Washington [328]
Slowly, Washington assembled a cadre of bright, capable young men—the peacetime equivalent of his military family—to assist him with the mounting stacks of paperwork. In January 1786 General Benjamin Lincoln recommended as a private secretary twenty-three-year-old Tobias Lear of New Hampshire, a Harvard graduate who read French and was a fluent letter writer. In reply, Washington explained that such an assistant would also tutor Washy and “will sit at my table—will live as I live—will mix with the company which resort to the Ho[use].”70 Despite his unstinting admiration for Washington, Lear expressed one reservation about working at Mount Vernon: he abhorred slavery. Only when Washington declared his ultimate intention to free his slaves and said they would meanwhile be better off under his tutelage than anywhere else did Lear relent. The personal and professional relationship with Lear lasted much longer than that with the self-absorbed David Humphreys. Lear became yet another of the surrogate sons who supplied the absence of biological children for George and Martha Washington. The feeling was reciprocated, as can be seen in Lear’s praise of Martha Washington as “everything that is benevolent and good. I honor her as a second mother and receive from her all those attentions which I should look for from her who bore me.”71
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Gentleman Farmer
GEORGE WASHINGTON might resign his commission—might spurn an impertinent suggestion that he be anointed king—but he refused to renounce a princely style in his private life, as if his highest social ambition after the war were to return to Virginia and resurrect the privileged world he had left behind. He had, in many ways, been transformed by the war, but he had not yet realized how profoundly the democratic message of the American Revolution would filter down to the masses and even, in the fullness of time, threaten slavery itself. He clung to the tastes of a British country squire while making few concessions to a more egalitarian ethos. Strange as it may sound, Mount Vernon after the war did not evolve in notable ways that reflected American independence, except for greater efforts at agricultural modernity.
Many improvements that Washington had first projected in the early 1770s came to fruition only after the long hiatus of the war. Where visitors had once approached Mount Vernon by a straight path, they now rode along a symmetrical pair of serpentine drives that tantalized them with flickering glimpses of the distant mansion. At the end, right before they alighted, their carriages ran over rough gravel and curved around a bowling green and a small circular courtyard. Unable to tell a lie, Washington admitted in his diary that he had “cut down the two cherry trees in the courtyard.”1 The house was now attached to the outlying buildings by graceful covered walkways that, instead of shutting out nature, disclosed distant vistas of natural beauty. All in all, Mount Vernon contained fourteen or fifteen separate buildings, giving newcomers the impression that they had rolled into a small, bustling rural village.
The most imposing expansion of the house was the soaring chamber at