By W. Due west. Abbot
The Lowell Lecture Series, The Museum of Our National Heritage
Lexington, Massachusetts, v Dec 1999

Preface

retireThe following lecture was presented by Westward. W. Abbot at The Museum of Our National Heritage in Lexington Massachusetts, on v December 1999 every bit office of the Lowell Lecture Series, sponsored by The Massachusetts Historical Society and The Colonial Society. Mr. Abbot, Professor Emeritus of the Corcoran Department of History and Editor Emeritus of the Papers of George Washington at the University of Virginia, opened ii exhibits honoring the bicentennial of Washington's death at the University of Virginia with his lecture, "The Young George Washington and His Papers," presented xi February 1999.

For George Washington retirement had a precise meaning. Information technology meant leaving the public phase and going home to attend to ane's business organization. By this definition, Washington retired three times. He start retired in 1759 when he gave up his military career and began the life of a planter at Mount Vernon. This lasted about 16 years. In Dec 1783, after nine years away from dwelling house as commander in master of the Continental regular army, he resigned his commission and returned to Mountain Vernon. This, his 2d retirement, lasted for a petty over five years, ending in 1789 with his departure for New York to go President. After eight years in the presidency, Washington retired for the terminal time, in March 1797. Two years and nine months later, he died at Mountain Vernon.

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Due west. West. Abbot
Photo by Stephanie Gross

The business that Washington went abode to attend to, in 1759, in 1783, and in 1797, was always the same: the management of the plantation at Mountain Vernon, fabricated upward of five farms eventually totaling 8,000 acres, with a grist mill and distillery, a fishery, the estate house and its extensive ornamental and experimental gardens, scores of outbuildings, and several hundred slaves-and roads, hedges, ditches, fences, horses, jackasses, jennies, mules, cows, prize bulls and rams, sheep, pigs, goats, guinea hens, and fox hounds. It is fair to say, I believe, that whereas the Revolution and the presidency forced upon Washington a role in history-a role, I hasten to add, he embraced eagerly and played to the hilt-his career in agronomics, of his own choosing and design, had on him a stronger and more indelible hold than did either war or politics.

As a planter, Washington ever faced the challenge of finding ways to produce at Mount Vernon, for sale and for consumption, plenty to sustain the sort of life that he deemed suitable for himself and for his dependents. Virginia planters were finding such a goal more and more difficult to attain in the years before the Revolution and nearly impossible afterwards. Washington came closer to making his plantation profitable than did nigh.

It was an article of faith with him that, contrary to general exercise in Virginia, a planter's start business organisation was to preserve and improve the fertility of his land. To this stop, Washington experimented with many cover crops, he rotated crops in varying sequences, he tried unlike types of plows and ways of plowing, and he used a wide assortment of fertilizers in various ways. One time he bought in Philadelphia a large car, chosen a "Hippopotamus," 1 with which he scraped muck from the lesser of the Potomac to spread on his fields.

Early on on, Washington abandoned the culture of tobacco, which was exhausting the soil, and turned to grain for his primary coin ingather. Most of the grain he sold, or consigned, to local and foreign merchants in the form of wheat flour, corn repast, and, later, whiskey. Information technology was a abiding challenge to find sources for loftier quality seed with which to sow his fields in wheat, corn, barley, rye, clover, and grasses. Nor was he always satisfied that he knew all he needed to know almost how all-time to plant, cultivate, harvest, and market these crops. Much the aforementioned might exist said of his raising vast amounts of foodstuff for homo and beast consumption at Mountain Vernon. There were the large fields of vegetables-carrots, corn, cabbages, potatoes, peas, beans, pumpkins, and turnips-to be attended to every yr. There were the rows of fruit trees begetting different varieties of apples, cherries, pears, plums, peaches, and apricots. His fishery on the river provided not just food for his people but also an important commodity for sale. He paid detail attending to his farm animals and took pains to acquire breeding animals that would improve his stock. He was forever seeking information and advice virtually the art of farming from beau agriculturalists in Virginia and Pennsylvania, and in U.k.. His passion for agricultural experimentation led him to try, briefly, to grow flax and hemp as staple crops, and his enthusiasm for growing rare and exotic plants made him never tire of planting in his greenhouse and gardens the seed and cuttings sent to him from faraway places. Nor did he ever cease trying to devise new and better ways to utilize his labor forcefulness, the greatest challenge of all.

