Chapter II: Part 2

“There goes two millions with the dash of a pen!” a bystander remarked. “Oh, Carroll, you will get off,” said another. “There are so many Charles Carrolls.” At which Charles Carroll Third took the pen and jabbed “of Carrollton” under his signature, that George Third of England might make no mistake and punish any other of the same name. There is some cherry-tree flavor in the story, and precious historians maintain that he invariably signed his full title; but, if it can accomplish by example what the cherry-tree fable has accomplished, let it stand.

What circumstances carried this patriot, whom we left a moment ago as a baby, to the front rank of his country’s champions? The best of schooling then was to be had abroad. An ardent father and mother put aside their fierce attachment to their only child in order that he might become a proper heir to the estate which Charles Carroll the Second was accumulating. Just as the young Pinckneys and Rutledges and Middletons of Charleston in pre-Revolutionary days went to the mother country for their cultural training, so the youths of the middle states whose families could afford the excursion were dispatched to France, or England, or Flanders. One day in 1748 saw Charles Carroll, a boy of eleven, take ship with his cousin John for Europe. What pangs his mother experienced at the loss of her only chick are faintly reflected in a passage from the correspondence between the two: “You are always at heart my dear Charley and I have never tired of asking your papa questions about you. I daily pray to God to grant you his grace above all things, and to take you under his protection.” “With your mother,” his father wrote in 1753, “I shall be glad to have your likeness in the compass of 15 inches by 12”--and directed him to have the specified portrait done by a good painter. But the mother was not well, and in 1761, when the baby who had sailed away was a grown man, a student of Law in the Temple in London, and nearly ready to return to the warmth of his mother’s adoration, she died.

Such a beau as he would have made her! Heredity gave him an active mind and bearing of real charm, and just as the Manor house back in Maryland took on through the years extensions and embellishments which multiply its effect of useful luxury, so each addition to Charles Carroll’s intellect only seemed to make him more companionable and genuinely attractive. Even during his student period his sensitive spirit was not altogether proof against affairs of the heart, and if it had not been for her meddlesome sister, Miss Louisa Baker would have gone back to Maryland as his bride, as mistress over 68,000 acres. Instead, the catch of the commonwealth returned at twenty-nine under a cloak of melancholy from the shelter of which he wrote, dourly, “Matrimony is at present but little the subject of my thoughts.”

Persons familiar with the laws of gravity and more particularly with the physics of the rebounding heart will not be surprised to learn that within a few months he was again engaged to be married, this time to Miss Rachel Cooke. He wrote to London for her trousseau--such intimate finery as he hardly dared describe, things to turn even the Babylonian fiancée of today as green with envy as the Doughoregan meadows. But the Brussels lace was not for her, for Rachel Cooke fell ill of a fever, and died, and her miniature and a lock of her tresses were hidden away in a secret partition of Charles Carroll’s writing desk.

Undiscouraged, he found serious distraction in the fermenting affairs of the colonies. From provincial grievances such as his father had related from time to time in his letters dwelling on the oppression of the rights of Catholics, the problems of the colonists had overflowed greater areas. Like a flood swelling over the landscape, the minor swirls of flow and eddy were merged into a common misfortune of drab color and threatening proportions. It was Charles Carroll’s first chance for constructive citizenship. At the writing-desk where Rachel’s miniature lay hidden he wrote a program of letters which may be said to constitute the brief for independence. And by the time his heart had healed, and he had fallen in love with Miss Mary Darnell, whom he preferred, he said, “to all the women I have ever seen, even to Louisa,” and had married her, he was caught in the flood himself. There was no turning back even if he wanted to--and he did not want to turn back.

His town house at Annapolis and the manor of Doughoregan (it is pronounced _Dooráygan_, and it means the house of the king, because a thousand years or so ago the O’Carrolls were Irish kings) opened their doors with special welcome to those who were prepared to resist the oppression of a king. “A warm, firm, zealous supporter of the rights of America, in whose cause he has hazarded his all,” wrote John Adams, Carroll’s “all” at that time yielding an income of some ten thousand pounds a year. When, in 1773, an outraged importer set fire to his cargo of taxed tea in Annapolis, Charles Carroll was his chief legal counsel. When the Continental Congress met in Philadelphia the next year, he was a member. When the Congress sent a delegation to Canada to enlist support for the Revolution, it seized upon his French training as an asset in Charles Carroll, as it chose Benjamin Franklin for his practical judgment, Father John Carroll (later the first Archbishop of Baltimore) for his ecclesiastical influence, and Samuel Chase for his legal ability. The mission failed; Canada would not help; we must work alone. So to indicate that he welcomed the opportunity Charles Carroll signed the Declaration of Independence.

