Speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, Part X: Students of Prestige

Education, as it happened, was another of the social markers adopted by the American planter class as a means of setting themselves above their similarly wealthy but uncultured peers. Granted, it was not a privilege of which every member of this cohort took enthusiastic advantage. The likes of George Mason (1725-1792), for example – later famous for his scholarship and his erudition – brothers Francis Lightfoot Lee (1734-1797) and Richard Henry Lee (1732-1794), and the aforementioned William Blount of North Carolina were all educated at home by a succession of tutors hired by their wealthy families. Under the circumstances, this was entirely reasonable given that the management of a plantation could best be learned by firsthand observation, and that even a career in the law – perhaps the most popular vocation among the southern gentry – could be had via apprenticeship. Pragmatism, of course, was not a trait for which the American planter class was particularly renowned. For that reason, many of the scions of the colonial South’s wealthiest families received prestigious educations on the classical model – far in excess of what their likely vocations would ever require – either in America, Britain, or Continental Europe. By and large, the greater the cost, the more prestigious the resulting accreditation, and the greater the social cache it conferred.

 

On the first order – being those whose families could afford to send them only to the better class of school within the confines of the southern colonies – there were men like Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Carter Braxton (1736-1797), John Blair Jr. (1732-1800), and Edmund Randolph (1753-1813), all of whom attended the College of William & Mary – founded in 1693 and named for the sponsoring monarchs William III (1650-1702) and Mary II (1662-1694) – in Williamsburg, Virginia. Though, by the standards of the contemporary British Empire, William & Mary was a far cry from Oxford or Cambridge, it nevertheless managed to provide its students with a thoroughgoing education is such diverse and heady topics as mathematics, metaphysics, and philosophy, as well as languages like French, Ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. While, in light of the kinds of careers which the aforementioned students pursued upon graduation – Jefferson apprenticed as a lawyer under George Wythe (1726-1806), Randolph did the same under his father John (1727-1784) and his uncle Peyton (1721-1775), and Braxton became a merchant and plantation owner – this would seem on the surface to be an excessively dense criteria, the intention behind it was as much a matter of style as it was substance. Regardless of what the students of the College of William & Mary ultimately did with their education, the mere fact of having been taught to read ancient languages, and to discuss politics and philosophy, and to exercise the rules of rhetoric in conversation conveyed upon them a quality of prestige with few material equivalents. Being a gentleman, after all, was about more than simply living like one. A gentleman, on the 18^th century Anglo-American model, had to be able to talk a certain way, and be erudite, and witty, and well-read, and worldly. William & Mary successfully instilled these qualities into its students despite its relative obscurity within the sphere of contemporary British instructional institutions, and for this reason it served a certain strata of the southern planter class for generations on end.

 

There was also, of course, an entire sub-class of the southern elite above those families who patronized the flagship college of the Province of Virginia for whom greater wealth and more prestigious connections provided access to some of the most esteemed institutions in the 18^th century world. Of this latter group, it must be said, religion also factored into the decision of where to send their heirs and scions. Cousins Daniel Carroll (1730-1796) and the aforementioned Charles Carroll of Carrollton, for example, were members of a prominent Catholic planter family from Maryland who would accordingly have been prohibited from attending any of the colleges that had been chartered in British America to serve the needs of its Protestant inhabitants. In consequence, after having attained a preliminary education mainly via private tutors, both men attended the College of St. Omer in Artois in the Kingdom of France. Founded as a school for lay English Catholics outside the jurisdiction of the Anglican Church, St. Omer had served the needs of Britain’s Catholic gentry for over a hundred years by the middle of the 18^th century, during which time it began to perform the same function for similarly wealthy and restricted Catholics in British America. That the Carrolls consented to pay the extra costs that this arrangement entailed is quite telling. As mentioned previously, the careers which men like Daniel and Charles Carroll eventually took on almost certainly did not require them to attain an advanced education. Charles became a lawyer after an apprenticeship in London. Daniel inherited his family’s plantation in Prince George’s County, Maryland. Both of them, as the experiences of certain of their contemporaries clearly shows, could have followed these same paths without ever having left America or attended more than the equivalent of a primary school. Their attendance at St. Omer accordingly must not have been a matter of practical necessity. Rather, as with a number of their Protestant contemporaries, it was a question of appearance. Not only was St. Omer the only means by which Catholic planters in America could maintain a parity of prestige with their Anglican counterparts, but it arguably possessed the added distinction of being the same school to which members of the British aristocracy – Catholic though they were – sent their children and heirs. By making their children the academic peers of these aristocratic scions, families like the Carrolls thus arguably elevated themselves to the same rank in the contemporary Anglo-American social structure.

Protestant planters possessed of similar resources to those of the Carrolls naturally had a much easier time attaining the same level of distinction within the realm of education. The aforementioned “ancient universities” of Cambridge and Oxford were notable favorites among those families who could afford them, with Virginia’s Thomas Nelson Jr. (1738-1789) and South Carolina’s Thomas Lynch Jr. (1749-1779) and Arthur Middleton (1742-1787) attending the former, while Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (1746-1825), also of South Carolina, matriculated at the latter. Both institutions were products of the Medieval Era – Oxford having been founded in 1096, Cambridge in 1209 – and by the 18^th century possessed unsurpassed reputations in such fields as mathematics, philosophy, and the classics. It accordingly followed – whether it was empirically true or not – that a contemporary graduate of either of the “Oxbridge” institutions could convincingly boast of possessing the best education that money could buy. Granting, once again, that such a claim was of questionable practical value within the economic sphere that the late 18^th century American planter class inhabited, those families who could afford it seemed not to doubt its less-than-tangible worth. Just so, while it was entirely possible – and perfectly acceptable – for the heir of a wealthy planter family to begin a career in the law by apprenticing with a local professional, the wealthiest among them nevertheless insisted on sending their children to Britain to receive the formal training traditionally required of the better class of English barrister.

