Book Read Free

You Never Forget Your First

Page 25

by Alexis Coe


  13. From George Washington to Joseph Whipple, 28, November 1796,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed September 29, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/99-01-02-00037; “From George Washington to Oliver Wolcott, Jr., 1 September 1796,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/99-01-02-00910. [This is an Early Access document from PGW. It is not an authoritative final version.]

  14. “From George Washington to Frederick Kitt, 29 January 1798,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/06-02-02-0053.

  15. “From George Washington to Joseph Whipple, 28 November 1796,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/99-01-02-00037.

  16. “From George Washington to John Francis Mercer, 9 September 1786,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-04-02-0232.

  17. “From George Washington to Alexander Spotswood, 23 November 1794,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-17-02-0136.

  18. “From George Washington to Joseph Thompson, 2 July 1766,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-07-02-0300.

  19. “An Act to Authorize the Manumission of Slaves (1782),” Encyclopedia Virginia, accessed May 6, 2019, www.encyclopediavirginia.org/An_act_to_authorize_the_manumission_of_slaves_1782.

  20. “From George Washington to Lund Washington, 7 May 1787,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-05-02-0161. The best resource on this is Mary V. Thompson. Please see her most recent book, “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret”: George Washington, Slavery, and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019).

  21. “John Adams to Abigail Adams, 5 March 1797,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-12-02-0005, and “John Adams to Abigail Adams, 9 March 1797,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-12-02-0009.

  CHAPTER 19: FINAL RETIREMENT

  1. “From George Washington to Lawrence Augustine Washington, 3 September 1797,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/06-01-02-0302.

  2. “From George Washington to James Anderson (of Scotland), 7 April 1797,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/06-01-02-0059.

  3. “From George Washington to James McHenry, 29 May 1797,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/06-01-02-0128.

  4. “From George Washington to Burgess Ball, 22 September 1799,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/06-04-02-0266.

  5. “Martha Washington to Elizabeth Willing Powel, 17 December 1797,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/06-01-02-0462.

  6. Washington Irving, The Life of George Washington, vol. 5 (New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1859), 138.

  7. “From George Washington to George Washington Parke Custis, 22 May 1797,” Founders Online, National Archives, last modified June 13, 2018, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/06-01-02-0121.

  8. Virginia Kays Creesy, “George Washington as a Princeton Parent,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, July 4, 1976.

  9. “From George Washington to George Washington Parke Custis, 24 July 1798,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/06-02-02-0354.

  10. George Washington Parke Custis and Mary Randolph Custis Lee, Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1860), 38.

  11. “Comments on Monroe’s A View of the Conduct of the Executive of the United States, March 1798,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/06-02-02-0146. Washington’s copy ended up at Harvard’s Houghton Library because his nephew, Bushrod Washington, gave it to his fellow Supreme Court Justice, Joseph Story. Story taught at Harvard Law School and donated the book.

  12. “Thomas Jefferson to Walter Jones, 2 January 1814,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-07-02-0052.

  13. PGW, RS, 2: 169–217.

  14. The United States still had no meaningful standing army. It was not until after the founding of West Point and the near disaster of the War of 1812 that such a force came into existence. An army was raised by nationalizing state militia regiments.

  15. John Adams to George Washington, June 22, 1798, PGW, RS, 2: 351–352.

  16. “From George Washington to John Adams, 13 July 1798,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/06-02-02-0314.

  17. “From George Washington to Jonathan Trumbull, Jr., 21 July 1799,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/06-04-02-0165.

  CHAPTER 20: “’TIS WELL”

  1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations come from Tobias Lear’s Narrative Accounts of the Death of George Washington. “II, 14 December 1799,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/06-04-02-0406-0002.

  He officially died, according to Craik and Dick, of “cynanche trachealis,” an inflamed upper windpipe. But most historians, consulting with physicians, have argued it was acute epiglottitis caused by virulent bacteria, which partially obstructed his airway, and his symptoms are consistent with that diagnosis. When the epiglottis is inflamed, it can be very sore and painful, sometimes swelling to the size of a golf ball. As it grows, it obstructs the larynx, making breathing and swallowing extremely painful. Although later accounts would describe Washington experiencing “with so little pain” during his “beautiful death,” he more than likely spent much of that last day feeling as if he was being smothered.

  2. Nelly had married Lawrence Lewis, the late Betty Washington Lewis’s son.

  3. Tobias Lear to Alexander Hamilton, January 16, 1800, PAH, 24: 199.

  4. Gustavus Richard Brown to James Craik, WGW, 14: 257.

  5. “From George Washington to Martha Washington, 18 June 1775,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-01-02-0003.

  6. “George Washington’s Last Will and Testament, 9 July 1799,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/06-04-02-0404-0001.

  7. Bushrod Washington did a poor job of keeping the documents, handing them out as mementos to friends and colleagues. He also allowed great liberties to John Marshall, George Washington’s first biographer, and Jared Sparks, George Washington’s first editor, that led to further dispersal of the collection.

