citizens had to feel before they saw—that is, they couldn’t react to abstract problems, only to tangible ones. The long fight against British tyranny, paradoxically, only strengthened his view that the foremost political danger came not from an overly powerful central government but from an enfeebled one—“a half-starved, limping government that appears to be always moving upon crutches and tottering at every step.”10
The snowbound house was enlivened by young people. The Washingtons ran something akin to a small orphanage, and the general must have fled sometimes from the rambunctious shouts of skylarking children to the silence of his study. As we recall, after Jacky’s death, George and Martha had taken in his two youngest children, Nelly, now four, and Washy, now two. Although the situation was never formalized, Washington referred to them as his “adopted” children. Martha seemed to transfer her affections intact from Patsy and Jacky to Nelly and Washy, including her propensity to spoil the boy and anguish over his health. “My pretty little dear boy complains of a pain in his stomach,” Martha wrote in one letter. “. . . I cannot say but it makes me miserable if ever he complains, let the cause be ever so trifling . . . I hope the almighty will spare him to me.”11 She couldn’t conceive of a happy home devoid of children. “My little family are all with me,” she exulted to a friend, declaring that, without them, “I almost despair of ever enjoying happiness.”12
This second set of children seemed far happier than the epileptic Patsy and the feckless Jacky, and family life at Mount Vernon was less troubled than before. When Robert Edge Pine painted the children, he captured their contrasting natures. A sprightly girl, clever and sociable, Nelly stares out boldly, even impudently, at the viewer. Washy has a soft mop of well-brushed hair that falls over his forehead, and he seems gentle, almost feminine, his thoughts trailing far away. When Washington hired tutors for them,