The Inns of Court – a set of four institutions founded in the 14^th century just outside the contemporary City of London for the purpose of training and lodging professional barristers – were accordingly well-patronized by a certain subset of the American planter elite, with Middle Temple in particular – as opposed to Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn, or Inner Temple – appearing to be the most common choice among American students. Of the examples named above, Pinkney, Lynch, and Middleton all became members of Middle Temple, along with fellow South Carolinian Thomas Heyward Jr. (1746-1809) and brothers John Rutledge (1739-1800) – who would go on to become the 2^nd Chief Justice of the United States – and Edward Rutledge (1749-1800). Training at the Inns was at that time a rather lengthy and unstructured affair, with students expected to take advantage of the on-site archives and libraries and their proximity to working barristers – who traditionally kept their chambers and dined there – as the principle means of cultivating a mastery of the law. While apprenticeships – as were common in America – functioned on essentially the same model, with lawyers-in-training splitting their time between reading tomes like Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1770) by Sir William Blackstone (1723-1780) and observing court proceedings in the company of their master, they lacked some of the more social aspects of life and study at the Inns. Not only were the students of Middle Temple expected to develop a technical understanding of the intricacies of English Common Law, but it was taken for granted that they would also size the opportunity to forge connections with both their contemporaries and their superiors for the purpose of building a network upon which to fashion a professional career. The cache which attending the Inns at Court conveyed upon the relative handful of colonial Americans who were fortunate enough to do so accordingly had only so much to do with the knowledge acquired therein. After all, anyone could become a lawyer in contemporary British America by studying under another lawyer and gaining acceptance to the relevant colonial bar. But only at the likes of Middle Temple could a prospective barrister rub shoulders with – and potentially learn at the feet of – some of the most skilled, honored, and respected legal professionals in the whole of the British Empire.

Notwithstanding the comparative excess of resources which the members of the late 18^th century southern planter class appeared willing to lavish upon their children in the name of formal instruction, it bears noting that they were not the only community living in contemporary British America to attach such surpassing social importance to the prospect of education. In the colonies of the so-called “Middle Atlantic” – i.e. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware – wealthy merchant or land-owning families patronized institutions of higher learning for much the same reasons as their southern counterparts. John Jay (1745-1829), for instance, attended King’s College in Manhattan at the behest of the wealth his father and grandfather had acquired as highly successful merchants and traders, and doubtless for the purpose of reinforcing – or improving – the family’s reputation. Robert R. Livingston (1746-1813), likewise the heir of a very prestigious family, most assuredly attended the same institution for precisely the same reasons, as did fellow New Yorker Gouverneur Morris (1752-1816). Johnathan Dayton (1760-1824) matriculated at the College of New Jersey under very similar circumstances, and the wealthy, plantation-owning family of John Dickinson (1732-1808) went so far as to send him to be trained as a lawyer at the aforementioned Middle Temple. Notwithstanding their relative frequency, however, examples such as these don’t necessarily represent the norm for an entire social class in the same way that the patronage bestowed upon the like of William & Mary arguably does for the southern planters.

Not everyone who attended Mid-Atlantic institutions like King’s College, the College of New Jersey, or the College of Philadelphia did so as a function of the social expectations nurtured by their respective families. Aaron Burr (1756-1836), for instance, very likely became a student of the future Princeton University because his deceased father, Aaron Burr Sr. (1716-1757) had been its second president. For that reason, the younger Burr’s decision was probably as much personal as it was aspirational, owing to a sense of paternal legacy as much to the prospect of social advancement. Just so, Burr’s eventual victim, the orphaned, penniless Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), attended King’s College thanks to the charity of his neighbors in the Danish Indies settlement of Christiansted. Far from living up to the expectations of a wealthy family, Hamilton was instead arguably pursuing some means of re-establishing the sense of personal and economic stability that the earlier departure of his father and the death of his mother had served to systematically destroy over the course of the 1760s. While it would be difficult to deny that both Burr and Hamilton benefited socially and materially from their respective educational experiences, neither of them could accordingly be said to have pursued higher learning based on the same kinds of assumptions that motivated either their contemporaries in the Mid-Atlantic colonies or their counterparts among the southern planters. Rather than respond to the prevailing currents in the social strata to which they belonged, they were compelled by the events of their respective personal lives.

  

And then there was New England, wherein formal education was much more common in the late 18^th century and higher learning was regularly pursued without any expectation of a gain in social capital. Owing to the emphasis which the Calvinist founders of colonial Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire placed on the principle of biblical literacy, compulsory education in fact became the norm across the region as early as the middle of the 17^th century. Most townships of a reasonable size thereafter came to possess at least a primary school, supported by a mix of taxes and tuition fees, with larger settlements going so far as to establish grammar schools for the instruction of adolescent students. Boston Latin School was among the most famous of the latter, having been established in its namesake city in 1635, while Connecticut’s Hopkins School – located in New Haven and named for the late Governor Edward Hopkins (1600-1657) was founded in 1660. High learning was in turn facilitated by the likes of Harvard College (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1636), Yale College (New Haven, Connecticut, 1701), Dartmouth College (Hanover, New Hampshire, 1769), and Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island, 1764), the majority of which were established and endowed for the purpose of training young men to enter careers in the ministry. Granting that the proportion of students at the likes of Harvard or Yale who actually became ministers dropped off significantly over the course of the 18^th century – to the point that, by around 1760, they could no longer realistically claim to be divinity schools – the social context in which these institutions existed continued to be colored by a strong perceived link between education, piety, and moral character.

   

While the proliferation of educational institutions in New England, and the consequent availability of learning to a wider social spectrum than in the contemporary southern colonies, might at first blush be taken to imply that similar class distinctions or aspirations didn’t exist among the inhabitants of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, or Rhode Island, this was very much not the case. There were elites, middling sorts, and commoners in the northern colonies just as there were in the southern colonies, with all of the assumptions and implications that such stratification entails. The so-called “Boston Brahmin,” for example – so named by Cambridge native and Harvard graduate Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809-1894) to describe the class to which he belonged – may not have been as wealthy as their southern planter counterparts, but they endeavored to cultivate much the same air of gentility, urbanity, and refinement. That being said, education undeniably played a smaller part in defining these kinds of social distinctions in New England than it did in Virginia, the Carolinas, or Maryland. A yeoman farmer in 18^th century rural Massachusetts might not have dreamt of sending his eldest son to Harvard, or even have believed that it was necessary for the reputation of his family that he did so. But his male children would more likely than not have benefited from at least a primary school education, or else have acquired as much literacy and learning as the law and custom required. The reason for this was also largely social, but in a very different way to those which seemed to motivate the planter elite of the colonies to the south.