Years later he wrote this summary of his career:

“On the breaking out of the Revolution I took a decided part in the support of the rights of this country; was elected a member of the Committee of Safety established by the Legislature; was a member of the Convention which formed the Constitution of the State. The Journals of Congress show how long I was a member of that body during the Revolution. With Dr. Franklin and Mr. Samuel Chase I was appointed a Commissioner to Canada. I was elected a member of the Senate at the first session of Congress under the present Confederation.... The mode of choosing the Senate was suggested by me....”

That was all he found to write. It ought to be enough to qualify him for the emphasis which, in the eminent line of Charles Carrolls, we have placed upon him. But if, after you have followed him through the Revolution, you inquire just what connection the details of his career have with Doughoregan Manor, listen to a short recital of what he was too modest to write.

In 1780 his father, Charles the Second, was standing on the veranda of his Annapolis house and peering through a spy-glass at a sail in the Bay. He made a misstep, pitched heavily from the porch, and was killed. Mary Darnell Carroll, his daughter-in-law, saw him fall. Her health, already taxed by her devotion to Mrs. Carroll II during her last illness, gave way at “Breakneck” Carroll’s tragic death, and she died within a fortnight, leaving to her husband a son and two daughters. The son, of course, was Charles Carroll the Fourth. The Signer saw him go to Liége to school, return, as his father had returned before him, the idol of a gay countryside, court Nellie Custis at Mount Vernon, marry Harriet Chew of Cliveden, and rejoice with pride at the advent in 1801 of Charles Carroll the Fifth.

Charles the Fourth, of Homewood, has been described by a contemporary as follows: “Nothing in Greek art surpasses the perfect symmetry of his figure.” No less a person than Washington had asked Harriet Chew to remain in his presence while he sat for his portrait to Gilbert Stuart in order that his own face might “wear its most agreeable expression.” Therefore if the baby Charles the Fifth was not handsome it was neither the fault of his parents nor of the distinguished grandfather who immediately became his devoted slave.

The concerns of the estate, and the larger questions of the nation, had the Signer’s first attention. His avocations were to ride his lanes and woodland, to read Greek and Latin in the original--he was reading Cicero’s “De Senectute” at ninety-three; to preside over a growing flock of grandchildren at Homewood with his son, at Brooklandwood, where Mary Carroll Caton was bringing up the three stunning daughters whom society called the “American Graces”; and to spend much time in the company of his daughter Kitty’s husband, Robert Goodloe Harper. From time to time he was called upon to step into his earlier character as Signer. In 1824 he was invited, with Jefferson and Madison, the only survivors of that great company who fixed their names to the Declaration, to attend the anniversary of the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. His age forced him to decline, but he compromised by meeting Lafayette at Fort McHenry and lunching with him in a tent which had been Washington’s, and by attending a ball given in Lafayette’s honor at Colonel Howard’s “Belvedere.”

Few men of eighty-seven have shown such activity as was his; most men of his years would have given way to the misfortunes which now trooped out of the shadows. Charles Carroll the Fourth died; General Harper, the beloved son-in-law, followed. In the next year John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day, and it was the sad duty of Charles the Third to mourn at their funeral. He was now the last of the Signers. At eighty-nine he signed a copy of the Declaration which is now held in the New York Public Library--and signed it in a handwriting as firm as it had been fifty years before; at ninety he laid the foundation stone of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad; at ninety-three the cornerstone of St. Charles’ College, near Doughoregan Manor. And by this time the patriarch had seen born into his grandson’s family a sixth Charles Carroll.