  8. “10 Facts About Washington and Slavery,” George Washington’s Mount Vernon, accessed May 13, 2019, www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/ten-facts-about-washington-slavery/.

  9. Ashley Bateman, “George Washington’s Anti-Slavery Legacy,” The Federalist, accessed May 16, 2019, https://thefederalist.com/2016/02/22/george-washingtons-anti-slavery-legacy/.

  EPILOGUE

  1. Annual Report (Mount Vernon, VA: The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union, 1936), 54.

  2. Henry Lee, Fu
neral Oration on the Death of General Washington (Boston: Printed for Joseph Nancrede and Manning & Loring, 1800), 10.

  3. John Cotton Smith, The Correspondence and Miscellanies of the Hon. John Cotton Smith with an Eulogy Pronounced before the Connecticut Historical Society at New Haven, May 27th, 1846. By the Rev. William W. Andrews (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1847), 224–225. Smith’s account, published years after the reported event in an extremely critical essay of Thomas Jefferson, was most likely somewhat exaggerated.

  4. William P. Cutler and Julia P. Cutler, Life, Journals, and Correspondence of Rev. Manasseh Cutler, LL.D., vol. 2 (Cincinnati, OH: R. Clarke & Co., 1888), 56–57.

  5. Martha Washington, December 31, 1799, quoted in John Adams, The Works of John Adams, vol. 9 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1856), 92.

  6. “Virginia F. F’s.,” Cleveland Daily Leader, September 26, 1865.

  7. Abigail Adams to Mary Adams, December 21, 1800, in Fritz Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery: A Documentary Portrayal (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 214.

  8. Horace Binney, Bushrod Washington (Philadelphia: C. Sherman & Son, 1858), 25–26.

  9. “Letter, Martha Washington to Fanny Bassett Washington, May 24, 1795,” George Washington’s Mount Vernon, accessed May 21, 2019, www.mountvernon.org/education/primary-sources-2/article/letter-martha-washington-to-fanny-bassett-washington-may-24-1795/.

  10. Information about enslaved people has been drawn from Washington’s 1786 and 1799 slave lists: George Washington, Diary, February 18, 1786, and “Washington’s Slave List,” 1799, PGW; “List of the Different Drafts of Negros,” ca. 1802, in scrapbook, box 34, Peter Family Archives, Washington Library.

  ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

  Index

  The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. The link provided will take you to the beginning of that print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader.

  Adams, Abigail, xxxviii, 42, 50, 122, 128, 144, 204, 241n

  Adams, John, xxxi, 42, 50, 103, 121–22, 135–36, 144, 145, 156, 191, 241n

  elected president, 174, 176

  political parties and, 147

  in presidential election, 121

  presidential title and, 122

  Quasi-War and, 191–92

  Washington compared with, 121–22

  Washington’s relationship with, 111

  Adams, John Quincy, 42

  Adams, Samuel, 64

  Addison, Joseph, 120

  Allegheny River, 20

  American colonies:

