Chapter VII · GEORGE WASHINGTON (continued 2)

But was this all? Is it quite true that Washington had only a love of boisterous fun, and nothing else? It is worth looking a little deeper than the current stories of the camp to find out, and yet one of these very camp-stories raises at once a strong suspicion that Mr. Parton's conclusion in this regard, like so many conclusions about Washington, is unfounded. When General Lee took the oath of allegiance to the United States, he remarked, in making abjuration of his former allegiance, that he was perfectly ready to abjure the king, but could not bring himself to abjure the Prince of Wales, at which bit of irony Washington was greatly amused. The wit of the remark is a little cold to-day, but at the moment, accompanying as it did a solemn act of abjuration, it was keen enough. Washington himself, moreover, was perfectly capable of good-natured banter. Colonel Humphreys challenged him one day to jump over a hedge. Washington, always ready to accept a challenge where riding was concerned, told the colonel to go on. Humphreys put his horse at the hedge, cleared it, and landed in a quagmire on the other side up to his horse's girths; whereupon Washington rode up, stopped, and looking blandly at his struggling friend, remarked, "Ah, colonel, you are too deep for me." "Take care," he wrote to young Custis, when he sent him money for his college gown, "not to buy without advice; otherwise you may be more distinguished by your folly than your dress."

We find in his letters here and there a good-natured raillery, and jesting, which show a sense of humor that goes beyond the limits of mere fun and horse-play. Here is a letter he wrote toward the close of the war, asking some ladies to dine with him in his quarters at West Point:—

"WEST POINT, August 16, 1779.

"Dear Doctor: I have asked Mrs. Cochran and Mrs. Livingston to dine with me to-morrow; but ought I not to apprise you of their fare? As I hate deception, even where imagination is concerned, I will.

"It is needless to premise that my table is large enough to hold the ladies: of this they had ocular demonstration yesterday. To say how it is usually covered is rather more essential, and this shall be the purport of my letter.

"Since my arrival at this happy spot, we have had a ham, sometimes a shoulder of bacon, to grace the head of the table. A piece of roast beef adorns the foot, and a small dish of green beans—almost imperceptible—decorates the centre. When the cook has a mind to cut a figure,—and this I presume he will attempt to-morrow,—we have two beefsteak pies, or dishes of crabs, in addition, one on each side of the centre dish, dividing the space, and reducing the distance between dish and dish to about six feet, which without them would be nearly twelve feet apart. Of late he has had the surprising luck to discover that apples will make pies; and it is a question if, amidst the violence of his efforts, we do not get one of apples instead of having both of beef.

"If the ladies can put up with such entertainment, and submit to partake of it on plates once tin, but now iron, not become so by the labor of hard scouring, I shall be happy to see them."

We may be sure that the ladies found their dinner a pleasant one, and that the writer of the note was neither a stiff nor unsocial host. A much more charming letter is one to Nellie Custis, on the occasion of her first ball. It is too long for quotation, but it is a model of affectionate wisdom tinged with a gentle humor, and designed to guide a young girl just beginning the world of society.

Here, however, is another extract from a letter to Madame de Lafayette, of rather more serious purport, but in the same strain, and full of a simple and, as we should call it, an old-fashioned grace. He was replying to an invitation to visit France, which he felt obliged to decline. After giving his reasons, he said: "This, my dear Marchioness (indulge the freedom), is not the case with you. You have youth (and, if you should incline to leave your children, you can leave them with all the advantages of education), and must have a curiosity to see the country, young, rude, and uncultivated as it is, for the liberties of which your husband has fought, bled, and acquired much glory, where everybody admires, everybody loves him. Come, then, let me entreat you, and call my cottage your home; for your own doors do not open to you with more readiness than mine would. You will see the plain manner in which we live, and meet with rustic civility; and you shall taste the simplicity of rural life. It will diversify the scene, and may give you a higher relish for the gayeties of the court when you return to Versailles."