There are three ghosts at Doughoregan Manor. One is the shade of an ancient housekeeper, whose quiet tread may be heard in the corridors, and whose keys tinkle faintly when the house is still. Another is the spectral coach--its wheels grind on the driveway when death rides to claim a member of the household--the coach which swung up to the door on a still November day in 1832 when the Signer went to join his fathers. It is hardly dignified to call the third a ghost. A warm, lively, pervading spirit it is--that of the Signer himself, smiling down from his portrait on the walls. It beamed on Charles the Sixth through a long and active life until it beckoned to him in 1895. To the son of Charles Carroll VI, John Lee Carroll, it nodded: “Well done, my boy,” when he became Governor of Maryland, and to the seventh Charles it told again all that its cumulative history could convey of the philosophical guidance and binding parental attachment that has made Doughoregan Manor something more than a home. Charles Bancroft Carroll, the Eighth, “carries on” and injects typical enthusiasm into farming twenty-four hundred acres of the grant you will see in the hall on a map the first Charles Carroll drew.

You will feel the spirit strongly as you contemplate the Signer’s place of burial in the chapel where the countryside gathers each Sunday for services. You will sense the alliance between devotion to God and to profoundly national ideals, and recall the sympathetic correspondence between the Signer and his father, as you enter the Cardinal’s room, a gorgeous chamber decorated in red, containing a great mahogany bed where Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop John Carroll, and the Marquis de Lafayette have slept. In a mellow library are the books he read. Trophies over the door of a panelled dining-room, cups won at yachting, a friendly hound from the present master’s hunting pack at your feet--remember that the Signer believed that a clear mind was most likely to be found in a sound body. We may fairly conceive that when the house was to be renovated, as it has been four times in its history, the Signer laid a gentle hand upon the sleeve of the workmen and cautioned them so: “Paint, if you like. Replace, where the old has given all its service. But remember, sirs, this is and must be a home.” And in the fullest connotation of the word, it is a home, with old chairs to fit you, bright cretonnes at the windows, and friendly things about you to rest your eyes upon--the sort of a home that a lad like Charles Carroll the Ninth, who isn’t much interested in ancestors, likes to take refuge in when strangers grow inquisitive.

THE JUMEL MANSION

© D.McK

THE JUMEL MANSION

Alone in its brittle modern neighborhood, this lovely anachronism stands on the highest point of Manhattan, untroubled, unruffled, and undisturbed except by Sunday idlers to whom its orchards are just another breathing spot. Though it was Heath’s headquarters, then housed Washington, later was captured by Howe, and was one of the smartest suburban estates of Colonial New York, it will never be forgotten as the home of a person of no military or aristocratic consequence, yet of caprice, beauty, ambition, impropriety, common sense and eccentricity--yes, a woman.]

THE JUMEL MANSION

A little over a hundred years have passed. Much sea-water has pressed up the Harlem on the incoming tide, boiled and eddied in the narrow pass of Spuyten Duyvil, and slipped away again to the Atlantic, diluted by the contribution of mountain streams in the Catskills and Adirondacks, tainted by the factory waste of busy cities up the Hudson and the Mohawk. Men threw giant bridges across its ebb and flow, tunneled under its current, bit and blasted and scratched at its Hell Gate channel. The placid, austere heights that stood above the stream “nine miles from New York City” bear now the unromantic name of Coogan’s Bluff, and are as many miles within the city’s northern limits.

The camera had not been invented when Roger Morris built the house for his young wife. To the westward, where his acreage touched the Hudson, apartment houses have risen and cut off the Palisades; to the south, where once he could see far down Staten Island, a tangle of bridges and shipping is half screened by the battlements of more apartment buildings; only to the east and north, over the sunny throat of the Sound and the far blue profile of the Long Island hills, has the prospect its former grand, pure simplicity. A fan of railway tracks are at the Harlem where once was “Fishing, Oystering and Clamming,” and from the very skirts of the estate rises each afternoon the roar of fifteen or twenty thousand “busy Americans” who are totally unoccupied except with the baseball game in process on the Polo Grounds.

It is hard, without photographic record, to reconstruct the picture. Alone in its brittle modern neighborhood this lovely anachronism is the only fragment of the composition left to us. It stands on the highest point of York Island, untroubled, unruffled, and for the most part undisturbed, except by Sunday idlers to whom its orchards are just another breathing spot.