Consider, by way of a case in point, the family of 2^nd President John Adams. His father, John Adams Sr., could most definitely claim descent from an ancestor who took part in the first period of settlement to what was then the Colony of Massachusetts Bay in the early 1630s. While this doubtless conveyed upon him a quality of social capital that could not be matched by those of his neighbors who were the offspring of later waves of emigration, it hardly made him the material equal of a similarly descended southern planter. For all the pride he purportedly invested in his ancestry, and the lengths to which he went to uphold the values he believed this heritage stood for, John Adams Sr. was a man of relatively modest means. He was a prosperous yeoman farmer, to be sure, though not to the extent that he could forgo taking on extra work in the winter as a cobbler. He was also a deacon in his church, a lieutenant in the colonial militia, a tax collector, and a selectman for the Town of Braintree. And he was a graduate of Harvard, at which he insisted his son also enroll. All of these things doubtless contributed to a reputation for integrity, diligence, and piety; most definitely they did not aid in projecting an image of gentlemanly conduct befitting one who was born to lead. Indeed, if the younger John’s recollections of his father were in any way accurate, the elder John was motivated exclusively by considerations of substance rather than appearance. Far from believing that study at Harvard would serve to set him apart from those he considered to be his social inferiors – many of whom lived in identical material circumstances – Farmer John considered the education one received at such an institution to be a mark of good character and sound habits.

Most assuredly, it was this reason that the elder Adams sent his son to the same institution. Graduating from Harvard, after all, had done little to improve either the social or material conditions of his life, and it seems unlikely he believed the experience would better serve John Jr. Just so, the younger Adams was evidently adamant that his own son, John Quincy Adams, be schooled in Cambridge in turn despite that fact that, by the time of his admittance in 1785, the boy had already accompanied his father to Europe, attended several schools in cities across the continent, and served as personal secretary to American diplomat Francis Dana (1743-1811). Compared to having attended the court of Catherine the Great (1729-1796) in Saint Petersburg or studying at Leiden University in the Dutch Republic, one would be hard pressed to imagine that even the toniest of the Massachusetts elite would have maintained that a degree from Harvard was the most prestigious honor a man could seek. Nevertheless, it was to Harvard that John Quincy next applied himself, and it was from Harvard that he graduated in 1787 before proceeding upon a career as a lawyer and a diplomat. Distinction, clearly, was not what John Adams sought for his son, for it would have seemed obvious to any who cared to measure such things that the boy already possessed it in abundance. Rather, as his own father had arguably impressed upon him, it was a matter of discipline, self-improvement, and character. The common product of New England habits and New England values – among them such Puritan virtues as hard work, probity, and studiousness – John Adams Sr., John Adams, and John Quincy Adams each of them attended Harvard College, not for the boost which they believed it would provide to their respective reputations, or in answer to a social expectation of gentlemanly attainment, but because they had imbibed the value of education as a shaper of morals and a cultivator of habits.

Speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, Part IX: The Lords of America

            Though the history and continuing influence of the Continental Army most definitely presented a potential source of concern for those who viewed the draft constitution presented to the various American states in 1787 as investing far too much power in far too few hands, there were yet other reasons for people like Patrick Henry to suspect that certain of his countrymen were more interested in the projection of splendor than the protection of civil liberties. Granting that the creation of the Society of the Cincinnati in 1783 by Major General Henry Knox (1750-1806) as a hereditary association of Revolutionary War veterans wholly closed off to those below the rank of officer hardly spoke to the republicans bona fides of its members and the broader fraternity to which they belonged, there existed a much older and much larger – though comparatively informal – association of like-minded individuals living in the United States whose general character was similarly superficial. While there existed, at the time, no singular name for them, they have become known to history as variously the planter class, the Southern gentry, or the American aristocracy, all of which labels fairly capably describe their general quality and disposition. They were, in essence, the class of men living in what is now the American South during the colonial (1600-1783) and antebellum (1783-1860) eras whose economic prospects and social standing was inextricably linked to the style of plantation agriculture made possible by the importation and ownership of African slaves. Prior to the advent of cotton in the early 19^th century, they chiefly farmed cash crops like rice, tobacco, and indigo for export to European markets, the sale of which – along with trading in slaves – made them some of the wealthiest men on the continent and the de facto ruling class of their respective political communities.

            Notwithstanding the origins of their wealth and influence in international commerce, the members of the planter class tended to self-consciously set themselves apart from the merchants and traders upon whom they depended by adopting a lifestyle whose material trappings were distinctly ostentatious and whose social pretentions were decidedly patrician. It was not enough for these men to possess tremendous wealth, it seemed. Rather, they had to spend that wealth in a particular way, on particular things, all the while cultivating a sense of innate superiority that belied their origins as traders in human flesh and wholesale produce. The English gentry unsurprisingly provided the default model for the resulting socio-economic community. The “first families” of many southern colonies, after all, were descended from the otherwise landless second sons of a number of prominent English dynasties, and the events of the 1640s and 1650s – i.e. the English Civil War (1642-1651) and the Interregnum (1651-1660) – provided ample reason for aristocratic capital and noble manners to transport themselves to the American wilderness. In time, however, what had started as the continuation of established family lines became something more broadly aspirational. Certainly, even as late as the 1770s and 1780s, they were many prominent members of the political elite in Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas for whom descent from a prominent family remained a point of pride and distinction. Benjamin Harrison V (1726-1791), for example, was the scion of a prominent Virginia dynasty which claimed to trace its pedigree back to the 14^th century, while Maryland’s Charles Carroll of Carrollton (1737-1832) was the grandson of Charles Carroll the Settler (1660-1720), an Irish-born lawyer who had attended the prestigious Inns of Court and became an aide and confidante of Charles Calvert, 3^rd Baron Baltimore (1637-1715). Often as not, however, the wealthiest and most influential members of the contemporary southern gentry were the successors of middling farmers and entrepreneurs whose claim to prestige was acquired rather than inherited.

