Part 5
The estate he divided into five farms, each under an overseer responsible to the manager of the estate, and each equipped with the necessary complement of labor, buildings and stock. Through the manager the reports of progress from the five farms were passed up to the master in the big house every Saturday morning, and with scrupulous precision he transcribed and classified them. Washington never heard of a microbe, nor studied chemistry, yet in these reports and his own conclusions will be found exhaustive experiments in inoculating the soil and rotating crops. He balanced his cultivation so as to produce sufficient food for his people and stock, and the utmost yield of negotiable grains. “Our lands,” he wrote, “were originally very good; but use and abuse have made them quite otherwise”--and so he sent abroad for new seeds to try out. Selected quantities of his grains he set aside for experiment upon the diet of his livestock. Although he was a host of lavish hospitality within the house, every move he made as a farmer was a lesson in conservation. His woodcutters got explicit orders to select the timber they cut; his overseers were told not to try to squeeze the land for high crop yield at the expense of upkeep; each new herd of cattle must be better stock than the last; the mill was re-engineered to grind more meal from each bushel of corn; a stone deposit became a quarry; the waters of the Potomac gave up “a sufficiency of fish for my own people” in the first catch, and beyond that a great supply for salting and sale in the winter market; every by-product of the estate was developed and applied. Jefferson sat at Monticello above nature’s workshop as at a play; Washington took off his plain blue coat and tinkered with the machinery to increase its efficiency.
In his admirable work on Mount Vernon, Paul Wilstach has hit upon the secret of its master’s enthusiasm:
“Mount Vernon was eventually brought to a state of high productiveness, but the scale of life there was such that rarely did the farms show a balance wholly on the right side of the ledger. Washington had to look to his estate for other assets than appeared in the physical valuation of its produce. He found its true and largest asset in the fulfilled ideal of private life; in solving the interesting problems of the planter; in mental health and physical strength; and in the enjoyment of the easy and graceful social life of the colonial country gentleman, of which Mount Vernon became a veritable example.”
A vigorous life is easy and natural to a man of Washington’s physical power. He was six-feet-three-inches high, rose with the sun, and went to bed at nine unless there were guests. His routine during the sixteen years preceding the Revolution was varied on this day to ride “Valiant” or “Ajax” after the hounds, on that to dine at Belvoir or Gunston Hall, or Belle Aire; now up-river to a dance at Alexandria, now down-river shooting ducks; this week to Annapolis and the races, next to Williamsburg on affairs of the legislature. A never-ending procession of guests arrived and departed, from parsons to British naval officers, and found a uniformly perfect welcome--even extending to the gentleman who “contrary to all expectation” held Washington motionless for three sittings while he painted his first portrait, and charged him slightly more than £57 for effigies of himself, Mrs. Washington, Martha and Jack Custis.
To the refurnished home Mrs. Washington had brought many objects of her own to add to its luxury, which was further enhanced from time to time by orders upon his London agents for furniture and ornaments. On one occasion he wrote for busts of Alexander, Caesar, Charles XII of Sweden and the King of Prussia, fifteen inches high; Prince Eugene and the Duke of Marlborough, somewhat smaller; and “Wild Beasts, not to exceed twelve inches in height nor eighteen in length.” He received instead:
“A Groupe of Aeneas carrying his Father out of Troy, with four statues, viz. his Father Anchises, his wife Creusa and his son Ascanius, neatly finisht and bronzed with copper £3.3”
“Two Groupes, with two statues each of Bacchus & Flora, finisht neat & bronzed with copper £4.4”
and “Two Lyons after the antique Lyons in Italy,” also “finisht neat,” with the following apology:
“There is no busts of Alexander ye Great (none at all of Charles 12th of Sweden), Julius Causar, King of Prussia, Prince Eugene, nor the Duke of Marlborough, of the size desired; and to make models would be very expensive--at least 4 guineas each.”
With other orders the agents had better luck, for it was neither difficult nor distasteful to satisfy a Virginia gentleman who merely described the articles ordered (if he described them at all) as either “good” or “neat” or “fashionable.” He bought the best, rarely specified price, and paid in the best tobacco--a fair deal all round, and a very agreeably furnished home Mount Vernon became.
There came a day when he was called to command the army in the north. For eight years thereafter Mount Vernon saw him but twice, and then for fleeting visits: once on his way southward from Dobbs Ferry to Williamsburg, during the march on Yorktown; once on his return to the north. Those years had seen his ascent to the height of public veneration. On December 4 of 1783 his officers bade him a frankly tearful good-bye at Fraunce’s Tavern in New York, and the chief “walked in silence to Whitehall, followed by a vast procession ... and entered a barge ... on his way to lay his commission at the feet of Congress at Annapolis.” His progress to Mount Vernon was a succession of popular demonstrations. And when on Christmas Eve he went up the hill and pandemonium broke loose to see the master returned, in his mind were no thoughts of consulates or dictatorships, empire or world-domination, but only profound relief that he had come at last into sweet and voluntary exile from affairs.
