Once at Mount Vernon in mid-November, he consulted Dr. Charles Green of Alexandria, who forbade him to eat meats and prescribed a diet of jellies and other soft foods, lubricated with tea or sweet wine. With a lifelong bias against medication, Washington preferred to let illness take its course. At first his sister (or possibly sister-in-law) came to nurse him, but when she left and he looked attractively helpless, he attempted to lure Sally Fairfax to his bedside. In a note, he asked if he could borrow a book of recipes to prepare jellies, noting that “my sister is from home and I have no person that has been used to making these kind of things and no directions.” ⁵² It seems probable that Sally rose to the bait.

Every time Washington seemed to gain ground, the disease recurred with a vengeance. With some symptoms resembling tuberculosis, he grew terrified that he would follow in brother Lawrence’s footsteps. In February he even had to deny reports of his death circulating in Williamsburg. “I have heard of letters from the dead, but never had the pleasure of receiving one till your agreeable favor came to hand the other day,” his friend Robert Carter Nicholas told him wryly. “It was reported here that Colo. Washington was dead! As you are still alive, I must own myself obliged to the author of that report.”⁵³ It said something about Washington’s high standing in Virginia society that the capital hummed with these rumors. When he left for Williamsburg on February 1, he was soon overcome by fever and had to turn around and return home. The physicians again admonished Washington that he jeopardized his life by taking such a journey. On March 4 he described to Colonel John Stanwix the “great injury” already done to his constitution and the need for “the greatest care and most circumspect conduct” if he was to recover.⁵⁴ With only a slim chance of securing a regular army commission, the despondent Washington thought of “quitting my command and retiring from all public business, leaving my post to be filled by others more capable of the task.”⁵⁵ The next day he left for Williamsburg, stopping en route to visit his mother. In the capital, Dr. John Amson assured him that his fears of consumption were unfounded and that he was indeed recuperating from the dysentery.

For someone with Washington’s robust physique, the dysentery must have had a profound psychological effect. His body had suddenly lost the strength and resilience that had enabled him to cross freezing streams and ride through snowy forests. And it was not the first time he had experienced a sense of physical fragility. By the age of twenty-six, he had survived smallpox, pleurisy, malaria, and dysentery. He had not only evaded bullets but survived disease with astounding regularity. If these illnesses dimmed his fervor for a military commission, they may also have reminded him of the forgotten pleasures of domestic life.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A Votary to Love

AFTER HIS WOUNDING CONFRONTATIONS with the haughty agents of British imperial power—Dinwiddie, Shirley, and Loudoun—Washington could only have concluded that his dreams of a military career would always be foiled by deep-seated prejudice against colonial officers and that it made more sense to become an independent planter. While posted to the frontier in the summer of 1757, he daydreamed about Mount Vernon and compiled shopping lists of luxury goods to be shipped from London. Though he had never been to England, he tried to imitate the style of an English country gentleman, instructing Richard Washington that “whatever goods you may send me, where the prices are not absolutely limited, you will let them be fashionable, neat, and good in their several kinds.”¹ The young man’s social ambitions seemed boundless. He ordered a marble chimneypiece with a landscape painting above the mantel and “fine crimson and yellow papers” for the walls.² Such rich colors for wallpaper were then thought very fashionable. Though mahogany was an expensive imported wood, Washington opted for a mahogany bedstead and dining table and a dozen mahogany chairs. To entertain in regal style, he ordered a complete set of fine china, damask tablecloths and napkins, and silver cutlery whose handles bore the Washington crest—a griffin poised above a crown, set above an ornamental shield with three stars, the whole emblazoned with the Latin motto Exitus Acta Probat (“The outcome justifies the deed”). ³ In his purchases, Washington instinctively trod the fine line between showiness and austerity, defining a characteristic style of understated elegance.

Mount Vernon would be George Washington’s personality writ large, the cherished image he wished to project to the world. Had the estate not possessed profound personal meaning for him, he would never have lavished so much time and money on its improvement. It was Washington’s fervent attachment to Mount Vernon, its rural beauties and tranquil pleasures, that made his later absences from home so exquisitely painful. He believed in the infinite perfectibility of Mount Vernon, as if it were a canvas that he could constantly retouch and expand. There he reigned supreme and felt secure as nowhere else.

In December 1757 he made his first additions to the property, buying two hundred acres at nearby Dogue Run and another three hundred acres on Little Hunting Creek. This proved the first wave of an expansion that would ultimately culminate in an eight-thousand-acre estate, divided into five separate farms. Since few professional architects existed at the time, Washington followed the custom of other Virginia planters and acted as his own architect. He worked from British architectural manuals, coupled with his own observation of buildings in Williamsburg and Annapolis. Drawing on popular classical elements, he melded ideas from various places and devised a synthesis uniquely his own.

In 1758 Washington doubled the size of the main house and began to convert Lawrence’s farmhouse into an imposing mansion. He could have swept away the old foundations and started anew, making the house more symmetrical and architecturally satisfying. Instead, he built on top of earlier incarnations. Whether this stemmed from economy or family reverence is not known. But where Lawrence, a naval officer, had placed the entrance on the east side of the house, facing the water, George, an army officer and a western surveyor, switched the entrance to the west side, presenting an arresting view for visitors arriving by horse or carriage. First glimpsed from afar, the house would impress travelers with its grandeur. At this point, however, it was still boxy and unadorned and devoid of the elements that later distinguished it: the cupola, the piazza with the long colonnade, the formal pediment above the entrance. In a geometric pattern likely copied from Belvoir, Washington laid out a pair of rectangular gardens with brick walls in front of the house, allowing visitors to experience his magnificent grounds before alighting at his door. Washington also fleshed out the upstairs, making it a full floor, reworked most of the ground-floor rooms, and added a half-story attic, resulting in eight full rooms in all.

In 1758 Washington’s aspirations still outstripped his means, and he resorted to ruses to make his abode seem more opulent. Unable to afford a stone house, he employed a method known as rusticated boards that created the illusion of a stone exterior. First plain pine boards were cut and beveled in a way that mimicked stone blocks. Then white sand from the Chesapeake Bay was mingled with white paint, which lent the painted wood the rough, granular surface of stone. In many respects, Mount Vernon is a masterpiece of trompe l’oeil. Washington used another sleight of hand on his study walls, a technique called “graining” that transformed cheap, locally available woods, such as southern yellow pine or tulip poplar, into something resembling expensive imported hardwoods, such as mahogany or black walnut.