The Marquis de Lafayette’s son, born in 1780 and named for George Washington, also served a function in the president’s emotional life. In 1795, with Lafayette still in an Austrian prison, Washington offered asylum in the United States to his friend’s family. Mme. Lafayette promptly dispatched her fifteen-year-old son across the Atlantic, the tab for the voyage largely paid for by Washington. But when George Washington Motier Lafayette arrived, a French exile disembarking in a country in the midst of severely strained Franco-American relations, Washington thought it impolitic to have the youngster live with his family in Philadelphia. Instead, he secured the lad’s admission to Harvard College, where he remained for a year while the president paid for his schooling. Near the end of the Washington presidency, however, the boy and his elderly French tutor moved into Mount Vernon, remaining there as Washington’s guest for eighteen months. In many ways the young man was unlike his famous father. Henrietta Liston found him to be sad and gentle, others thought him awkward. But a loving father-son relationship grew up between the boy and Washington. Indeed, the president must have been pervaded with a melancholy sense of déjà vu when he witnessed the departure of the quiet, polite youngster late in 1797, for he could not but have recalled that snowy day thirteen years before when the boy’s father had set out for France. In one final gracious act toward young Lafayette, Washington bore the cost of his return passage.47
The president also was close to another namesake, George Washington Craik, the son of his old army doctor, James Craik. Raised in Alexandria, where the Scottish physician had set up his practice following the French and Indian War, young Craik was introduced at any early age to his famous neighbor. Beginning in 1788 the master of Mount Vernon had helped underwrite the boy’s formal education, and in the final year of his presidency Washington briefly took young Craik on as one of his secretaries. There young Craik joined another aide to whom Washington was especially close. In 1790 Washington had brought Bartholomew Dandridge to Philadelphia to serve as an aide to Lear. Bat, the son of Martha’s brother, had performed well enough. Naturally bright, though with little formal education, Bat could handle those duties, but when Lear resigned in 1793 and Dandridge was elevated to the post of the president’s personal secretary, it soon was apparent that he had overstepped his limits. In the summer of 1796 Bat simply deserted his post for more than two months, fleeing perhaps because of the pressures of the job. When he resurfaced begging forgiveness, Washington reinstated him, but he made young Craik his assistant.48
After seven years of loyal service, Washington had grown much closer to Lear than to any other aide, but during the second term this talented attendant resigned. Following the death of his wife Polly during an epidemic of yellow fever in 1793, Lear, overcome with grief, opted to leave the First Family and enter business in the new Federal City. Washington lent his assistance by recommending the fledgling enterprise to the commissioners of the Federal District, and later he secured the presidency of the Potomac Canal Company for his onetime amanuensis. But Lear continued to be plagued by ill fortune. His business collapsed, largely because of the ineptitude of his partner. Even worse, in 1795 he married Fanny Washington, George Augustine’s widow, a marriage that lasted barely six months before she died at age twenty-nine. Moved by his plight—among other things Lear was left with four small children under the age of ten—Washington gave him generous amounts of cash and land.49
The public was unaware of the kindness and the warm benevolence with which Washington treated those close to him. Certainly strangers who encountered Washington only briefly would have been surprised by his compassionate qualities, for almost without exception he struck these people as terribly cold and implacable. His most conspicuous trait was his solemn, formal demeanor. When the young architect Benjamin Latrobe first visited Washington he found a man of “reserve, but no hauteur.” He also discovered that the president was difficult to speak with, that he “was frequently silent for many minutes, during which time an awkward silence seemed to prevail.” So stilted and quiet was the host at mealtime, in fact, that Labrobe soon “felt a little embarrassed at the quiet reserved air.” He quickly added, however, that there was “something uncommonly majestic and commanding” in the way that Washington walked and comported himself.” A young relative saw the same characteristic in Washington. The president’s “dignity awed all who approached him,” he later recollected. Curiously, a craftsman, an English stonemason who encountered Washington in the course of his work on the new federal city, saw another side to the president. Without the need to be on guard around such a man, Washington evidently relaxed, leading the artisan to see him as a down-to-earth man who exhibited “none of the disgusting hauteur of a superior.” Whatever that worker perceived, there was one thing that almost every witness agreed on who saw Washington during the last two years of his presidency: he looked old and worn and tired.50
The many portraits made of Washington during these years confirmed the toll that age and service had begun to exact. Charles Willson Peale’s last painting of Washington, the one undertaken during the Constitutional Convention in 1787, depicted a robust subject, a man of fifty-five who could have passed for forty-five, who seemed to brim with energy and, for once, with secure self-confidence. Washington was six months beyond the second major illness of his presidency when he sat for Edward Savage late in 1790. He appeared gaunt and slack-jawed, his eyes staring ahead dully, his once ruddy complexion vitiated, an ineffable fatigue etched into his features. Five years later Washington posed for the most famous American painter of the era. Trained in London, Gilbert Stuart returned to the States during the Washington presidency and first induced the great man to sit for him in 1795; two additional sittings followed the next year. The president now was recovered and healthy. His features had filled out, and, indeed, in the initial of the three Stuart works, the so-called Vaughn portrait, Washington appeared to be more overweight than at any time since he had camped with his army before Boston twenty years earlier. In each painting Washington possesses that air of gravity and taciturnity that most contemporaries witnessed. According to all eyewitnesses, he appeared tight-lipped, assertive, humorless, and majestical. Stuart seemed to have captured the essence of the man as described by so many who met him, except that he depicted him as more robust than he was. To most observers Washington seemed never to have recaptured the vitality stolen from him by his illnesses in 1789 and 1790. Those who knew him thought him slower, weaker, more tired—in essence, older—in the wake of those grave afflictions. But, aside from depicting a receding hairline and a full mane of grey hair, Stuart’s brush did not dwell on the ravages of time.
