60 Ducere Est Servire: THE LEADERSHIP JOURNAL OF DALLAS BAPTIST UNIVERSITY Manhattan and hand Washington his most disastrous and embarrassing defeat, Washington wrote home about flour sales and home repairs, which Chernow labels Washington’s “battlefield sedative.” On yet another occasion, Chernow refers to Mount Vernon and says that his home and farms “offered sustenance for his weary mind.” Later, he writes of Washington’s presidency, opining that the longer his presidency lasted, the more Washington longed “more wistfully for the solace of Mount Vernon.”17 Mount Vernon, his sanctuary, became more than just a sanctuary when he resided there. Thinking about Mount Vernon and managing its myriad of complexities provided an outlet for his mind in the same way that sitting on the porch with Martha overlooking the Potomac provided repose for his body. As Joseph Ellis writes of Washington’s obsession during the final years of his presidency, “The longest letters, and more of them than he devoted to any official topic, deal with the management of his farms at Mount Vernon.” Ellis continues, “Even when immersed in crucial diplomatic negotiations with France or controversial deliberations about Hamilton’s fiscal policy, Washington found time to compose meticulous instructions to his managers about plowing, weeding, worming, or grubbing schedules, about when to stock the icehouse, about the personalities and work habits of different overseers or slave laborers, about proper food and rum rations at harvest time.” Even though many people might see these as distractions or additional burdens, Ellis further adds, “One can read these letters as a continuance of his obsessive urge to remain the strenuous squire, the honest inclinations of a man who felt more genuine excitement discussing the merits of a new threshing machine than the intricacies of the Jay Treaty. Or one could, more speculatively, argue that the Mount Vernon correspondence allowed him to retain a zone of personal control amidst an increasingly discordant political world that seemed to defy control altogether.” From this, students of Washington might argue as Ellis does, “But, in the end, the most compelling explanation is that Washington’s soul, or at least the last sliver of his private personality, never made the trip to New York [and then Philadelphia] but remained ensconced at Mount Vernon.”18 Like his successors, including the five presidents included above, the very
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODc4ODgx