He had served without pay through the war, and his first concern now was to put the estate on its feet. He took up the flags of the eastern piazza, reinforced the foundations of the house, “removed two pretty large and full-grown lilacs to the No. Garden gate,” combed the neighboring forest for handsome trees to transplant, amplified his orchards, stocked a deer park, and made his daily rounds of the farms. The man who had lately dictated terms to the best soldiers out of Europe got from his gardener a promise to stay sober most of the time on consideration of “four dollars at Christmas, with which he may be drunk four days and four nights; two dollars at Easter to effect the same purpose; two dollars at Whitsuntide to be drunk for two days; a dram in the morning and a drink of grog at dinner at noon.”
If there had been visitors before the war, double their number flocked to him now. One night he was routed out of bed to receive a young French sculptor, sent by Jefferson and Franklin in Paris to make his statue for the capitol at Richmond. A Mount Vernon tradition says that a few days later Washington was called out to look at a pair of horses offered for sale. He asked the price, and was told “a thousand dollars.” He drew himself up in indignation, for a thousand dollars was an outrageous price for a horse and was likewise a tenth of his whole year’s living expense. Houdon, the sculptor, had been dogging Washington’s footsteps for days, studying his subject. He caught the general in the fine glow of dignified wrath, cried out, “I ’ave him! I ’ave him!” and set to work at once to make the pose immortal. With a life mask, sketches, and full measurements he returned to Paris, and there, with Gouverneur Morris posing for the standing figure, he made the composite statue which stands at Richmond today.
There came a youngster of twenty, very quiet and abashed at an audience with the great general. This boy’s name was Robert Fulton, he who later invented the steamboat. There came Noah Webster, who was to write the great American dictionary; there came Jedediah Morse, who wrote the first American geography. Lafayette, the “French boy,” was always welcome, and he spent nineteen days there in the autumn of 1784. Others were not so welcome: “My house may be compared to a well-resorted tavern,” wrote Washington. He had to summon young Laurence Washington to Mount Vernon to carry its social burden after candle-light, when he withdrew to his study to answer letters, or to taste the human pleasure of postponing answers “until tomorrow evening,” as he confessed to his former secretary of war. But, welcome or uninvited, they all came, for the country was to have a new government, and Washington was not only to help build it, but to run it. With the same modest misgivings of his own capacity for the post that he had frankly confessed in 1775, he went out again in 1789 to serve his country, and put aside again the labor that was nearest to his heart.
For eight years more his sight of Mount Vernon was limited to visits borrowed from public affairs, but he never lost his grip on its minute arrangements, directing, advising, correcting in his letters to his managers. In one downright homesick moment he said flatly that he would rather be at home with a friend or two than to be attended at the seat of government by the officers of state and the representatives of every power in Europe. John Adams, after his inauguration in 1797, wrote a letter to his wife, who had not been there to enjoy the greatest moment of his life. “It was made more affecting to me,” he said, “by the presence of the General, whose countenance was as serene and unclouded as the day. He seemed to enjoy a triumph over me. Methought I heard him say, ‘Ay, I am fairly out and you fairly in! See which of us will be the happiest!’” Everything on that bright March day in Philadelphia sang “Home!”
Presently he was there, admiring the new setting of the fine furniture and silver and glassware and china brought down from the Presidential Mansion in the Capital, some of which is in the house today. Sixty-five years old, with the western world at his feet, and he saw only the broad reaches of the Potomac down below the ha-ha walls. Sixty-six, and to see a young lad named Charles Carroll from Maryland courting his favorite grand-daughter made a man feel young himself. Sixty-seven, forty years married, the favorite grand-daughter to be married (though not to Charles Carroll), and life seemed perennial. One December morning he caught cold riding the farms, and two days later was dead.
Nothing short of the domestic enthusiasm of George Washington could have kept Mount Vernon in order. For sixty years it yielded gradually to the advance of time. Then, through the truly heroic zeal of Miss Ann Pamela Cunningham of Laurens, S. C., and the eloquence of Edward Everett, and the fine spirit of Miss Cunningham’s Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union, the estate was purchased, and with searching fidelity to the wishes of its master, restored to the state in which he would have had it. Too fulsome praise can hardly be expressed--certainly not here--for the good sense, discrimination and good organization which combine to maintain the estate. It is as if a hand had touched it lightly on a spring morning in the brightest year of its occupancy, and had held it, fixed forever in the pose, like the castle of the sleeping princess. No prince will come to rouse the place. But better than that, after sixty years of care and a century and a half of life, it re-creates each year to thousands of pilgrims the crises and victories that wrote our creed as a nation. And fortunately no landholder on this great farm of ours will leave Mount Vernon without a deep sense of relief that it is first and last a perfect monument to a country gentleman.