Actually, Washington had been in generally good health since those two serious ailments early in his presidency, although he continued to be nagged by a series of relatively minor discomforts not uncommon to a man of his age. A recurrence of the tumor in his thigh resulted in a temporary illness, and an unhappy but inconsequential bout with a virus—probably the ubiquitous flu bug—also briefly felled him. In addition, in June 1794, while inspecting the progress of the Potomac Canal Company workmen, he injured his back in a fall. For a while the injury made it too painful to mount a horse or even to ride in a jostling carriage, yet after a few days of distress he again was in good fettle. About that same time a prickly, tender spot appeared on his right cheek, a splotch diagnosed as skin cancer. However, after two months of treatment at the hands of a physician “possessed of the valuable secret of curing Cancerous complaints,” the disorder disappeared.51
Of course, Washington’s chronic dental afflictions also continued to distract him, a woe his wife now shared. By the middle of his presidential years Washington had only one natural tooth left in his head; he made do with the dentures fashioned from hippopotamus ivory that he had purchased in 1789, an ill-fitting set that caused his lips to protrude in a bucktoothed manner, and which led him to compensate for that look by severely pursing his mouth. If that was not bad enough, the artificial teeth
had begun to turn black, the legacy of drinking port wine, a substance that eroded the color and polish from ivory. Aside from periodic colds and a brief bout with colic, Martha also was in good health during these years, but she too had been driven to wear false teeth. Evidently, although she resorted to a different dentist, she had no better luck. Soon after acquiring her artificial dentures she ordered a new pair, instructing her dentist to make the set “something bigger and thicker in the front and a small matter longer.”52
The greatest health scare of these years did not harm Washington or his family. Late in the summer of 1793 one of the worst epidemics ever to strike America laid siege to Philadelphia. Yellow fever had invaded the capital. A score or more died each day, and 325 perished during the last twelve days of August. Hamilton was one of the stricken, for days lingering at death’s door, although, unlike so many, he ultimately survived. When the death toll climbed to forty per day early in September, President Washington fled the city for Mount Vernon.
Washington had contemplated leaving thirty days earlier, and he even had asked Eliza Powel and her husband to accompany his family to Virginia. She declined the offer, explaining that her husband “saw no Propriety in . . .flying from the only spot where Physicians conversant in the Disorder . . . could be consulted.” She would remain with her husband, she added; the “line of Duty” required that she do so. Curiously, Washington then abandoned his plan to flee, and he did not finally depart until the infestation’s net had spread from the city’s working-class neighborhoods into the more fashionable districts. To no avail he once again urged the Powels to come with him. Samuel Powel’s refusal to leave Philadelphia was a fatal error, for he, too, soon contracted the disease and perished.
