Charles 12th of Sweden), Julius Causar, King of Prussia, Prince
Eugene, nor the Duke of Marlborough, of the size desired; and
to make models would be very expensive--at least 4 guineas
each.”
With other orders the agents had better luck, for it was neither
difficult nor distasteful to satisfy a Virginia gentleman who merely
described the articles ordered (if he described them at all) as either
“good” or “neat” or “fashionable.” He bought the best, rarely specified
price, and paid in the best tobacco--a fair deal all round, and a very
agreeably furnished home Mount Vernon became.
There came a day when he was called to command the army in the north.
For eight years thereafter Mount Vernon saw him but twice, and then
for fleeting visits: once on his way southward from Dobbs Ferry to
Williamsburg, during the march on Yorktown; once on his return to
the north. Those years had seen his ascent to the height of public
veneration. On December 4 of 1783 his officers bade him a frankly
tearful good-bye at Fraunce’s Tavern in New York, and the chief “walked
in silence to Whitehall, followed by a vast procession ... and entered
a barge ... on his way to lay his commission at the feet of Congress at
Annapolis.” His progress to Mount Vernon was a succession of popular
demonstrations. And when on Christmas Eve he went up the hill and
pandemonium broke loose to see the master returned, in his mind were no
thoughts of consulates or dictatorships, empire or world-domination,
but only profound relief that he had come at last into sweet and
voluntary exile from affairs.
He had served without pay through the war, and his first concern
now was to put the estate on its feet. He took up the flags of the
eastern piazza, reinforced the foundations of the house, “removed two
pretty large and full-grown lilacs to the No. Garden gate,” combed the
neighboring forest for handsome trees to transplant, amplified his
orchards, stocked a deer park, and made his daily rounds of the farms.
The man who had lately dictated terms to the best soldiers out of
Europe got from his gardener a promise to stay sober most of the time
on consideration of “four dollars at Christmas, with which he may be
drunk four days and four nights; two dollars at Easter to effect the
same purpose; two dollars at Whitsuntide to be drunk for two days; a
dram in the morning and a drink of grog at dinner at noon.”
If there had been visitors before the war, double their number flocked
to him now. One night he was routed out of bed to receive a young
French sculptor, sent by Jefferson and Franklin in Paris to make his
statue for the capitol at Richmond. A Mount Vernon tradition says
that a few days later Washington was called out to look at a pair of
horses offered for sale. He asked the price, and was told “a thousand
dollars.” He drew himself up in indignation, for a thousand dollars
was an outrageous price for a horse and was likewise a tenth of his
whole year’s living expense. Houdon, the sculptor, had been dogging
Washington’s footsteps for days, studying his subject. He caught the
general in the fine glow of dignified wrath, cried out, “I ’ave him! I
’ave him!” and set to work at once to make the pose immortal. With a
life mask, sketches, and full measurements he returned to Paris, and
there, with Gouverneur Morris posing for the standing figure, he made
the composite statue which stands at Richmond today.
There came a youngster of twenty, very quiet and abashed at an audience
with the great general. This boy’s name was Robert Fulton, he who later
invented the steamboat. There came Noah Webster, who was to write the
great American dictionary; there came Jedediah Morse, who wrote the
first American geography. Lafayette, the “French boy,” was always
welcome, and he spent nineteen days there in the autumn of 1784. Others
were not so welcome: “My house may be compared to a well-resorted
tavern,” wrote Washington. He had to summon young Laurence Washington
to Mount Vernon to carry its social burden after candle-light, when he
withdrew to his study to answer letters, or to taste the human pleasure
of postponing answers “until tomorrow evening,” as he confessed to his
former secretary of war. But, welcome or uninvited, they all came, for
the country was to have a new government, and Washington was not only
to help build it, but to run it. With the same modest misgivings of his
own capacity for the post that he had frankly confessed in 1775, he
went out again in 1789 to serve his country, and put aside again the
labor that was nearest to his heart.
