A Magnificent Catastrophe

by Edward J. Larson

  In this scenario, a vice presidential candidate who had strong party backing for the second votes from Federalists in the North, where that party held sway, and also strong state or regional support in the Republican-dominated South, so that he could also pull second votes there, might actually outpoll both presidential candidates. That was Hamilton’s plan for Pinckney, who, as a popular Federalist from South Carolina, had strong support both in his home state and among Federalists generally.

  Hamilton expected that Pinckney would get votes from all of South Carolina’s electors even if they preferred the Republican Jefferson for President. Some other Southern electors might also favor Pinckney for their second votes. So long as Federalist electors in the North duly gave their second votes to Pinckney, those votes combined with Pinckney’s votes from Southern electors should bring the South Carolinian in first, with something over 75 votes.

  In the end, the plan backfired. Eighteen pro-Adams Federalist electors in New England, who had discerned Hamilton’s scheme, decided not to vote for Pinckney, instead “dropping” their votes from him by casting them for either U.S. Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut or Governor John Jay of New York, who they knew had no chance of becoming either President or Vice President. In order to drop votes and not inadvertently hurt their favored candidate, electors needed to cast their second votes for someone who had no chance of winning.

  Ultimately, Pinckney came in third in the overall voting even though, as expected, South Carolina’s eight electors voted for him and Jefferson. Jefferson, Hamilton’s old adversary, became Vice President instead of Pinckney, which made Hamilton’s frustration with the failure of his scheme even worse.

  Now, heading into the 1800 election, Hamilton was still set on displacing Adams. He was one of those urging Washington to run and orchestrating a chorus of like-minded High Federalists.

  Unless you consent to stand for the office, Federalist Governor Jonathan Trumbull of Connecticut wrote to Washington in June 1799, “the next election of President, I fear, will have a very ill-fated issue.” Adams had barely beaten Jefferson in 1796. Republicans now hated Adams even more than then, and High Federalists distrusted him as a trimmer. Trumbull’s letter carried an enclosure suggesting that he wrote on behalf of other High Federalists, including at least one member of Adams’s cabinet, Oliver Wolcott. Hamilton naturally concurred.

  Washington replied disingenuously that party rather than personality would prevail in the next election and thus he would receive no more electoral votes than Adams. Trumbull rightly responded, “My fears and those of other well-wishers to our country are that neither [Adams] nor any other who could be named will be likely to secure with certainty that decided and necessary totality of votes which are to be wished unless it be [you].” As an evangelical Christian ruling over a virtual theocracy in Connecticut, Trumbull deeply distrusted Jefferson for his alleged Deism and anticlericalism.

  At Hamilton’s urging, Federalist senior statesman Gouverneur Morris took up the plea in a December 9 letter to the General. “The leading federal characters (even in Massachusetts) consider Mr. Adams as unfit for the office he now holds,” Morris wrote. “You must be convinced (however painful the conviction) that should you decline, then no man will be chosen whom you wish to see in that high office.” Morris’s letter recited a litany of reasons why Washington, for the sake of his country and his own reputation, must consent to serve. “Ponder this I pray,” Morris concluded. Although Adams did not know the extent of the cabal against him, he certainly felt the High Federalists’ anger.

  Washington never received Morris’s letter. On December 12, four days before the letter reached Mount Vernon, he returned from his five-hour ride wet and cold. “About one o’clock it began to snow,” the General recorded in his diary for that day, “soon after to hail and then turned to a settled cold rain.” Snow hung from his hair when he finally reentered the Mansion House after 3 PM.

