His Excellency_George Washington

by Joseph J. Ellis

  Meanwhile the old routines buoyed his days. The guests kept coming in small waves, most of them referring to their host as “The General” rather than “The President,” a few harking back to the old honorific “His Excellency.” Hamilton kept writing to ask for advice about the proper deployment of the never-to-be New army, letters which Washington answered in his old commander-in-chief mode, warning that deployments on the western frontier risked war with Spain, which was probably just what Hamilton wanted to provoke. A few Federalists, noting recent Republican gains in state elections, urged him to remain open to a draft if it seemed likely that Jefferson would oust Adams in the next election. He dismissed these urgings with a backhanded slap at the partisan atmosphere, then unburdened himself one final time on the dishonorable tactics of Jefferson’s supporters, who would surely, and now with greater plausibility, accuse him of being senile: “Let That party set up a broomstick,” he shouted, “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!” At some level he recognized that political parties were transforming the shape of national politics, making character as he understood it irrelevant, even a liability. The new ground rules, soon to triumph in the new century, struck him as both alien and awful, a world in which he had no place.35

  He made one intriguing gesture on the political front, a letter requesting Patrick Henry to reenter the political arena in Virginia in order to stem the Republican tide that was swelling around Jefferson’s prospective presidency. It was an odd request, since Henry shared Jefferson’s political principles, most especially his hatred of a fully empowered federal government that threatened Virginia’s domestic agenda. But Washington had fond memories of Henry’s political support during the darkest days of the war. He believed that Henry, unlike Jefferson, was a man of character who would not allow his Republican convictions to take precedence over the national interest. (He probably also knew that Henry and Jefferson utterly detested one another.) But it all came to nothing when Henry’s chronic illness proved fatal.36

  Mount Vernon remained the bittersweet object of his affections and frustrations. He continued to search out ways to consolidate his holdings by leasing outlying farms. His updated plan, another meticulously crafted blueprint more detailed than any of his military campaigns during the war, called for reducing the size of his operation, releasing James Anderson, his dutiful but overmatched manager, then taking personal control over the surviving remnant of land and laborers. If he could not lease them locally, he was apparently considering moving his surplus slaves to his western lands in order to make more productive use of their labor on virgin soil. Though his will made a clear moral statement about slavery after he was gone, he continued to juggle moral and economic priorities with mutual regard for both considerations. Morality, in Washington’s mind, needed constantly to negotiate its way against the harsh realities of the world as it is, rather than as it ought to be.37

  These same harsh realities came to claim him on December 12, 1799. Despite a storm that deposited a blanket of snow, sleet, and hail on the region, Washington maintained his regular routine, riding his rounds for five hours in the storm, then choosing not to change his wet clothes, because dinner was ready upon his return and he did not wish to inconvenience his guests with a delay. The following day he was hoarse, but insisted on going out in the still inclement weather to mark some trees for cutting. He presumed he had caught a cold, and felt the best treatment was to ignore it: “Let it go as it came,” as he explained. During the night, however, he awakened Martha to report severe shortness of breath and pain in his throat. Word went out at dawn to fetch Lear and Dr. James Craik, Washington’s personal physician and friend for over forty years. Craik immediately diagnosed Washington’s condition as serious, possibly terminal, and he dispatched riders to bring two local physicians to Mount Vernon to assist him in prescribing treatment.38

  Washington enjoyed the best care that medical science of that time could provide. Unfortunately, everything the doctors did made matters worse. They bled him four times, extracting more than five pints of his blood. They blistered him around the neck. They administered several strong laxatives—all misguided attempts to purge his body of infection. If antibiotics had been available then, Washington would almost surely have survived to keep his promise to Mrs. Powel. As it was, the infection that had invaded his throat was untreatable and fatal.

  Subsequent studies by modern medical experts have concluded that Washington most probably suffered from a virulent bacterial infection of the epiglottis, a plum-sized flexible cartilage at the entry of the larynx. Epiglottitis is an extremely painful and horrific way to die, especially for a man as compulsively committed to self-control as Washington. As it swells, the epiglottis closes off the windpipe, making breathing and swallowing extremely difficult, eventually impossible. The fully conscious patient has the sensation of being slowly strangled to death by involuntary muscles inside his own body. In Washington’s case the last hours must have been even more excruciating, since he was essentially being tortured to death by his doctors at the same time.39

  Eventually Washington ordered his doctors to cease their barbarisms and let him go in peace. “Doctor, I die hard,” he muttered, “but I am not afraid to go.” Then he gave an intriguing final instruction to Lear: “I am just going. Have me decently buried, and do not let my body be put into the Vault in less than two days after I am dead. . . . Do you understand me?” Washington believed that several apparently dead people, perhaps including Jesus, had really been buried alive, a fate he wished to avoid. His statement also calls attention to a missing presence at the deathbed scene: there were no ministers in the room, no prayers uttered, no Christian rituals offering the solace of everlasting life. The inevitable renderings of Washington’s death by nineteenth-century artists often added religious symbols to the scene, frequently depicting his body ascending into heaven surrounded by a chorus of angels. The historical evidence suggests that Washington did not think much about heaven or angels; the only place he knew his body was going was into the ground, and as for his soul, its ultimate location was unknowable. He died as a Roman stoic rather than a Christian saint.

