by Alexis Coe
Washington “Wash” Parke Custis, his step-grandson, was helping him get there. “Having heard nothing from you, or of you, since you left the Federal City, but hoping you got safe to Princeton, the sole intention of this letter is to cover the enclosed,” he wrote to Wash, forwarding a letter from his sister, Eleanor “Nelly” Parke Custis, in May 1797.7 Washington’s note was four sentences long and somewhat unnecessary, considering that Wash and Nelly corresponded directly, so it seems written to convey his annoyance. Wash had indeed arrived in New Jersey, but by September he had been suspended “for various acts of meanness and irregularity.”8 Washington kept that part from Martha, who only knew he was switching colleges.
Wash wrote more often from the College of St. John, his new school in Annapolis, but it was never good news: He wanted to marry a merchant’s daughter; he needed more money; he’d lost a friend’s umbrella; most of all, he wanted to know if he could just quit school already. Seething over the question, Washington wrote in the summer of 1798 that it “really astonishes me! for it would seem as if nothing I could say to you made more than a momentary impression.”9 By August, he gave in to the reality that if Wash was going to complete his education, he would only do so by private tutor at home, where Martha could dote on him and Washington could watch him closely. (“Grandmamma always spoiled him,” Nelly would later say of her brother.10) Tobias Lear, who lived in a house on the property with Fanny, stepped in.
James Monroe, whom Washington had recalled from France in 1796, helped raise his blood pressure even further the following year, when he published A View of the Conduct of the Executive, in the Foreign Affairs of the United States, a 473-page critique of Washington’s administration and a defense of his own conduct. Washington, who rarely responded to criticism in writing, let loose in the margins of his copy, starting with the very first sentence. Monroe wrote: “In the Month of May, 1794, I was invited by the President of the United States, through the Secretary of State, to accept the office of the minister of plenipotentiary to the French Republic.” To which Washington scrawled a tart rebuttal: “After several attempts had failed to obtain a more eligible character.”11
Even without Monroe in Paris, the revolutionary committee that governed France continued to make its displeasure about the Jay Treaty known. The five members of the so-called Directory rejected John Adams’s new ambassador to France and ordered that American trading ships be seized.
WASHINGTON UNBOUND
Washington could keep control of his anger in most situations, but he often left the impression that he was seething beneath it all. “His temper was naturally high toned,” Jefferson recalled in January 1814. When “it broke its bonds, he was most tremendous in his wrath.”12 These marginalia offer some of the only firsthand evidence we have.
MONROE’S TEXT
WASHINGTON’S ANNOTATION
But it was my duty to answer this letter, which I did without a comment; for it was improper for me to censure and useless to advise.
When a rational answer and good reasons cannot be given, it is not unusual to be silent.
I shewed, it is true, no mark of undue condescension to that government.
Few will be of this opinion, who reads this Book.
Had France been conquered, to what objects that administration would have aspired, has fortunately, by her victories, been left a subject for conjecture only.
An insinuation as impudent, as unfounded.
I resolved, therefore, to stand firm at my post. . . .
Curious and laughable to hear a man under his circumstances talking seriously in this stile, when his recal was a second death to him.
The appearance of the treaty excited the general disgust of France against the American government, which was now diminished by the opposition which the American people made to the treaty.
Who were the contrivers of this disgust and for what purpose was it excited? Let the French Party in the U.S. and the British debtors therein answer the question.
But by this attack on me, a new topic has been raised for discussion, which has drawn the public attention from the conduct of the administration itself.
Self importance appears here.
. . . yet none of those acts or of the disposition which produced them were even glanced at in the president’s address to congress, although it was to be inferred, such notice would have produced a good effect, and although it was then as just as it was politic to notice them.
What! declare to the world in a public speech that we were going to Treat with this and that Nation, and that France was to assist us! Insanity in the extreme!
Fourth, my appointment to the French republic with the circumstances attending it.
And an unfortunate one it was.13
Adams, the first (and only) president who openly identified with the Federalists, wanted to muster an army in case hostilities broke out, and turned to sixty-six-year-old Washington, who had left the Continental Army fifteen years earlier, to lead it.14 “We must have your Name, if you, in any case will permit Us to Use it,” Adams pleaded in June 1798. “There will be more efficacy in it, than in many an Army.”15 Washington agreed, as long as he could remain at Mount Vernon until “the army is in a situation to require my presence, or it becomes indispensible by the urgency of circumstances.”16 He had no idea that Adams would promptly announce his appointment, followed by Alexander Hamilton and Charles C. Pinckney, as major general to assist in the organization of the Provisional Army, and that he would soon be bombarded with letters from men who wanted to serve under him.