There is also apparent in many of his letters a vein of worldly wisdom, shrewd but kindly, too gentle to be called cynical, and yet touched with the humor which reads and appreciates the foibles of humanity. Of an officer who grumbled at disappointments during the war he wrote: "General McIntosh is only experiencing upon a small scale what I have had an ample share of upon a large one; and must, as I have been obliged to do in a variety of instances, yield to necessity; that is, to use a vulgar phrase, 'shape his coat according to his cloth,' or in other words, if he cannot do as he wishes, he must do what he can." The philosophy is homely and common enough, but the manner in which the reproof was administered shows kindly tact, one of the most difficult of arts. Here is another passage, touching on something outside the range of war and politics. He was writing to Lund Washington in regard to Mrs. Washington's daughter-in-law, Mrs. Custis, who was contemplating a second marriage. "For my own part," he said, "I never did, nor do I believe I ever shall, give advice to a woman who is setting out on a matrimonial voyage: first, because I never could advise one to marry without her own consent; and secondly, because I know it is to no purpose to advise her to refrain when she has obtained it. A woman very rarely asks an opinion or requires advice on such an occasion till her resolution is formed; and then it is with the hope and expectation of obtaining a sanction, not that she means to be governed by your disapprobation, that she applies. In a word, the plain English of the application may be summed up in these words: 'I wish you to think as I do; but if unhappily you differ from me in opinion, my heart, I must confess, is fixed, and I have gone too far now to retract.'"

In the same spirit, but this time with a lurking smile at himself, did he write to the secretary of Congress for his commission: "If my commission is not necessary for the files of Congress, I should be glad to have it deposited among my own papers. It may serve my grandchildren, some fifty or a hundred years hence, for a theme to ruminate upon, if they should be contemplatively disposed."

He had, indeed, in all ways a thoroughly well-balanced mind and temper. In great affairs he knew how to spare himself the details to which others could attend as well as he, and yet he was in no wise a despiser of small things. Before the Revolution, there was a warm discussion in the Truro parish as to the proper site for the Pohick Church. Washington and George Mason led respectively the opposing forces, and each confidently asserted that the site he preferred was the most convenient for the largest number of parishioners. Finally, after much debate and no conclusion, Washington appeared at a vestry meeting with a collection of statistics. He had measured the distance from each proposed site to the house of each parishioner, and found, as he declared, that his site was nearer to more people than the other. It is needless to add that he carried his point, and that the spot he desired for the church was the one chosen.

The fact was that, if he confided a task of any sort to another, he let it go on without meddling; but if he undertook anything himself, he did it with the utmost thoroughness, and there is much success in this capacity to take pains even in small things. He managed his plantations entirely himself when he was at home, and did it well. He knew the qualities of each field, and the rotation of its crops. No improvement in agriculture and no ingenious invention escaped his attention, although he was not to be carried away by mere novelty, which had such a fascination for his ex-secretary at Monticello. Every resource of his estate was turned to good use, and his flour and tobacco commanded absolute confidence with his brand upon them. He followed in the same painstaking way all his business affairs, and his accounts, all in his own hand, are wonderfully minute and accurate. He was very exact in all business as well as very shrewd at a bargain, and the tradition is that his neighbors considered the general a formidable man in a horse-trade, that most difficult of transactions. Parkinson mentions that everything purchased or brought to the house was weighed, measured, or counted, generally in the presence of the master himself. Some of his letters to Lear, his private secretary, show that he looked after his china and servants, the packing and removal of his furniture with great minuteness. To some persons this appears evidence of a petty mind in a great man, but to those who reflect a little more deeply it will occur that this accuracy and care in trifles were the same qualities which kept the American army together, and enabled their owner to arrive on time and in full preparation at Yorktown and Trenton. The worst that can be said is that from his love of perfection and completeness he may in this respect have wasted time and strength, but his untiring industry and his capacity for work were so great that he accomplished so far as we can see all this drudgery without ever neglecting in the least more important duties. It was a satisfaction to him to do it; for he was methodical and exact to the last degree, and he was never happy unless he held everything in which he was concerned easily within his grasp.

