Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

rejoicing. Dinner-parties and card-parties were then in order, and we find, in that wonderful record of his daily receipts and expenditures, that on one of these occasions he won thirty guineas at loo. Probably it was after this night that he threw the historic dollar across the river, the only instance of extravagance ever charged against him. A dinner party was usually given to him on his arrival at the old Indian Queen Tavern, where, tradition tells us, drink was deep and play was high.

"It is generally believed that Washington did not laugh or enjoy a joke. I have often heard Judge Francis Taliaferro Brooke, for many years Chief Justice of Virginia, say this was not true. Washington often dined at Smithfield, the home of the Brooke family. It is now known in the histories of the battle of Fredericksburg as the 'Pratt House.'

"Judge Brooke used to tell of a dinner given to Washington at the Indian Queen Tavern, at which he was present. A British officer sang a comic song,-a very improper song, but as funny as it was improper, at which Washington laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks, and called upon the singer to repeat it."

Washington had been initiated into the Lodge at Fredericksburg when he was only twenty, and he was an enthusiastic member all his life, belonging also to the Alexandria lodge. At the Fredericksburg lodge is an extraordinarily fine portrait which he had painted for its walls. He doubtless took his turn at the two venerable demijohns, "one called 'Jachen,' full of Jamaica rum, and the other called, 'Boaz,' full of Holland gin, with an old-fashioned loaf of sugar, kept in the ante-room for the refreshment of the brethren." 18

More prosaic but more certain it is that Washington was once brought before a justice of the peace and fined for trading horses on Sunday.

Also, he and George William Fairfax, and half a dozen others were fined for not reporting their taxable wheeled vehicles according to law.1

19

The Rev. Dr. Goodwyn 20 thinks that the prosecution was mere "spite work," but it is comforting to Sabbath-breakers and tax-dodgers to have so illustrious a patron saint.

During the anti-Masonic agitation of the 1830's, it was violently denied that the Father of his Country could ever have stooped to the degrading rites of a secret organization, but like so many other statements of his aloofness from human concerns, the documents destroy the myth."1

Sone

V

HE KEEPS HIS BOOKS

O well concealed is the Washington of this period that one is delighted to find in the account books he kept a rich store of humanity of which there is no other record.

Even the men who knew him well were so overawed by his final achievements and the reverence he inspired in those who were not jealous of him that they simply ignored his activities as a private citizen. His friend, Justice Marshall, in his famous five-volume biography-in which he did not get Washington born until the second volume-devotes to the first twenty-six years of his hero's life only the first fifty-two pages of his second volume. Chapter I ends at 1758. Chapter II begins in 1775 with this brief enough summary of seventeen years:

"The attention of Colonel Washington, for several years after his marriage, was principally directed to the management of his estate. He continued a most respectable member of the legislature of his country, in which he took an early and decided part against the claims of supremacy asserted by the British Parliament."

Having given fifty-two pages to Washington's first twenty-six years, he gave fifty-one words to the next seventeen!

Parson Weems, though horrified by Marshall's omission. of all anecdotes (especially as the Parson was expected to sell Marshall's work, being more book-agent than evangelist) is no more satisfactory concerning these years.

His seventh chapter ends with the marriage to Martha,

of whom he says, "gratitude to that bright saint, now in heaven, who was my noblest benefactress, while I preached in her parish, compels me to say, that her VIRTUES and CHARITIES were of that extensive and sublime sort, as fully to entitle her hic jacet to the following noble epitaph, a little altered, from one of the British poets.

"UNDERNEATH this marble hearse,
Lies the subject of all verse.

Custis' widow-great George's wife-
Death! ere thou robb'st another life,
Virtuous, fair, and good as SHE,

Christ shall launch a dart at thee."

This fantastic whimsicality makes his biography hardly less delicious and hardly more veracious than Sterne's "Tristram Shandy." Having put Martha's epitaph right on top of her epithalamium, Weems parodies Ben Jonson's ancient verses on "Lady Pembroke" as ruthlessly as he fastened old anecdotes on Washington's life.

His eighth chapter begins with a long account of a bad dream that came to Washington's mother and foretold the beginning of the Revolution. Though a trifle out of place in time and importance, it is so exquisitely Weemsish that it is worth quoting in its entirety in order that a generation that knows not its Weems may realize upon what Washingtoniana our earlier generations were fed for nearly a hundred years:

WHEN a man begins to make a noise in the world, his relatives, (the Father, sometimes, but, always that tenderer parent, the Mother) are sure to recollect certain mighty odd dreams, which they had of him when he was a child. What rare dreams, for example, had the mothers of "Macedonia's madman, and the Swede," while pregnant with those butchers of the human race! Mrs. Washington also had her dream, which an excellent old Lady of Fredericksburg assured me she had often heard her relate with

« ZurückWeiter »