            The migrant ancestor of George Washington (1732-1799), for instance, was one John Washington (1631-1677), the son of a village rector from Hertfordshire who was reduced to poverty for his support of the Crown during the aforementioned Civil War. He managed to improve his circumstances over many years by first clerking for a London merchant firm, then becoming second officer on a trading vessel, then marrying into a planter family in Virginia, and finally by becoming a tobacco farmer with the land he received from his wife’s father as her dowry. Similarly, while the father of Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was not exactly born into a life of material deprivation, the social capital possessed by the children of Peter Jefferson (1708-1757) was much more the result of enterprise than entitlement. A surveyor and cartographer rather than a planter, the elder Jefferson acquired land in Albemarle Country on the western frontier of the Province of Virginia as a consequence of his vocation, and spent most of his career in service to Thomas Fairfax (1693-1781), a Scottish peer and prominent Virginia land magnate. While neither George Washington nor Thomas Jefferson could accordingly claim to have been the descendants of avowed members of the British gentry, they could nevertheless aspire to the example set by that cohort in the way they made use of their wealth. Indeed, by conforming to an unspoken but well-established set of behaviors and customs by which the gentry of the southern colonies comported themselves, they could effectively erase the origins of their prominence and become simply one of many gentlemen in a society dominated by the tastes and intentions of the same.

            Where this kind of behavior might have become a source of concern within the context of the ratification of the proposed constitution in 1787/88 – whereby a weak, confederal government was to be replaced by a strong, national one – was in what the nature of the planter lifestyle implied about the men who sought to embody it. For all their pretensions to the contrary – which, as will be discussed momentarily, were many – the landed gentry of the southern states were not actually aristocrats. They were not members of any peerage or nobility, for the American republic did not recognize such things. And for all the influence they wielded over the public affairs of the communities in which they dwelt – which was substantial – they were still a far cry from the dukes and lords of Britain and Ireland who practically owned entire counties and filled the ranks of the great ministries of state. And yet, for all the rigidness of that basic reality, the planters behaved as a class as though they thought themselves the equal of any marquis or baron that old England could boast. They built great manors, in the English fashion, and gave them names, and furnished them with gardens, and cultivated massive estates from the surrounding country. They sent their sons to the best schools, and taught them to dance, and speak Latin, and to play music, and patronize the arts. And always, they comported themselves with a mixture of gentility and hauteur – an attitude of “to the manor, born” – that gave clear and constant proof of their innate preeminence.

There was nothing innate about their prestige, of course; they were simply very wealthy men. Shameful as this seemed to be to them, however, they accordingly went to great lengths to convince the world otherwise.  How important to them was the concept of splendor? To what extent would they have been willing to carry it? These were important questions, and ones which someone like Patrick Henry – himself a Virginian of considerable means – was arguably bound to consider within the context of essentially re-founding the United States of America along much more centralized lines. If the American planter class really did aspire to the level of social prestige enjoyed by the English gentry upon which they modeled themselves, the elevation of America’s reputation abroad would seem an ideal means of accomplishing just that. Within a strictly colonial context, the southern magnates would forever be overshadowed by the existence of an actual aristocracy for whom displays of conspicuous wealth were a function of their status rather than the cause of it. Just so, with the United States of America operating under a government which the great powers of the world seemed to tolerate more than respect, the planter gentry would yet still struggle to affirm themselves as equal members of the European aristocratic order. But if the American republic were to become a splendid thing, possessed of all the trappings of empire, then no one could deny that its great landowning families were deserving of all the respect and admiration which they had long since claimed as their birthright.

Consider, by way of context, some of the things that the southern planter elite in the United States did in order to make conspicuous their patrician bona fides. Architecture having long been a means by which individuals, organization, or government make known both the extent of wealth they possess and the superiority of their tastes or aspirations, it at length became customary for the “gentlemen” of the southern colonies/states to invest some portion of their personal worth in magnificent manor houses in the style of English country estates. Westover Plantation, for example – located approximately halfway between Williamsburg and Richmond – was built around the year 1750 by one William Byrd III (1728-1777), grandson of enterprising migrant William Byrd I (1652-1704), in a style and on a scale that left little room to doubt the pretensions of its owner. Encompassing some twelve hundred acres, Westover was centered on a three story Georgian mansion adjoined by extensive wings, replete with secret passages and winding staircases, and surrounded by magnificent gardens in the contemporary English style. Grand fireplaces abounded, surrounded by gleaming white plaster, and the front façade included soaring pillars flanking a massive front door. By way of comparison, the house in Quincy, Massachusetts that future president John Adams (1735-1826) lived in for the first part of his adult life – and in which his son, future president John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), was born – was a 2 ½ story saltbox dwelling given to him by his father John Adams Sr. (1691-1761) in 1764. It had four rooms, a single fireplace, and a white clapboard exterior.

While clearly the Byrd family and the Adams family lived in different material universes – the former being wealthy planters and slave traders, the latter being deacons, farmers, and lawyers – they were also separated by ideas of perception and ambition. The elder Adams, though far from wealthy, was reportedly very proud of the life he’d carved out for himself and his family. He owned his property outright, farmed during the spring and summer and made shoes during the winter, attended Harvard College, and was active as a town councilman for some twenty years by the time of his death. William Byrd III, lord of stately Westover, was conversely a gambler and a spendthrift who inherited almost two hundred thousand acres from his father and sold almost all of it off either to pay for the construction of his manor home or to service his mountainous personal debts. Whereas Adams was content with what his own enterprise could gain for him, Byrd was unsatisfied even with the substantial fortune in property that his family had preserved for his inheritance. He built larger, grander; damn the cost and the likelihood of losing it all to his creditors, there was an image someone in his position was expected to maintain. Though this example may represent something of an extreme – not every planter was as compulsive and as unlucky as William Byrd III – it is also in many ways characteristic of the manner in which the southern elite carried themselves. The image of wealth was often as important to them as – if not arguably more important than – actual wealth, and splendor often as cherished as substance.

