Washington [404]
Washington spoke no eulogies, told no fond anecdotes of the hard, sometimes shrewish mother who had served as the lifelong whetstone of his anger; he took refuge instead in empty generalities. Whether responding to an unspoken accusation from Betty Lewis that he had been derelict in his filial duties, or feeling guilty that his sister had borne the burden of caring for their infirm mother, Washington sent her a detailed accounting of his financial generosity to their mother:
She has had a great deal of money from me at times, as can be made [to] appear by my books and the accounts of Mr. L[und] Washington during my absence. And over and above this [she] has not only had all that was ever made from the plantation, but got her provisions and everything else she thought proper from thence. In short, to the best of my recollection, I have never in my life received a copper from the estate and have paid many hundred pounds (first and last) to her in cash. However, I want no retribution. I conceived it to be a duty whenever she asked for money and I had it to furnish her.16
In her will, Mary Washington named George as executor, a responsibility he couldn’t have relished as president. She left him a bed, curtains, a blue and white quilt, and a dressing mirror—items he identified as “mementoes of parental affection,” but he never took possession of them and left them for his sister’s use.17 Entitled to a one-fifth portion of his mother’s estate, he received two slaves, which meant that Mary Ball Washington had owned as many as ten slaves, certifying that she had scarcely been destitute. The auction of Mary’s belongings that October also suggested that, for all her complaints, the elderly widow had accumulated considerable property. Among the auction items cited in a newspaper advertisement were “stocks of horses, cattle, sheep and hogs, plantation utensils of every kind, carts, hay, and fodder.”18 In fact, Mary had amassed such substantial landholdings that George alone inherited four hundred acres of valuable pine land; he gave it to Robert Lewis, Betty’s son. All of this property had been owned by a woman who saw fit to petition the Virginia legislature for a private pension during the war because of her son’s alleged neglect.
THE MENACING GROWTH ON HIS THIGH and his mother’s death slowed Washington down only slightly as he forged the office of the presidency, which immediately involved him in a thicket of constitutional issues. Could the Supreme Court give advisory opinions to the legislative and executive branches? Would the executive branch supervise American foreign policy, subject to congressional approval, or vice versa? Numberless questions about the basic nature of the federal government would be decided during Washington’s presidency, often in the throes of heated controversy. Although Washington had not been an architect of the system of checks and balances or separation of powers, he gave sharp definition to them by helping to draw the boundaries of the three branches of government in a series of critical test cases.
A central component of the Whig orthodoxy that had spurred the American Revolution was the supremacy of the legislative branch, viewed as a curb to the executive. By design, the framers of the Constitution devoted Article I to a lengthy description of legislative powers, giving Congress the ability to help shape the other two branches. Left deliberately vague was the office of the presidency, allowing its first occupant to fill in the blanks. The earnest Washington tried to adhere to the letter of the Constitution and hoped to enjoy harmonious relations with Congress. But he soon realized that