It may be unjust to the Jumel Mansion to compare it with the lady in one of Leonard Merrick’s stories who “had outgrown her sins, but remembered them with pleasure,” but the spirit of Madame Jumel haunts the air so persistently that the suggestion is not altogether out of place. Despite the fact that when the British were advancing across Long Island in 1776 it was General Heath’s headquarters, that it housed Washington for six weeks, and that fifteen minutes after he had left it on the day Fort Washington was taken General Howe established his own headquarters there--despite its standing as one of the smartest suburban estates of Colonial New York, the house will never be forgotten as the home of a person of no military or aristocratic consequence, yet a person of caprice and beauty, ambition and impropriety, common sense and eccentricity. She was no sort of person to talk about, and therefore talked about; a kaleidoscopic contradiction--in short, a woman.

Though General Washington probably never heard of the lady, the house which she occupied was strangely related to important moments in his own career. When he was an athletic officer of twenty-five, neither Betsy Bowen nor her mother, Phebe Kelly of Providence, knew of him or cared about him, for they were both yet unborn. Of his restrained sentimental interest for Polly Philipse, the Yonkers heiress, they could not know, nor had they comment to offer when Colonel Roger Morris, a gallant of the colonial forces, crowded the young Virginian out of her affections and married her. In 1760 when Washington himself married Martha Custis, Phebe Kelly was three years old; at the age of eighteen, in the same month when Washington was appointed commander-in-chief of the American army and rode to its head at Cambridge, Phebe Kelly Bowen of Providence gave birth to her second daughter, and called her Betsy.

Ten years before, Roger Morris had built a lovely house for his wife and their growing family on the topmost point of Manhattan; the wailing baby in Providence in that turbulent July, 1775, scarcely suspected that one day she would be the mistress of that house, or that a month ago Roger Morris, a Tory, too peaceful to fight, had fled to England for refuge. But there began the chain of events which finally landed his estate in Betsy Bowen’s hands.

The city of Providence was so named because its founders had supreme confidence in its namesake. With the advent of a pathetic little atom of humanity called Betsy Bowen, Providence the power, through the agency of Providence the city, undertook to show off. “Her father was a seafaring man of no account; her mother of less,” said the town. “It looks bad. It probably is. If not, it ought to be. In any case, Providence shall be appeased.” Betsy’s mother was presently arrested and thrown in jail, and Betsy, with her sister Polly, then a child of fourteen, was first locked up in the workhouse and later sent to live with a more respectable family. John Bowen, the father, was knocked overboard by the boom of a sloop and drowned; his widow and her second husband were allowed out of jail long enough to be ordered out of town; they returned and were shortly expelled at the expense of the town, to carry on a wretched existence in a hut on the Old Warren Road. As the daughters matured they moved to a less respectable family. In 1794 a son was born to Betsy Bowen, and its father’s name being either unknown, undesirable or Jones, the baby was christened George Washington Bowen. Three years later her mother and her step-father, once more expelled from Providence, made their way to the North Carolina mountains, got sufficiently acquainted with their neighbors to start a lawsuit, and then were shot by a squirrel rifle in the hands of one or more of the defendants. Providence the town had forgotten them, Providence the power had accomplished a _tour de force_.

The divine lightnings were apparently spent. Betsy Bowen left her baby in the hands of a friend and fled from the mockery of her native city. She began six obscure years of adventure as Betsy Bowen, reappeared in New York for a fleeting glimpse as Madame De la Croix, and emerged as Eliza Brown, the mistress of the wealthy Stephen Jumel. From 1800 to 1804 she occupied this prosperous French merchant’s house at the corner of Whitehall and Pearl Streets, near the lower tip of Manhattan. He came home one day to find her apparently on her death bed, explaining faintly, through the medium of her physician, that she wanted nothing more than to leave a sorry world as his wife. To Jumel, who was deeply touched, it was an irresistible appeal, and the clergyman who had come to pray for her married the pair. No hypodermic has since been discovered by a vaulting medical science which ever had such magical powers of restoration, for two days later Betsy Bowen-de la Croix-Brown-Jumel was riding out behind Stephen Jumel’s smart horses as Stephen Jumel’s lawful, gleeful, wedded wife. Her program, after a bad start, was fairly begun.