  The heavy snowfall and his physical condition prevented Washington from riding on Friday, December 13. “He had taken cold (undoubtedly from being so much exposed the day before) and complained of having a sore throat,” the General’s personal secretary, Tobias Lear, wrote in his journal. “He had a hoarseness which increased in the evening but he made light of it, as he would never take anything to carry off a cold, always observing, ‘let it go as it came.’” That afternoon, after it stopped snowing, Washington walked outside to mark some trees for removal. In the evening, he asked Lear to read aloud from the transcript of recent debates in the Virginia legislature. What he heard upset him. Republicans in the legislature had selected James Monroe—a neighbor and close political ally of Jefferson and Madison—as the state’s next governor. That choice had stacked the deck for Jefferson in the upcoming contest for Virginia’s presidential electors. The General surely went to bed in a sour mood.

  For Washington, the upcountry triumvirate of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe had become the very personification of partisanship; and to him, partisanship represented the gravest threat to freedom. Strong parties might help check and balance the excesses of monarchical power in the Old World, Washington conceded, but would likely subvert the American constitutional union of institutionalized checks and balances. “In this sense,” Washington observed in his Farewell Address as President, “it is that your union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty.” Factionalism, he warned, tends “to put in place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party.”

  Jefferson and the Republicans, in contrast, worried that Federalists had already swept away any meaningful institutional checks contained in the Constitution. “Against us are the executive, and the judiciary,…the legislature, all the officers of the government, all who want to be officers, all timid men who preferred the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty, British merchants and Americans trading on British capitals, [and] speculators and holders in the banks and public funds,” Jefferson wrote during the waning days of Washington’s second term. The naval war with France, the creation of the Additional Army, and the enactment of the Sedition Act had served only to confirm Republicans’ worst fears of the Federalists’ supposed authoritarian agenda.

  Now, in the run-up to the 1800 election, Republicans mobilized with a new vigor to counter this Federalist hegemony. Their emergence as an ever more organized party deeply distressed Washington, who tended to see Federalists as disinterested patriots and Republicans as little more than domestic Jacobins. Indeed, Washington and other Federalists took to using that French label for their partisan opponents.

  Comparing the situation when he left office in 1797 with circumstances in 1799, Washington wrote, “At that time the line between parties was not so clearly drawn, and the views of the opposition [not] so clearly delineated as they are present.” By “the opposition,” he meant the Republicans, and he went on to lament, “Let that party set up a broomstick and call it a true Son of Liberty, a Democrat, or give it any other epithet that will suit their purpose and it will command their votes in toto!” In a subsequent letter to the same Federalist correspondent, Washington complained that the Republican faction, in its increasingly harsh attacks in the press, is “hanging upon the wheels of government, opposing measures calculated solely for internal defense, and is endeavoring to defeat all the laws which have been passed for this purpose by rendering them obnoxious.” To him, the Republicans stood against security, while of course the Republicans saw themselves as standing for liberty.

  By selecting Monroe as their state’s governor in 1799, Republicans in the Virginia legislature could not have made a more partisan pick—nor one more calculated to enrage Washington and the Federalists. “Virginia’s misfortune may be comprised in one short sentence,” the Virginia Federalist reported: “Monroe is elected.”

  The bad blood between Washington and Monroe went back to 1794 and the negotiation of Jay’s Treaty with Britain. At the time, as a young Republican senator from Virginia, Monroe had led
calls to retaliate against Britain for imposing unilateral restrictions on American trade with France. Instead of retaliating, however, Washington had decided to send John Jay to negotiate peace with Britain at almost any price. Then, to keep France from immediately striking back at the United States, Washington asked Monroe to replace America’s proroyalist ambassador in Paris, Gouverneur Morris. Monroe naïvely served Washington’s purposes in deflecting French attention from Jay’s negotiations with Britain by indiscreetly embracing the republican regime in France. Once the treaty took effect, Washington promptly recalled Monroe from Paris and replaced him with Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, who, like his younger brother Thomas Pinckney, was a wealthy South Carolina lawyer and planter with ties to French royalists.