President Washington spent several weeks at Mount Vernon, and when he returned north he lived for six weeks in Germantown, a safe haven a few miles outside Philadelphia. There he remained until late in November when the “malignant fever,” as he called the malady, at last had spent itself. By then one in every twenty Philadelphians had succumbed to the grim visitor.53
A year later, in the summer of 1794, news of another malady reached the capital—a disorder within the body politic. From western Pennsylvania, a region in which Washington had spent some of his most trying days, came word that defiant backwoodsmen had organized a campaign of armed resistance against the federal excise tax on distilled whiskey. The duty had been established in 1791—and modified the next year—at the behest of Hamilton. There is no reason to believe that the secretary of the treasury should have been surprised by the protest movement aroused by the tax. Western farmers had a history of violent dissent, a record that included both the Shaysite episode in the 1780s as well as random resistance to various state excises during that decade. In this instance, too, there was good reason to scorn the law. The tax was considerable (one quarter of the cost of a gallon of whiskey); moreover, the revenue generated by the excise was to be used to rescind the states’ debts, in itself never a popular policy out on the frontier. Some scholars even have surmised that Hamilton may have hoped the outlanders would challenge the law, thus presenting the administration with an excuse for demonstrating the power of the new national government.54
If he did harbor such wishes, the opportunity to make an example of the defiant westerners arose in mid-1794. For two years the area about Pittsburgh had bubbled and simmered with the rhetoric of discontent, and even with sporadic violence. As early as 1792, when word of the initial disorders reached Philadelphia, Hamilton had urged the use of force to suppress the dissidents. His strident counsel was premature. Washington was unmoved. Fearing that force would be counterproductive—if the endeavor to subdue the yeomenry did not destroy the fledgling central government, he seemed to warn, it would render it impossible in moments of greater crisis ever again to raise an army—the president agreed only to issue a proclamation defending the duties.55
By mid-1794 nothing had been resolved. With monotonous regularity couriers arrived in the capital bearing word of increasingly recalcitrant behavior in the West. June brought tidings from Kentucky of remonstrances against the Jay mission, and that in turn was followed in July by lurid accounts of angry protests and inflammatory statements against the excise. Popular evasion was endemic on the frontier, from Pennsylvania to Kentucky, from backcountry Virginia to South Carolina.
Washington also learned that the excise inspector in western Pennsylvania had been assaulted by an anti-tax mob. Other reports indicated that insurgent leaders were seeking to neutralize local militia units in order to prevent the enforcement of the law. Washington’s reaction was swift, and in this instance, unlike two summers before, he and his treasury secretary thought along similar lines. From the outset of the crisis both sought a resolution of the frontier commotions through the use of force. Both Washington and Hamilton were anxious to display the power of the new national government. Still, the president and Secretary Hamilton were troubled. Their problem was not over the wisdom of using force, but, as historian Richard Kohn has written, “whether it was possible to use force.”56
One quandary that faced Washington was simple. Western resistance was widespread, but it took its most overt form in Pennsylvania and Kentucky, and the latter was precisely the region from which the president hoped to find militia assistance for Anthony Wayne’s army. Washington’s dilemma, therefore, was to find a means by which force might be used against the refractory frontiersmen without at the same time alienating those from the backcountry who were expected to soldier in the war for the Northwest.57
Another problem also vexed Washington. He soon discovered that unleashing a federal force was easier said than done. Article IV of the Constitution stipulated that federal troops could be dispatched to a state only upon the petition of the state legislature, or, if the assembly was not in session, as was the case in Pennsylvania in the summer of 1794, on the request of the governor. Washington learned quickly that Thomas Mifflin, Pennsylvania’s governor, did not wish to ask for federal troops.
On August 2 Washington summoned his cabinet to consider the unrest on the frontier, and he invited Mifflin and three additional Pennsylvania officials to sit in on the deliberations. While a hot sun blazed away at steamy, stifling Germantown, to which Washington had transferred his residence three days earlier, the cabinet and its guests met for several hours. In that session, as well as in written reports subsequently submitted to the president, Washington discovered that his council was divided. He opened the meeting with the declaration that he was determined to “go every length that the Constitution and Laws would permit, but no further.” The remark shed no light on his thinking. But the length to which Hamilton, Knox, and the new attorney general, William Bradford, would go soon was apparent. Each man urged the president to use force to suppress the uprising. Hamilton’s view typified the outlook of these three advisors. The anti-tax movement, he said, was the result of an organized conspiracy, and he urged an “immediate resort to Military force.” The president, he added, should simultaneously call up the militia and issue another proclamation, a statement demanding compliance with the law; when it became evident that the law would not be obeyed, he went on, Washington should unleash the army.
Among the cabinet members only Secretary of State Randolph eschewed the use of force. In a long, perhaps emotional, statement he appeared to argue that an army was not the proper instrument through which to compel tax evaders to comply with the law. He probably took issue with the notion of an organized conspiracy among the discontented frontiersmen, and, without question, he warned that if Hamilton’s end was merely to display the efficacy of federal power under the new Constitution, such a heavy-handed tactic was likely to be counterproductive, for the government ultimately could succeed only if it possessed the affection of the people.
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