For eight years more his sight of Mount Vernon was limited to visits
borrowed from public affairs, but he never lost his grip on its minute
arrangements, directing, advising, correcting in his letters to his
managers. In one downright homesick moment he said flatly that he would
rather be at home with a friend or two than to be attended at the seat
of government by the officers of state and the representatives of every
power in Europe. John Adams, after his inauguration in 1797, wrote a
letter to his wife, who had not been there to enjoy the greatest moment
of his life. “It was made more affecting to me,” he said, “by the
presence of the General, whose countenance was as serene and unclouded
as the day. He seemed to enjoy a triumph over me. Methought I heard
him say, ‘Ay, I am fairly out and you fairly in! See which of us will
be the happiest!’” Everything on that bright March day in Philadelphia
sang “Home!”
Presently he was there, admiring the new setting of the fine furniture
and silver and glassware and china brought down from the Presidential
Mansion in the Capital, some of which is in the house today. Sixty-five
years old, with the western world at his feet, and he saw only the
broad reaches of the Potomac down below the ha-ha walls. Sixty-six, and
to see a young lad named Charles Carroll from Maryland courting his
favorite grand-daughter made a man feel young himself. Sixty-seven,
forty years married, the favorite grand-daughter to be married (though
not to Charles Carroll), and life seemed perennial. One December
morning he caught cold riding the farms, and two days later was dead.
Nothing short of the domestic enthusiasm of George Washington could
have kept Mount Vernon in order. For sixty years it yielded gradually
to the advance of time. Then, through the truly heroic zeal of Miss
Ann Pamela Cunningham of Laurens, S. C., and the eloquence of Edward
Everett, and the fine spirit of Miss Cunningham’s Mount Vernon
Ladies’ Association of the Union, the estate was purchased, and with
searching fidelity to the wishes of its master, restored to the
state in which he would have had it. Too fulsome praise can hardly
be expressed--certainly not here--for the good sense, discrimination
and good organization which combine to maintain the estate. It is as
if a hand had touched it lightly on a spring morning in the brightest
year of its occupancy, and had held it, fixed forever in the pose,
like the castle of the sleeping princess. No prince will come to
rouse the place. But better than that, after sixty years of care and
a century and a half of life, it re-creates each year to thousands of
pilgrims the crises and victories that wrote our creed as a nation.
And fortunately no landholder on this great farm of ours will leave
Mount Vernon without a deep sense of relief that it is first and last a
perfect monument to a country gentleman.
THE QUINCY HOMESTEAD
[Illustration:
© D.McK
THE QUINCY HOUSE
which sheltered, among other delicate ornaments, three successive
Dorothy Quincys. There are ever so many things in the house today to
call up a Quincy tradition, for if you scratch almost any chapter
of New England history you will find a Quincy tradition underneath.
Take away its Hoars, Lowells, Holmeses, Adamses, Wendells, Hancocks,
Sewalls--to mention only a few of the Quincy connections--and what,
indeed, becomes of New England?]
THE QUINCY HOMESTEAD
It is perhaps impolite to compare a Massachusetts family tree to a
banyan instead of the conventional elm, but no prowler among her old
houses can come away without a feeling that almost everything in New
England is related to almost everything else. Chicago glances over
Boston’s shoulder and finds her reading the Monday _Transcript’s_
genealogy page; Chicago howls with laughter and turns to _Vanity Fair_
to see what is going on in New York. Boston is momentarily interrupted,
doesn’t know quite what Chicago is laughing at, returns a well-bred
smile of complete detachment, and plunges back into the genealogy page.
This business of keeping track of marriages and deaths, cousinships
and children-by-the-second-wife is serious, though bred of no spirit
of arrogance, no desire to find a coat of arms for the door of the new
town-car. There is brisk mental exercise in chasing an obscure ancestor
to his lair and finding that he was what you thought he was when you
started out, and not his own grand-nephew-twice-removed. Further,
reasons Boston, unless you know to whom a person is related, how can
you know to whom that person is related? By this sound process of logic
a personal news item in a Boston newspaper worth six agate lines of
white paper is so interestingly overgrown with eighteen or twenty lines
of genealogical wistaria that the outsider has some trouble peering
through the vines to the item itself. He will never understand the
irrelevant matter until he understands that it is not irrelevant, that
the ever-present landmarks of tradition are bristling with precedents,
and that the respect for those precedents is so congenital that they
guide the footsteps of New Englanders more than even New Englanders
suspect.[A]
[A] I am told by Mr. George Stephenson, of the _Transcript_,
that the bulk of special subscription to the genealogical
issues comes from the Middle West. Again brutal statistics
blunder in to shatter a pleasant theory. I repeat this to a
Boston beldame; she says, “Why of course--those subscribers
are from families who migrated west to make money, and
_now_, of course--” and leaves me to fill out the sentence.