By the end of the year, Washington did indeed travel farther than twenty-five miles. He rode to Philadelphia and spent five weeks advising Hamilton. Ultimately, though, Adams opted for a diplomatic solution. The conflict became known as the Quasi-War, or the Half War, or the Undeclared War.
A year later, Jonathan Trumbull, Jr., the governor of Connecticut, urged Washington to resume another role: The presidential election of 1800 was near, and Adams was unpopular. Would he run on the Federalist ticket? Washington firmly declined. “It would be criminal therefore in me, although it should be the wish of my Country men,” he wrote in protest in July 1799, sure “another would discharge with more ability.” And besides, he’d become known as a Federalist partisan. “I should not draw a single vote from the Anti-federal side,” he told Trumbull.17
Before leaving Philadelphia, he visited his old friend Robert Morris in debtors’ prison; the financier who had once rented the Washingtons his own home was now without one. Washington was far from that fate, but he was also far from comfortable. “I shall not suffer false modesty to assert that my financies stand in no need of it,” he wrote to Secretary of War James McHenry, declining a salary, out of pride, for the months he served as commander in chief. He should have taken it. Washington’s crops had suffered from drought, and he was still owed monies from loans and rents. To stabilize his finances, he rented out his whiskey distillery and gristmill, and began making elaborate plans for his farms. He hoped to have it all sorted out by 1800, a year he would not live to see.
CHAPTER 20
“’Tis Well”
Washington’s to-do list, by his estimate, was going to take three years to complete. He awoke on the morning of Thursday, December 12, 1799, to rain, hail, and snow, but wouldn’t let the weather delay his agenda; he rode out to his farms and back, a journey of five hours. When Washington returned, he didn’t change out of his wet clothes or warm himself by the fire; he had already kept Martha waiting long enough for dinner. Friday brought another snowy, windy day. By that point, according to To
bias Lear’s diary, Washington had “taken cold (undoubtedly from being so much exposed the day before) and complained of a sore throat.” But he remained set on accomplishing his next task—marking trees to be felled—and went out anyway.1
That evening, his voice was increasingly hoarse, but he wanted to stay up. Martha excused herself to check on Nelly upstairs; her granddaughter had given birth to a daughter, Francis Parke Lewis, in November.2 Washington was in good spirits until Lear, who had been reading the papers in the parlor, shared the latest on the Virginia Assembly. Monroe had been elected governor, with Madison’s backing, which left Washington “much affected.” He “spoke with some asperity on the subject,” Lear reported—probably a polite way to describe cursing.
Take some medicine, Lear suggested on the way out.
“You know I never take anything for a Cold,” Washington replied. “Let it go as it came.”
At 2 a.m., “he awoke Mrs. Washington.” He could hardly speak. He had difficulty breathing. She wanted to send for help, but he protested. Martha had been sick, and he feared the early-morning air would cause her to relapse. Four excruciating hours later, Caroline, a household slave, came to light the fire in their room. Martha sent her to get Lear, and Lear sent a servant to get Dr. James Craik, who had attended to Washington since the French and Indian War; he had just been at the house to deliver Nelly’s baby.
Washington asked for George Rawlins, an overseer who did a little bloodletting on the side. In the meantime, “a mixture of Molasses, Vinegar & butter was prepared to try its effects in the throat; but he could not swallow a drop; whenever he attempted it he appeared to be distressed, convulsed and almost suffocated.” Christopher Sheels, who had replaced Billy Lee as Washington’s enslaved manservant, propped Washington up by the fire. Caroline remained; she was soon joined by two other house slaves, Charlotte and Molly. Rawlins appeared after sunrise and nervously prepared to bleed him by cutting his arm.
“Don’t be afraid,” Lear heard Washington tell Rawlins, only to add that the cut was “not large enough.” Others disagreed; Lear thought “the blood ran pretty freely” and Martha “begged that much might not be taken from him, lest it should be injurious.” Lear was inclined to listen to her, and was about to untie the string that restricted the veins to promote blood flow, but “the General put up his hand to prevent it, and as soon as he could speak, said ‘more, more!’” By the time Craik arrived at 9 a.m., Washington had bled a pint of blood.
“’Tis very sore,” he managed. He was still coughing, his breath short and shallow.
Craik had his own well-intentioned bad ideas. He produced a blister on his patient’s throat with Spanish flies and gave him an enema and a vinegar and sage tea, which didn’t go well. “[I]n attempting to use the gargle he was almost suffocated.” At Craik’s insistence, Washington tried to cough up phlegm, but couldn’t. Around 3 p.m., two more doctors—Gustavus Richard Brown and Elisha Cullen Dick—arrived, and they spent the rest of the day coming in and out of the room, discussing options in the hallway. They administered an emetic to induce vomiting and evacuate his bowels, which left him dehydrated. Dick suggested a tracheotomy but, much to his regret, was overruled. Washington demanded to be bled again and again.