THE QUINCY HOMESTEAD
THE QUINCY HOMESTEAD
It is perhaps impolite to compare a Massachusetts family tree to a banyan instead of the conventional elm, but no prowler among her old houses can come away without a feeling that almost everything in New England is related to almost everything else. Chicago glances over Boston’s shoulder and finds her reading the Monday _Transcript’s_ genealogy page; Chicago howls with laughter and turns to _Vanity Fair_ to see what is going on in New York. Boston is momentarily interrupted, doesn’t know quite what Chicago is laughing at, returns a well-bred smile of complete detachment, and plunges back into the genealogy page.
This business of keeping track of marriages and deaths, cousinships and children-by-the-second-wife is serious, though bred of no spirit of arrogance, no desire to find a coat of arms for the door of the new town-car. There is brisk mental exercise in chasing an obscure ancestor to his lair and finding that he was what you thought he was when you started out, and not his own grand-nephew-twice-removed. Further, reasons Boston, unless you know to whom a person is related, how can you know to whom that person is related? By this sound process of logic a personal news item in a Boston newspaper worth six agate lines of white paper is so interestingly overgrown with eighteen or twenty lines of genealogical wistaria that the outsider has some trouble peering through the vines to the item itself. He will never understand the irrelevant matter until he understands that it is not irrelevant, that the ever-present landmarks of tradition are bristling with precedents, and that the respect for those precedents is so congenital that they guide the footsteps of New Englanders more than even New Englanders suspect.[A]
[A] I am told by Mr. George Stephenson, of the _Transcript_, that the bulk of special subscription to the genealogical issues comes from the Middle West. Again brutal statistics blunder in to shatter a pleasant theory. I repeat this to a Boston beldame; she says, “Why of course--those subscribers are from families who migrated west to make money, and _now_, of course--” and leaves me to fill out the sentence. My theory stands, and defies the lightnings.
If the foreigner from beyond the Hudson or the Delaware or the Mississippi will do himself the favor of visiting the Quincy house, he will sense the point, and be paid in full measure by the contemplation of a house with a varied and engaging story.
It began life as a Puritan farmstead, by a brookside in the town of Braintree. Sixteen years after the first settlement at Plymouth, and therefore nearly three centuries ago, William Coddington built three rooms on a kitchen. Bigoted public opinion soon broke up the trio of liberals who used to sit and talk free worship before the great fireplace in that kitchen--Coddington fled, Sir Harry Vane went other ways, and Anne Hutchinson was banished from the colony. Edmund Quincy, the new owner, came out from Boston, with a retinue of six servants. Such a staff was a rare luxury in those ascetic days. It is partially explained by the fact that in an age of large families Edmund Quincy’s was no exception, and four children wanted a lot of looking after. He enlarged the house to accommodate his growing tribe, and about 1685 gave up the Coddington structure to his slaves, while he built a new house a few rods away. (It was this Edmund’s sister who married the master of the Mint, John Hull; he named Point Judith after her, and their daughter Hannah was the maiden who was given in marriage with a dowry of her weight in pine-tree shillings--one hundred and twenty-five pounds avoirdupois and five hundred sterling.)
Another Edmund, the third of the American line and the second in possession of the estate on Quincy Brook, fell heir to it when his father died in 1698. Through his grandmother Edmund was already related to the line which was presently to bring forth John Adams. His thirteen brothers and sisters and numerous cousins connected him by marriage with nearly all the families of the settlement, and out of one of those ceremonies is left to us a glimpse of tragedy: Judge Sewall records in his diary that just after “Cousin Daniel” was being married to Mrs. Shepard, when the guests were singing in the hall, one of them dropped dead. Her body was carried to the room which was to have been the bride’s, “the Bridegroom and Bride ... going away like Persons put to flight in Battel” to spend their honeymoon at a neighbor’s house.
Edmund the Third was a man not only of fortune but of discrimination, which he showed by marrying Dorothy Flynt--the first “Dorothy Q.” In 1706 he invited the whole countryside to the estate by the brook, and around and above the old Coddington house the whole corps of neighbors, abetted by hard cider, raised the huge timbers of a new mansion, the one which stands there today restored to its full dignity. It was a suitable dwelling for a man of eminence in the colony, a man big enough to quarrel with Benning Wentworth over the boundary of New Hampshire. On the rear of the new home he built an extension containing a bedroom and a study, where “Tutor” Flynt, Mrs. Quincy’s brother, could find rest from his duties in Harvard College, and there Tutor Flynt spent most of a crusty, tobacco-perfumed bachelor life as a sort of paying guest, driving down to Braintree from Cambridge in a calèche for week-ends and the longer holidays. (Tutor Flynt, by the way, is the earliest recorded user of the “If-you-are-going-to-Heaven-I-don’t-want-to-go-there” joke, though genuine research would doubtless reveal that Shem made the same remark to Japheth one afternoon when the Ark lay becalmed.)
