Washington

  Another casualty of the treaty fracas was Washington’s relationship with James Monroe, who had fought with him at Trenton. “He has in every instance,” Washington then declared, “maintained the reputation of a brave, active, and sensible officer.”23 In appointing Monroe as minister to France in 1794, Washington aimed to reduce tensions between Federalists and Republicans. As a protégé of Jefferson and Madison, however, Monroe threw aside any pretense of neutrality, showed blatant favoritism toward the French, and allowed himself to be embraced by leading French politicians. According to Washington, Monroe had also tried to pry loose advance details of the Jay Treaty to give the French an unauthorized preview and, instead of allaying French anger over the treaty, actively incited it. When Monroe published in the Aurora an anonymous piece critical of Washington, entitled “From a Gentleman in Paris to His Friend in the City,” Washington quickly figured out its author. (Wolcott and Pickering had somehow obtained a copy of the original letter.) In July 1796 he recalled Monroe and replaced him with Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, leaving Monroe mortified at such treatment .24

  Back in Philadelphia, still seething over his recall, Monroe published a 473-page indictment of Washington’s handling of the incident called A View of the Conduct of the Executive in the Foreign Affairs of the United States. Jefferson, who coached Monroe on this diatribe, was delighted by the result. “Monroe’s book is considered masterly by all those who are not opposed in principle, and it is deemed unanswerable,” he informed Madison.25 When Washington pored over the book, he not only snorted with rage but scrawled in its margins sixty-six pages of sardonic comments. These dense notes afford a rare glimpse of Washington in the grip of uncensored anger. Responding to one comment by Monroe, he scoffed, “Self importance appears here.”26 In another aside, he wrote, “Insanity in the extreme!”27 Another time, he mocked Monroe’s statement as “curious and laughable.”28 The gist of many of Washington’s remarks was that French actions toward America had been motivated by self-interest, not ideological solidarity, and flouted American neutrality in seeking to enlist the United States in the war against England. The imbroglio with Monroe signaled the demise of yet another Washington friendship with a prominent Virginian, a list that now encompassed George Mason, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Edmund Randolph.

  Now that it was open season on Washington in the press, he took a pounding from yet another Revolutionary War hero. Thomas Paine believed that Washington had made no effort to free him after he was imprisoned in France as a British-born resident and a Girondin supporter who had opposed the execution of the king. Having advanced a dubious claim to American citizenship, he accused Washington of “connivance at my imprisonment.”29 He was finally released with help from Monroe, who then invited him to lodge in his residence. In October 1796 Paine published in the Aurora an open letter to Washington, accusing him of “a cold deliberate crime of the heart” in letting him rot in prison, and he also took dead aim at his command of the Continental Army.30 “You slept away your time in the field till the finances of the country were completely exhausted,” he fumed, “and you have but little share in the glory of the event.”31 Paine alleged that Horatio Gates and Nathanael Greene deserved true credit for the patriots’ victory, abetted by French assistance: “Had it not been for the aid received from France in men, money, and ships, your cold and unmilitary conduct . . . would in all probability have lost America.”32

  Not content to denigrate Washington’s military performance, Paine defamed him as an unfeeling man, lonely and isolated, who ruthlessly crushed anyone who crossed him. Among his associates, Paine contended, it was known that Washington “has no friendships; that he is incapable of forming any; [that] he can serve or desert a man or a cause with constitutional indifference.”33 Paine ended with the most vicious swipe of all: “As to you, sir, treacherous in private friendship (for so you have been to me, and that in the day of danger) and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.”34 This intemperate outburst cast more doubt on Paine’s erratic judgment than on Washington’s performance. In writing to Abigail, John Adams gave this verdict on Paine’s letter: “He must have been insane to write so.”35

  FOR A TIME DURING HIS PRESIDENCY, Washington had shunned the tedium of sitting for portraits, but with the end now in sight, he was amenable to pictures that might immortalize his waning days. Since the Revolutionary War, he had been fond of Charles Willson Peale, the multifaceted artist who had opened an eccentric museum in Philadelphia, a cabinet of curiosities crammed with exotic specimens of natural history, coupled with a portrait gallery of wartime heroes. In 1795 the artist’s son Rembrandt Peale, age seventeen, received a commission to paint the president. Doubtless rewarding a faithful ally by posing for his son, Washington agreed to three sessions with Rembrandt in Peale’s Museum, with each sitting lasting three hours. The president stipulated a seven A.M. starting time, and on the appointed day young Rembrandt rose at dawn, trembling with anxiety. So nervously did the young man prepare for the sitting that he could scarcely mix his colors and decided to proceed only if his father sketched a portrait beside him, ensuring “that the sitting would not be unprofitable by affording a double chance for a likeness. This had the effect to calm my nerves, and I enjoyed the rare advantage of studying the desired countenance whilst in familiar conversation with my father.”36 At the second session, a third family member, James Peale, Charles’s brother, daubed a miniature of Washington while two of Rembrandt’s brothers, Raphaelle and Titian, knocked off sketches as well. Never before had Washington allowed two, much less five, artists to record his image at the same time.