My theory stands, and defies the lightnings.
If the foreigner from beyond the Hudson or the Delaware or the
Mississippi will do himself the favor of visiting the Quincy house, he
will sense the point, and be paid in full measure by the contemplation
of a house with a varied and engaging story.
It began life as a Puritan farmstead, by a brookside in the town of
Braintree. Sixteen years after the first settlement at Plymouth, and
therefore nearly three centuries ago, William Coddington built three
rooms on a kitchen. Bigoted public opinion soon broke up the trio
of liberals who used to sit and talk free worship before the great
fireplace in that kitchen--Coddington fled, Sir Harry Vane went other
ways, and Anne Hutchinson was banished from the colony. Edmund Quincy,
the new owner, came out from Boston, with a retinue of six servants.
Such a staff was a rare luxury in those ascetic days. It is partially
explained by the fact that in an age of large families Edmund Quincy’s
was no exception, and four children wanted a lot of looking after. He
enlarged the house to accommodate his growing tribe, and about 1685
gave up the Coddington structure to his slaves, while he built a new
house a few rods away. (It was this Edmund’s sister who married the
master of the Mint, John Hull; he named Point Judith after her, and
their daughter Hannah was the maiden who was given in marriage with a
dowry of her weight in pine-tree shillings--one hundred and twenty-five
pounds avoirdupois and five hundred sterling.)
Another Edmund, the third of the American line and the second in
possession of the estate on Quincy Brook, fell heir to it when his
father died in 1698. Through his grandmother Edmund was already related
to the line which was presently to bring forth John Adams. His thirteen
brothers and sisters and numerous cousins connected him by marriage
with nearly all the families of the settlement, and out of one of those
ceremonies is left to us a glimpse of tragedy: Judge Sewall records in
his diary that just after “Cousin Daniel” was being married to Mrs.
Shepard, when the guests were singing in the hall, one of them dropped
dead. Her body was carried to the room which was to have been the
bride’s, “the Bridegroom and Bride ... going away like Persons put to
flight in Battel” to spend their honeymoon at a neighbor’s house.
Edmund the Third was a man not only of fortune but of discrimination,
which he showed by marrying Dorothy Flynt--the first “Dorothy Q.” In
1706 he invited the whole countryside to the estate by the brook,
and around and above the old Coddington house the whole corps of
neighbors, abetted by hard cider, raised the huge timbers of a new
mansion, the one which stands there today restored to its full
dignity. It was a suitable dwelling for a man of eminence in the
colony, a man big enough to quarrel with Benning Wentworth over the
boundary of New Hampshire. On the rear of the new home he built an
extension containing a bedroom and a study, where “Tutor” Flynt,
Mrs. Quincy’s brother, could find rest from his duties in Harvard
College, and there Tutor Flynt spent most of a crusty, tobacco-perfumed
bachelor life as a sort of paying guest, driving down to Braintree
from Cambridge in a calèche for week-ends and the longer holidays.
(Tutor Flynt, by the way, is the earliest recorded user of the
“If-you-are-going-to-Heaven-I-don’t-want-to-go-there” joke, though
genuine research would doubtless reveal that Shem made the same remark
to Japheth one afternoon when the Ark lay becalmed.)
The light of the household was Dorothy Q, and the source of her
radiance was her family of growing children. Three of them claim our
attention: Edmund (the Fourth), who inherited the Homestead; Josiah
(the first of a series of notable Josiahs); and a second Dorothy, whom
her grandson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, described in this way:
“O Damsel Dorothy! Dorothy Q!
Strange is the gift that I owe to you;
Such a gift as never a king
Save to daughter or son might bring,--
All my tenure of heart and hand,
All my title to house and land;
Mother and sister and child and wife
And joy and sorrow and death and life!
“What if a hundred years ago
Those close-shut lips had answered No,
When forth the tremulous question came
That cost the maiden her Norman name
Should I be I, or would it be
One-tenth another to nine-tenths me?”
