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CHAPTER IX THE REGION ’ROUND ABOUT
NO American city has suburbs more interesting than Washington’s. Those that hold first rank, naturally, are on the Virginia side of the Potomac, the region most redolent of the memory of the great patriot whose name was given to the capital. The Arlington estate, which lies nearest, was never the home of George Washington, but he visited it often, for it belonged by inheritance to the grandson of his wife by her earlier marriage; and George and Martha were so pleased with it that they built a little summer-house about where the flagstaff now stands, whence they could overlook the work going on in the new federal city across the river. Young George Custis, owner of the place, built the spacious dwelling substantially as we now find it, finishing it four years after Washington’s death. He left the property to his daughter Mary, who in 1831 became the wife of Robert E. Lee, then a lieutenant in the regular army, but thirty years later commander-in-chief of the Confederate{236} forces. Their wedding took place in the old drawing-room, where visitors now register their names.

Lee had just reached colonel’s rank when the Civil War broke out. He was opposed to secession, but, faithful to the traditions of State sovereignty in which he had been trained, decided that it was his duty to sacrifice all other ties and follow the fortunes of Virginia. After a painful interview with General Scott, who strove vainly to shake his resolution, he wrote, in the library across the hall from the drawing-room, his resignation of his commission in the United States army. Then, accompanied by his family, he set out for the South, never to return. In a few days the Federal troops took possession of the estate as important to the protection of Washington. Here McClellan worked out his plans for the reorganization of the union army following the Bull Run disaster. A few years afterward, there being no one at hand to pay the war-tax laid on the land, it was sold under the hammer, and the Government bid it in. Before the sale had been definitely ordered, a Northern relative of the Lees came forward with an offer to pay the levy and costs, but the tax commissioners declined the tender on the ground that the delinquent taxpayer had not made it in person.

Meanwhile, the house had been turned into a military{237} hospital, and the patients who died there were buried close by. When it became necessary to have a soldiers’ burial-ground near Washington, Quartermaster-general Meigs was permitted to lay off two hundred acres of the estate for the purpose. This was the beginning of the National Cemetery of to-day, where about eighteen thousand soldiers and sailors have found a last resting-place.

Some time after the war, General Lee’s son brought suit for the recovery of the property and won it, the Supreme Court holding that the tax commissioners ought to have accepted the tender made them; but Mr. Lee compromised with the Government, conveying to it his interest for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Since then the house has been put into excellent repair, and the land about it suitably enclosed and improved. On the upper edge of the estate has been established the military post known as Fort Myer, where cavalry-training is carried to a high point, weather observations are made, and a wireless telegraph station exchanges despatches with the Eiffel tower in Paris. Some of the land down by the river has been made over into an experimental farm under the auspices of the Department of Agriculture.

Happily, the Cemetery has been kept free from tawdry memorials and inconsequential ornament, and{238} enveloped in an atmosphere of dignity well fitting its sacred character. Its most impressive tomb is that dedicated to the Unknown Dead, which contains the remains of more than two thousand soldiers found on various battlefields but never identified. “Their names and deaths,” says the inscription, “are recorded in the archives of their country, and its grateful citizens honor them as their noble army of martyrs.” Not far away is a fine amphitheater with a carpet of turf and a canopy of trellised vines, where memorial exercises are held annually on Decoration Day, the President almost always taking part. There is also a Temple of Fame, bearing the names of Washington and Lincoln, with those of the military leaders who particularly distinguished themselves in the Civil War. An extension has recently been made in the grounds devoted to sepulture, where the most conspicuous monument is that which commemorates the tragedy of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor. The base is built to represent a gun-turret on the deck of a man-of-war; on this are inscribed the names of the victims, while from the center of the turret rises a mast with a fighting-top. A larger and more ambitious amphitheater, also, has been laid out in the extension.

From Arlington we can go, by the same road that Washington trod on his trips, to Alexandria, a town{239} which fairly reeks with associations, from the colonial names of some of its streets—King, Queen, Prince, Princess, Duke, Duchess, Royal—to its remnants of cobblestone pavement laid by the Hessian prisoners in the Revolution. Here is the old Carlyle mansion, where General Braddock had his headquarters before starting on his ill-fated expedition against the French and Indians. In its blue drawing-room Washington, as a young surveyor ambitious to serve his king, received the first rudiments of his military education; and at the foot of yonder staircase one evening stood the same Washington, expectant, while pretty Sally Fairfax tripped lightly down to join him and be led through the opening cotillion at her coming-out ball.