Mount Vernon, famous as the beloved estate of George Washington, was in fact the product of several generations of improvements and consolidations on the part of the Washington family. Originally acquired by George’s great-grandfather John Washington (1633-1677) in 1674, the first permanent dwelling was built there by John’s grandson, Augustine Washington (1694-1743), sometime between 1726 and 1735. This initial construction, dubbed Little Hunting Creek, was evidently quite modest, with two rooms on the ground floor and an third room in an additional half-story. Augustine’s eldest son Lawrence Washington (1718-1752) was subsequently gifted Little Hunting Creek upon his return to Virginia from schooling in England in 1738, and spent the next several years buying up adjoining parcels of land until obtaining a coveted officer’s commission and departing to serve in the British Army during the so-called War of Jenkin’s Ear (1739-1748). Upon his return, having served under Royal Navy Admiral Edward Vernon (1684-1757) during the late conflict, he decided to change the name of his estate to Mount Vernon as a form of tribute. Lawrence’s younger half-brother George Washington left this moniker unchanged upon inheriting the property in full in 1761, though that was about all he allowed to remain in its original state. Between 1758 and the late 1770s, the latest master of Mount Vernon undertook at least two major renovations, raising the central building to 2 ½ stories, adding north and south wings, a cupola, and a piazza that overlooked the nearby Potomac River. The final enlargement left the compound with over twenty rooms covering eleven thousand square feet.

It bears noting that throughout the period of his ownership, Washington, his wife Martha (1731-1802), and her two children from her first marriage to Daniel Parke Curtis (1711-1757) were the only permanent residents of the manor house at Mount Vernon. Slaves owned by the Washington family – of which there were many – lived in separate quarters, and guests, while frequent, never appeared in such numbers as to require entire wings to be built to house them. The sheer size of the dwelling could not therefore have been described as being in any sense practical. On the contrary, it was decidedly impractical, particularly in light of the remoteness of Mount Vernon from the nearest major settlement. Floating the produce of the plantation down the Potomac and out to the Chesapeake for shipping aboard was one thing, but moving materials and artisans upriver in order to undertake major expansions and renovations represented an economically needless expense that could only have eaten into Washington’s yearly profits or else caused him to go into debt. Just so, the physical arrangement of the estate embodies a distinctly inefficient style of landscape planning. Though it was a working farm whose continued existence depended on cash-crop agriculture, Washington nevertheless made a point of reserving no small amount of potentially arable land at Mount Vernon for well-manicured gardens and a grassy bowling green planted with English boxwood trees. Tobacco would have been more profitable, no doubt, or indigo, or even wheat. But profit, clearly, was not all that men of George Washington’s class cared about. Mount Vernon was both extravagant and needlessly expensive, but to its master’s thinking it was also entirely necessary.

And then there was Mount Airy, built by John Tayloe II (1721-1779) in Richmond County, Virginia on land his family had already owned for over a century. At the time of its construction in the late 1750s, Tayloe was one of the richest planters in British North America, and the resulting complex of structures and gardens was appropriately grandiose in scale and design. Of the five main structures that comprised the central pavilion, the main building rose two 2 ½ stories above surrounding land, with two, curving one story passageways leading to two further two story wings that combined to enclose a large, semi-circular sunken courtyard. Wide stone steps led from a circular carriage drive and between a pair of pedestals topped with carved stone vases to the columned, limestone main façade. Further entrances on the north and south faces of the central building led to finely manicured gardens that collectively occupied almost ten times the acreage of the manor itself, with terraces, topiary, and even an enclosed “orangery” for the purpose of growing tropical plants in an otherwise inhospitable climate. Sheer size and extravagance was not all that Mount Airy had to offer, however. Evidently eager to establish a reputation for good taste as well as fantastic wealth, Tayloe consulted some of the latest manuals of architecture and design during the planning phase of his palatial manor home. Several aspects of the resulting structure were accordingly copied directly from the works of some of contemporary Britain’s foremost architects – James Gibbs (1682-1754) for one, William Adam (1689-1748) for another – with the whole built on a ridge overlooking the north bank of the Rappahannock River.

Compared to the plantation estates of the vast majority his American contemporaries, Tayloe’s Mount Airy was truly palatial, approaching more closely the scale of an English aristocrat’s country seat than just about any of its nearest contemporaries. Doubtless this was exactly the conclusion which Tayloe hoped all those who heard tell of or visited him home would arrive at, yet the association could not but have embodied certain problematic implications. Mount Airy very likely represented the closest that any of the southern colonial elite ever came to truly meeting the material aspirations they had set for themselves as New World gentry on the Old World model. But in the way that he financed and maintained his manor, Tayloe was pointedly not an English aristocrat. Whereas most members of the English landed gentry sustained themselves on rents collected from tenants whose labor generated the actual wealth – and were thus only marginally involved in the economy from which they benefited – the planter class of the southern colonies were agriculturalists who, though they also refrained from working the soil themselves, were nevertheless forced to pay heed to things like crop rotation and market trends in order to sustain the wealth upon which they depended. The significance of this distinction would seem essentially to be twofold.

First, it appears to further emphasize the aspirational quality of the planter lifestyle. Near though Tayloe came to replicating the material circumstances of the English landed gentry, he could not but fail to surmount the vulgar commercial underpinnings of the wealth that made it possible. Aristocratic gentility, therefore, operated as a kind of screen by which a sufficiently wealthy individual could at the very least project the image of effortless social superiority absent the customary feudal privilege. Second, in light of the economic activity which the planter class was obliged to undertake in order to sustain themselves, the extravagances of Mount Airy appear yet more extreme. A contemporary plan of the estate buildings and gardens reveals a truly distressing amount of potentially productive land entirely given over to the cause of cementing Tayloe’s status as the wealthiest man among a cohort of frighteningly wealthy men. As with Mount Vernon, one imagines that far from unsubstantial revenues could have been derived from the property which at Mount Airy was allocated to the growing of ornamental shrubbery or exotic fruit. Likewise, Tayloe’s fame as an owner and breeder of racehorses represented a drain upon his yearly profits that was almost certainly unaccompanied by a commensurate return.

While this was, it bears repeating, entirely intentional, it also reinforces the seemingly destructive superficiality with which the members of the American planter class conducted themselves. Though commercial agriculture was absolutely central to their ability to sustain the aristocratic lifestyle that they had collectively chosen to imitate, this same act of imitation was also decidedly noncommercial. Bowling greens, and boxwood trees, and ornamental gardens, and racing stables could only cost these men money, and make it harder for them to continue to fund such needless extravagances. To them, of course – to the attitudes and customs of the particular social class to which they belonged – they were absolutely essential. They were not aristocrats in the truest sense, and in all likelihood would never become them. Image, therefore, was arguably all they had as a means of setting themselves apart from the merchants and manufacturers that comprised the elite class of northern colonies. The southern planters accordingly showed themselves more than willing to pour every pound, shilling, and pence they could possibly bear to part with into whatever would help them appear as something more than particularly wealthy farmers – which was, in truth, all that they were. 

Speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, Part VIII: A Weak General and Bad Counselors

Looming behind all of the men serving as officers in the Continental Army, of course, either as rival or patron, was George Washington himself. And though neither the dedication nor humility which he displayed during his service as Commander-in-Chief of that force ought to be called into question – from refusing pay at the outset in 1775 to resigning his commission on his own initiative in 1783 – he was himself given to fits of ego over the course of his military career. During his service in the Seven Years War with the colonial Virginia Regiment, for example, he not infrequently came into conflict with British Army officers over the relative authority which each of them claimed to possess. Royal officers of lesser rank more than once asserted superiority over the colonially-appointed Washington, and he was known to complain to his commanders at being so callously disregarded. That the remedy which he settled upon was to pursue a royal commission for himself should not come as much of a surprise. Becoming an officer of the British Army would have elevated Washington’s social standing among his fellow planters substantially at the same time it served the function of firmly establishing his fitness to command mixed regular and colonial troops. With this aim in mind, he accordingly attempted to make himself indispensable to General Edward Braddock (1695-1755), newly arrived in the colonies and tasked with leading an expedition against the French position at Fort Duquesne – later renamed Fort Pitt, later still known as Pittsburgh – in the hope that his services would be appropriately rewarded. While Braddock subsequently came to trust and depend on the young Virginian for both logistical support and tactical advice, to the point that Washington was certain Braddock would have granted him a commission if asked, events would unfortunately transpire so as to prevent this or any similar outcome.

Braddock, history famously records, was killed at the Battle of the Monongahela on July 9^th, 1755. And though Washington managed to rally the slain general’s dispirited men sufficiently to fight a rear guard action and permit an organized retreat – for which he became something of a hero among his fellow Virginians – his efforts did not generate much in the way of goodwill with Braddock’s successors. Both William Shirley (1694-1771), then Governor of Massachusetts Bay, and Lord Loudon (1705-1782), then Governor of Virginia, rebuffed his request for a regular army commission, the latter going so far as to humiliate him in front of his aides. Stung yet still dutiful, Washington continued for a time to serve alongside his British counterparts and superiors to the best of his abilities – such as when he accompanied General John Forbes (1707-1759) on a second, far more successful expedition to capture Fort Duquesne in 1758 – all the while becoming increasingly resigned to the fact that the recognition he coveted was simply not forthcoming. Upon returning to Virginia from the Forbes Expedition early in 1759, he accordingly resigned his post with the Virginia Regiment and returned to Mount Vernon as once more a private citizen.

Washington’s experiences during the Seven Years War were most definitely formative ones, providing him both with a sense of the rigors and requirements of 18^th century warfare as well as an appreciation for the countervailing pressures of ambition and restraint within a military hierarchy. He did not wholly cease to be ambitious, or course, or to pursue those personal objectives which he most ardently desired, though his persistence in seeking a royal commission had been a source of irritation among a number of his commanders. Indeed, even his early patron, Lt. Governor of Virginia Robert Dinwiddie (1692-1770), at length became frustrated with his young protégé’s near-constant stream of recommendations, requests, and complaints, and started to suspect Washington of dishonesty and mismanagement when anonymous reports to that effect were published in the Virginia Gazette in September, 1756. Seeming to take these incidents to heart, Washington thereafter became much more patient and much more cautious when attempting to advance and protect his public reputation. When, some twenty years after his name first became known in America, the Second Continental Congress offered him the post of Commander-in-Chief of its prospective army, he accordingly behaved with a great deal of humility, expressed his gratitude at having been so chosen, and professed it as his earnest hope that he would live up to the confidence that had been placed in him by his fellow delegates. In spite of these kinds of professions, however, Washington remained acutely conscious of the manner in which he was perceived, his statute as Commander-in-Chief, and potential threats to his authority in the form of jealous or disgruntled subordinates. Consider, by way of example, the degree to which Washington actively attempted to maintain his presence at the peak of the American republic’s nascent military hierarchy in spite of the various reverses that threatened him and it.

Despite leading a successful campaign to recapture British-occupied Boston which culminated in the early spring of 1776, the next several months for the Continental Army proved to be among the most trying in the entire course of the Revolutionary War. Chased out of Brooklyn on August 27^th by British General William Howe (1729-1814) and forced to retreat across the East River into Manhattan on August 30^th, Washington’s forces then failed to stop a British landing at Kip’s Bay on September 15^th, barely held their ground at Harlem Heights on September 16^th, and suffered a series of defeats at White Plains on October 26^th, Fort Washington on November 16^th, and Fort Lee on November 20^th. Retreating through New Jersey, dispirited, underfed, shorthanded, and half-frozen, the five thousand troops that remained to Washington – compared to the twenty-three thousand he’d started the campaign with – accordingly had little reason to place much confidence in the tactical prowess of their commander. Nor, arguably, did Congress, thereby placing Washington in a very precarious position. Had the string of defeats which followed the lifting of the Siege of Boston into the winter of 1776 continued unbroken, Washington would surely have found himself without a command one way or another. Sheer attrition may have bled away his forces, Congress may have opted to surrender to the British, or he might have been replaced as Commander-in-Chief. Something, in short, needed to change if the hero of Monongahela was to retain the preeminent station to which he had but a year and a half prior been elevated.

A more cautious commander – i.e. a less ambitious one – might not have come to that conclusion. Weighing his chances of securing a victory after so many consecutive defeats, absent fresh men, supplies, and favorable weather, a man of humbler character might fairly have determined that his first duty should have been to preserve what was left of the Continental Army through the winter so that it could be passed along to whomever Congress chose as his successor in the spring of 1777. There was far more at stake than one man’s ego, after all, and far more to gain than personal glory. Washington did not do this, of course. Instead, though it may have ended the Revolutionary War there and then, he resolved to engineer a victory from the jaws of defeat. It was a very risky proposition. Supplies, as aforementioned, were limited, some seventeen hundred men were unfit for duty due to injury or illness, and though the arrival of additional soldiers under the commands of General Gates and General Lee served to buttress Washington’s weakened forces, many of the men’s enlistments were due to expire at Christmas and morale was generally quite low. In spite of these difficulties, however, and notwithstanding the harsh winter conditions of central New Jersey, the Commander-in-Chief – while he yet still bore that title – gathered information, planned well and carefully, and determined finally to cross the Delaware River on December 26^th with some six thousand men to strike a garrison of German mercenary troops from the state of Hesse-Kassel quartered at Trenton.

