Washington [485]
Having lost the services of George Augustine and Anthony Whitting, Mount Vernon lacked a guiding hand, and it was all Washington could do to keep the place running from afar. He never overcame his chronic financial anxieties, which only worsened with the distractions of his political career, and he remained a notably relentless, hard-driving boss. His incomparable success in life seemed not to soften his views or lighten his touch with employees, as if his economic insecurity were too deeply rooted ever to be extirpated. It never seemed to dawn on him to apply the same courtesy to his employees that he did to colleagues in Philadelphia, where he was such an exquisitely tactful politician. In December 1792 he badgered Anthony Whitting to keep a slave named Gunner hard at work, even though Gunner was probably around eighty-three years old. “It may be proper for Gunner to continue throwing up brick earth,” the president wrote.20 Despite his theoretical opposition to slavery, he cautioned his overseers against the “idleness and deceit” of slaves if not treated with a firm hand.21
Washington’s business letters home have an unpleasantly caustic tone, as if he felt himself at the mercy of so many dunces and knaves. He was constantly on guard against inept overseers, whom he thought too lax in dealing with slaves. If overseers weren’t up with the sun, he warned, slaves would sleep late, loaf, and cost him money. In essence, the overseers became slaves to the long hours of the slaves they supervised. In petulant weekly letters to the consumptive Whitting in 1792 and 1793, Washington scarcely ever offered an encouraging syllable. With painful consistency, he faulted Whitting’s work, loaded him with advice, and seemed to accuse everyone of malingering.
In mid-March 1793, as Whitting was spitting up blood, Washington informed Fanny Bassett Washington that the doctors had pronounced his tuberculosis “critical and dangerous.”22 Whitting himself wrote pathetically to the president: “I am just now able to walk a little. Am very much reduced and very weak.”23 Nonetheless that spring, as he grappled with neutrality and Citizen Genet, Washington continually lambasted Whitting and talked to him as if he were a fool or a child. When he thought Whitting did not respond adequately to his questions, he told him to take a slip of paper, jot down all the instructions, then cross off each item on the checklist as it was accomplished. At the time Whitting was so weak that he could scarcely mount a horse; a month later he lay in critical condition. Bedridden, barely able to speak, he nonetheless fretted about his failure to file weekly reports with Washington. As Tobias Lear reported from the scene: “Mr. Whitting was much concerned at your not having received the reports of last week, but observed that he had directed [James] Butler [the Mansion House overseer] to take them, as he was unable to do it himself.” 24 A few days later the estate manager was dead.
Preoccupied with political problems, Washington was thrown into turmoil by Whitting’s death and promptly launched a search for a successor, looking for an honest, sober bachelor between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five. Only after Whitting’s death did Washington learn to appreciate his virtues, telling one correspondent, “If I could get a man as well qualified for my purposes as the late Mr. Whitting . . . I sh[oul]d esteem myself very fortunate.”25 Even so, Washington continued to defame Whitting, claiming that he “drank freely, kept bad company at my house and in Alexandria, and was a very debauched person.”26
In late September,