  Gilbert Stuart, who was then painting his iconographic images of Washington, happened to stroll by as Washington sat in thrall to the busy swarm of painting Peales: “I looked in to see how the old gentleman was getting on with the picture, and, to my astonishment, I found the general surrounded by the whole family.” As Stuart walked away, he ran into Martha. “Madam,” said Stuart, “the general’s in a perilous situation.” “How sir?” “He is beset, madam—no less than five upon him at once; one aims at his eye—another at his nose—another is busy with his hair—the mouth is attacked by a fourth; and the fifth has him by the button. In short, madam, there are five painters at him, and you who know how much he has suffered when only attended by one, can judge of the horrors of his situation.”37

  The two best-known portraits to emerge from these sessions tell a doleful tale of George Washington late in his second term. In the Charles Willson Peale version, a suddenly older Washington sits in a dark velvet coat, with an upturned collar and ruffled shirtfront. There is no sparkle in the immobile face, and his drooping eyelids make him appear sleepily inactive. A bag has formed under his left eye, which seems half shut, and the right eye does not open much wider. All in all the portrait depicts a weary, dispirited president, fatigued after long years in office and depleted by the battle royal over the Jay Treaty. The Rembrandt Peale portrait makes Washington seem a bit enfeebled and even more geriatric, his skin parched with age. As he stares worriedly ahead, the lips of his wrinkled mouth are tightly compressed with displeasure. Ironically, in his later years, Rembrandt Peale painted heroic portraits of Washington in his Continental Army uniform, nobly fired by youthful energy.

  In many ways, it was unfortunate that Gilbert Stuart’s lasting images of Washington date from this period, when the swagger and panache of his early days had faded. Embittered by partisan feuding and feeling burdened by public life, Washington had made massive sacrifices to his country, and the luster had fled from his eye. Although Stuart captured the ineffable grandeur of the man, who sometimes seemed to float in a timeless realm, his images gave posterity a far more dour and haggard Washington than the charismatic general known to contemporaries from earlier times. Stuart was cognizant of the distortions that time had visited upon Washington. “W
hen I painted him,” he said, “he had just had a set of false teeth inserted, which accounts for the constrained expression so noticeable about the mouth and lower part of the face.”38 To help rectify such distortions, he turned to Houdon’s bust and life mask, but Stuart’s portraits still reflect the physiognomy of the mid-1790s.

  Already in the 1780s Washington had tired of artistic conventions that cast politicians in Roman togas. Averse to idealizing his subjects, Gilbert Stuart dressed them in modern clothing and took a hard, cold look at them. So Stuart, for all the antics and fast talk that may have irritated Washington, was very much to his taste as a portrait painter. Only in the so-called Lansdowne portrait, where a visionary Washington stands with a fixed gaze and stiffly outstretched arm, does Stuart resort to the props of republican power, showing copies of The Federalist and the Constitution in bound form at his feet. Perhaps the memories of a healthier and happier husband predisposed Martha Washington to criticize Stuart’s work. “There are several prints, medallions, and miniatures of the president in the house, none of which please Mrs. Washington,” John Pintard wrote when he visited Mount Vernon in 1801. “She does not think Stuart’s celebrated painting a true resemblance.”39 Stuart converted the Washington portraits into a thriving industry, stamping out copies for so many years that he laughingly referred to them as his hundred-dollar bills—that being the price he charged for each. His daughter Jane contended that he could crank out a copy in a couple of hours and sometimes finished two portraits in a single session.

  AS PATERFAMILIAS OF THE CLAN, the president loved to shower his young wards with sage advice, especially in affairs of the heart. Despite pressing political concerns, he enjoyed playing the didactic role of the grizzled adviser. George and Martha Washington were thrilled in 1795, when Fanny Washington, widowed by George Augustine’s death, wed Tobias Lear, who had lost his wife, Polly, to yellow fever. To bind them more closely, the Washingtons bestowed upon the young couple a rent-free house and 360 acres at Mount Vernon. Since Fanny had three children from her previous marriage and Tobias Lear a little boy from his, the wedding seemed a fairy-tale solution for the grieving young couple. Then in March 1796 Lear informed the Washingtons that Fanny had fallen gravely ill, and they were stunned when she breathed her last. “Your former letters prepared us for the stroke,” the Washingtons commiserated with Lear, “but it has fallen heavily notwithstanding.”40 For Martha Washington, who had been overjoyed by the marriage, touting Lear as “a worthy man . . . esteemed by everyone,” it extended the dreadful pattern in her life of the untimely death of children, both real and substitute.41

  Another young woman who preoccupied Washington’s thoughts was Elizabeth Parke Custis, Nelly’s oldest sister, an attractive brunette raised by her mother and David Stuart. The girl so adored her stepgrandfather that she was once paralyzed by nerves when he descended for a visit. “The General said that, although he thought a young girl looked best when blushing,” she recalled, “yet he was concerned to see me suffer so much.”42 When requesting a portrait from Washington, she professed herself indifferent to love: “It is my first wish to have it in my power to contemplate at all times the features of one who I so highly respect as the Father of his Country and look up to with grateful affection as a parent to myself and family.”43 While Washington obliged her with a miniature by Irish artist Walter Robertson, he teased her gently and inquired whether “emotions of a softer kind” did not move her heart.44