This must have been a splendid mansion in its time, with a terraced garden descending to the river-bank, and a fountain in the midst of the flower-beds. It was built on the ruins of a fort used by the early settlers against the Indians; the living-rooms of the fort became the cellar of the mansion, and the fort proper the plaza, upon which the main hallway opens. You enter the house now through a cozy little tea-room established by a group of young ladies of Alexandria; and it may be your good fortune to be shown about the premises by one of them who is herself a member{240} of the historic Carlyle and Fairfax families and familiar with all their ancestral tales.

A prominent site in town is covered by Christ Church, where Washington worshiped, and where you can see the square family pew for which he paid the record price, thirty-six pounds and ten shillings. The church stands in a large, old-fashioned yard, sprinkled with the gravestones of men and women of local renown. Hither, on Sundays, drove the ladies from Mount Vernon, seven miles away, in a chariot with a mahogany body, green Venetian blinds, and pictured panels, drawn by four horses. The General did not take kindly to the coach for himself, but rode beside it on his favorite saddle-horse, followed at a respectful distance by Bishop, his colored body-servant, in scarlet livery. After service he would linger in the churchyard, chatting with his friends, till Bishop reminded him of the flight of time by bringing up his horse and holding the stirrup for him to mount.

A spirited historical controversy has been waged over the question of Washington’s attitude toward religion. The weight of evidence favors the idea that, though not bound by dogma, he had a broad faith in the philosophy of Christianity, always knelt with the rest of the congregation and joined in the responses, and occasionally remained for the communion. He{241} certainly encouraged his slaves to believe in the efficacy of prayer; for once, when a long-continued drought threatened to ruin his crops, he called his farm-hands together on Sunday morning and bade them put up their united supplication for rain. They did so, and to their great delight the flood-gates of heaven suddenly opened and deluged the earth; but the Washington family were caught in the storm on their way home from church, and could not make shelter soon enough to save Mrs. Washington’s best gown from serious damage or the General from being soaked to the skin.

In his younger days, Washington was fond of dancing, and used to come into town to attend assemblies at Clagett’s Tavern. The assembly-hall was up-stairs. It was afterward divided into three rooms, one of which, having fallen into the hands of persons who respect its pedigree, has been pretty well preserved. In the old times it had at one end a gallery for the musicians, accessible only by a ladder, which was removed as soon as they were all in their places. This arrangement was designed to compel them to stay at their work till released, and to drink only what was passed up to them with the approval of the floor-committee.

Across the corridor from the old assembly-hall was{242} a chamber that later became interesting through its occupancy by an unknown woman who came to the tavern one morning in 1816, plainly in ill health. She was accompanied by a few servants, with whom she conversed only in French, and neither she nor they could be drawn into any communication with other persons, except what was necessary to engage accommodations and order meals. On the fourth day of her stay, there appeared on the scene a strange man, who from various indications was assumed to be her husband. An hour after his arrival she died in his arms. He buried her in St. Paul’s cemetery on the outskirts of the town, planting a willow-tree over her grave, and raising at its head a stone inscribed to the memory simply of “A Female Stranger,” with this stanza from Pope’s “Unfortunate Lady”:
“How loved, how honored once, avails thee not,
To whom related, or by whom begot.
A heap of dust alone remains of thee,
’Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be.”

And the Female Stranger remains a mystery to this day, though many efforts have been made to discover her identity. A local suspicion that she was Theodosia Allston, the daughter of Aaron Burr, seems to be discredited by the fact that Theodosia’s disappearance occurred in 1812, and that her husband was{243} dead long before the Stranger came to Clagett’s Tavern.

How public-spirited a citizen Washington was is attested by his having laid the foundation of Alexandria’s free-school system, presented the town with its first fire-engine, organized its first militia company, and got up a lottery to raise a fund for improving the country roads thereabout. He was an earnest Freemason, and the lodge named for him owns a number of relics like the chair in which he presided as Master, his apron, his wedding gloves, his spurs, his pruning-knife, and a penknife which his mother gave him when he was eleven years old and which he carried till he died. It has also the last authentic portrait of him taken from life, a pastel done by William Williams of Philadelphia.