The light of the household was Dorothy Q, and the source of her radiance was her family of growing children. Three of them claim our attention: Edmund (the Fourth), who inherited the Homestead; Josiah (the first of a series of notable Josiahs); and a second Dorothy, whom her grandson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, described in this way:
“O Damsel Dorothy! Dorothy Q! Strange is the gift that I owe to you; Such a gift as never a king Save to daughter or son might bring,-- All my tenure of heart and hand, All my title to house and land; Mother and sister and child and wife And joy and sorrow and death and life!
“What if a hundred years ago Those close-shut lips had answered No, When forth the tremulous question came That cost the maiden her Norman name Should I be I, or would it be One-tenth another to nine-tenths me?”
Dorothy Q the Second was a dear child, carrying at fifteen the cares of the household, and apparently pointed down the path of a winsome spinsterhood. But within a few weeks, in the summer of 1737, her grandmother, her mother, and then her father died, and she married Edward Jackson and went to live in Boston, where her husband was a ship-owner in partnership with her brother Josiah.
One of their vessels, the _Bethell_, with thirty-seven men and fourteen guns, fell in with the _Jesus Maria and Joseph_, a Spaniard with 110 men and twenty-six guns. The _Bethell’s_ skipper gambled on the gathering twilight, set up six wooden dummy guns, hung sailors’ caps and hats in the rigging to suggest a numerous crew, and then demanded the Spaniard’s surrender. Down came her ensign! The Spanish crew was set ashore at Fayal, and the _Bethell_ brought back to Josiah and Dorothy one-hundred-and-sixty-one chests of silver, and two of Spanish gold.
With the prize money safely banked, Josiah was able to retire from business at the age of forty. He moved to Braintree, taking up his residence in the Hancock parsonage, across the way from the Homestead. Brother Edmund, the lantern-jawed parson, who had been living in Boston and spending his summers in Braintree, moved to the Homestead in his turn, lost most of his share of the prize money in artless speculation, and turned to farming.
Life in the two families presented diversion aplenty--most of the eligible young men of Boston and Braintree were courting Edmund’s five daughters. A sober young man named John Adams was running perilously close to the charms of Hannah, Josiah’s daughter. He was a marked man when her cousins, Esther and Susan, suddenly “broke in upon Hannah and me and interrupted a conversation that would have terminated in a courtship that would have terminated in a marriage which might have depressed me to absolute poverty and obscurity to the end of my life.” He veered, took a deep breath, went away from there, and two years later was married to Abigail Smith, who alone of American women was the wife and the mother of an American president. Important guests occasionally penetrated the swarm of suitors--such men as Admiral Warren and Sir William Pepperrell, the heroes of Louisburg; or Benjamin Franklin, who sent Squire Quincy cuttings of Rhenish grapevines and a new stove which he had invented; or Sir Harry Frankland, who gave the Squire a fine pear-sapling--the same Sir Harry who married Agnes Surriage, whom he had first seen barefoot, scrubbing floors in a tavern in Marblehead.
And the youngest of all was Dorothy Q the Third, with four big brothers and three boy cousins to pay her court, and four elder sisters to study. Through all the bitter period that followed the Boston Massacre, when her cousin Josiah Junior and John Adams were defending the British captain, and her cousin Samuel was appearing for the Crown, Dorothy Q was on the fringe of the excitement, coquetting with all of the earnest youths who were polishing their arms, but engaging in entangling alliance with none. Not until she was twenty-seven did she make her choice, and then it was John Hancock, the chief figure of pre-revolutionary days in Boston, a vigorous patriot who defied the Crown and became a member of the Committee of Safety. Most of the winter of 1774–75 she spent with his aunt in the Hancock mansion, where came Revere, and Warren, and Samuel and John Adams. By March of ’75 she was back in Quincy, gathering her trousseau, and superintending the application of a new French wall-paper to the walls of the north parlor, where a company of conventional blue Venuses and Cupids, garlanded with delicate flowers, was to preside over the wedding ceremony. The untroubled Homestead presented a strong contrast to the one she had left in Boston: a loyalist rabble stormed the Hancock house, tore down the fence, broke the windows and wrecked the coach-house, and the prospective bridegroom, threatened with arrest, was obliged to escape with little dignity and all possible speed.