Washington and Caesar

Reverend Cleve was a wholly new experience for Caesar—a black minister, and a free man. He spoke beautifully, as Caesar himself hoped to speak. His clear diction rolled through the cart shed, and his challenges brought out the strongest responses in his congregation. His sermon was simple and direct, and on a theme calculated to appeal most strongly to his listeners: that salvation would come for the worthy, regardless of color or station; that God’s house had many doors, and that all of them were open. He never went so far as to say that worldly freedom was unimportant, but his listeners were able to note that eternity would outlast life, and freedom and grace defeat bondage in their own souls’ lives.

Caesar was a baptized man, brought to Christ’s Table when fresh from Africa and newly enslaved, but no part of the religion had moved him like the preaching he heard from the Reverend Cleve. He raised his voice in response, affirming his loyalty to Jesus. Neither his glass of rum at the dance nor his frequent tumbles with Queeny troubled him. Later in the sermon, when both acts were denounced by the minister, Caesar felt some surprise that the gentle, new-light Jesus had time for such small stuff, but he responded that he would not do such things again. He meant it, at the moment the words were spoken. And when they reached the responses in the creed, he tried to form his responses exactly as the Reverend Cleve had spoken them, syllable by syllable. He heard his own voice speaking the words so well, above the cart-shed din, and he knew he could do it always, if he practiced.

Because, though an eternity of heavenly bliss appealed to him, he still wanted freedom while on the earth.

At Truro church, Reverend Massey droned on toward the completion of his sermon, the attention of most of his congregation taken up in the recurrent thunder and worries about their horses or shays outside. His theme had been warm enough, and well taken at the outset, but only the parish’s philosophers were still on the scent with the minister’s theological pack as they finally began to pull down their ethereal fox.

Washington was elsewhere, his mind making an orderly survey of the new black children and how best to house them, the question of drainage in a new field on the upper parts of Dogue Run, the health of Old Blue and whether the African boy was all he seemed with the dogs, and most of all his stepson’s coming marriage and its consequences, which were great enough, for all love.

Marriage with the Calverts of Baltimore was pleasant enough, and the girl seemed comely and proper, although a certain element of papishness clung to the family. Jack liked her out of all mind, had neglected his expensive studies at Columbia, and wouldn’t be satisfied until he had her, so have her he would. Martha was insistent. In this, she reminded him too much of his own mother, and made him writhe, but there was nothing for it.

Providentially, the event was planned for Mount Airy; nothing he had to do but get on a horse and cross at the ferry. The effect on the estates would be negligible as long as everyone understood the precautions he had taken, and should his wife’s son, Jack Custis, decide to build himself a manor house, he now had the means to support one. Washington had worked hard on the Custis estate, which was really his wife’s and would now be Jack’s. It pleased him that Jack was now going to enjoy the work, but Washington hoped he didn’t enjoy it so much that he took either to spending his capital by selling lands or interfering with the excellent managers that Washington had installed.

He could tell by Massey’s tone of voice that the end of the sermon was near, and he began to cast his mind toward his Maker in the sort of symbolic prayer the Masons taught. That was more real to him than all the talk. He thanked his Maker for the favor of the making and the providence that made him what he was, and turned by the congruence of names and ideas to look at his friend George Mason, who was nodding like a musician at someone else’s concert. George probably had a point he wanted to dispute. Then he felt Washington’s attention, turned, and gave him a significant look, and a long one. Washington had no idea what it meant, but it almost caused him to miss the closing words and the signal to rise.

The closing, the admonition to go with God to love and serve him, a spartan procession, not like the papist affairs in some Anglican churches, a moment of silence, and he was walking in the yard, the rain past, with George Mason, who clearly had something urgent to communicate. They walked a distance from the others.

“Boston has spoiled the East India tea.”

Washington looked at him, fumbling for words and understanding simultaneously.

“A group of men thinly disguised as Indians went on board the Indiamen and threw the tea in the harbor rather than pay the tea tax.”

Washington tapped the church wall with his crop.

“Idle fellows? Or a decision taken by the gentlemen of the town?”

“Not known.”

“I…I don’t think it was well done.”

“Would you have us submit to the tax?”

“Is the tax so illegal, Mr. Mason?”

“It is an external tax. We have resisted Parliament’s attempts to impose such up till now.”

“I mislike…I very much mislike the notion that men can take such an act against property into their own hands.”

“So must all propertied men.”

