George Washington

by David O. Stewart

  On that first day of illness, heavy snow kept him indoors except for a sortie to mark for removal some trees between the mansion house and the river. Despite growing hoarseness, Washington scanned the newspapers that evening, rasping aloud those items that amused him. When Lear read out a statement by Madison praising James Monroe, Washington offered an acid comment. He waved off Lear’s suggestion that he take some remedy for his ailment. “You know I never take anything for a cold,” he said. “Let it go as it comes.” As he retired to bed, he stopped at the room of Martha’s granddaughter to look in on her newborn, just seventeen days old.

  In the early-morning hours, Washington woke Martha. He could hardly speak and was struggling to breathe. Martha proposed fetching a servant, but Washington objected that Martha would catch cold. He could wait until the servant came to build the morning fire. When the servant arrived, Martha sent for Lear, who summoned Dr. Craik from Alexandria. Waiting for the doctor, Washington tried but failed to drink a concoction intended to soothe his inflamed throat, and a Mount Vernon worker bled him. Martha, fearing that the bleeding would weaken him, stopped the process after a half pint flowed out. They tried home remedies, which did not help. The general continued to be weak, fighting for breath.

  Craik’s arrival after eight a.m. brought a second round of bleeding and an attempted gargle that nearly suffocated the patient. After sending for Dr. Gustavus Brown from across the river in Maryland, Craik bled Washington a third time. By late morning, with Washington still suffering greatly, Craik summoned another doctor, Elisha Dick. The additional physicians arrived in midafternoon and bled the patient a fourth time. “The blood,” according to Lear, “came very slow, was thick, and did not produce any symptoms of fainting.” The doctors also induced an explosive bowel movement, which must have been a torment for a weakened man struggling for air.

  Washington’s throat was nearly closed off, preventing him from swallowing, making speech an agony, and slowly strangling him. Yet there is no evidence that the doctors, with the medical skills of the age, ever looked into his throat, much less attempted to open his airway with an instrument. Indeed, they had no instrument for examining throats.

  After the fourth bleeding, the doctors and the patient agreed that the illness was fatal. He had cheated death repeatedly through life, beginning with his bout of smallpox in Barbados, extending through numerous battlefields where his disregard of danger was alarming, and including two near-death experiences during his first term as president. But not this time. At four thirty in the afternoon, Washington asked Martha to retrieve two wills from his office. When she brought them, he selected one and asked her to burn it. She did. She placed the remaining will in her closet.

  Through the day, three enslaved women and the housekeeper, Mrs. Forbes, helped care for the desperately ill man. Caroline was a seamstress. Molly and Charlotte were house servants. In the afternoon, Washington realized that Christopher Sheels, his enslaved valet, whose plan to run away had been thwarted three months before, had been standing in the room all day. Washington told him to sit. Martha maintained her vigil at the foot of the bed.

  To Lear, Washington gasped that his breath would give out soon. He asked his aide to arrange his accounts and books and inquired if there was anything he should do in the time he had left. When Lear said he hoped the general would recover, the patient smiled, whispering that “it was the debt which we must all pay, [and] he looked to the event with perfect resignation.”

  Lear tried to make Washington comfortable, as “he appeared to be in great pain and distress, from the difficulty of breathing, and frequently changed his posture in the bed.” Washington said he feared he was fatiguing Lear, adding, “I hope when you want aid of this kind you will find it.”

  Dr. Craik examined him at sundown. Washington remained stoic. “I die hard,” he wheezed, his breath labored, “but I am not afraid to go.” He thanked the doctors for their help, then urged them to take no more trouble. “Let me go off quietly,” he whispered. “I cannot last long.” Unable to reply, Dr. Craik retired to the fireside. The other two physicians left the room.

  The final hours brought more agony. Washington repeatedly asked for the time. By reading Washington’s expressions and gestures, Lear shifted him, trying to grant some relief. A final, futile treatment involved applying blisters and cataplasms to Washington’s legs.

  At ten o’clock, Washington wanted again to speak. When he could make a noise, he asked that the funeral be delayed for three days, so he would not be buried alive. Some minutes passed. His breathing eased. He felt for his own pulse and whispered, “ ’Tis well.” Lear saw the general’s face change and called Dr. Craik over. Martha and the four enslaved servants watched in silence.

  “Is he gone?” Martha asked. Unable to speak, Lear motioned yes. Lear kissed Washington’s hand, “which I had held to my bosom; laid it down and went to the other end of the room, where I was for some time lost in profound grief.”