  Continental Army of, see Continental Army

  Continental Congress of, see Congress

  Declaration of Independence of, 49, 91

  unrest in, 44–48, 51–52

  American Revolution, 19, 50, 52

  Arnold’s betrayal and, 85–86

  Boston siege in, 58, 66, 87

  Brandywine battle in, 60

  Britain’s diplomatic attempt to avert, 63–69

  Britain’s surrender in, 98, 227n

  Clouds battle in, 61

  debt incurred by U.S. from, 138–39, 147, 157, 164

  Delaware River crossing in, 60, 75–76, 225n

  espionage in, 69, 77–78, 81–86, 226n, 228n

  Fort Lee evacuation in, 59

  Fort Washington battle in, 59

  generals of, 56

  Germantown battle in, 61

  Harlem Heights battle in, 59

  Indians and, 74–75, 135

  Kip’s Bay battle in, 58

  Long Island battle in, 58, 80, 227n

  Monmouth battle in, 62

  Princeton battle in, 60

  prisoners in, 67–69, 224n

  sexual assault cases and, 71–73

  smallpox during, 91

  Treaty of Paris ending, 103, 117

  Trenton battles in, 60, 75

  Valley Forge in, 119, 228n

  Washington aged by, 101

  Washington’s battles at a glance, 57–62

  White Marsh battle in, 61

  White Plains battle in, 59

  Yorktown siege in, 62, 66, 79, 90, 96–98, 227n

  see also Continental Army

  Ames, Fisher, 132

  André, John, 83–85

  animals, xxi–xxii

  mules, xxii, 113–14

  anthrax, 131

  Appalachians, 114

  Appleby Grammar School, 4, 5

  armies, 150, 241n

  Continental, see Continental Army

  Provisional, 191

  Armory, John K., xxxiii–xxxiv

  Arnold, Benedict, 79, 84–86, 94, 141, 228n

  Articles of Confederation, 103, 116–18

  Aurora, 171, 174

  bakers, 143–44, 240n

  Ball, Burgess, 187

  Ball, Joseph, 8–9, 216n

  banks, 150

  central, 138–39

  Barbados, 11–13

  Bard, Samuel, 131

  Bassett, Anna Marie, 41

  Bassett, Burwell, 41, 92

  Bateman, Ashley, 199

  Bates, Ann, 83–84

  Beckwith, George, 86

  Belvoir, 6, 7, 13

  Bible, xxxvii, xxxviii, 126, 129–30

  Biddle, Clement, 125

  Bill of Rights, 150

  biographers and historians, xxvi–xxvii

  on Mary Washington, xxxiv–xxxix

  on Washington, xxv–xxviii, xxi–xxxix

  women, xxvi–xxvii, 213n

  Boston, Siege of, 58, 66, 87

  Boston Tea Party, 47

  Boucher, Jonathan, 42, 211

  Braddock, Edward, 23–25, 35

  Braddock’s Field, 157–60

  Bradford, William, 162

  Brandywine, Battle of, 60

  Brewster, Caleb, 80

  Britain, British, 147

  bank proposal and, 139

  colonial unrest and, 44–48

  diplomatic attempt to avert war, 63–69

  fire sales of, 102

  France’s war with, 153–56, 163–64

  Indians and, 74, 135

  Jay Treaty and, 163–66

  navy of, xxxvi, 7–9, 163, 216n

  Parliament, 44–48, 50, 63–65, 137, 146

  peace treaty with, 103, 117

  slaves and, 50, 74, 79, 88, 89

  surrender of, 98, 227n

  U.S. Neutrality Proclamation and, 153–55, 163

  British Army, 35–36, 50–51, 63–65

  sexual assault by soldiers in, 71–73

  Virginia militia, 13–14, 15–22, 23–25, 35, 39

  Brodie, Fawn, 213n, 219n

  Brookhiser, Richard, xxxi, xxxii

  Brown, Gustavus Richard, 195

  Brown, Philip, 64

  Bunker Hill, Battle of, 227n

  cabinet:

  use of word, 145, 240n

  of Washington, 144–45, 153, 162, 167

  Cain, Elizabeth, 71–72

  Cain, Sarah, 71

  Caldwell, Margaret, 234n

  Cambridge, Mass., 227n

  Capitol, U.S., 155

  Carey, Matthew, xxx

  Carleton, Guy, 56

  Caroline (slave), 194

  Carter, Charles, 28

  Carter, Robert, III, 199

  Cary, Mary, 13

  Cary & Company, 33, 42–43

  Cato (Addison), 120

  Champe, John, 85

  Charles II, King, 114

  Charlotte (slave), 194

  Chernow, Ron, xxvii, xxxi, xxxii, xxxiv–xxxvii, 214n, 2
16n, 232n

  Civil War, 79, 206

  Clinton, Cornelia, 243n

  Clinton, George, 103, 243n

  Clinton, Henry, 56, 62, 72, 82, 85

  Clouds, Battle of the, 61

  Cobbett, William, 166–67

  Coercive Acts, 47

  Common Sense (Paine), 172

  Compromise of 1790, 140, 149

  Congress, 49, 52, 64, 77, 78, 84, 101–4, 107, 115, 122, 127–28, 135, 138, 154, 161, 163, 203

  House of Representatives, 121, 123, 124, 129, 155, 166, 167, 174

  Senate, 121, 123, 124, 129, 135–37, 164, 166

  and Washington’s election as president, 123

  Constitution, U.S., 75, 119, 128, 130, 138, 147, 161, 163, 172

  Bill of Rights, 150

  Senate and, 135, 137

  Twelfth Amendment to, 121

  Whiskey Rebellion and, 158, 159

  Constitutional Convention, 118–19, 141

  Continental Army, 49–54, 63, 64, 78, 101–3, 119

  desertions from, 64, 101–2

  pay to soldiers in, 101, 102

  supplies and, 64–65

  Washington as commander of, 49–54, 123

  Washington’s farewell address to, 104–6, 128

  Washington’s resignation as commander of, 103–7

  Continental Congress, see Congress

  Conway, Richard, 129

  Corbin, Richard, 21

  Cornwallis, Charles, Lord, 56, 62, 81, 227n

  Coulon de Villiers, Louis, 19

  counterfeit currency, 78

  Craik, James, 194, 195, 198–200, 248n

  Cranch, Mary Smith, 128, 204

  Cromwell, Oliver, 84

  Culper ring, 80–82, 85

  currency, 139, 150, 211

  counterfeit, 78

  U.S. dollars, 114

  Cushing, Thomas, 51

  Custis, Daniel Parke (Martha’s first husband), 28, 33, 203

  Custis, Eleanor “Nelly” Parke (step-granddaughter), 31–32, 96, 99, 115, 123, 124, 140, 144, 183, 188–89, 193, 194, 203

  slaves and, 205

  Custis, Eliza (step-granddaughter), 31–32, 96

  slaves and, 205

 

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