She craved social prominence. She wanted to hob-nob with such folk as the Philipses, the rich Astors, the Van Cortlandts, the Lows, and the Livingstons, none of whom would have much to do with her. The leverage of owning one of the great estates evidently did not occur to her just yet, though there was one to be had. In a letter from Aaron Burr to his daughter Theodosia, then married and living in the Pringle house in Charleston, he wrote: “Roger Morris’s place, the large handsome house on the height beyond Mrs. Watkins, is for sale. I can get it for Richmond Hill with _four_ acres. Shall I exchange? R. M.’s has one hundred and thirty acres. If I leave Richmond Hill, however, had I not better buy in town, that you may have a resting place here?”

He evidently rejected the idea. He could not foresee that within a few months he would retire from the vice-presidency of the United States, bully Alexander Hamilton into a duel on the Palisades, kill him; nor that he would then organize an invasion of Mexico and a revolution in the new Louisiana Purchase only to be caught in the act and be tried for treason; nor that the year 1810 would find him abroad, disgraced, and still plotting to capture Mexico.

In that year Stephen Jumel, who had taken his wife’s trick-marriage in good part, bought the Roger Morris house and transferred his family to the heights, to install his wife in a style of living to which she hoped to become accustomed. Nothing was nearer her heart than the social prestige which her position as the chatelaine of a fine estate would afford, nothing farther from her mind than a lonesome ex-vice-president who had once speculated on buying this very house. The God of Coincidence made a mental note of this, and laid his plans.

Although frequent changes of ownership and lack of care had tarnished the house, it was intrinsically the same fine honest mansion that Roger Morris built, with two-foot outer walls lined with English brick, and supporting timbers of enduring oak. Madame Jumel entered her new home through a lofty portico to a main hall which runs through the center of the building from front to rear. This hall leads, as at Monticello, to an octagonal annex which is the only departure from a rather simple Georgian plan. To her left a reception room, to her right the dining-room, ahead in the octagon, a drawing-room which commanded nearly the full circle of that far-reaching panorama. Here had been held the Revolutionary courts-martial. The room north of the reception room had been the commander-in-chief’s office; the southeast bedroom had been his, and from its window he could see the smoking embers of the fire set by his troops when they evacuated the city in ’76--the night Nathan Hale was caught there as a spy.

With Roger Morris a fugitive in London and the house in debatable ground, Polly Philipse Morris had resorted to the Manor at Yonkers for safety. When Washington was driven out, and the house became British headquarters, the army paid rent, but when the Revolution ended, the families of Morris and Philipse, their properties confiscated, went back to England. The mansion was sold and resold, but no one held it for long. It failed as a tavern, and was doubtless expensive to run as a home.

Jumel was a great admirer of Washington, as well as a man of taste, and he combined the two qualities to restore the house implicitly to its earlier condition. It meant a lot to him that Washington, the president, had dined a brilliant company there in 1790, when New York was the national capital, and he equipped the room with fine furniture brought from France in one of his packets. He had the wall-paper in the octagon copied and rehung, respected the simplicity of the mantels, and chose his decorative “remarks” with a nice eye. When his work was done we may fancy that he rubbed his hands and said to his pretty wife: “_Voilá!_ A house worthy of its guests. Let them come, my dear.”

They didn’t come. Everything domestic a woman could crave Betsy Jumel had, even the company of her step-sister’s little daughter, to take the part of the daughter she never had. It was not enough. Five years of it made her despise the place. So the Jumels packed up and sailed for France.

It was no expeditionary force against a new stronghold of society, but an innocent visit to relatives, and perhaps that is why her luck turned. Family tradition has it that in Bordeaux they met the fleeing Napoleon, and offered him the Jumel ship. In return he gave them his carriage, for which he had no further use, and they drove in it to Paris.