  Bryan Fairfax was saddened when he learned that on his final day, Washington had said, “I die hard.” Because Washington “was one of the last men to complain,” Fairfax wrote, “one expression of that sort from him, to me shows more suffering than 100 groans from almost any other man.” Fairfax added, “He died as he lived, with fortitude, so he was great to the last.” The modern consensus among physicians is that an inflammation of his epiglottis killed him.1

  * * *

  Thomas Law, husband to Martha’s eldest granddaughter, described the Mount Vernon funeral as attended by a “vast concourse of people.” He added, “We have all of us been crying.” The scene was re-enacted around the nation. Virtually every community held a memorial service or mock funeral to mark the death of the founding father. His virtues were lauded, even improved upon. His weaknesses were ignored. The nation had lost its protector. “I feel myself alone,” President Adams told the Senate, “bereaved of my last brother.”2

  Word soon spread of the will he left behind, written in his own hand a few months earlier, without a lawyer’s aid. The document named as executors his “dearly beloved wife,” five nephews, and Martha’s grandson. Bushrod—his brother Jack’s eldest and a Supreme Court justice—took the lead.

  The will’s fourth paragraph, after the bequests to Martha, addressed his enslaved people; it directed that after Martha’s death, all of the 123 people that Washington owned “shall receive their freedom.” Washington wrote that he would have preferred to direct their immediate freedom, but intermarriage between them and dower slaves created “insuperable difficulties.” He noted that he lacked the power to liberate the dower slaves. Of his own slaves, he directed that those too old to work should be supported by his estate; those too young to work should be “taught to read and write; and . . . brought up to some useful occupation.” Until they were emancipated, he added, “I do expressly forbid that they be sold or transported out of Virginia.”3

  Washington’s instructions left his executors no wiggle room. He “most pointedly, and most solemnly, enjoin[ed] it upon [his] Executors . . . to see that this clause respecting slaves, and every part thereof be religiously fulfilled at the epoch at which it is directed to take place; without evasion, neglect or delay.”

  About forty slaves at Mount Vernon were rented from a neighbor, so they had to be returned; the rest were dower slaves beyond Washington’s power; they would be distributed to Martha’s grandchildren when she died in 1801; of those, only a few, who were possibly descended from Martha’s family, would be freed by Thomas and Eliza Law.4 Washington also prescribed eventual freedom for thirty-three more slaves who had belonged to Martha’s late brother, Bartholomew Dandridge. Those enslaved people had been pledged to secure a loan Washington made to Dandridge. Washington directed that when Bartholomew’s widow died, Washington’s executors should forego collecting on the money debt and take the slaves. Those above the age of forty should be emancipated; the others should be freed either after
seven years of service or upon reaching the age of twenty-five.

  Washington singled out one enslaved worker for immediate emancipation: William Lee, who rode at his side through the Revolutionary War. Recognizing that Lee might not wish to leave Mount Vernon since accidents had left him unable to walk, Washington specified that Lee could choose to remain at Mount Vernon.

  After a condolence visit to Martha, Abigail Adams reported that the widow feared that the slaves would fare poorly once they were freed, set “adrift into the world without horse, home or friend.” According to Adams, Martha also feared she was not safe surrounded by more than one hundred people who would be free as soon as she died. Within two weeks of Washington’s death, Bushrod referred to a plan to get his Aunt Martha “clear of her negroes and of plantation cares and troubles.” In December 1800, she signed papers emancipating all of Washington’s slaves as of January 1, 1801.5

  Freedom brought its own challenges, especially for those who had to choose between freedom and family because of ties to the dower slaves. Some struggled to support themselves on their own, though many made their way successfully. Bushrod and his fellow executors cared for those too old to work, making support payments for the next thirty-three years.6

  Martha Washington

  Courtesy of the Library of Congress

  If Washington had hoped his will would inspire Southerners to embrace gradual emancipation, he would have been disappointed. In the coming decades, Southern slave owners would close ranks to defend the slave system. Only secession and a brutal civil war would uproot that system. Centuries later, slavery’s traditions and attitudes still infect American life.

  Washington knew the slave system would not die easily. He chose not to risk the unity of the new nation against the combination of prejudice and economic self-interest that entrenched slavery. Despite his personal feelings, he made the political judgment not to support abolition publicly. That judgment—made by Washington and so many others of the founding generation—had profound consequences for the nation.7

  Washington’s will had political significance as an anti-slavery statement by the country’s most revered slaveholder. But for Washington, emancipating his slaves seemed more personal than political. His will contained neither denunciation of the sin of slavery, nor exhortations to his countrymen to turn their backs on the perfidious system. Washington surely understood that such statements would seem hypocritical coming from one who had been a stern slave master, had schemed to recover runaways, and had blocked slaves from claiming their freedom. Such statements also might be dismissed as cheap sentiment from a rich man whose wife had ample assets, whose family would inherit slaves of their own, and who would not personally endure any inconvenience from the loss of enslaved workers.

  Rather, the emancipations granted in the will represented an acceptance of personal responsibility. Washington would not go to his grave without admitting, and beginning to atone for, his participation in the sin of slavery. In an early statement he made while trying to develop a plan to free his slaves, Washington humbly wrote that such a plan “could not I hope be displeasing to the justice of the Creator.”8

  * * *

  By examining the career of George Washington, this book has aimed to understand how he became a master politician, which requires deciding what is a master politician. A master politician is not one who seizes power and clings to it through the years, strewing the land with images of himself but dedicated principally to his own aggrandizement. Both history and today’s world bristle with such figures. Nor is a master politician one whose commitment to an ideology or religion demands unswerving adherence even after the ideology or religion has created more suffering than benefit. History and today’s world offer many examples of those figures as well.