“The blood came very slow, was thick, and did not produce any symptoms of fainting,” Lear observed in his diary. “He could only speak at intervals and with great difficulty,” he wrote to Hamilton.3
“We were governed by the best light we had,” Brown would later write to Craik. “We thought we were right; and so we were justified.”4 And by the medical standards of the day, and the information available to them, they were. But everything Craik, Brown, and Dick did made Washington’s condition worse.
Around 4:30 p.m., Washington asked Lear to get Martha, who preferred to wait in another room.
He sent her to his study to get the wills. (He had two: The earlier one, possibly dated around June 1775, had been drawn by a lawyer friend; the other was more recent.5) As he neared death, Washington was still focused on what people around him were feeling, and what those left behind would remember about him.
* * *
In the summer of 1799, Washington had written a new will. He had been an executor, administrator, and trustee for enough people to know that his last wishes needed to be clear. He filled twenty-nine watermarked pages with his neat, looping handwriting, endeavoring “to be plain, and explicit in all Devices.”
The document, which includes a painstaking inventory of his worldly possessions, reveals him to be one of the richest men in America. He wasn’t lying when he had claimed to be cash poor—though there always seemed to be money for finery, or to hire slave hunters to catch Hercules and Ona Judge—but he wasn’t exactly telling the truth, either.
Washington was land rich, incredibly so, far past his own plantation. Washington owned 51,000 acres of land, mostly in what was then Virginia, but also Maryland, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and what became Ohio, along with small tracts in various cities; that included properties in the City of Washington (now Washington, D.C., which is currently, for context, a total of 43,740 acres). Over the years, Washington had tried to sell some of it off, but he rarely succeeded; either there were no takers, or there were, but they didn’t meet his criteria. Had he accepted the offers he received, he might have had enough money to do what he’d been talking about for two decades: emancipate the people he’d enslaved.
Instead, Washington failed to free a single slave during his lifetime. He was always waiting for something—a land deal, a law to compel him—but in the end, he always came back to the same problem: The fate of his slaves’ families. Many of the people Washington enslaved had married the Custis slaves, who belonged to Martha’s heirs, and it seems her family had no intention of freeing them.
But Washington wouldn’t have to deal with any of those complications after he died. In his will he stipulated that his hundred and twenty-three slaves should be freed—after Martha had her use of them, and the income they would generate.
Upon the decease of my wife, it is my Will & desire that all the Slaves which I hold in my own right, shall receive their freedom. To emancipate them during her life, would, tho’ earnestly wished by me, be attended with such insuperable difficulties on account of their intermixture by Marriages with the dower Negroes, as to excite the most painful sensations, if not disagreeable consequences from the latter, while both descriptions are in the occupancy of the same Proprietor; it not being in my power, under the tenure by which the Dower Negroes are held, to manumit them.6
There were other provisions. His slaves should be “comfortably” clothed and fed; younger slaves, bound as servants until the age of twenty-five, should be taught to read and write and a trade; older or sick slaves should be provided with care after they were emancipated—whenever that happened. Martha might live for another ten years.
It is notable that Washington did not make all of his slaves wait until Martha’s death. He singled out Billy Lee for special treatment:
And to my Mulatto man William (calling himself William Lee) I give immediate freedom; or if he should prefer it (on account of the accidents which have befallen him, and which have rendered him incapable of walking or of any active employment) to remain in the situation he now is, it shall be optional in him to do so: In either case however, I allow him an annuity of thirty dollars during his natural life, which shall be independent of the victuals and cloaths he has been accustomed to receive, if he chuses the last alternative; but in full, with his freedom, if he prefers the first; & this I give him as a testimony of my sense of his attachment to me, and for his faithful services during the Revolutionary War.
Washington had always seen Lee as exceptional. He did not free him sooner, though, because he truly believed, as he often said, that Lee was better off in his “care.”
* * *
Martha brought her husband the two wills, and he made a dec
ision. He chose the one drawn most recently that freed his slaves upon her death; that one, she put in her closet. The other one “he observed useless” and “desired her to burn it; which she did.”
“I find I am going, my breath can not last long,” he said to Lear, their hands intertwined. “I beleived from the first that the disorder would prove fatal.” He asked that his longtime secretary see to his military letters and papers, his accounts and books, “as you know more about them than any one else.” Washington’s will gave Bushrod Washington, a favorite nephew and Supreme Court justice, control over his personal papers; after Martha died, he would inherit the mansion house, the surrounding farm, and much of the remaining estate.7
A MORE CONSERVATIVE NARRATIVE