While engaged in a lifelong effort to brand the plantation at Mount Vernon a model of efficiency and productivity, Washington institute time, during his outset and second retirements, to take the lead in the building of the Potomac River and James River canals and in the draining of the Neat Dismal Swamp, the largest projects of that kind undertaken in Virginia during his lifetime. He also acquired and offered for auction tens of thousands of acres of western land along the banks of the Ohio and Kanawha rivers.

In all of this, Washington's purpose, of course, was to advance his ain interests. But like other enlightened planters of his generation, he believed that any success he might take would too benefit his fellow countrymen. The improvement of agricultural practices and the expansion of available land would offer all farmers new opportunities for advancement. What was skilful for George Washington was good for his country. Washington's assumptions near the coincidence of his personal and the general interest was, I suspect, a real source of strength for him during those years when he sought to fill the demanding role of Father of His Land.

Washington's first stint in the public realm, as commander in chief of Virginia's forces during the French and Indian War, transformed him from a callow youth hungry for stardom into an achieved ground forces officer who commanded with easy conviction and considerable skill a brigade of the British general John Forbes'due south army in its march on Fort Duquesne in the autumn of 1758. To phone call Washington's departure from his regiment at the finish of this entrada, at age 26, his first retirement, every bit I do, is, of form, fifty-fifty by Washington's definition, stretching the point. Different his retirement in 1783, and again in 1797, this was not a purposeful withdrawal from public life. It was a retirement only in the sense information technology represented a reluctant acceptance that a career in the British army was not open up to him and that he must brand his way in private life. For the next decade and a half Washington lived at Mount Vernon making himself, with the aid of his wife's fortune, a homo of large holding and broad influence. These were the years in which he developed his farming operations on a large scale and acquired vast stretches of land in the west. This was also the time in his life in which he equally a great planter took a leading part in local affairs, serving without interruption on his parish vestry and the Fairfax County court, and in the Virginia legislature.

The alacrity with which Washington abandoned this life to assume command of the Continental army in 1775 gives some credence to the label of retirement for these early years at Mount Vernon. In any case, he was abroad from Mount Vernon at war for nearly 9 years. In December 1783, the hero of the Revolution submitted his resignation to Congress and returned home, taking with him only boxes of papers recording the long fight for independence. This act of retirement was perhaps the unmarried almost of import activity of his career. Non that the renunciation of ability by the conquering hero preserved the American states from military dominion, so or thereafter. Washington, in fact, could non have get, or remained, ruler even if he had wished. But his prompt return to Mount Vernon, without pay, prize, or office, with no demands made and the solemn assurance that no reward or office would be accepted, struck a chord in the American and European consciousness. It fabricated the Cincinnatus of the Due west a great man: swell in the eyes of the world, in the eyes of his countrymen, and, in a very real sense, his own. The newly independent American republic stood in need of a symbol, a personified ideal, to give it unity and to aid it define itself. The bear witness is convincing that Washington came to understand and accept that this was to be his function in the infancy of the new union. During the early days of his retirement in the 1780s, he played the role of great man with zest and thereafter always sought to see the demands the part placed upon him. This is one of the reasons why he suffered agonies of indecision in 1787, over whether or non he should attend the convention called in Philadelphia to typhoon a new frame of authorities. Should he attend and increase the chances of the convention'southward success, or should he keep his distance lest the effort fail and he be needed every bit a symbol to aid preserve for a while longer the delicate union of states? And over again, in the next twelvemonth, should he consent to become president in the new government in guild to put it on a firm ground, or should he stand up aside, to a higher place the fray, to preserve his fame, his reputation, and his presence as a unifying force in fourth dimension of troubles yet to come? He decided to chance his fame by presiding at the Constitutional Convention, and in doing and so added to its luster. He risked it again to serve as president, which by the time he left function had dimmed its glow but in the stop confirmed his place as the central figure in the founding of a nation.

The story I'd similar to tell this afternoon, briefly, I promise, and as just as I tin, is the story of Washington'south final retirement. I began working on Washington's retirement papers, his post-presidential papers, in 1992. This was the twelvemonth that I myself finally retired, at the age of seventy, from the faculty at the University of Virginia and from the editorship of The Papers of George Washington. I had spent years preparing a ten-volume edition of Washington's pre-Revolutionary papers, and I had just finished editing and publishing in six volumes his Confederation papers, the periods of his commencement and second retirements. My successor recklessly invited me to stick around for a bit to edit the papers of Washington's terminal retirement. I stayed for nearly half-dozen years. The terminal ii of the four volumes in the Retirement Series, which encompass the period from four March 1797 to 14 December 1799, were published this fall.