  Feeling that Washington and the Federalists had poorly used him, Monroe returned to the United States intent on setting the record straight. He published an intemperate pamphlet that denounced Jay’s Treaty as a calculated surrender to Britain and criticized Washington by name. Washington had retired to Mount Vernon by that time and, unaccustomed to such treatment, he could scarcely restrain himself from lashing back in kind. Now he faced the prospect of this insolent partisan becoming his governor. The entire episode must have come back to the General as he listened to Lear read from the legislative transcript. “He appeared much affected and spoke with some degree of asperity on the subject,” Lear reported in his diary. Madison’s warm praise of Monroe’s character particularly angered Washington. His sworn enemies were at the gate and he was growing old.

  Washington awoke in the early hours of Saturday morning struggling for breath. His sore throat had developed into something much worse. It was as if someone were strangling him. Martha wanted to call for help immediately, but the General asked her to wait until dawn. Apparently he feared that she might catch a cold getting out of bed on such a chilly night. By morning, Washington could barely utter a sound and never again spoke above a whisper.

  “’Tis very sore,” the General said of his throat. Lear sent for Washington’s physician, James Craik. Even before Craik arrived, two other doctors were summoned as well. Awaiting their arrival, Washington asked for a bleeding by George Rawlins, the overseer who generally treated Mount Vernon’s slaves. In line with standard medical practice of the day, Washington believed that removing some blood might reduce the pressure in his throat. “Don’t be afraid,” the General counseled his reluctant overseer. “More,” he demanded when Rawlins tried to stop. In all, the overseer removed half a pint of blood, but the bleeding did not help.

  Dr. Craik repeated the procedure after he arrived and also prescribed a sage-tea-and-vinegar gargle, steam, and a cantharidin blister to draw the swelling to the surface. When none of these reduced the internal inflammation in Washington’s neck, Craik bled the patient for a third time and administered two laxatives, which produced a dramatic bowel movement. After the other doctors arrived in the afternoon, they prescribed a fourth bleeding. “The blood came very slow,” Lear noted this time. “Was thick.”

  Washington could barely swallow or breathe. He asked to review his two wills, and had one of them destroyed. “I find I am going,” he whispered to Lear. “My breath cannot continue long. I believed from the first attack it would be fatal.”

  Washington called his illness “an ague”; Craik diagnosed it as “inflammatory quinsy”; the medical team ultimately termed it “cynanche trachealis.” During the late eighteenth century, these were just words tied to particular symptoms without any effective treatments linked to them. The youngest doctor in attendance suggested a tracheotomy, which might have helped Washington to breathe, but the other doctors vetoed the procedure as too risky. In all likelihood, Washington had contracted epiglottitis from a bacterial infection in his larynx. If so, then no available medical procedure could have cured him. Indeed, at the time and ever after, critics have charged that the bleedings, blisters, and purges inflicted upon Washington only made matters worse. Clearly, they did not help him. “Let me go off quickly. I cannot last long,” he told his doctors at dusk. To Craik, the General added, “Doctor, I die hard, but I am not afraid to go.”

  The physicians continued to treat Washington with blisters and poultices into the evening but they gave up on his life. “About 10 o’clock he made several attempts to speak to me before he could effect it,” Lear noted. “At length, he said ‘I am going. Have me decently buried and do not let my body be put in the vault in less than two days after I am dead.’” Once he was certain that Lear understood his request, the General spoke for the last time: “’Tis well.” After feeling his own pulse, Washington’s hand fell from his wrist and he died. “’Tis well,” Martha echoed. “I have no more trials to pass through. I shall soon follow him!” Twenty-nine months later, grieving still and feeling very much alone, she did.

  Lear formally notified President Adams of the General’s passing. “His last scene corresponded with the whole tenor of this life,” Lear wrote. “With perfect resignation and a full possession of his reason he closed his well spent life.”

  News of the unexpected death shocked Americans and precipitated an outpouring of grief unprecedented in the young nation’s history. “Every paper we received from towns which have heard of Washington’s death are enveloped in mourning,” reported Boston’s Columbian Centinel on December 28, 1799. “Every city, town, village and hamlet has exhibited spontaneous tokens of poignant sorrow.”