  Master politicians place the good of the people at the center of their efforts, and commit themselves to general advancement. Far more difficult, they persuade their countrymen to follow them. When their course proves flawed, they correct it. Finally, they leave the society—and its institutions—stronger than when they began. They leave the people with greater understanding and power to influence their own lives. The legacy of a master politician includes a shared vision of how to live together; those who are luckiest also leave times of prosperity and peace.

  Washington, and not many others, met this standard. He began as a headstrong young man with a patchy military career. As commander of the Virginia Regiment, he won no battles, picked unnecessary quarrels, and repeatedly alienated powerful figures, trapping himself in a career cul-de-sac. Then he resolved to reinvent himself. When he entered the House of Burgesses in 1759, he was such a political naïf that he could not manage legislation to ban the running of pigs in a frontier town.

  Over the following decade and a half, he evolved into a deft, sensitive leader who inspired by the sincerity of his striving for the common good, and by the steady, intelligent judgments he applied to public issues. He managed local roads and ferries, cared for the poor, decided disputes between neighbors, punished a political enemy, won elections, and wrote laws that addressed the mundane and the grand. He rose to the head of a revolutionary movement, relentlessly pressing for American rights and resistance to Britain.

  In his second tour of military service, Washington fought a stronger adversary for eight years. He commanded raw militia, half-trained Americans, and Continental Army veterans who had learned their business. He worked effectively with Congress, state governors and legislators, and local officials, persevering through harsh defeats and cruel hardships, retaining the loyalty of his soldiers and support from enough of the people. Challenged from within for control of the army, he adroitly outmaneuvered his rivals and solidified his position, reinforcing it with military success. Then, somehow, he restrained his near-mutinous, much-abused soldiers and sent them home peacefully. His own resignation from the army, at a time when he could have installed himself as America’s leader, amazed contemporaries and earned the public trust to a degree never rivaled in American history.

  When the loose American union quickly frayed and foundered, Washington pointed the way to a stronger government, then agreed to forsake the comforts of Mount Vernon for another round of public service. His insistence on the need for a new constitution, and his embrace of the charter produced at Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, were indispensable to the reinvention of the nation as a stable republic.

  As that republic’s first president, he sought to preserve the union through the Compromise of 1790, which balanced the sectional interests of North and South through his financial program and the placement of the new seat of government. He undertook two grueling journeys through the states to reinforce that union with his personal popularity. In his second presidential term, he steered the nation past foreign threats from France and Britain, and quelled an internal rebellion. After he slid into the partisan wrangling of the day, his Farewell Address warned his countrymen against his own error. For more than twenty years, his steady, careful leadership and his unassuming, modest deportment bequeathed the nation a stable foundation that held for generations.

  Washington repeatedly struck the elusive balance between respecting public opinion and leading it, showing a rare sense of timing and employing his lifelong gift for inspiring trust. He rewarded that trust with his final withdrawal from the public scene after his second term as president, insisting that his countrymen govern themselves. In his final retirement, he sought to withdraw from the system of human bondage that had supported his life of comfort, but in that effort he failed, as he always had. Only through his death did he grant freedom to those he had owned. By that action, he aimed to set an example for his countrymen, but Americans chose to ignore it. He was remarkable, and remarkably successful, but a man with flaws and failures too.

  George Washington established a model of wisdom and integrity by which every successor would be judged. For a man who cared so deeply abo
ut his public reputation, he could have wished for little more.

  Washington was forty when he posed for this painting by Charles Willson Peale, though he looks younger. He had left military service thirteen years before, yet he donned his old uniform as commander of the Virginia Regiment during the French and Indian War.

  Courtesy of the Museums at Washington and Lee University

  George Washington’s half-brother Lawrence, fourteen years older, was his surrogate father, essential sponsor, and “best friend.” Throughout Washington’s life, he kept this portrait on a wall in his private office at Mount Vernon.

  Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association

  Sixteen months younger than Washington, Betty Washington Lewis remained close to her brother throughout their lives. She bore a striking resemblance to him.

  Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association

  Martha Washington at age twenty-six, while still married to Daniel Parke Custis. Two years later, after Custis’s death, she married George Washington.

  Courtesy of the Museums at Washington and Lee University

  John Parke Custis, Martha Washington’s son by her first marriage and heir to a sizable fortune, was a frustration to Washington because of his indifference to learning. Some thought him spoiled.

  Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association

  Martha (“Patsy”) Parke Custis, Martha Washington’s daughter from her first marriage, suffered from epilepsy. The Washingtons consulted numerous physicians in search of a cure and tried many possible therapies.