During the twenty-odd years that I was editing Washington's papers, I inappreciably e'er lectured on the man, wrote annihilation about him for publication, or fifty-fifty passed judgment on what others said or wrote. I'm not sure why. A strange sort of disharmonize of interest matter perhaps. Final year, no longer an editor of his papers, I agreed to requite a talk in California on the young Washington. So, last summertime, I was asked to speak here in this wonderful place eight days before the two hundredth ceremony of Washington's death, about his last years. It seemed the right time and identify to give my 2nd, and last, talk on the groovy man. Maybe, I thought, if I call up difficult plenty nigh the papers I've been immersed in for nearly a decade, I can come upwards with something worth saying about Washington in his brief last retirement. I hope I have done so. A word of warning: What follows is my own rather high-flight reading of the documents in which I give little supporting evidence, considering I practise not have time to provide it, and with no reference to what others have said because, largely to my discredit, I for the virtually function exercise not know what they accept said.

I current view of George Washington later leaving the presidency is of a quintessential eighteenth-century human, dislocated and hurt as the world about him rapidly and radically changed in ways that he could not sympathise or take. This characterization is accurate plenty every bit far as information technology goes. Merely the documents, every bit I read them, suggest that Washington, and his life, moved and changed in his brief retirement, and that both were poised for further motion and change when death intervened.

In many means, Washington left role and resumed private life much as others take done, earlier and since. There were the rounds of goodbyes and the handing over the role to his successor. Private papers and personal possessions had to be separated from public ones and packed for shipment. Washington disposed of, past sale or souvenir, things not needed at Mountain Vernon-the horses used for the presidential carriage, for instance-and purchased other things that would be needed there. He arranged to have shipped to Virginia, aboard the sloop Salem, personal belongings filling 97 boxes, 14 trunks, 43 casks, 13 packages, and 3 hampers, along with i ton of iron, 24 plow plates, 3 bedsteads, 1 heater, a bird muzzle, 2 wooden pillars, 1 safe, a mangel, 8 demijons, six fire buckets, a bundle of fruit trees, Venetian blinds, carpets, a tin can shower bath, and more. 2

Traveling with Mrs. Washington, her granddaughter Nelly Custis, and young George Washington Lafayette and his tutor, Washington made the trip from Philadelphia in half-dozen days, stopping for public appearances just at Baltimore, Washington, and Georgetown. He had been at habitation less than 3 weeks when he wrote to a friend in Philadelphia that he was "already surrounded by Joiners, Masons, Painters &ca &ca and such is my anxiety to leave of their easily, that I have scarcely a room to put a friend into, or to set in myself, without the Music of hammers or the odoriferous smell of Paint." 3 He remained in "the easily" of the carpenters and painters through the summer and into the fall. All the while, he searched for funds to support his operations at Mount Vernon, making repeated efforts to collect money owed on land long sold and to sell afar tracts notwithstanding unsold, with no cracking success.

From the start he followed the routine of rising early and seeing to it that the painters and carpenters began their work at the pause of day. Afterward breakfast, at about seven, "I mount my horse," he reported, "and ride round my farms, which employs me until information technology is time to wearing apparel for dinner; at which I rarely miss seeing strange faces. . . . The usual time of sitting at Table-a walk-and Tea-brings me within the dawn of Candlelight." four As the candles were lit, he withdrew, whenever he could manage, to his "writing Tabular array," where he remained until bedtime. Even in the long stretches during the war and his presidency when he could not make a daily inspection of the farms himself, Washington had kept close tabs on their operation. He wrote his farm managing director each calendar week a alphabetic character filled with queries and instructions about subcontract piece of work. He required the farm manager to respond promptly and to send weekly reports, giving in full item such things equally what piece of work had been done at each farm, how each slave had been employed, which of them had been sick, had died, or had given birth, and the precise status of all the farm animals. Several months before his return to Mount Vernon, Washington had hired a new subcontract manager, a Scot, named James Anderson. Washington held loftier hopes for him. Anderson did not fulfill these hopes-no man alive, I daresay, could have done then-but he earned Washington's respect and remained at Mount Vernon until after Washington'due south expiry.

