by Ron Chernow
The president summoned Dr. Samuel Bard, a prominent New York physician, who diagnosed the condition as the cutaneous form of anthrax. Petrified that Washington would expire, Bard refused to leave his bedside for several days. The situation must have shocked everyone around Washington: no sooner had the federal government been formed than its president lay in mortal peril. In all likelihood, Washington had a carbuncle or soft tissue infection. As might be expected, he was the picture of stoic courage. “I am not afraid to die and therefore can bear the worst,” he told Bard evenly. “Whether tonight, or twenty years hence, makes no difference. I know that I am in the hands of a good Providence.”2 The public knew something was wrong, if only because Tobias Lear had servants cordon off Cherry Street, stopping traffic. The household staff also sprinkled straw outside the mansion to deaden passing footsteps. Still, the public had no notion of the gravity of the president’s illness.
On June 17, when Dr. Bard operated on Washington’s thigh, he brought along his father, Dr. John Bard, to supervise the proceedings. The elder Bard, a veteran surgeon, felt too old to undertake the procedure himself. Surgery was then a hellish ordeal, as the patient gritted his teeth and endured excruciating pain. While the younger Dr. Bard split open the abscess, his father exhorted him to persevere: “Cut away—deeper—deeper still! Don’t be afraid. You see how well he bears it!”3 Tobias Lear claimed that the tumor was “very large and the incision on opening it deep.”4 In all likelihood, the younger Bard excised the mass of infected tissue and scraped away any pus or dead tissue, all of which would have been enormously painful for Washington, who remained unfailingly courteous. As Samuel Bard assured his daughter, “It will give you pleasure to be told that nothing can exceed the kindness and attention I receive from him.”5
For weeks afterward, as Washington lay bedridden, some friends thought he might never recover his legendary strength. “I have now the pleasure to inform you that my health is restored,” Washington apprised James McHenry on July 3, “but a feebleness still hangs upon me, and I am yet much incommoded by the incision which was made in a very large and painful tumor on the protuberance of my thigh.”6 In extreme discomfort, unable to walk or sit, he reclined on his right side for six weeks and couldn’t even draft a letter. When Abigail Adams visited, she found him, with becoming presidential dignity, stretched out on the sofa and praised this “singular example of modesty and diffidence.”7
The interior of Washington’s coach was reconfigured so he could lie down, although he had to be lifted and deposited gently inside by four servants. For an hour each day, he made salutary tours of the town with Martha. On July 4, 1789, Baron von Steuben and Alexander Hamilton—now, respectively, president and vice president of the New York Society of the Cincinnati—trooped to 3 Cherry Street to pay their respects before Hamilton delivered a eulogy to Nathanael Greene at St. Paul’s Chapel. In a moving homage to Greene’s memory, Washington, despite his discomfort, dressed up in full regimentals to greet his visitors at the door—an unusual instance of Washington donning a military costume during his presidency. To the limited extent possible, he kept up appearances and tried to convey an aura of calm.
By early September, Washington reassured Dr. James Craik that the inflammation had dwindled to “the size of a barleycorn” and that he expected it would shortly disappear altogether.8 Martha Washington was hugely relieved, although a visitor noticed that when she discussed her husband’s health, “a tear of apprehension for futurity was in her eye.”9 Except with intimates, Washington was discreet about discussing his malady. Dr. Craik and other friends urged him to launch a brisk regimen of outdoor exercise to offset his staid indoor life. Washington conceded that his job might have contributed to his ailment and might even kill him, but he was resigned to the sacrifice. Echoing Shakespeare, he said, “The want of regular exercise, with the cares of office, will, I have no doubt, hasten my departure for that country from whence no traveler returns.”10 Nevertheless, his official duties, he maintained, would remain “the primary consideration in every transaction of my life, be the consequences what they may.”11
Washington took to heart his friends’ advice to do more exercise, which was one reason he made a trip to New England that fall. Upon his return, he and Martha, along with Nelly and Washy, began extended coach rides around Manhattan, often cruising a fourteen-mile loop that took them to the scenic northern reaches of the island. Even in the winter, Washington supplemented these excursions with strolls around the Battery. Sometimes he mixed in a smattering of politics, as happened in January when he went horseback riding with Senator Samuel Johnston of North Carolina and William Cushing, an associate justice of the Supreme Court—a perfect equestrian union of all three branches of government.
