Washington [534]
Washington’s life was more weighted with care than he admitted to Sally. For all the beauty and scenic vistas of his estate, the financial pressure remained unrelenting. His elaborate plan for renting four of the Mount Vernon farms had faltered because he wanted to rent them all at once, which was impossible. In the spring of 1797 he compromised and offered them for rent individually. In hiring his new estate manager, James Anderson, Washington had hoped that this “honest, industrious, and judicious Scotchman” would alleviate his chronic financial woes, but Anderson struggled in vain to make Mount Vernon more productive.23 He turned out to be too impulsive and improvident for Washington’s fastidious taste, though he did introduce signal innovations. The enterprising Anderson devised the concept of taking grain grown at Mount Vernon and converting it into corn and rye whiskey at a commercial distillery on the estate. For Washington, always rabid on the subject of alcoholism, it was an ironic turn of events, to put it mildly. Although the distillery started modestly, by 1799 it had five gleaming copper stills and produced eleven thousand gallons yearly, so that it may have ranked as the largest whiskey producer in America. Nevertheless, when Anderson talked of quitting in 1798, Washington chided him for having coaxed him into assuming “a very serious expense in erecting a distillery of which I had no knowledge . . . But do as you please in this matter. I never did, nor ever shall, wish to retain any person in my employ contrary to their inclination.”24
Washington again found himself sliding into a slow-motion financial crisis. Just as he had been forced to borrow to attend his own inauguration in 1789, he had had to sell “two valuable tracts of land” in western Pennsylvania and land in Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp to make the journey home in 1797 and “lay in a few necessaries for my family.”25 In his presidency’s waning days, he had been reduced to the indignity of personally dunning tenants in arrears on rent, threatening one with a lawsuit. Degraded to a bill collector, he had warned, “I w[oul]d fain avoid this appeal, but if I am obliged to resort to it, remember that it is brought upon you by your own default.”26 Upon returning to Mount Vernon, he scratched out testy notes to people, trying to settle their land disputes. When nephew Samuel Washington approached him for an emergency $1,000 loan, Washington grudgingly agreed, while lecturing him on the perils of borrowing and warning that “you are under the same mistake that many others are in supposing that I have money always at command.”27 To improve his financial situation, Washington started an economy campaign and froze the wages of overseers. He also began a gradual shift from agriculture to grazing, which curbed expenses and averted the need for more slave labor.
AFTER LEAVING OFFICE, Washington made a futile attempt to distance himself from politics. Because the post office lay nine miles away, he collected his mail only thrice weekly, so the bags when they arrived bulged with political letters, gazettes, and pamphlets. Inevitably, the irascible President Adams suffered from comparison with the tactful Washington. “There never was perhaps a greater contrast between two characters than between those of the present president and his predecessor,” James Madison observed. “The one cool, considerate, and cautious, the other headlong and kindled into flame by every spark that lights on his passions.”28 For all his vast legislative experience, the temperamental Adams was a complete tyro as an executive. Much as Jefferson predicted, Adams immediately had to contend with multiple crises as France seized nearly three hundred