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Mount Vernon
From Lossing's Mountain Vernon

While it would appear that Washington settled into the rhythm of private life much similar any other man, his situation was in fact unique. For 1 thing, being an icon he attracted an endless stream of visitors, many mere gawkers, whom good manners required he entertain at considerable expense and loss of fourth dimension. But the matter that complicated Washington'due south retirement more than anything else was that not only had he been the offset President of the United States, he was now also its first ex-President. The ambiguities and uncertainties of the role of ex-President were to lead to his descent for a time from the pedestal on which he had long stood as hero of the Revolution and Father of His Country.

At the time that Washington handed over the reins of government to John Adams, both the outgoing and the incoming presidents, and their supporters, causeless the second President would simply go on the policies of the showtime. Afterward all, the policies were plainly in the common interest and designed for the common skilful. (The opposition causeless the aforementioned thing, but assigned quite different reasons for it.) This was why Adams retained in office all of the heads of departments-the secretaries of state, war, treasury, and the attorney full general-who had formed Washington's chiffonier and carried out his policies. Bemoaning the unreliability of the news reports printed in the gazettes, Washington, on his return to Mountain Vernon, wrote Secretary of War James McHenry asking him "to communicate to me occasionally such matters as are interesting, and non contrary to the rules of your official duty to disclose." five The "matters" that most interested Washington were whatever developments in the relations of the United States with France. During his second administration, controversial policies regarding Britain and Revolutionary French republic had opened deep and lasting divisions in the American body politic, with opponents of the policies viewing them as dangerously pro-British and anti-French, monarchical and anti-republican in their tendencies. It was at Washington'southward initiative, or with his like shooting fish in a barrel compliance, that the men in his successor'southward cabinet provided him with frequent confidential reports on developments in foreign relations. Nor was this the finish of it. Washington in his replies commented freely and fully on what he had been told. Whatsoever his intentions the ex-President was using the back door to secure information from his successor'southward cabinet and to requite information technology advice and support, all without Adams's cognition.

That Washington equally ex-President should have ready access to the men in the new cabinet, all of whom had served in his, was inevitable. Just why did Washington cull to make apply of the access? Why did he not just walk away and in doing so define the role of the president subsequently leaving office in the way he had defined the President's office while in part? The answer is, I think, that for all his talk of longing to sit undisturbed nether his ain vine and fig tree, Washington was non notwithstanding quite ready to spotter the globe pass him past without giving information technology a nudge or two. This brief falter, or detour, coming near the end of the road to greatness which Washington had mapped out for himself and traveled triumphantly down since 1775, should not be surprising. For 1 matter, Washington had been for nearly a quarter of a century at or near the centre of the world's stage, at the top of the heap. In giving all of this upwards, even a homo of Washington'southward remarkable lack of vanity and unmatched cocky-control, might well betray symptoms of a sort of uneasiness, incertitude, or discontent. All of u.s.a. know-and some of us number ourselves among them- doctors, lawyers, merchants, and bankers-and professors-who are not at their best when they observe themselves at the age of 65, or 77, no longer players, every bit nosotros say, outside the loop, on the shelf, living out in Sun City.

In Washington's example, information technology was non only the usual reluctance to let go. The past had a hook in him. A yr after leaving office, he received a copy of a book by James Monroe mounting a biting set on on the foreign policy of the Washington assistants. Washington read the book in March 1798 and wrote copious notes in the margins of its pages. The uncharacteristically angry, sarcastic, and acidly contemptuous tone of his comments rebutting Monroe's charges reveal how great a personal and emotional stake Washington had in the conduct of American strange policy. His comments also evidence how strongly persuaded he was that his opponents were not just wrongheaded but had in fact become unsafe and even treasonous.

A month subsequently venting, in the privacy of his written report, his spleen on Monroe, and the French regime that Monroe championed, Washington learned the total extent of French "perfidy." In April 1798, President Adams forwarded and Congress published the dispatches from the three American envoys sent to Paris to negotiate with the Directory. The dispatches told of the outrageous treatment that the envoys had received at the hands of the French Minister Talleyrand. This was the notorious XYZ affair. As the country seethed, President Adams recommended measures for strengthening American defenses, and Congress promptly voted to raise a conditional ground forces.