WASHINGTON’S ILLNESS coincided with the final stages of Mary Ball Washington’s protracted struggle with breast cancer. Showing belated maternal warmth, Mary had her daughter, Betty, write to the new president, apropos of his convalescence, that she “wishes to hear from you; she will not believe you are well till she has it from under your own hand.” 12 Mary had always been a hardy woman and, even as she aged, retained “full enjoyment of her mental faculties,” according to her famous son.13 Clinging to her independence, she still made daily visits to her farm in an open carriage, until illness rendered that impossible. When he visited his redoubtable mother in early March 1789, Washington knew he might never see her again and that it would be “the last act of personal duty I may . . . ever have it in my power to pay my mother.”14 It is significant that he employed the word duty, since affection had never formed part of the picture. Whatever she may have said privately, Mary Washington took no more public pride in his being president than she had in his command of the Continental Army. But it’s hard to imagine that on his last visit to his mother, Washington was unmoved by the sight of a dying parent, cruelly disfigured by disease, or that he felt no residual gratitude toward her. Whatever her glaring flaws, Mary Washington had worked hard to raise him in the absence of a father.
By mid-August Mary Ball Washington had drifted into a coma; she finally passed away on August 25, 1789, at eighty-one. On September 1 Washington was hosting a dinner party, with Steuben keeping the table in uproarious merriment, when the laughter was abruptly silenced by a message announcing her death. Despite his reservations about his mother, Washington was much too decorous to dispense with the proper forms of mourning. Always correct in his conduct toward his mother, he ordered black cockades and ribbons for his household staff, while government members wore black crape on their arms; black ribbons and necklaces became de rigueur for ladies. Official New York went into mourning for a woman whom they had never seen and who had shown scant interest in the new government. The formal levees were canceled for three weeks. Soon the capital resumed its normal social rhythm, but Washington wore badges of mourning for at least five months. In what seems like shocking neglect, however, he failed to erect a tombstone on his mother’s grave. “The grave of Washington’s mother is marked by no visible object, not even a mound of earth, nor is the precise spot of its locality known,” noted an astonished Jared Sparks during an 1827 visit to Fredericksburg. “. . . For a long time a single cedar tree was the only guide to the place; near this tree tradition has fixed the grave of Washington’s mother, but there is no stone to point out the place.”15 No special memorial arose at Mary Washington’s graveside until three decades after George Washington’s death.
Washington spoke no eulogies, told no fond anecdotes of the hard, sometimes shrewish mother who had served as the lifelong whetstone of his anger; he took refuge instead in empty generalities. Whether responding to an unspoken accusation from Betty Lewis that he had been derelict in his filial duties, or feeling guilty that his sister had borne the burden of caring for their infirm mother, Washington sent her a detailed accounting of his financial generosity to their mother:She has had a great deal of money from me at times, as can be made [to] appear by my books and the accounts of Mr. L[und]
Washington during my absence. And over and above this [she] has not only had all that was ever made from the plantation, but got her provisions and everything else she thought proper from thence. In short, to the best of my recollection, I have never in my life received a copper from the estate and have paid many hundred pounds (first and last) to her in cash. However, I want no retribution. I conceived it to be a duty whenever she asked for money and I had it to furnish her.16
In her will, Mary Washington named George as executor, a responsibility he couldn’t have relished as president. She left him a bed, curtains, a blue and white quilt, and a dressing mirror—items he identified as “mementoes of parental affection,” but he never took possession of them and left them for his sister’s use.17 Entitled to a one-fifth portion of his mother’s estate, he received two slaves, which meant that Mary Ball Washington had owned as many as ten slaves, certifying that she had scarcely been destitute. The auction of Mary’s belongings that October also suggested that, for all her complaints, the elderly widow had accumulated considerable property. Among the auction items cited in a newspaper advertisement were “stocks of horses, cattle, sheep and hogs, plantation utensils of every kind, carts, hay, and fodder.”18 In fact, Mary had amassed such substantial landholdings that George alone inherited four hundred acres of valuable pine land; he gave it to Robert Lewis, Betty’s son. All of this property had been owned by a woman who saw fit to petition the Virginia legislature for a private pension during the war because of her son’s alleged neglect.
