Washington [347]
The plan to extend navigation of the Potomac influenced American history in ways that far transcended the narrow matter of commercial navigation. It created a set of practical problems that could be solved only by cooperation between Virginia and Maryland, setting a pattern for a seminal interstate conference at Annapolis in September 1786 and indeed the Constitutional Convention itself in 1787. Coordinating the efforts of two states confirmed Washington’s continental perspective and sense of the irreparable harm that could be done by squabbling among states unconstrained by an effective national government. When Edward Savage painted The Washington Family, he shrewdly made the Potomac River, wending its way west in the background, a central element of the composition. Washington continued to tout the Potomac as “the great avenue into the western country . . . which promises to afford a capacious asylum for the poor and persecuted of the earth.”27 The Potomac River Company never lived up to these grandiose expectations: in the nineteenth century it went bankrupt, having penetrated no farther than Cumberland in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. But its real value in American politics had long since been realized.
FOR ALL THE HOPEFULNESS of his postwar life, Washington retained wistful recollections about his prewar existence, especially his relationship with George William and Sally Fairfax. Wartime duties had precluded him from acting as care-taker of Belvoir, and he was alarmed to hear rumors as early as 1778 that the estate was “verging fast to destruction.”28 Before the war the Fairfaxes had returned to England to follow a suit in Chancery, which involved a sizable estate left to George William by a relative; the case degenerated into a ghastly, never-ending Dickensian donnybrook. George William told Washington in August 1778 that the case was “as far from a conclusion as ever, owing to the villainy of my solicitor.”29 Lacking the income expected from the suit’s resolution and deprived of any money from Virginia, the hitherto rich couple had to retrench drastically. They were both broken in health and had bought a small cottage near Bath so they could take the spa waters. There a chastened General John Burgoyne, after his Saratoga defeat, sought out the couple and hand-delivered a personal letter from General George Washington.
During the last year of the war, Belvoir had been severely damaged by fire, but for more than a year Washington could neither find the time nor muster the nerve to visit it. Then in late January 1785 he made a midwinter visit and grew awash in nostalgia. On February 27 he sent a heartfelt letter to George William in which he described the ravages visited upon their beloved Belvoir:
I took a ride there the other day to visit the ruins—and ruins indeed they are. The dwelling house and the two brick buildings in front underwent the ravages of the fire; the walls of which are very much injured. The other houses are sinking under the depredation of time and inattention and I believe are now scarcely worth repairing. In a word, the whole are, or very soon will be, a heap of ruin. When I viewed them—when I considered that the happiest moments of my life had been spent there—when I could not trace a room in the house (now all rubbish) that did not bring to my mind the recollection of pleasing scenes, I was obliged to fly from them and came home with painful sensations and sorrowing for the contrast.30
Whenever he gazed longingly toward Belvoir, he admitted, he wished that George William and Sally Fairfax would return to America and rebuild their residence while staying at