Amid the ensuing public uproar, President Adams and Alexander Hamilton, among others, warned Washington that he should expect to be summoned to head the American armed forces and salve the country from French republic. In response, Washington spoke of his reluctance to leave private life and of his doubts that the French would invade, even though they were evidently capable "of whatever Species of Despotism & Injustice," and even though they were supported by "their Agents, & Partisans amid Us." However, he wrote Adams, "In instance of actual Invasion past a formidable force, I certainly should not Intrench myself under the cover of Age & retirement, if my services should exist required past my Country, to assistance in repelling information technology." six Early in July 1798 the Senate unanimously approved Adams's nomination of Washington every bit " Lieutenant Full general and Commander in Master of all the Armies raised or to exist raised for the service of the United states of america." 7 Secretarial assistant of War McHenry arrived at Mountain Vernon on 11 July, bearing Washington's commission. Two days subsequently Washington wrote President Adams and accepted the appointment, with the proviso that only in the case of imminent or actual invasion would he leave Mount Vernon and take the field.

Information technology was at this point that the impropriety, or inappropriateness, of Washington's correspondence with the Adams cabinet began to reveal itself. Earlier he accepted the control of the army, Washington fabricated it generally known that he expected to have final say in the choice of the general staff officers. Adams initially signaled his compliance with Washington'southward wish that Alexander Hamilton be Washington's second in command, simply in September back in Quincy with his ill married woman Abigail, the President changed his mind. He would appoint not Hamilton just the New Englander Henry Knox instead. The members of the cabinet, all political allies of Hamilton, led by Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and Secretary of War McHenry, immediately informed Washington of Adams'due south determination. Infuriated, Washington joined the venomous Pickering and the others in their campaign to force the President to appoint Hamilton. A month after, Adams gave in. Hamilton became the senior major general.

In the midst of the maneuvering to get the job for Alexander Hamilton, Washington wrote the Secretarial assistant of State of war in September about a report beingness circulated that Americans sympathetic to France, if given commissions, "would endeavor to split up, & contaminate the Army, by artful & Seditious discourses; and perhaps at a disquisitional moment, bring on defoliation," a premise he and Hamilton acted on a few months afterwards when choosing officers for the New Army. Washington went on to express to McHenry his conviction that, 1 "could as soon scrub the blackamore white, as to change the principles of a profest Democrat." 8 Such persons, he wrote, "will leave nothing unattempted to overturn the Government of this Country."

So it had come to this: the judicious, nonpartisan, and moderate George Washington interim and talking similar the virtually partisan of the virulently reactionary Federalists. It is truthful that earlier he learned of Adams's decision to appoint Hamilton, Washington detached himself from the maneuvering of the cabinet and himself wrote to Adams well-nigh the appointment. And he never again spoke then intemperately about the Republicans. Nevertheless what we have hither is a sure modify in the man. Enraged and bewildered by what he sees as the betrayal of the country by his political enemies, and existence fully aware that this also represented the utter rejection of himself as the unifying father of the land by many of his beau citizens, he comes down off the pedestal that had served him and his country so well for and then long and lashes out at those who had turned against him and his policies. Alas, is this how Washington'due south long and noble journeying ends, in bitterness, sick-temper, and alienation? Or does he, off his pedestal, regain his balance and come to encounter himself as a man who has had his day and is now ready to move on?

In November 1798 Washington met in Philadelphia with his two major generals, Alexander Hamilton and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, to formulate plans for raising the new regular army regiments authorized by Congress, and to choose officers for those regiments. After meeting daily for 6 weeks, they made their recommendations in a series of reports to the Secretary of War.

Secretary McHenry and President Adams were slow to human action on the recommendations, to Washington's irritation, but past spring appointments of most of the officers had been made and some recruiting of soldiers had begun. During these months Washington's activities every bit commander in chief were bars largely to reading reports from General Hamilton and forwarding letters of awarding and recommendation for commissions to McHenry, forth with an occasional letter of his ain complaining of McHenry's dilatory habits. The truth is that what seemed to arouse his interest as much as anything else and consumed a cracking deal of his fourth dimension and idea was the cut and blueprint of the compatible for the new rank of lieutenant general which had been bestowed on him. He carried on an all-encompassing correspondence with the Philadelphia tailor who was making information technology, asking him, for instance, whether the cuff "shall merely turn upwards, or accept a slash through it, with a flap the colour of the cloth (blue, with three buttons and holes) also embroidered; and whether the [pocket flap] shall take a cross pocket in the usual form, or slashed (that is inclining downward)." ix