Such credentials opened every door of the Bonapartist royalty. Everything Madame Jumel would have wished to be in New York she became in Paris--a turn of fortune which has come to many a socially ambitious American woman since. New avenues of association opened, and she tried to cajole Louis XVIII into giving Stephen a title. What Stephen would have liked better was money for two ships the French government stole from him, for the demands of his expensive establishment in the Place Vendome and a few strokes of ill luck in trading were reducing his funds. When his position grew embarrassing his wife left him and returned to New York.

Two years later--in 1828--Stephen Jumel followed her. Dark rumor says that it was very late when he drove out from town, and that as he approached the mansion he passed Aaron Burr, who was leaving it. He entered, and found that his wife, with the expert legal assistance of Alexander Hamilton, Jr., had transferred the property from her name to his. Four years later he fell from a hay-cart, and in a few days died of his injuries, and whoever took the bandage off those injuries and let him bleed to death will answer for that crime elsewhere, for it is not known in this world.

On a midsummer night of 1833, presided over by the God of Coincidence, Aaron Burr came to the mansion to play whist with the widow. “Madame,” he said, “I offer you my hand; my heart has long been yours.” If you will believe her own version of this proposal from a veteran of seventy-eight, she made no reply. He came the next night, with a priest. She fled upstairs. He overtook her at the landing, “saying the priest was old, and it was nearly midnight, and I must not detain him--and he was so handsome and brave and I allowed him to keep my hand and I stood up there ... and like a fool was married to him! The wretch, but he did not stay here long.”

A few days he stayed, and left her, after a wedding trip in the course of which she sold some stock in Hartford and scornfully bade the purchaser “pay the money to my husband.” Months later he was persuaded to rejoin her, but it could not last. A divorce ensued, and Aaron Burr died.

There really ends the career of Madame Jumel. But she lived through the Mexican and the Civil wars. Here and there in the city, now at Saratoga, once in Europe, she “lived around” with relatives of sorts, but most of the time she spent in the great house. Its corners grew less and less neat as age crept over her. Still, however, the active physique her sea-faring father and her tomboy mother had given little Betsy Bowen held on grimly to life and activity, and the social mania which had consumed her thoughts lighted up her memory with fantasies, as a sputtering lantern creates half-authentic figures among the shadows of a dusty, neglected stage. Outside the house she had no friends except those who wanted her money or stole her firewood and livestock, indoors life was a perpetual pageant. For twenty years a feast table, fully set, with dust in the crystal wine glasses, and mould on the petrifying candies, stood in a closed room: this, she related, was the table at which she had entertained Joseph Bonaparte when he came over to marry her and her riches and had to climb over the back wall to gain entrance. She took pity on him then, she said, for it didn’t look just right to have the King of Spain in the kitchen. The truth is that she never entertained Joseph Bonaparte (though she offered him the estate in 1820); nor did the Duke of Palermo offer to marry the “Vice-Queen of America” as she styled herself (although she inspected the ducal palace in Palermo); she was in Paris when Lafayette visited America in 1825, but she honestly believed that she had been his hostess on the Heights. Some recollection of a name, a face, a romantic anecdote out of her vivid past popped up, or she ran across one of the dingy, pathetic dance favors or trinkets or ribbons of a dead affair, and presto!--her feverish mind whirled away in a jumbled drama, unlimited in its romantic action, and delicious in its inaccuracy.

If the public saw her it was under circumstances that magnified all the erratic tales that were--and still are--current about her history. One winter she took a group of penniless Frenchmen under her wing, quartered them in the barn, which had once held American prisoners, armed them from the arsenal she kept in the house, organized them into a military outfit, and would ride proudly at their head over her estate. From France she brought home green livery for her postilions--though she had no postilions, and when taunting reached her ears she dressed the gardener and his boy in the livery and rode to town with them. Her face to the world was as haughty and as tinctured with rouge as if she were Eliza Brown of Whitehall Street, her dress as shabby-genteel as she fancied it was fashionable, her intellect as tragically aflame with the mad dance of Might-Have-Been as it was fixed, cold, and shrewd in financial matters. _Grande dame_ she had set out to be, _grande dame_ she had become, and mercifully to the poor little shrunken creature with the powdered cheeks and the soiled finery who was finally carried upstairs to the Washington room to die, _grande dame_ in her mind she died.