  Elizabeth’s desire to join the Washington household in Philadelphia in 1795 must have filled the older couple with misgivings. However devoted she was to them, she had a fiery temper and was cursed with what one aunt called “a violent and romantic disposition.”45 That same aunt regretted that in “her tastes and pastimes, she is more man than woman and regrets that she can’t wear pants.”46 When she first came to Philadelphia, she was sulky and querulous and boycotted church and dances. Martha Washington, a confirmed believer in social duties, could not sympathize with such morbid brooding. Washington, however, enjoyed Elizabeth’s company, and she accompanied him for sittings with Gilbert Stuart. One day, as Stuart painted, Elizabeth abruptly barged into the room and, folding her arms across her chest, cast an appraising look at his work. He was so struck by this self-assured pose that he painted her in exactly this manner, holding a straw hat embellished with a red ribbon. Her sidelong glance in the portrait is proud, spirited, and obstinate, as if she refused to budge from the viewer’s glance. Elizabeth appeared indifferent to her own beauty, as if it were something too trivial to occupy her attention.

  In 1796 an Englishman twice her age, Thomas Law, revealed his plans to marry her, a move that took the Washingtons by surprise, Elizabeth having concealed the courtship. After running up a fortune in India, Law had come to America to dabble in real estate and promptly bought five hundred lots in the new federal district. Even before Washington knew he would someday have a familial connection with Law, he had recoiled at the scale of these purchases. “Will it not be asked,” he inquired, “why are speculators to pocket so much money?”47 When Law apprised him of his intention to marry Elizabeth, Washington was quietly livid and must have known that he could not talk the stubborn Elizabeth out of the marriage. In replying to Law, he faulted him for the deceptive manner in which he had proceeded but did not protest the marriage outright: “No intimation of this event, from any quarter, having been communicated to us before, it may well be supposed that it was a matter of surprise. This being premised, I have only to add . . . my approbation, in which Mrs. Washington unites.”48

  It was a typically shrewd response from Washington, who offered qualified support to Law while privately gathering more information about him. He confronted Elizabeth gingerly, saying that she had “more honesty than disguise” in her nature and should disclose more details of her engagement: “This I have a right to expect in return for my blessing so promptly bestowed, after you had concealed the matter from me so long.”49 Wary of Law’s motives, Washington wrote on the sly to Elizabeth’s stepfather, David Stuart, suggesting a strong prenuptial agreement that would have Law “make a settlement upon her previous to marriage, of her own fortune, if no more.”50 When the couple married in Virginia the next month, the wedding was conducted in a studiously low-key style, devoid of dancing or festivities, as if the family had no wish to invest in premature celebration. The marriage proved a misalliance, and the couple separated in 1803.

  Elizabeth’s petulant nature threw into shining relief the sterling qualities of her vivacious sister Nelly, who was so varied in her interests, including horseback riding, singing, playing the harpsichord, studying French, and drawing. One smitten male visitor marveled that she “has more perfection of form of expression, of color, of softness, and of firmness of mind than I have ever seen before.”51 With keen wit she skewered her enraptured male admirers. When she heard false rumors that she was romantically involved with one young man, she admitted that he had pleasing manners but had “been told too often of his merit and accomplishments, and it has given him more affectation than is by any means agreeable.”52 She mocked another young man for his pseudoromantic babble about “hearts, darts, hopes, fears, heart-aches ” and other terms related to the “tender passion.”53 With such merciless comments, Nelly murdered the hopes of many young suitors, and it seemed unlikely she would marry anytime soon.

  Martha sometimes found Nelly a little unconventional for her tastes, but the president adored her. Far more trying was his relationship with George Washington Parke Custis, who recapitulated his father’s history of academic apathy. He had grown into a handsome teenager, crowned with curly hair, a broad face, and large, attractive eyes. When Washy entered Princeton in the autumn of 1796—the president thought the school had “turned out better scholars” and “more estimable characters” than any other—the president didn’t know whether he would adjust to the academic rigors or loaf his way through.54 As with Jacky, Washington smothered the young man with advice, warning him ag
ainst idle amusements, dissipated company, and hasty friendships. Trying to instill his own prudent habits, he told him to “select the most deserving only for your friendships, and, before this becomes intimate, weigh their dispositions and character well.”55 Washington’s vague bromides about Washy becoming a scholar and a useful member of society seemed like so much wishful thinking.

  Within six months of Washy’s arrival at Princeton, Washington was confronted by disturbing reports from the boy’s tutor. “From his infancy, I have discovered an almost unconquerable disposition to indolence,” Washington informed the professor in words that echoed his chronic dismay with Jacky Custis.56 Like Jacky, Washy apologized profusely for his misdemeanors and promised to reform. He assured Washington that “like the prodigal son,” he would be “a sincere penitent,” but such noble intentions lasted only as long as it took the ink to dry.57 However good-natured and ingratiating in his letters, Washy was, at bottom, feckless and incorrigible. He would say all the right things, then do all the wrong things, and he lasted only a year at Princeton.