He had the same attention to details in external things, and he wished everything about him to be of the best, if not "express'd in fancy." He had the handsomest carriages and the finest horses always in his stables. It was necessary that the furniture of his house should be as good as could be procured, and he was most particular in regard to it. When he was preparing as President to move to Philadelphia, he made the most searching inquiries as to horses, stables, servants, schools for young Custis, and everything affecting the household. He sent at the same time most minute directions to his agents as to the furniture of his house, touching upon everything, down to the color of the curtains and the form of his wine-coolers. He had a like feeling in regard to dress. His fancy for handsome and appropriate dress in his youth has already been alluded to, but he never ceased to take an interest in it; and in a letter to McHenry, written in the last year of his life, he discusses with great care the details of the uniform to be prescribed for himself as commander-in-chief of the new army. It would be a mistake, of course, to infer that he was a dandy, or that he gave to dress and furniture the importance set upon them by shallow minds. He simply valued them rightly, and enjoyed the good things of this world. He had the best possible taste and the keenest sense of what was appropriate, and it was this good taste and sense of fitness which saved him from blundering in trifles, as much as his ability and his sense of humor preserved him from error in the conduct of great affairs.

The value of all this to the country he served cannot be too often reiterated, for ridicule was a real danger to the Revolutionary cause when it started. The raw levies, headed by volunteer officers from the shop, the plough, the work-bench, or the trading vessel, despite their patriotism and the nobility of their cause, could easily have been made subjects of derision, a perilous enemy to all new undertakings. Men prefer to be shot at, if they are taken seriously, rather than to be laughed at and made objects of contempt. The same principle holds true of a revolution seeking the sympathy of a hostile world. When Washington drew his sword beneath the Cambridge elm and put himself at the head of the American army, effective ridicule became impossible, for the dignity of the cause was seen in that of its leader. The British generals soon found that they not only had a dangerous enemy to encounter, but that they were dealing with a man whose pride in his country and whose own sense of self-respect reduced any assumption of personal superiority on their part to speedy contempt. In the same way he brought dignity to the new government of the Constitution when he was placed at its head. The confederation had excited the just contempt of the world, and Washington as President, by the force of his own character and reputation, gave the United States at once the respect not only of the American people, but of those of Europe as well. Men felt instinctively that no government over which he presided could ever fall into feebleness or disrepute.

I will quote only a single one of the numerous descriptions of Washington, and I select it because, although it is the least favorable of the many I have seen, and is written in homely phrase, it displays the most evident and entire sincerity. The extract is from a letter written by David Ackerson of Alexandria, Va., in 1811, in answer to an inquiry by his son. Mr. Ackerson commanded a company in the Revolutionary war.

"Washington was not," he wrote, "what ladies would call a pretty man, but in military costume a heroic figure, such as would impress the memory ever afterward."

The writer had a good view of Washington three days before the crossing of the Delaware.

This description is certainly not a flattering one, and all other accounts as well as the best portraits prove that Washington was a much handsomer man than this letter would indicate. Yet the writer, despite his freedom from all illusions and his readiness to state frankly all defects, was profoundly impressed by Washington's appearance as he watched him meditating by the camp-fire at the crisis of the country's fate, and herein lies the principal interest of his description.

This personal impressiveness, however, affected every one upon all occasions.

Mr. Rush, for instance, saw Washington go on one occasion to open Congress. He drove to the hall in a handsome carriage of his own, with his servants dressed in white liveries. When he had alighted he stopped on the step, and pausing faced round to wait for his secretary. The vast crowd looked at him in dead silence, and then, when he turned away, broke into wild cheering. At his second inauguration he was dressed in deep mourning for the death of his nephew. He took the oath of office in the Senate Chamber, and Major Forman, who was present, wrote in his diary: "Every eye was on him. When he said, 'I, George Washington,' my blood seemed to run cold and every one seemed to start." At the inauguration of Adams, another eye-witness wrote that Washington, dressed in black velvet, with a military hat and black cockade, was the central figure in the scene, and when he left the chamber the crowds followed him, cheering and shouting to the door of his own house.

There must have been something very impressive about a man who, with no pretensions to the art of the orator and with no touch of the charlatan, could so move and affect vast bodies of men by his presence alone. But the people, with the keen eye of affection, looked beyond the mere outward nobility of form. They saw the soldier who had given them victory, the great statesman who had led them out of confusion and faction to order and good government. Party newspapers might rave, but the instinct of the people was never at fault. They loved, trusted and well-nigh worshiped Washington living, and they have honored and reverenced him with an unchanging fidelity since his death, nearly a century ago.