It was a signal for the jackals. No less than twenty law-suits sprang up to break the will and seize the property. Some of the claims seem just, others less so, and all of them, in the course of fifty years, have gone through the mill of the courts and been ground exceeding fine. Of them all, the most interesting fragment is the attempt made by George Washington Bowen, Betsy’s deserted baby in Providence, to own his mother’s home. For thirteen years the old man pursued his case, even to the Supreme Court, lost it, and died, though the claim is still cherished by his own connections. The estate could not hold out long against the march of the city, and parcel by parcel it was split up, until in 1894 the house and its dooryard came into the hands of General F. P. Earle.

The city owns it now, and four capable chapters of the Daughters of the American Revolution have formed the Washington Headquarters Association, and have brought the mansion out of neglect and oblivion. They opened the windows Madame Jumel kept sealed and let in air and sunlight; they consigned the Eastlake-and-gimcrack whatnottery of its most recent tenants to the exceedingly efficient ash-removal department of the City of New York, which is equipped to handle just such situations, and from the four corners of our country they assembled and installed in the house as much of its historic equipment as they could find. There is much of it, of course, which has no special significance, and there is so great a quantity of relics there that the house is in no sense a home, but rather an interesting and valuable museum. Next best of all, they opened the doors to the public in a city where sorely-needed Americanization may well begin at home. And best of all, they installed as curator William Henry Shelton, as gracious a story-teller as the humble history-seeker may ply with questions. It is to him largely that the excellent administration of the house is due. It is he who can bid you close your eyes, make a few passes, and translate you into the presence of Mary Philipse, or bring you to attention before George Washington, or open a secret panel that you may peep at Madame Jumel. In his book, “The Jumel Mansion,” he has done just this, and it is from that source with his permission that the greater part of this story is drawn, and so, gratefully acknowledged.

MOUNT VERNON

© D.McK

MOUNT VERNON

Here on a hill in Fairfax County, Virginia, we may catch glimpses of the man George Washington liked to be.]

MOUNT VERNON

The First President once wrote a letter to a Charleston gentleman named Thomas Pinckney, who was then American ambassador at the British court. His words were for Thomas Pinckney, not for posterity, so posterity finds it refreshing to see a president writing a specific letter to his envoy under the pitiless light of publicity. Its chief interest here is not his report of the Senate’s action on a proposed treaty with Great Britain, nor his anxiety over Lafayette’s imprisonment in Olmutz, though both are subjects upon which he dwells at some length. The note for us is the fact that after long diplomatic instruction to his ambassador, Washington says:

“Before I close this letter permit me to request the favour
of you to embrace some favorable opportunity to thank Lord
Grenville in my behalf, for his politeness in causing a special
permit to be sent to Liverpool for the shipment of two sacks
of the field peas, and the like quantity of winter vetches,
which I had requested our Consul at that place to send me for
seed, but which it seems cannot be done without a special order
from Government. A circumstance which did not occur to me, or I
certainly should not have given it the trouble of issuing one
for such a trifle.

“With very great esteem and regard
“I am, dear Sir,
“Your obedt. Servant,
“G. Washington.”

A treaty with Great Britain, Lafayette to be got out of prison, two sacks of field peas and some winter vetch--and there is George Washington. Our national heroes march down the ages without time to change costumes. While they live we call them everything under the sun; they die, and we endow them with a certain type-quality which they must wear forever to the exclusion of other and equally interesting qualities which they possessed in equal quantity. Unless some circumstance rescue those qualities from oblivion, a large part of the inspiration of their lives has been unnecessarily sacrificed. We have seen the first manifestation of such a process with the death of Colonel Roosevelt, and we wonder how frequently our children’s children will think of Roosevelt on the tennis-court, at Sagamore, in Montana, in Rock Creek Park, or facing death in Brazil. The nation loses a man, to mourn a saint. So in a lesser degree with our lesser heroes: Hale becomes the lay-figure of Loyalty, Franklin, of Common Sense, Grant, of Military Patience. Here, on a hill in Fairfax County, Virginia, in and about a great white house, we may catch glimpses of the man George Washington liked to be--glimpses denied us in the popular Washington legend.

