Washington [327]
Unable to escape fame even in his own home, Washington felt confined to his desk, and his health suffered for lack of sufficient exercise. “I already begin to feel the effect,” he told Henry Knox. “Heavy and painful oppressions of the head and other disagreeable sensations often trouble me.”63 A physician, possibly James Craik, advised him that the worrisome head symptoms resulted from excessive paperwork and that he had to stop. The solution grew crystal-clear to Washington: “I am determined therefore to employ some person who shall ease me of the drudgery of this business.”64 In July 1785, he hired a young man, William Shaw, as his factotum to draft letters, organize his papers, and even tutor Nelly and Washy. But Shaw had a habit of gallivanting about whenever Washington needed him and lasted only thirteen months.
Far happier was Washington’s association with Lieutenant Colonel David Humphreys, who had served as his aide late in the war. A Yale graduate and former Connecticut schoolmaster, he was a husky young man in his mid-thirties with a dense thatch of wavy hair, a soft, jowly face, and an engaging gleam in his eyes. Washington doted on Humphreys to the point that John Trumbull said, with only a touch of mockery, that he was the “belov’d of Washington.”65 Humphreys had turned in such a stellar performance at Yorktown that Washington honored him with a special distinction: he had carried the twenty-four captured British flags to Congress and was presented, in turn, with a commemorative sword. An able writer, Humphreys drafted many of Washington’s remarks at the stultifying round of receptions that followed the evacuation of New York.
After the war Humphreys worked in Paris with Jefferson and helped to negotiate commercial treaties. In July 1785 Washington acceded to Humphreys’s request to write a biography of him. In laying out the conditions of employment, which would include arranging his papers, Washington smothered the younger man with attention, promising to provide him with oral reminiscences and access to his archives: “And I can with great truth add that my house would not only be at your service during the period of your preparing this work, but . . . I should be exceedingly happy if you would make it your home. You might have an apartment to yourself in which you could command your own time. You would be considered and treated as one of the family.”66 By now Washington had guaranteed that objectivity would be impossible for Humphreys, embraced as he was by the American god. In a telling comment, Washington told his prospective Boswell that he would have undertaken his own memoir but lacked the time and was also “conscious of a defective education and want of capacity to fit me for such an undertaking.”67 It is striking that Washington’s earlier insecurity still resided beneath his confident air. One visitor picked up an interesting verbal tic of Washington’s that may reflect a lack of education, the way he tripped over words: “The general converses with great deliberation and with ease, except in pronouncing some few words: in which he has a hesitancy of speech.”68 Such pauses may also have owed something to Washington’s slippery dentures.
Starting in the summer of 1786, Humphreys came to Mount Vernon to compile research for his book. His admiring but incomplete narrative of Washington’s life proved less important than the four-thousand-word marginal commentary penned by Washington on portions dealing with the French and Indian War. At some point after returning to Mount Vernon, Washington had assistants transcribe his letters from that period, and in another instance of old insecurities rearing their head, he corrected his youthful spelling and grammar and polished awkward passages. Addicted as always to self-control, he opposed inadvertent revelations of self.
During his Mount Vernon stays, Humphreys was a charming, amiable companion of the family. With a deep passion for poetry, he was wont to burst into recitations