  The end came between ten and eleven o’clock on the evening of December 14. Besides the doctors, Lear, and Martha, the bedside entourage included three women slaves serving as nurses and Washington’s body servant, Christopher Sheels, who had replaced the crippled Billy Lee a few years earlier. (Christopher had recently tried to escape slavery with his new wife, but Washington chose not to punish him for making the effort and Christopher remained at his side until the end.) As that end approached, Washington noticed that Christopher, who had been standing for many hours, was visibly fatigued, so he invited him to sit down. His last words were, “’Tis well.” His last act, taking charge for the final time, was to feel his own pulse as he expired.40

  He was buried in the family vault four days later. The culminating piece of evidence in the long debate about his height materialized at this time, when his corpse was measured in order to provide specifications for his lead-lined mahogany coffin. It showed that he was 6' 3 1⁄2" tall, though some scholars have questioned its accuracy. As far as his contemporaries were concerned, there was no question about his stature in American history. In the extravaganza of mourning that occurred in more than four hundred towns and hamlets throughout the land, he was described as the only indisputable hero of the age, the one and only “His Excellency.”

  EULOGIES

  MOST OF THE EULOGIES provided only platitudinous lamentations on his passing, often observing that his departure coincided with the end of the century, obviously a sign that the first chapter of American history was ending. Two of the eulogists, however, managed to sound more resonant notes that afford an opportunity to take his measure as a man in that last moment before the legendary renderings, already being composed, gathered around him like ivy on a statue to obscure his
human features.

  In the eulogy that has echoed through the ages, Henry Lee proclaimed that Washington was “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” This formulation offered an elegantly concise summation of the three historical achievements on which his reputation rested: leading the Continental army to victory against the odds and thereby winning American independence; securing the Revolution by overseeing the establishment of a new nation-state during its most fragile and formative phase of development; and embodying that elusive and still latent thing called “the American people,” thereby providing the illusion of coherence to what was in fact a messy collage of regional and state allegiances. There was a consensus at the time, since confirmed for all time, that no one else could have performed these elemental tasks as well, and perhaps that no one could have performed them at all.

  In effect, there were two distinct creative moments in the American founding, the winning of independence and the invention of nationhood, and Washington was the central figure in both creations. No one else in the founding generation could match these revolutionary credentials, so no one else could plausibly challenge his place atop the American version of Mount Olympus. Whatever minor missteps he had made along the way, his judgment on all the major political and military questions had invariably proved prescient, as if he had known where history was headed; or, perhaps, as if the future had felt compelled to align itself with his choices. He was that rarest of men: a supremely realistic visionary, a prudent prophet whose final position on slavery served as the capstone to a career devoted to getting the big things right. His genius was his judgment.

  But where did that come from? Clearly, it did not emanate from books or formal education, places where it is customary and often correct to look for the wellspring that filled the minds of such eminent colleagues as Adams, Jefferson, and Madison with their guiding ideas. Though it might seem sacrilegious to suggest, Washington’s powers of judgment derived in part from the fact that his mind was uncluttered with sophisticated intellectual preconceptions. As much a self-made man as Franklin, the self he made was less protean and more primal because his education was more elemental. From his youthful experience on the Virginia frontier as an adventurer and soldier he had internalized a visceral understanding of the arbitrary and capricious ways of the world. Without ever reading Thucydides, Hobbes, or Calvin, he had concluded that men and nations were driven by interests rather than ideals, and that surrendering control to another was invariably harmful, often fatal.

  Armed with these basic convictions, he was capable of a remarkably unblinkered and unburdened response to the increasingly consequential decisions that history placed before him. He no more expected George III and his ministers to respond to conciliatory pleas from the American colonists than he expected Indians to surrender their tribal lands without a fight. He took it for granted that the slaves at Mount Vernon would not work unless closely supervised. He presumed that the Articles of Confederation would collapse in failure or be replaced by a more energetic and empowered federal government, for the same reasons that militia volunteers could never defeat the British army. It also was quite predictable that the purportedly self-enacting ideals of the French Revolution would lead to tragedy and tyranny. With the exception of his Potomac dream, a huge geographic miscalculation, he was incapable of illusion, fully attuned to the specter of evil in the world. All of which inoculated him against the grand illusion of the age, the presumption that there was a natural order in human affairs that would generate perfect harmony once, in Diderot’s phrase, the last king was strangled with the entrails of the last priest. For Washington, the American Revolution was not about destroying political power, as it was for Jefferson, but rather seizing it and using it wisely. Ultimately, his life was all about power: facing it, taming it, channeling it, projecting it. His remarkably reliable judgment derived from his elemental understanding of how power worked in the world.