He was a boy of three when his father first brought him there. He was seven when his father’s house burned, and the discouragement and loneliness of the wilderness plantation on the Potomac sent the young family to Fredericksburg to live. He was fifteen when he came back to live on the Potomac estate, now the property of his brother Lawrence. Lawrence was of no mean importance in his young brother’s eye--a veteran of the West Indian naval exploits of Admiral Vernon, and so full of them that he named the estate after his chief--altogether a rare big brother. And there were rare neighbors to be cultivated: like Lord Fairfax, an Oxford graduate and contributor to Mr. Addison’s _Spectator_, who took a fellow riding, and now and then rode after a fox.

As the boy broadened into self-reliance in such company as Lawrence’s, and into a degree of education by association with Fairfax, he fell heir to certain of their responsibilities. Fairfax sent him to survey his vast holdings. Lawrence developed tuberculosis, and his military duties devolved upon George. At twenty he was master of Mount Vernon, at twenty-one a lieutenant-colonel and fighting for the English against the French on the Ohio. Thackeray has pointed, in this episode, the caprice of fate: “It was strange that in a savage forest of Pennsylvania a young Virginian officer should fire a shot and waken up a war which was to last for sixty years, which was to cover his own country and pass into Europe, to cost France her American colonies, to sever ours from us, and create the great Western Republic; to rage over the Old World when extinguished in the New; and, of all the myriads engaged in the vast contest, to leave the prize of the greatest fame with him who struck the first blow!”

The next year he was a part of Braddock’s disastrous expedition, and news went home that he had been killed. John Augustine Washington made alarmed inquiries, to which George replied with a wit equal to Mark Twain’s under similar circumstances: “As I have heard, since my arrival at this place, a circumstantial account of my death and dying speech, I take this early opportunity of contradicting the first, and of assuring you that I have not as yet composed the latter.” He became a member of the legislature, and then, when he was twenty-six and a full colonel, he married Martha Dandridge Custis, who was by all odds the most accomplished and probably the wealthiest young widow in Williamsburg. It was time now to renew his neglected acquaintance with Mount Vernon.

During the period of their engagement, while Washington was absent at the frontier, and later, while he was attending the session of the House of Burgesses at Williamsburg, Mount Vernon, which had been so long neglected, was taking on a new dress. The activity on the plantation was contagious. It spread down river, to Belvoir, to Gunston Hall, and through the countryside to the other estates where Washington was intimately known, and where his earlier and generous attentions to attractive daughters did nothing to dampen their interest in his bride. Their swift coach-ride homeward bound from Williamsburg was like a triumphal entry. She added to his holdings of twenty-five hundred acres at Mount Vernon, and as many over the mountains, some fifteen thousand acres of her own. She found the house rebuilt, its exterior strengthened by new brick burned on the estate, new boarding and sheathing, new windows and a new roof; inside was new plaster, new flooring, and plenty of new closet-room, which probably touched her woman’s heart as inexpressibly thoughtful.

“I am now I believe fixd at this seat with an agreeable Consort for Life,” he wrote to a friend in England. “And I hope to find more happiness in retirement than I ever experienced amidst a wide and bustling World.” Few realize how wide and bustling was the world surveyed from Mount Vernon, nor to what extent he exerted himself to make use of the talents he had been given. Remember that there were no neighboring shops, no groceries, no service stations--not one, in fact, of the multitude of helping hands which science reaches out today to perform every conceivable task; and remember too that in his custody were, and upon his wise management depended, not only the happiness of his wife and her two children, but that of a company of several hundred others on the estate.

Husband and wife shared in an informal copartnership not unlike that of a manufacturer and a retail store-manager of today. It was her duty to anticipate the living demands of the estate, his to supply them. When she requisitioned cloth, he built a spinning-house and hired labor which in one year spun fourteen hundred yards of textiles, from broadcloth to bed-ticking. Convenient to the house, and flanking the serpentine drive, were his little factories: a smokehouse for meats, a laundry, a tailor-shop, a shoemaker’s shop, a carpenter’s, a smithy; here he wrought his raw materials to the needs of his establishment. And it was when he put on his “plain blue coat, white cassimer waistcoat, black breeches and boots” to visit the fields and the mill, his usual custom in the forenoon, that he was most truly the producer, and most contented.

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.