In and around Alexandria are other points of interest, including the house in which Colonel Ellsworth was killed, and one where, it is said, Martha Washington secreted herself for a while during her widowhood for fear of a slave uprising; a theological seminary which has graduated, among other eminent divines, Bishops Phillips Brooks of Boston and Henry C. Potter of New York; and the nearly obliterated remains of the road which, in 1765, General Braddock began to build into the West.{244}

We can go to Mount Vernon by boat, or over a road which Congress has repeatedly, but without effect, been petitioned to acquire and improve. Already a trolley company has recognized a public demand and is running cars on a regular schedule from the heart of the capital city to the borders of Washington’s old estate. On the way down we pass Wellington, once the home of Tobias Lear, whom General Washington hired for two hundred dollars a year to act as tutor to the children at Mount Vernon, promoting him later to the post of private secretary. In both capacities, his employer provided, he “will sit at my table, will live as I live, will mix with the company who resort to the house, and will be treated in every respect with courtesy and proper attention.” Lear married three wives, one of them a kinswoman of the General’s. He acquired means, removed in later life to Washington, and became a merchant with a warehouse on the river. His tombstone in the Congressional Cemetery recites an overflowing list of his virtues and honors, and posterity owes him a large debt for having preserved many of the Washingtoniana most valued now by historians.

Mount Vernon became the property of the Washington family by a grant from Lord Culpepper in 1670 to John Washington, the great-grandfather of George.{245} It was christened in honor of Admiral Vernon, a friend of Lawrence Washington, the half-brother who brought George up and superintended his education. George, who received it by inheritance, willed it to his nephew Bushrod, he to his nephew John, and John to a son of the same name. Financial embarrassments led the last heir to part with some of the land; but to an area of a few hundred acres, including the mansion, the family tomb, and the wharf on the Potomac, he held fast till arrangements could be made for its purchase by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, a society of patriotic women who, with money privately raised, have restored the place and kept it in order ever since. There is good reason to doubt whether this would ever have come about but for the heroic energy of Miss Ann Pamela Cunningham of South Carolina, who, though a confirmed invalid, devised and executed a plan which saved the estate from being sold to a professional showman.

Just as in Alexandria we found ourselves in touch with a George Washington who was a flesh-and-blood Virginian as distinguished from the colorless paragon of the standard histories, so at Mount Vernon we meet the same Washington in his character of husband, farmer, and host. Even here, however, we are not wholly beyond the penumbra of fiction; for only five{246} miles away is the town of Pohick, once the parish seat of Parson Weems, the inventor of the cherry-tree myth on which my generation were industriously fed. Although, of course, no one still living in the region can remember Washington, there are not a few who are familiar with the details of his daily life, handed down in their families from ancestors who did remember him. These make him out a very human country gentleman, who loved to ride, to shoot, to fence, and to wrestle; who mixed business with pleasure in an occasional horse-race or real estate speculation; who disbelieved in slavery, and was recognized by his own two hundred bondmen as a kind master, yet was noted for getting more work out of a negro than any other slaveholder in Virginia, and for not hesitating to administer corporal punishment to one who deserved it.

We learn from these sources that he was “as straight as an Indian, and as free in his walk”; that he was what the ladies of that day, in spite of some marks left by the smallpox, styled “a pretty man”; that his weight of two hundred and ten pounds was all bone and muscle; and that he stood six feet and two inches tall in his shoes, which ranged in size from Number eleven to Number thirteen. His hands seem to have been his only physical deformity; they were so large{247} as to attract attention and required gloves made expressly for them, three sizes larger than ordinary. His eyes are variously described as “blue,” as “of a bluish cast and very lively,” as “a cold, light gray,” and as “so gray that they looked almost white.” These alternatives may be reconciled, perhaps, by Gilbert Stuart’s recollection that his eyes were “a light grayish blue, deep sunken in their sockets, giving the expression of gravity of thought.” His hair was originally dark brown and fairly thick; his face was long, his nose prominent, his mouth large, and his chin firm. He suffered a good deal with toothache, particularly after his military service, and, as the rural remedy was the simplest known, he passed his last years almost toothless. This drove at least one portrait-painter into padding the front of his mouth with cotton wool, to make his lips look more natural than they did when drawn over the ill-fitting artificial teeth which he inserted for state occasions.

The great man lived well, his principal meal being a three o’clock dinner, which he washed down with five glasses of Madeira, taken with dessert. This allowance he gradually increased toward the close of his life till it reached two bottles. In sending away for sale a slave whom, though troublesome, he guaranteed as “exceedingly healthy, strong and good at{248} the hoe,” he expressed his willingness to take in part payment “a hogshead of the best ............
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