Dorothy Q the Second was a dear child, carrying at fifteen the cares
of the household, and apparently pointed down the path of a winsome
spinsterhood. But within a few weeks, in the summer of 1737, her
grandmother, her mother, and then her father died, and she married
Edward Jackson and went to live in Boston, where her husband was a
ship-owner in partnership with her brother Josiah.
One of their vessels, the _Bethell_, with thirty-seven men and fourteen
guns, fell in with the _Jesus Maria and Joseph_, a Spaniard with
110 men and twenty-six guns. The _Bethell’s_ skipper gambled on the
gathering twilight, set up six wooden dummy guns, hung sailors’ caps
and hats in the rigging to suggest a numerous crew, and then demanded
the Spaniard’s surrender. Down came her ensign! The Spanish crew was
set ashore at Fayal, and the _Bethell_ brought back to Josiah and
Dorothy one-hundred-and-sixty-one chests of silver, and two of Spanish
gold.
With the prize money safely banked, Josiah was able to retire from
business at the age of forty. He moved to Braintree, taking up his
residence in the Hancock parsonage, across the way from the Homestead.
Brother Edmund, the lantern-jawed parson, who had been living in Boston
and spending his summers in Braintree, moved to the Homestead in his
turn, lost most of his share of the prize money in artless speculation,
and turned to farming.
Life in the two families presented diversion aplenty--most of the
eligible young men of Boston and Braintree were courting Edmund’s five
daughters. A sober young man named John Adams was running perilously
close to the charms of Hannah, Josiah’s daughter. He was a marked man
when her cousins, Esther and Susan, suddenly “broke in upon Hannah
and me and interrupted a conversation that would have terminated in a
courtship that would have terminated in a marriage which might have
depressed me to absolute poverty and obscurity to the end of my life.”
He veered, took a deep breath, went away from there, and two years
later was married to Abigail Smith, who alone of American women was
the wife and the mother of an American president. Important guests
occasionally penetrated the swarm of suitors--such men as Admiral
Warren and Sir William Pepperrell, the heroes of Louisburg; or Benjamin
Franklin, who sent Squire Quincy cuttings of Rhenish grapevines and
a new stove which he had invented; or Sir Harry Frankland, who gave
the Squire a fine pear-sapling--the same Sir Harry who married Agnes
Surriage, whom he had first seen barefoot, scrubbing floors in a tavern
in Marblehead.
And the youngest of all was Dorothy Q the Third, with four big brothers
and three boy cousins to pay her court, and four elder sisters to
study. Through all the bitter period that followed the Boston Massacre,
when her cousin Josiah Junior and John Adams were defending the
British captain, and her cousin Samuel was appearing for the Crown,
Dorothy Q was on the fringe of the excitement, coquetting with all
of the earnest youths who were polishing their arms, but engaging
in entangling alliance with none. Not until she was twenty-seven
did she make her choice, and then it was John Hancock, the chief
figure of pre-revolutionary days in Boston, a vigorous patriot who
defied the Crown and became a member of the Committee of Safety.
Most of the winter of 1774–75 she spent with his aunt in the Hancock
mansion, where came Revere, and Warren, and Samuel and John Adams.
By March of ’75 she was back in Quincy, gathering her trousseau, and
superintending the application of a new French wall-paper to the walls
of the north parlor, where a company of conventional blue Venuses
and Cupids, garlanded with delicate flowers, was to preside over the
wedding ceremony. The untroubled Homestead presented a strong contrast
to the one she had left in Boston: a loyalist rabble stormed the
Hancock house, tore down the fence, broke the windows and wrecked the
coach-house, and the prospective bridegroom, threatened with arrest,
was obliged to escape with little dignity and all possible speed.
He turned up at Concord for the meeting of the Provincial Congress on
April 15, and after its adjournment he was joined by Dorothy, Madame
Hancock and Samuel Adams at the Rev. Jonas Clark’s house in Lexington.
