59 it vulnerable to attack if the British discovered the program and chose to move from winter quarters to a surprise attack or if a large number of soldiers remained ill or died from the inoculations. Some of his generals allegedly advocated revolt against his leadership in the socalled Conway Cabal. He could not get Congress to respond to his pleas for soldiers’ pay and even basic supplies, like food, clothing, and shoes. How could he be worried about which crop to plant next season in the lower field or increasing the yield in the lands down river? Did it really matter what the price of flour was going to be or if the estate’s spinning went forward or not “with all possible dispatch?” If his carpenters were not making casks and he was paying them “to be idle,” would that determine what Generals Howe, Clinton, or Cornwallis did? If the Patriot armies continued to lose battles, making casks and breeding animals would have been the least of Washington’s worries—he would most likely have been captured and perhaps hanged and someone else would then have owned Mount Vernon—shouldn’t he have focused on winning the war?15 Additionally, supervising a large plantation like Mount Vernon from a distance undoubtedly created huge of amounts of stress, especially dealing with the difficulty of administering managers, overseers, hired workers, and large numbers of enslaved people, struggling with what modern day observers would call cash-flow issues, and the fact that being a public figure made his sanctuary a stopping point for travelers who then became an unexpected burden on his finances. During the war, his estate could have been targeted for potential British destruction. Additionally, he suffered from an internal moral dilemma regarding his enslaved people and the conflict of fighting for liberty while owning human beings. If Mount Vernon, his sanctuary, added to Washington’s stress so significantly, then how could it remain a sanctuary? Ron Chernow refers to the immense value that Mount Vernon held for Washington during the most heated days of the American Revolution. As a beleaguered Washington awaited British attack, Chernow writes that the general’s “overburdened mind turned where it always did for comfort: to Mount Vernon, his mental sanctuary.”16 He implies that Washington’s attention to details at his Virginia home became the general’s “escapist vision.” Even as the British prepared to assault LEADERS, LEADERSHIP, AND “SANCTUARY”: A FOCUS ON SIX U.S. PRESIDENTS AND THE PROBLEM OF REST
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