Washington [325]
Though not notable for scintillating repartee, Washington enjoyed the society of writers and never felt intellectually threatened by their company. In May 1785 the lexicographer Noah Webster spent a day at Mount Vernon, angling to get Washington to support a copyright law in Virginia. In all likelihood, he furnished Washington with a copy of his Sketches of American Policy, which made the case for a strong central government. A surprising wheeler-dealer, Webster attempted to cut a deal with Washington: he would tutor Nelly and Washy gratis in exchange for unrestricted access to Washington’s papers. Scenting a bad bargain, Washington spurned the offer.
For ten days in June he entertained a well-known British historian, Catharine Macaulay Graham, and her younger husband. Taken with his visitor, he told Henry Knox that a “visit from a lady so celebrated in the literary world could not but be very flattering to me.”51 A woman with a very long, pale face, sharply accentuated by a very long, pale nose, she was an expert in English and Roman history. A radical Whig and a distinguished friend to American liberty, she entered into serious political talks with Washington. “It gave me pleasure to find that her sentim[en] ts respecting the inadequacy of the powers of Congress . . . coincided with my own,” Washington told Richard Henry Lee.52 Perhaps Washington was also subtly screening a potential biographer for himself, for he confessed to his diary: “Placed my military records into the hands of Mrs. Macaulay Graham for her perusal and amusem[en]t.”53 Dr. Samuel Johnson memorably satirized the female historian as a high-minded hypocrite, once asking her to show her faith in her egalitarian beliefs by inviting her footman to dine at her table. She never forgave Johnson for the taunt.
Washington’s desire to socialize with literary personalities likely arose from his belief that writers crowned those who won fame and ended up in history’s pantheon. In 1788, when he steered Lafayette to the American poet Joel Barlow, then resident in France, Washington described Barlow as “one of those bards who hold the keys of the gate by which patriots, sages, and heroes are admitted to immortality. Such are your ancient bards who are both the priest and doorkeepers to the temple of fame. And these, my dear Marquis, are no vulgar functions.”54 Washington went on to say that military heroes, far from being passive, could groom their own advocates: “In some instances . . . heroes have made poets, and poets heroes. Alexander the Great is said to have been enraptured with the poems of Homer and to have lamented that he had not a rival muse to celebrate his actions.”55 The passage shows Washington’s underlying hunger for posthumous glory and how calculating he could be in gaining it. He ended the letter by lauding the golden ages of arms and arts under Louis XIV and Queen Anne and by expressing the hope that America would not be found “inferior to the rest of the world in the performance of our poets and painters.”56
For all of Washington’s professions of modesty, the thought of his high destined niche in history was never far from his mind. Few historical