The resulting battle, though tactically of limited significance at the time, has since become known as one of the most famous engagements in the history of the United States. While the crossing of the ice-choked Delaware proved so difficult that over half of the man assigned to the attack were forced to turn back before it even began, the Hessians were caught completely off guard and surrendered after only a short – though reportedly still quite intense – exchange of fire. Almost one thousand Hessians were captured at the cost of minimal American casualties, thus effectively dispelling the notion that colonial troops could not successfully overcome a trained, professional European force. At the same time, the victorious Americans carried the garrison’s supplies back across the Delaware along with their prisoners, thus significantly alleviating the potential resource crisis that loomed on the horizon. Congress naturally made the most of the news, and enlistments increased significantly for the campaign season that followed. The winter was still a harsh one, and desertion remained a chronic issue for the Continental Army throughout the Revolutionary War, but Washington’s victory at Trenton on December 26^th and at Princeton on January 3^rd had effectively given his fellow countrymen reason to hope that the cause of independence was not yet lost. The struggle would continue, notwithstanding the loss of New York to the British, and a final victory was yet possible.

Though he undoubtedly considered his actions in the moment to be wholly in service of the American cause, it would be difficult to deny that Washington himself also benefited personally from his victory at Trenton by effectively erasing his previous defeats in the face of a minor but unexpected triumph. Going into 1777, his reputation was arguably at its lowest ebb. New York had been lost, over two thousand of his men had been captured during the retreat from Manhattan, and what remained of the forces under his command were divided and disconsolate. If ever the likes of Charles Lee and Horatio Gates truly desired to displace their superior, it would be difficult to imagine a better time than that. By the beginning of the New Year, however, the tenor of the moment had changed dramatically. The American cause was yet still in danger –Washington’s victories in New Jersey having done relatively little to shift the actual balance of power – and there remained further months of privation ahead for the Continental Army. But the mood of the fight had shifted. Though the Patriots suffered, they were still in the fight, and Washington was the man to whom this miracle was owed. There were more tribulations he was due to face, at Valley Forge the following winter – during which some two thousand men died of disease and/or malnutrition – and in the form of a conspiracy intent on replacing him discovered at around the same time, but the seed of his glory had already been planted.

This isn’t to say that Washington didn’t make a point of nurturing his reputation from time to time in the years that followed. Humble though he has famously been depicted – and though certain of his actions undeniably were – he showed no inclination during the events of the Revolutionary War to step aside in favor of some rival or other who promised more decisive results. Fortunately for him, the master of Mount Vernon was canny enough to understand that he need not always involve himself personally in the preservation of his rank and title in order to see precisely that end achieved. During the events of the aforementioned conspiracy, for example, Washington responded to rumors of dissatisfaction with his performance in Congress and the Army by more or less allowing events to play out of their own accord. Having earlier tacitly threatened to resign as Commander-in-Chief in response to the persistent entreaties of an Irish-born Continental Army officer named Thomas Conway (1735-1800) to promotion over and ahead of his American-born cohorts, Washington took the news of Conway suggesting to Horatio Gates that, “A weak General and bad Counselors” were near to ruining the country with comparative calm. In reference to a letter by Conway to Gates that his subordinate and confidante William Alexander (1726-1783) had placed in his hand, he in wrote to Conway in November, 1777 to confirm the truth of what he’d read. Conway unsurprisingly demurred, acknowledging that he had written to Gates but that the passage in question was an entire fabrication. Whether or not Washington truly believed this explanation, he notably took no further action directly against either Conway or Gates.

Conway, his petitions having at long last paid dividends, was appointed Inspector General of the newly-created Board of War in December, 1777, the purpose of which body was ostensibly to superintend the war effort on behalf of Congress and over the authority of Washington. Thus threatened in his role as sole commander of the Continental Army by a man whose sympathies were demonstrably and decidedly against him – and who, in his new position, could have sidelined or even removed him with relative ease – Washington made it known the Congress the contents and the source of the letter which he had previously brought to the attention of Conway. Far from a fabrication, it had found its way into the aforementioned Alexander’s hands directly from those of James Wilkinson (1757-1825), an aide to its recipient. It was at this point that Gates rendered his aforementioned apology and Conway, having now been removed from the Board of War and concerned that his influence in Congress was at and end, threatened to resign his commission in March, 1778. Unfortunately for him, Congress accepted. Shortly thereafter – perhaps at the urging of Washington, perhaps not – Wilkinson challenged his former commander Gates to a duel and Washington’s supporter John Cadwalader (1742-1786) challenged Conway. While Gates apologized sufficiently to have the affair successfully called off, Conway was ultimately shot through the mouth by Cadwalader on July 4^th, 1778. Though he survived, he departed to France shortly thereafter, having begged Washington’s forgiveness and agreed forthwith to leave the Continental Army.

         

That Charles Lee and Thomas Conway each suffered similar fates after having challenged the authority of George Washington is most definitely worthy of reflection. Certainly, these men were each responsible for much of what befell them in consequence of their blatant egotism in the face of the ongoing national crisis that was the Revolutionary War. While their subordinates were being killed by the score at Brandywine and Long Island, or else dying of sickness or starvation at Valley Forge, Lee and Conway worked with their allies in Congress to obtain the recognition which they felt they respectively deserved. Humiliation was the least of what they deserved, not to mention discharge from the Continental Army and the foreclosure of their hopes of preferment and prestige. But that was not all that they received. Though Washington himself, as aforementioned, took little or no action against either man once it became clear that they were prepared to move against him, his presence would yet be felt. Lee was shot in a duel by John Laurens, loyal aide-de-camp to the Commander-in-Chief. Conway was shot by John Cadwalader, who had fought alongside Washington in New Jersey during the winter of 1776/1777. While it remains impossible to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt whether or not the master of Mount Vernon either ordered or encouraged these men to challenge his rivals according to the social mores of the time, it would be hard to deny that the end result in either case was both convenient and effective. Maintaining an outward aloofness from the matter, Washington could claim that he was not responsible for the off-duty behavior of his younger subordinates, and that he was in fact wholly unaware of the challenges and the duels until substantially after the fact. Laurens and Cadwalader had acted of their own accord, hotheaded young mavericks that they were. But in so doing, they had extracted apologies from Lee and Conway at the same time that they had reduced them to a state of intense physical humiliation. With the fate of these men as examples, other potential rivals of Washington would doubtless be made to think twice before placing themselves in the path of his loyal coterie of officers. Not only would they likely suffer defeat, but the honor which their efforts intended to augment may yet have ended up dashed to pieces in the most public manner imaginable.

