Washington [322]
In eighteenth-century Virginia, where roadside taverns were sparse and travelers could easily be stranded in transit, feeding and lodging travelers who showed up unannounced at one’s doorstep were considered necessary marks of hospitality. The polite Washington was victimized by this tradition as veterans and curiosity seekers descended on his home in massive numbers. Much of the mystique later attached to the White House first crystallized around Mount Vernon, which became a sort of proto-presidential mansion. Except for Ben Franklin in Paris, Washington was the first American celebrity, and he only partially succeeded at shielding himself from supplicants. Strangers arrived intent upon seeing Washington, who had to figure out ways to bar their prying eyes. He often greeted people at the door, only to hand them off to slaves, then disappeared into his study or rode off to his farms. “Even friends who make a point of visiting him are left much to themselves, indeed scarcely see him from breakfast to dinner, unless he engages them in a ride, which is very agreeable to him,” said a visitor named Elizabeth Ambler Carrington.27 Sometimes, like a dutiful innkeeper, Washington showed up in the room of a sick guest, proffering a hot cup of tea and showing his basic decency.
He never resolved the problem of the tremendous expenses he incurred in taking care of visitors. Not only did guests devour his food, but their horses freely ate his forage. “My situation is very little understood by most people,” he explained in later life. “Whatever may be my property, the income of it is inadequate to my expenses. Not from any wish or desire I have to live extravagantly, but from unavoidable necessity proceeding from the public walks of life in which I have been and the acquaintances made thereby, which fill my house continually with company.”28 At a typical dinner, half the people might be guests. “There is not one single officer on the whole continent who will forsake the pleasure of spending a few days with his General,” said Philip Mazzei, Jefferson’s Florentine-born friend. “. . . The result is that his house is continuously filled with strangers who bring with them an even larger number of servants and horses. As there is no village in the vicinity and no inn within reach, the General has to take charge of everything.”29
As legions of hopeful tourists made a pilgrimage to this mecca, George and Martha Washington struggled to retain some modicum of privacy. Sometimes they behaved like inmates held hostage by an overflowing wave of visitors, condemned to make small talk with complete strangers. One of the sadder lines in Washington’s copious papers occurs in his diary entry for June 30, 1785, where he notes that he “dined with only Mrs. Washington, which I believe is the first instance of it since my retirement from public life.”30 One can almost hear the sigh of relief. Washington admitted to Franklin that “retirement from the public walks of life has not been so productive of the leisure and ease as might have been expected.”31 Benjamin Franklin scarcely needed a lesson. “Celebrity may for a while flatter one’s vanity,” he wrote, “but its effects are troublesome.”32
The nation wouldn’t let Washington enjoy the ease of a private citizen, and he had to learn to manage his celebrity. One unspoken trick he used to deter unwanted visitors was to post inadequate signs indicating the way to his house, erecting a natural barrier against intruders. The nine-mile ride between Alexandria and Mount Vernon confounded travelers, forcing them to traverse bogs, thick woods, and winding trails; the visitor files at Mount Vernon abound