  President Adams set the tone for many. He grieved openly but in a subtly partisan manner. Responding publicly to a memorial message from Congress describing Washington as the country’s father, for example, Adams stressed that, among those still in the national government, only he had served with the General at the First Continental Congress, where the independence movement began. “I feel myself alone, bereaved of my last brother,” Adams wrote. By dating the independence movement from the first Congress in 1774, two years before the Declaration of Independence, Adams deftly excluded Jefferson from the band of founding brothers. On the eve of the 1800 presidential campaign, no one in government could have missed Adams’s subtext, especially because he sent his response to the Senate, where Jefferson presided.

  Adams was now the undisputed head of the Federalist Party, despite the opposition from High Federalists within the party. Washington’s death threw off the efforts of Hamilton and his allies who had been trying to persuade Washington to run in Adams’s stead. With no Federalist other than Adams enjoying a national reputation, except of course the widely unpopular Hamilton, High Federalists recognized that they now had to support Adams for a second term—at least in public. Privately, however, some continued their scheming to drop him in the end.

  Four days after Washington died, his body was entombed in the family’s Mount Vernon burial vault. People assembled from miles around to watch as, to the sound of solemn music and muffled drums, a military procession carried the casket from the Mansion House to the vault. A riderless horse with boots reversed in the stirrups followed the bier. After the eulogy, artillery cannons fired a salute. Everyone wore black insignia, with many choosing a darkened badge of the Society of the Cincinnati, an elite organization of former Revolutionary War officers whose badge had come to symbolize the Federalist Party.

  As President, Adams ordered that all military stations observe similar “funeral honors” for Washington, which the Army interpreted to mean military processions, gun salutes, solemn music, and spoken eulogies. Hundreds of communities followed suit with funerary processions and eulogies of their own, which enabled countless Americans to mourn Washington’s passing in a public way. Perhaps the largest such ceremony occurred on December 26 in Philadelphia, which was still the nation’s capital. Congress designated Federalist Representative Henry Lee of Virginia to deliver the eulogy at the event. There he spoke the words that many still use to characterize Washington: “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”

  At the time, some Federalists sought to take part
isan advantage of the sincere and widespread emotional response to Washington’s passing. They planned and led the ceremony in Philadelphia, for example, and Lee’s eulogy repeated the Federalist mantra: “Liberty and Order.” Republicans, in contrast, stood simply for “liberty” and took the American Revolution’s liberty cap, liberty pole, and liberty tree as their symbols. For many conservative Americans, however, the riotous revolutionaries in France had appropriated these symbols and equated them with a reign of terror. Federalists thus stressed the need for “ordered” or “civil” liberty and equated the Republicans’ notion of “liberty” with licentiousness and Jacobin mob rule. “Civil liberty,” explained Federalist leader John Jay, who then served as New York’s governor, “consists not in a right to every man to do just as he pleases, but it consists in an equal right…to do…whatever the equal and constitutional laws of the country admit to be consistent with the public good.” Their firm stand for civil order in turbulent times represented a principal appeal of the Federalists in the 1790s. Stressing this theme in his eulogy, Lee mourned Washington’s death coming at a time “when the civilized world shakes to its center [and] when every moment gives birth to strange and momentous changes.” He claimed to be hearing Washington plead, from beyond the grave, “Let Liberty and Order be inseparable companions.”

  Taking up two other Federalist election themes, Lee also claimed to be hearing Washington ask Americans to “reverence religion” and “control party spirit, the bane of free government.” Federalists freely denounced Jefferson as a Deist or atheist while calling on America’s Protestant majority to support their party’s God-fearing candidates. Privately, Washington and Adams inclined toward Deism or Unitarianism, too, but at least they publicly invoked God’s blessing on America through displays of civil religion and attended Protestant services. Despite the inroads of Enlightenment thought, particularly among the elites, evangelical Protestantism remained strong in the United States and most Americans valued the role of religion in civil society.