Equally Washington's enthusiasm for his new job, never corking, seemed to wane in the spring of 1799, it all of a sudden became more burdensome. In May 1799, Adams ordered that boosted officers exist plant and chosen into service should a provisional army of 10,000 men authorized by Congress be activated. Information technology savage to Washington to fill the quota of officers for Virginia, though he protested that from long absence he was "as piddling acquainted with present characters-a few excepted-as almost whatsoever human being" in the state. 10 In the fall, because of Full general Pinckney's absence, Washington constitute himself, much to his displeasure, under the necessity of finding winter quarters for several of the regiments in the New Army. In short, his military duties in 1799 demanded a off-white corporeality of his time just allowable relatively fiddling of his interest.

Washington did something else in the spring of 1799 that was as out of character as his before conniving with Adams'due south chiffonier and the barring from the new regular army men with Republican leanings. But this had quite different implications. In April and May he took a lead in the campaign in Virginia to elect Federalists to the new Congress. He persuaded Patrick Henry to run for the Senate. He encouraged Henry Lee to seek a seat in the Business firm of Representatives. He wrote messages to, and got letters from, Federalist leaders in Virginia, including John Marshall, Bushrod Washington, John Tayloe, and David Stuart, virtually the political races around the state. They, and others, reported to him the results of the elections to Congress and to the state legislature. This was a radical divergence for Washington. He had not personally engaged in electoral politics since his outset election to the House of Burgesses some forty years earlier. During the war, past steering clear of factional politics in the Continental Congress, he had managed to remain at the caput of the Continental army and to hold it together until the end. While remaining in a higher place the fray later the war, he strengthened the move for constitutional reform in the 1780s, held the federal convention on course in 1787, became a decisive cistron in the ratification of the new Constitution, and, equally President, gave the new authorities stability and direction. Not just had he always presented himself every bit standing above party, he had openly viewed parties with abhorrence as manifestations of destructive factionalism. His aggressively partisan participation in the Virginia elections in 1799 may non, and probably does not, signify his acceptance of the utility, much less the desirability, of political parties, but information technology certainly does reflect his recognition of their existence. The new politics was still not to his liking, simply it was not beyond his understanding, nor beneath his accomplish.

A few weeks after the elections, in the heat of summertime, Washington spent days, fifty-fifty weeks, writing a new will. Two years ago I spent an unabridged summertime studying that will. Anyone who perceives the will as the last attestation of an erstwhile man, discouraged and weary, taking formal leave of a life presently to exist over, is off the mark. On its face, the will is the work of a human being neither discouraged nor weary, of a man facing life, not leaving information technology. It is a design for the future, a bid to shape things to come.

The product of many "leisure hours," as he says, 11 the elegant text of the will adequately vibrates with the pleasure that this famously methodical and even-handed man took in setting down in such particular, with such precision and clarity, how the accumulation of an acquisitive lifetime should be distributed among his heirs, who numbered upwards of fifty, or one hundred and 80, depending on how one counts. Among the heirs, besides his wife, who was to retain possession of nigh of the manor during her lifetime, were a school in Alexandria, a college in Virginia, a neverhoped-for national university in the Federal City, the many offshoots of his deceased siblings, Martha Washington's four grandchildren and other relatives of hers, cousins of his, old friends-male and female-his brothers' widows, old servants and the children of one-time servants, and, in some sense, about one hundred and twenty slaves. To all these people and institutions, many to some caste dependent upon Washington'southward largesse, or once were, he made bequests ranging from personal items such as an ancient oak box, a gold-headed cane given to him by Benjamin Franklin, his own writing desk and chair, his shaving table, swords and pistols, and mourning rings, and such other assets as bank stock, stock in canal companies, debts due him, cash, tracts of land, farms with livestock and equipment, town lots, houses in Alexandria and Washington, and his treasured papers and books. He also provided for trustees, named by him, to sell many thousands of acres of vacant and tenanted land and to divide the proceeds amid his relatives according to a strict formula.