“And I fear that the Government’s reaction will be strong. We must await events.”

But Mason’s eyes burned with the evangelical zeal of the true believer.

“You still avoid English goods?”

“Within bounds. I bought a pianoforte, I must confess.”

“Oh, that’s nothing. It is the daily stuff we must learn to do without if we are to break this legislation.”

Washington looked away. His lack of response had disappointed his friend, and his friend’s dejection at the reception of his news was spreading. Washington found prating about the injuries of the colonies rather like searching his soul; it didn’t accomplish very much.

“This is, what, the fourth time we’ve embargoed goods?”

“It works well enough, if all comply.”

Washington winced slightly. In the earliest embargoes, he had consistently misunderstood the complex system by which the embargo of some goods “supported” the prohibition on “taxed” goods. But the picture of property destroyed by a mob did not please him at all, and it roused him to speech.

“I still fail to see how cheaper India tea makes us slaves. I see how it harms the interests of the Boston smugglers, and this morning I resent such merchants raising a mob to destroy property—it could as easily be my tobacco or my wheat. Doubtless, my friend, you will lead me to see the error of my ways another day. Today, I see the cost of Pohick Church rise before me beside the cost of Jack’s wedding, and I think that our troubles with England can wait until my crops are in the ground and spring is here.”

“You’ve other business, sir, and I will not detain you. The news is not so ominous, I allow, but the reaction of the Government to this check is likely to affect us all.”

Washington shook his head solemnly. Other men had gathered to hear the last of the exchange—men with greater debts in England, men with more love, or less, for the mother country—and in a moment the yard was abuzz with it. Washington left Mason retelling the dumping of the tea, motioned to Pompey for his horse, and looked at his watch. Slow.

“Care to pass me the time?” he said, bowing to the elder Mr. French, watch in hand.

“Your servant, sir. Hmm, a quarter past twelve.”

Washington opened the face of his watch and put an elegant gold key to the fuzee, and then to the hands. French caught the engraving on the key and smiled, closed his case with a sharp snap, and bowed; Washington eased his over the catch to save wear, but his bow was just as neat.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Bought that brig, did you?”

“I hadn’t much choice. I took her in lieu of a debt, you know.”

“Good buy, though. Will you send a cargo north, do ya think?”

“I may. First the Indies with my flour.”

“If she goes north, I’d be happy to help make a cargo.”

“Thankee. That’s something to think on. Good day to you, sir.”

“’Servant.”

He rose from the bow and turned to find his horse to hand, mounted in one athletic movement, nodded to Pompey, and was gone before the next rain cloud opened.

Mount Vernon, Virginia, January 1774

Washington’s library had a more martial character than its master admitted, these days. Charles XII of Sweden, Voltaire’s beau ideal, gazed angrily down from a column that faced his ideological child, Frederick the Great of Prussia. Julius Caesar and Alexander locked gazes in the other corner, an unceasing contest between youth (Alexander and Charles) and age (Caesar and Frederick). Or sometimes the masters of war divided other ways, classical versus modern.

The other furnishings of the room were to the latest taste, if a bit much by native English standards—drapes a little too plum, carpets a little too bright. All together, it was the room of a man of immense wealth, and the books that lined the shelves catalogued all his interests. A 1740 Humphrey Bland on military exercise, as well as a new subscription copy of Stevenson’s Advice to Officers in Command of Detachments, and a shelf of manuals of arms, directions on fortification with plates or without, Muller on artillery. The owner of the library had the most complete interest in war to be found in a library in Virginia.

Farming filled other shelves. The foundation of the collection had come with his wife, being her former husband’s books on the subject. He added to the collection every year, books such as Duhamel’s Practical Treatise of Husbandry and Young’s Annals of Agriculture, Thomas Fairfax on sports and dogs and the preservation of game, Tull on the new English plowing, The Farmer his own Mechanic, and dozens of other titles. The newest were newer than the military volumes, and on the whole more plentiful.

Sport for the sake of sport had its place as well: fishing, shooting, riding and keeping horses. There weren’t many of the classics: some schoolbooks, an uncut Ovid, a muchthumbed Epictetus in English and Latin—much thumbed because the owner knew that Frederick the Great had a copy and praised it. Washington liked Epictetus, because he had been a slave and spoke well of it. When Washington spoke to a slave, he tried to remember the precepts that Epictetus laid down. There was also Homer in translation by Pope—all the volumes save one, which his stepson, Jack, had lost while still in school and never replaced.