  A second memorable eulogy, this one delivered by Gouverneur Morris, made an intriguing connection between Washington’s grasp of the dynamics of power and his grip on himself. Morris observed that Washington’s legendary calmness and statue-like stolidity masked truly volcanic energies and emotions. Anyone who knew him well could testify, Morris claimed, that he was a man of “tumultuous passions” and could “bear witness that his wrath was terrible.” Intimate acquaintances felt the explosive energy lurking beneath the surface “and have seen boiling in his bosom, passions almost too mighty for man.” In Morris’s formulations, the potency of Washington’s vaunted capacity for self control derived from the virulence of the internal demons he had been required to master.41

  The image of a volcanic Washington seething with barely contained emotions and ambitions flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which emphasizes the serenity of the man who would not be king. But no less a source than Gilbert Stuart, who brought a trained artist’s eye to the subject, confirmed the Morris assessment. “Had he been born in the forests,” Stuart observed while painting Washington, “he would have been the fiercest man among the savage tribes.”42

  If we adopt the Morris and Stuart perspective, all kinds of lights go on up and down the line of Washington’s life: the frequent harangues against his overseers at Mount Vernon; the tirade against the retreating Charles Lee at Monmouth Court House; the outburst against Philip Freneau’s journalistic diatribes during a cabinet meeting; the secluded seething against James Monroe’s attacks on the Jay Treaty during his final retirement. These discernible leaks suggest that a massive reservoir of emotional intensity remained pent up inside the mature Washington, and that his interior wrestling match to subdue them never resulted in a conclusive triumph, as Morris suggested, because the ambitions never died. This is a man, after all, who kept coming back to center stage and who, despite his thoroughly sincere protestations in the Ciceronian vein, remained obsessed with imposing his will even after his death.

  The clearest evidence that we are talking about a truly monumental ego with a massive personal agenda comes from the early years before and during the French and Indian War. At this youthful stage the internal editing process had yet to develop its later strength, and the record more fully reveals the self-made man feverishly striving to become a self-made hero, which is the chief reason Washington kept returning to his early correspondence to edit out the evidence. Though George III and his ministers did not decide to place their empire in North America at risk in order to provide a Virginia squire with a larger stage on which to display his talents, that is precisely what happened. And it happened, at least in part, because Washington was alert to the opportunity the political crisis presented, much as he had been alert to the availability of Virginia’s wealthiest widow. Ambitions this gargantuan were only glorious if harnessed to a cause larger than oneself, which they most assuredly were after 1775. But even in the glorious rendition of “His Excellency” serving “The Cause,” a leader driven by such internal propulsion needed to be aware of arrogant appearances. Two of Washington’s abiding characteristics—his aloofness and his capacity for remaining silent—were in all likelihood protective tactics developed to prevent detection of the combustible materials simmering inside.43

  Of course, Morris’s main point was that the passions that stirred Washington’s soul required the creation of control mechanisms that subsequently served the nation so well when Washington voluntarily stepped away from power, first in 1783, and then again in 1796. Morris was saying that his psychological struggle for self-control prepared Washington to perform the crowning political achievement of his career. What we might call Washington’s internal muscularity is, of course, impossible to see, though Morris implied that it was just as impressive as his marvelous physique. We can only describe its visible manifestations. And on that score there were five self-denying decisions that stand out: the rejection of his love for Sally Fairfax; the adoption of a Fabian strategy against the British army in 1777, despite his own aggressive inst
incts; the symbolic surrender of his sword at Annapolis; the refusal to serve a third term as president; and the dismemberment of his estate in his will. While Morris’s formulation focuses attention on what Washington was prepared to give up in each instance, we should also notice that all the surrenders paved the way to larger acquisitions: a great fortune; victory in the war; and secular immortality. All the disciplined denials were also occasions to catch the next wave forward.

  We might nudge Morris’s line of thought in a slightly different direction, focusing not on the dramatic displays of self-control themselves but on the ongoing internal struggle as a lifelong educational process in which Washington hammered out, on the anvil of his own ambitions, his elemental convictions about political power. His insistence, for example, on a powerful Continental army and a wholly sovereign federal government become projections onto the national screen of the need for the same kind of controlling authority he had orchestrated within his own personality; a recognition that he could no more trust the people to behave virtuously than he could trust his own instincts to behave altruistically. One of the reasons, to take another example, he eventually found Jefferson dishonorable was that, unlike Hamilton, Jefferson could never acknowledge the depth of his own political ambitions.