Free His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph J. Ellis

immediate supervision.” 65
    CHAPTER TWO

    The Strenuous Squire
    O VER THE COURSE of his long public career, Washington made several decisions that shaped the basic contours of American history, but nothing he ever did had a greater influence on the shape of his own life than the decision to marry Martha Dandridge Custis. Her huge dowry immediately catapulted Washington into the top tier of Virginia’s planter class and established the economic foundation for his second career as the master of Mount Vernon. His first career as a professional soldier still hovered about his reputation in the form of the title “Colonel Washington.” And it apparently still hovered about in his own head as well, since in 1759 he ordered four large busts of military heroes—Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charles XII of Sweden, and Frederick the Great—to decorate the mansion he was already in the process of enlarging. The invoice to his London agent requesting the busts included requests for kid gloves, negligee, a velvet cape, and several purgatives for intestinal disorders. The agent was able to find all the other items, but not the military busts. This was prophetic, because for the next sixteen years Washington devoted his energies to perfecting the elegant lifestyle of a Virginia aristocrat, making his military experiences into memories, but eventually worrying himself sick that he and his fellow Virginia grandees were trapped in an imperial network designed to reduce them all to bankruptcy and ruin. 1
    DOMESTICITIES
    H E WAS ENTERING what turned out to be the most settled period of his life. The physical centerpiece for his newfound stability was, of course, Mount Vernon, both the mansion itself and the lands surrounding it. Renovations in the mansion had proceeded apace during his absence in the Forbes campaign, effectively adding a full story to the home he had inherited from Lawrence—or, more accurately, from Lawrence’s widow, who died in 1761. Though not in the same league with brick mansions like the Fairfaxes’s Belvoir or Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, the enlarged and embellished interiors of the new Mount Vernon were designed to make a statement. The home now visited by more than a million tourists a year looks different than the home that the newly married couple inhabited in 1759—the distinctive cupola, piazza, and several of the grandest rooms were not added until later—but Mount Vernon still effectively announced the arrival of an impressive new member of Virginia’s elite. Passing through in the summer of 1760, the inveterate English traveler Andrew Burnaby was suitably impressed: “This place is the property of Colonel Washington, and truly deserving of its owner. The house is most beautifully situated upon a very high hill on the banks of the Potowmac, and commands a noble prospect of water, of cliffs, of woods and plantations.” 2
    Burnaby spoke of plantations in the plural because Mount Vernon, like most Virginia estates in the revolutionary era, was not a centralized agrarian factory like the cotton plantations of the antebellum South, but a series of loosely connected farms, each with its own distinctive name, slave workforce, and overseer. Between the time he moved in with Martha and the time he departed for the war against Great Britain in 1775, Washington more than doubled the size of Mount Vernon, from about 3,000 to 6,500 acres, chiefly by buying up adjoining parcels of land when they became available. He more than doubled the size of the slave population, from fewer than fifty to well over a hundred, much of the increase coming from the forty-six new slaves he purchased during this time. Although appearances turned out to be deceptive, the newly ensconced master of Mount Vernon appeared to hold sway over a burgeoning and flourishing enterprise. 3
    The emotional centerpiece of Washington’s new world was Martha, who came complete with two young children, Jackie (four) and Patsy (two). If