He had, too, a fierce temper, and although he gradually subdued it, he would sometimes lose control of himself and burst out into a tempest of rage. When he did so he would use strong and even violent language, as he did at Kip's Landing and at Monmouth. Well-intentioned persons in their desire to make him a faultless being have argued at great length that Washington never swore, and but for their argument the matter would never have attracted much attention. He was anything but a profane man, but the evidence is beyond question that if deeply angered he would use a hearty English oath; and not seldom the action accompanied the word, as when he rode among the fleeing soldiers at Kip's Landing, striking them with his sword, and almost beside himself at their cowardice. Judge Marshall used to tell also of an occasion when Washington sent out an officer to cross a river and bring back some information about the enemy, on which the action of the morrow would depend. The officer was gone some time, came back, and found the general impatiently pacing his tent. On being asked what he had learned, he replied that the night was dark and stormy, the river full of ice, and that he had not been able to cross. Washington glared at him a moment, seized a large leaden inkstand from the table, hurled it at the offender's head, and said with a fierce oath, "Be off, and send me a man!" The officer went, crossed the river, and brought back the information.

But although he would now and then give way to these tremendous bursts of anger, Washington was never unjust. As he said to one officer, "I never judge the propriety of actions by after events;" and in that sound philosophy is found the secret not only of much of his own success, but of the devotion of his officers and men. He might be angry with them, but he was never unfair. In truth, he was too generous to be unjust or even over-severe to any one, and there is not a line in all his writings which even suggests that he ever envied any man. So long as the work in hand was done, he cared not who had the glory, and he was perfectly magnanimous and perfectly at ease about his own reputation. He never showed the slightest anxiety to write his own memoirs, and he was not in the least alarmed when it was proposed to publish the memoirs of other people, like General Charles Lee, which would probably reflect upon him.

He had the same confidence in the judgment of posterity that he had in the future beyond the grave. He regarded death with entire calmness and even indifference not only when it came to him, but when in previous years it had threatened him. He loved life and tasted of it deeply, but the courage which never forsook him made him ready to face the inevitable at any moment with an unruffled spirit. In this he was helped by his religious faith, which was as simple as it was profound. He had been brought up in the Protestant Episcopal Church, and to that church he always adhered; for its splendid liturgy and stately forms appealed to him and satisfied him. He loved it too as the church of his home and his childhood. Yet he was as far as possible from being sectarian, and there is not a word of his which shows anything but the most entire liberality and toleration. He made no parade of his religion, for in this as in other things he was perfectly simple and sincere. He was tortured by no doubts or questionings, but believed always in an overruling Providence and in a merciful God, to whom he knelt and prayed in the day of darkness or in the hour of triumph with a supreme and childlike confidence.

As I bring these volumes to a close I am conscious that they speak, so far as they speak at all, in a tone of almost unbroken praise of the great man they attempt to portray. If this be so, it is because I could come to no other conclusions. For many years I have studied minutely the career of Washington, and with every step the greatness of the man has grown upon me, for analysis has failed to discover the act of his life which, under the conditions of the time, I could unhesitatingly pronounce to have been an error. Such has been my experience, and although my deductions may be wrong, they at least have been carefully and slowly made. I see in Washington a great soldier who fought a trying war to a successful end impossible without him; a great statesman who did more than all other men to lay the foundations of a republic which has endured in prosperity for more than a century. I find in him a marvelous judgment which was never at fault, a penetrating vision which beheld the future of America when it was dim to other eyes, a great intellectual force, a will of iron, an unyielding grasp of facts, and an unequaled strength of patriotic purpose. I see in him too a pure and high-minded gentleman of dauntless courage and stainless honor, simple and stately of manner, kind and generous of heart. Such he was in truth. The historian and the biographer may fail to do him justice, but the instinct of mankind will not fail. The real hero needs not books to give him worshipers. George Washington will always hold the love and reverence of men because they see embodied in him the noblest possibilities of humanity.