Washington [547]
Hard as it was for him to admit, he could no longer supervise alone his far-flung operations, whose inspection had always formed part of his daily routine. In March 1798 he hired a clerk, Albin Rawlins, whose duties went beyond keeping accounts and drafting letters. Even though Washington still strode around in blue overalls and mud-spattered boots and was every bit the master of Mount Vernon, for the first time he alluded to difficulty in riding his horse. As he told a relative, he had hired Rawlins, in part, because he now found it “impracticable to use the exercise (on horseback) which my health, business, and inclination requires.”20
Washington had never made Mount Vernon the thriving productive enterprise he wanted. In his last months, he kept saying that the “first wish” of his heart was to simplify and contract operations and live “exempt from cares.”21 To this end, he planned to rent out his mill, distillery, and fishery businesses and dispose of one of his farms. Three of the farms—River, Union, and Muddy Hole—he decided to manage himself, restoring their exhausted fields through the scientific crop rotation that had long tantalized his imagination. The simple truth was that he had spent too many years away from Mount Vernon ever to attain the modern, advanced plantation of his daydreams. Sadly, the date he set for the new dispensation that would free him from onerous managerial duties was New Year’s Day 1800—a date he would not live to see.
BY 1799 George Washington must have realized that the only respite he would ever get from politics resided in a peaceful afterlife. That June Jonathan Trumbull, Jr., reminding him of the pending presidential election, expressed the hope that if Washington’s name were brought forward, “you will not disappoint the hopes and desires of the wise and good . . . by refusing to come forward once more to the relief . . . of your injured country.”22 Trumbull spoke for many Federalists who worried that Adams was a weak candidate and were terrified that the Francophile Jefferson might emerge as the next president. In response, Washington talked like an unabashed Federalist, sarcastically deriding Republican sophistry: “Let that party set up a broomstick and call it a true son of liberty . . . and it will command their votes in toto!”23 His passionate words mocked the Jeffersonian myth that his mental powers were impaired, and he satirized the scuttlebutt that he had lapsed into “dotage and imbecility.”24 He declined Trumbull’s request on political grounds, claiming that he could not draw a single new vote from the opposition. His personal reasons were far more cogent. Citing declining health, he said it would be “criminal therefore in me, although it should be the wish of my countrymen . . . to accept an office under this conviction.”25 Dismayed that, since mid-March, President Adams had absented himself from the capital, staying at his home in Quincy, Washington said that Federalists were aggrieved at his behavior while Republicans “chuckle at and set it down as a favorable omen for themselves.”26 With his usual sense of courtesy, Washington thought it would be unbecoming for him to advise the president: “It has been suggested to me to make this communication, but I have declined it, conceiving that it would be better received from a private character—m[ore] in the habits of social intercourse and friendship.”27
At the end of August Washington tossed cold water on Trumbull’s entreaties a second time. He now sounded even more categorical that “no eye, no tongue, no thought may be turned towards me for the purpose alluded to