The most interesting and pregnant provisions of the volition, however, are those dealing with the disposition of the Mount Vernon plantation and its enslaved inhabitants. At the beginning of the volition, Washington gives elaborately detailed instructions for freeing his slaves. All of them were to receive their liberty at Martha Washington's death; the old and infirm among them, and the children without parents, were to be supported by his estate for equally long as they should need it. At the end of his will, he provides for the breakdown of the groovy plantation that he had put together over several decades. Its ii,000-acre Dogue Run farm, along with the manufactory and distillery, was to be inherited jointly past Eleanor Custis Lewis, Martha'due south granddaughter and Washington's ward, and her husband, Lawrence Lewis, a son of Washington's sis Betty. Some other Mountain Vernon farm, River farm, a tract of about ii,000 acres to the east of Little Hunting Creek, was to get to the ii little orphan sons of Washington'southward beloved nephew George Augustine Washington and Martha Washington's beloved niece Fannie Bassett. The residuum of the plantation at Mount Vernon was to remain intact. The bang-up business firm and its three farms totaling more than than four,000 acres was, when Mrs. Washington died, to become the property of Washington's favorite brother's elder son, Bushrod Washington, a Supreme Courtroom justice.

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The Mount Vernon "Great House"
From a plough-of-the-century postcard

Whether Washington rewrote his will in July 1799 because he was working out in his heed what direction he wished his life at Mount Vernon to take, or whether information technology was the writing of the will that stimulated such thoughts, surely information technology was ane or the other. For years he had dreamed of simplifying his operations. Now, in the summertime and fall of 1799, he set nearly doing information technology. He himself would take over the full day-by-day direction of his farms. By doing so, he would reduce expenses, increase efficiency, and provide for himself "an agreeable & salubrious entertainment." 12 But first he must reduce the size of the plantation and the scope of its operations. He would keep for himself the three farms at the manor firm which he had willed to Bushrod Washington, and he would make other arrangements for the operation of the two farms and the mill and distillery that he had willed to others.

One of these farms, River farm, already had been leased to Washington'south long-time secretarial assistant, Tobias Lear, the stepfather and guardian of the two little Washington boys who were to inherit the farm. Lear would hold it in trust for them. In September, Washington approached his farm manager Anderson well-nigh renting his mill and distillery, taking them off Washington's hands and at the same time solving the trouble of what was to be done with Anderson when Washington should take over management of his farms. He also decided to offer immediately to Nelly and Lawrence Lewis the Dogue Run farm, which they were to inherit. Upon their return in October to Mount Vernon, where they were living every bit a newly-wednesday couple, the Lewises decided to rent for a modest fee all of the property that they were to inherit, which included the mill and distillery equally well as Dogue Run farm.

The plantation was at present the desired size. At that place was all the same a more than serious problem by far to be faced, ane that had discouraged him in the past from leasing whatsoever of his Mount Vernon land. What was to be washed with the slaves working that land? The size of the slave population at the place was the real stumbler. This, in fact, was the start affair that Washington confronted when he began restructuring his plantation in 1799. On 17 Baronial, he wrote his estate agent in the Virginia upcountry, his nephew Robert Lewis:

It is demonstratively articulate, that on this Estate (Mount Vernon) I have more working Negros by a full moiety, than can be employed to any advantage in the farming System; and I shall never plow Planter thereon.

To sell the overplus I cannot, considering I am principled against this kind of traffic in the human being species. To hire them out, is almost as bad, because they could not be disposed of in families to whatever advantage, and to disperse the families I have an aversion. What then is to be done? Something must, or I shall exist ruined. . . .

Under these circumstances, and a thorough conviction that one-half the workers I keep on this Estate, would return me a greater nett profit than I at present derive from the whole, has made me resolve, if information technology can exist accomplished, to Settle Plantations on some of my other Lands.

In June, around the time he was preparing his will, Washington had taken a census of the slaves at Mount Vernon. xiii He counted 317 men, women, and children, 124 of whom belonged to him outright. In the volition, he solved the slave problem at Mount Vernon for the future by providing that his own slaves would exist freed at his widow'due south death. At that fourth dimension the heir at law, Martha's grandson George Washington Parke Custis, would acquit her dower slaves downwardly to his plantations in Tidewater Virginia, eliminating the likelihood of unrest at Mount Vernon. Equally the provision of his volition delaying the freeing of whatever of his own slaves until later on his expiry would suggest, Washington did not consider it feasible to gratuitous some of his slaves during his lifetime, in order to reduce the burden of their maintenance and to increase the efficiency of his operations, while keeping others in bondage. Notwithstanding, from past feel he knew quite well that if he did every bit he suggests here and sent slaves out with overseers to create far afar farms, it was highly unlikely that he would derive much if any profit from their labors or, more to the point, maybe ever meet or hear anything of them once again. It was the next all-time thing to actually setting free unwanted bondsmen. In whatever case, the conclusion was later reached to pursue the matter in the upcoming spring past sending James Anderson west to have a look at Washington's lands on the Ohio, leaving Washington gratuitous to supervise the spring planting at Mount Vernon.