Quietly, in the evening of the eighteenth, British troops assembled in
Boston for a march to destroy the stores at Concord. As quietly, Paul
Revere rowed across the mouth of the river to Charlestown, slipped by
the guard, and rode hell-bent into the sleeping country. He pulled up
at the Clark parsonage and called for Adams and Hancock. “Don’t make
so much noise,” said a minute-man on guard. “_Noise!_” shouted Revere,
“You’ll have noise enough before long--the regulars are coming!”--and
he delivered Joseph Warren’s warning to Adams and Hancock to get out
of the neighborhood at once. Against their will they fled to Woburn,
while Dorothy slept no more that night. At dawn she saw Pitcairn and
his scarlet column tramp to the Lexington common and set fire to the
Revolution. Then she joined her lover in Woburn, and when he tried to
forbid her to go back to Boston, the strain of a sleepless night and
the horrors of the day broke the bridle on her tongue and she tossed
her head and retorted: “Recollect, Mr. Hancock, I am not under your
control yet. I shall go to my father tomorrow!”
Having spoken her mind, she exercised a woman’s privilege in changing
it--and did almost as he had asked: set out at once for a safe refuge
at Fairfield in Connecticut.
She was still somewhat piqued. She found at Fairfield, in the person of
her host’s nephew, an eager listener to her narrative of the skirmish
at Lexington--a Princeton graduate who was studying law. He probably
gained her confidence at once by asking her just what she thought he
ought to do, and by offering to join the colors for her sake. Aaron
Burr was very accomplished at that sort of thing, and considered
it good exercise, for he was carrying on two other affairs and an
anonymous sentimental correspondence at the same time. To Hancock’s
affectionate letter from Philadelphia Dorothy made no reply. For
the peace offering of silk stockings he sent her she said not even
“thank-you.” Then either Madame Hancock or Dorothy’s own conscience
stepped in and settled the quarrel. Burr left for Cambridge to enlist,
and Hancock came to Fairfield and married the lady.
They took up their home in Boston on the heels of the British
evacuation, and until Hancock went back to Braintree to die in 1793 her
life was a brilliant panorama of illustrious society. When Washington
came to Boston in 1789, Hancock, who was governor of the Commonwealth,
invited him to be a guest in the fine house on Beacon Street opposite
the Common. Washington declined and the governor offered him an
invitation to dinner. On the assumption that within his own state a
governor’s position was sovereign to that of the President, he did not
call upon Washington before dinner. The hour came, but no President,
and Hancock sent a messenger to apologize to Washington for not
having paid his respects, and to plead that sudden illness prevented.
Washington guessed that the illness was sour-grape poisoning and ate
his dinner at home. Later in the evening the lieutenant-governor and
two councilmen appeared to repeat Hancock’s apology. “I informed them,”
Washington writes in his diary, “that I should not see the governor
except at my own lodgings.” The next day Hancock bent his stiff neck to
the president, apologized, and the two became friends again.
The Squire had long since sold his rights in the old Homestead, though
the family continued to occupy it until his death in 1788. It passed
successively through the families of Black, Greenleaf, and Woodward,
and then into the hands of the town of Quincy, which was now formally
detached from Braintree. For thirty years it was held by the town as
part of a trust fund Ebenezer Woodward left to found a girl’s academy
to match the boy’s school started by John Adams.
Even before the Squire’s family had dispersed from the house, its
earlier liveliness was somewhat dimmed by the crescent line of able
Quincys in another Quincy house built by the first Josiah, and now
known as the “later Quincy Mansion.” From its windows he recorded
the sailing of the British from Boston in 1775; from those windows
his children saw the _Constitution_ sail in victorious over the
_Guerriere_. There lived Josiah the Second, agent of the provincials at
London, who died off Marblehead as the firing at Lexington began, while
his wife and the third Josiah were fleeing from a threatened naval
attack on Braintree. Josiah the Third grew up to be mayor of Boston
and president of Harvard, and if no other distinction remained to him
except this passage from his speech in Congress on the embargo in 1808,
it would be a proud enough monument for any American:
“But I shall be told, ‘This may lead to war.’ I ask, ‘Are we
now at peace?’ Certainly not, unless retiring from insult be
peace--unless shrinking under the lash be peace. The surest
way to prevent war is not to fear it. The idea that nothing
on earth is so dreadful as war is inculcated too studiously
among us. Disgrace is worse. Abandonment of essential rights is
worse.”
Is it any wonder that Daniel Webster, Lafayette, and the Adamses,
father and son, came often to the home of Josiah, or that, given his
heredity and achievement, he had such sons as Josiah the Fourth,
another mayor of Boston and an able economist, and Edmund, the stanch
abolitionist?