Washington [546]
Washington’s history with Nelly’s brother, Washy, remained problematic. Despite Washington’s constant exhortations and the boy’s eternal pledges to reform, the latter dropped out of Princeton, and in 1798 Washington enrolled him in the smaller St. John’s College in Annapolis. “Mr. Custis possesses competent talents to fit him for any studies,” Washington promised the school’s president, “but they are counteracted by an indolence of mind, which renders it difficult to draw them into action.”12 For Washington, who felt keen deprivation at having missed college, his grandson’s apathy must have been frustrating. The boy was never less than affectionate or respectful to him, but like his father before him, he was simply incorrigible.
When young Washington posed the question of whether he should not drop out of St. John’s as well, the former president threw up his hands in despair: “The question . . . really astonishes me! for it would seem as if nothing I could say to you made more than a momentary impression.”13 Bowing to the futility of pushing the boy any further, Washington had him tutored at Mount Vernon by Tobias Lear. When Washy then contemplated an inappropriate marriage, Washington tried to prevent it by getting him appointed to a cavalry troop. He ended up with a fatalistic attitude toward his trying adopted grandson as someone who meant well but suffered from a congenital inability to make good on his pledges.
A deeper source of discontent in Washington’s last year was the continuing financial worries that preyed on his mind, reaching their nadir in the spring of 1799. Even when he rode off to Philadelphia in November 1798, cheered by the adulatory multitudes, he gnashed his teeth over his finances, bewailing that “nothing will answer my purposes like the money, of which I am in extreme want, and must obtain on disadvantageous terms.”14 Never able to economize, he confessed that “I find it no easy matter to keep my expenditures within the limits of my receipts.”15 Another drought during the summer of 1799 ruined his oat crop, threatened his corn, and left his meadows barren, only aggravating his long-standing woes.
With mounting desperation, he badgered people for overdue money and dished out tough lectures to deadbeats, telling one, in the tone of a surly bill collector, that “however you may have succeeded in imposing upon and deceiving others, you shall not practice the like game with me with impunity.”16 While horrified at sending people to debtors’ prison, he believed that he had no choice but to summon sheriffs to collect the money. For the first time in his life, he took recourse to bank loans, renewed at sixty-day intervals and set at what he termed “ruinous” interest rates.17 His sales of western lands for emergency infusions of money scarcely kept pace with his insatiable demands for cash.
Two incidents underlined the gravity of his economic predicament. In October 1799 he decided to sell the houses he had built in the new capital—a terribly public blow to his pride as well as harmful to the project’s hard-won image. That fall he also declined two months’ salary as commander in chief. In thanking Secretary of War McHenry, Washington was frank