In the calendar week before he died, Washington formulated a meticulous and remarkably detailed plan for the future of his Mount Vernon farms, setting out precisely what should be done over the next iii years at every field of every subcontract, at every meadow, wood, pasture, stable, or pen. On 10 Dec he sent Anderson a copy of the plan, with a long and stern, and even eloquent, roofing letter, the theme of which, "A System closely pursued . . . is attended with innumerable advantages," he had expounded to one farm manager after some other for decades at present. At long last, the squire of Mount Vernon would take over himself and soon have his plantation running similar a clock. He died the next day.

tj
Thomas Jefferson

You volition agree, will you not, that Washington, in the finish, seems to have, as the saying is, made a good adjustment to retirement. Had he lived, he hardly would accept embraced the Jefferson assistants, but neither would he take refused to come up to terms with it. Certainly he would have cheered Jefferson's purchasing of Louisiana, merely he too would have taken satisfaction in the decisions of the court of his quondam friend John Marshall which infuriated the Republicans. And he once once more would accept met with disappointments in carrying out his elaborate plans for his farms, and, as always before, would take made new ones.

As nosotros are at the point of observing the 200th anniversary of George Washington's death, I should like to pay tribute to him by quoting a judgement or 2 from by far the best brief appraisal of Washington the human being and historical figure, written past his fellow revolutionary and ultimately political adversary, Thomas Jefferson, 14 years after Washington'south death:

He was incapable of fright, meeting personal dangers with the calmest unconcern. Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence, never acting until every circumstance, every consideration, was maturely weighed; refraining if he saw a doubt, but, when once decided, going through with his purpose, whatever obstacles opposed. His integrity was near pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known, no motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision. He was, indeed, in every sense of the words, a wise, a good, and a great man. . . .

On the whole, his character was, in its mass, perfect, in nix bad, in few points indifferent; and it may truly be said, that never did nature and fortune combine more perfectly to make a man great, and to place him in the aforementioned constellation with whatever worthies have merited from man an everlasting remembrance. For his was the singular destiny and merit, of leading the armies of his country successfully through an backbreaking war, for the establishment of its independence; of conducting its councils through the nascency of a government, new in its forms and principles, until information technology had settled down into a quiet and orderly railroad train; and of scrupulously obeying the laws through the whole of his career, civil and military machine, of which the history of the globe furnishes no other example. . . . I felt on his death, with my countrymen, "that verily a dandy human being hath fallen this day in Israel.14

i. GW to Levi Hollingsworth, 20 September 1785, and to Arthur Donaldson, 16 October 1785, Confederation Series, 3:267-68, and 307. [back]
2. Bill of Lading, 17 March 1797, Retirement Series, 1:38. [back]
iii. GW to James McHenry, 3 April 1797, Retirement Series, 1:71-72. [back]
4. GW to James McHenry, 29 May 1797, Retirement Series, 1:159-lx. [back]
5. GW to McHenry, 3 Apr 1797. [dorsum]
6. GW to John Adams, four July 1798, Retirement Series, two:368-71. [back]
7. GW to John Adams, 13 July 1798, Retirement Series, 2:402-4. [back]
8. GW to McHenry, 30 September 1798, Retirement Serial, 3:59. [dorsum]
9. James McAlpin to GW, 27 January 1799, Retirement Series, 3:340-42. [dorsum]
10. GW to John Marshall, Edward Carrington, and William Heth, 12 May 1799, Retirement Series, 4:67-68. [dorsum]
11. GW's Concluding Will and Testament, nine July 1799, Retirement Series, 4:477-527. [back]
12. GW to Lawrence Lewis, 28 September 1799, Retirement Series, 4:324-26. [back]
13. GW'due south Slave List, June 1799, Retirement Series, 4:527-42. [back]
14. Thomas Jefferson to Walter Jones, 2 Jan 1814, printed in Paul Leicester Ford, Writings of Jefferson, vol. nine (New York, 1898), p. 448. [dorsum]

© 1999 Westward. Due west. Abbot