Taking all of this to heart, one may naturally be given to ask why it was that Washington voluntarily surrendered the office he had seemingly spent so much time and energy defending at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War in 1783. As is so often the case, the correct answer may in fact be the most obvious. Having been appointed to the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army in the spring of 1775, Washington’s tenure had lasted over eight years by the time the Treaty of Paris was sealed and the war between Britain and the United States concluded. And while, though variously forced to confront tactical reverses, chronic shortages of manpower, resource scarcity, harsh weather, scheming rivals, political machinations, and at least one attempted mutiny, he had managed to sustain a reputation for competence and dedication, even the most successful occupant of such an office could be forgiven for growing fatigued. It is possible, as has been speculated since his aforementioned resignation, that Washington could instead have made himself king of America. The Continental Army was with him, the American people loved him, and Congress could likely not have resisted for very long or very effectively. In addition to quite possibly being too much the ardent republican to grasp at such power of his own accord, however, Washington was also likely already satisfied with what had been able to achieve. From chafing under the imperiousness of British officers in the 1750s while also coveting the prestige which they wore as though born to it, he had managed to best the entire British military establishment against substantial odds and with distressingly limited resources. It was not an easy road, to be sure, and had more than once nearly led to defeat. But in the process of following it, Washington had managed to fully justify the confidence his countrymen had placed in him in 1775 while at the same time forging a reputation from himself as America’s indispensable man. Little more could be done to burnish this image, and any number of things done to tarnish it. And so, likely as tired as he was satisfied, Washington opted to take retirement as his reward, and surrendered that power for which he had struggled so hard but which could arguably do him no more good than it had.

Notwithstanding George Washington’s evident rejection of something like monarchical glory in 1783, the example which he and his fellow Continental Army officers set for their countrymen through their often undisguisedly vainglorious behavior was understandably a source of concern for people like Patrick Henry in 1788. Faced with the proposition of the United States of America successfully adopting a far more centralized and energetic form of government than provided by the Articles of Confederation, it stands to reason that he would have been given to ask whether the evident desire of the Framers to create a more conventionally impressive American republic had anything to do with the fact that so many of them had so recently shown themselves to covet fame above all else. Of the fifty-five delegates who were sent to the Philadelphia Convention by their respective state governments in May, 1787, twenty-nine had served in some capacity in the armed forces organized by Congress beginning in 1775. Washington was the most famous of the bunch, of course, and the one whose record of service was the most well-known at the time. But if even he – paragon of virtue and self-sacrifice that he was – had at times been motivated by less-than selfless intentions, what could the twenty-eight others say for themselves by way of dispelling the appearance of ego or vanity?

What could Alexander Hamilton say, who, before he became Washington’s aide, passed up similar offers for the chance to win glory on the battlefield, and who was willing to risk his life unnecessarily at Yorktown so that he would not have to retire from the Continental Army as the Commander-in-Chief’s favorite clerk? And New Jersey’s Jonathan Dayton (1760-1824), whose service in the Continental Army began at age fifteen? And North Carolina’s William Blount (1749-1800), who served as a paymaster for the Continental Army at the same time that his family was selling it provisions? Each of these men would have conceivably been hard-pressed to affirm that their relationship with the concept of an American military establishment was not in the slightest bit colored by feelings of self-interest or vanity. Hamilton’s reputation was arguably grounded upon his having served as Washington’s aide, and his sense of personal pride was by his own admission closely tied to his service in the front-lines during the war. Dayton had meanwhile known nothing but the Army between the ages of fifteen and twenty-three – during which time he doubtless imbibed the self-importance of his fellow officers as an apprentice learns a trade by observing his master – while Blount had helped to further enrich his family at the same time that he established for himself a record for public service. The Continental Army, in short, had done these men well during their time spent in its ranks, and it would have been accordingly far from ridiculous to suggest in 1788 that they – and others like them – might have sought to impart the nascent American republic with some aspect of its essential character.

Under the auspices of the Articles of Confederation, after all, the United States of America could hardly have been described as splendid. Daring wasn’t rewarded by Congress any longer, opportunities for advancement were minimal, and there were hardly fortunes to be made fulfilling its minuscule material needs. Creating a more complex, more powerful, and more active government would naturally change all of that. Such an entity would require far more men and far more resources to sustain itself and its necessary appendages – “An army, a navy, and a number of things” – and would understandably be given to seek opportunities abroad to at once test its strength and justify its existence. What other purpose could such a thing serve? What good was having the ability to raise an army and levy taxes if the men and the money weren’t going to be directed towards winning a yet more impressive prize? Patrick Henry certainly seemed to think he knew the answer to questions such as these. The proposed constitution having been drafted in no small part by a coterie of former Continental Army officers whose experiences during the late war had affirmed their affection for military prestige, he no doubt feared that the expansion of federal power that they suggested would inevitably lead to larger armies, more wars, and the gradual erosion of American liberty at the behest of a few men’s vulnerable egos. Washington, it was true, no longer seemed interested in fame and reputation, and he had been the wellspring of much of the squabbling and the glory-seeking that had gone on in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. At the same time, regardless of what his reputation and his recent disinterest in power might have amounted to, he had also shown himself to be quite tolerant – and even encouraging – of those of his protégés whose eagerness for recognition burned brighter than his own. Washington’s participation in the Philadelphia Convention – as no less than its president – therefore doubtless presented to his fellow Virginian Henry a decidedly ambiguous prospect. Would the most popular man in America restrain the vainglorious impulses of his former subordinates or would he allow them to use his name to once more seek the glory which they believed to be their due? Though neither Henry nor anyone could say for certain which it would be, his suspicions were certainly well-founded in the meantime.