THE MENACING GROWTH ON HIS THIGH and his mother’s death slowed Washington down only slightly as he forged the office of the presidency, which immediately involved him in a thicket of constitutional issues. Could the Supreme Court give advisory opinions to the legislative and executive branches? Would the executive branch supervise American foreign policy, subject to congressional approval, or vice versa? Numberless questions about the basic nature of the federal government would be decided during Washington’s presidency, often in the throes of heated controversy. Although Washington had not been an architect of the system of checks and balances or separation of powers, he gave sharp definition to them by helping to draw the boundaries of the three branches of government in a series of critical test cases.
A central component of the Whig orthodoxy that had spurred the American Revolution was the supremacy of the legislative branch, viewed as a curb to the executive. By design, the framers of the Constitution devoted Article I to a lengthy description of legislative powers, giving Congress the ability to help shape the other two branches. Left deliberately vague was the office of the presidency, allowing its first occupant to fill in the blanks. The earnest Washington tried to adhere to the letter of the Constitution and hoped to enjoy harmonious relations with Congress. But he soon realized that the Constitution was less a precise blueprint for action than a set of general guidelines whose many ambiguities required practical clarification. If bemused by some congressional practices, he tried not to trespass on legislative prerogatives. For instance, he privately opposed the Senate’s closed-door policy, but he kept a discreet silence in public. For its part, Congress groped to define its relationship to the president. In June 1789 some congressmen wanted Washington to have to gain senatorial approval to fire as well as hire executive officers—the Constitution was silent on the subject; the House duly approved that crippling encroachment on executive authority. When the Senate vote ended in a tie, Vice President Adams cast the deciding vote to defeat the measure, thereby permitting the president to exert true leadership over his cabinet and, for better or worse, preventing the emergence of a parliamentary democracy.
The first formal clash between Washington and Congress arose on August 5, 1789, when the Senate rejected Washington’s nomination of Benjamin Fishbourn as collector of the Port of Savannah. Though still ailing, Washington made his way to Federal Hall and mounted to the second-floor Senate chamber, decorated on its ceiling with thirteen stars and suns. Washington’s unexpected entrance stunned the legislators. Undoubtedly feeling a bit befuddled, Vice President Adams rose from his canopied chair of crimson velvet and offered it to Washington, who then proceeded to upbraid the twenty-two members of the Senate, demanding to know why they had spurned his appointee. “The president showed [a] great want of temper . . . when one of his nominations was rejected,” said Senator Ralph Izard of South Carolina. 19 It was an unusual public display of emotion by Washington.
After a long, awkward silence, Senator James Gunn of Georgia, whose state included Savannah, rose and from “personal respect for the personal character of Gen[era]l Washington” explained his opposition to Fishbourn.20 At the same time he wanted it understood that the Senate felt no obligation to explain its reasoning to the president. The episode marked the start of “senatorial courtesy,” whereby senators reserved the right to block nominations in their home states. Despite Gunn’s respectful treatment, Washington went off in a great huff, and Tobias Lear said that as soon as he returned from the Senate, he “expressed his very great regret for having gone there.”21
This skirmish turned out to be trifling compared to the conflict over Indian policy some weeks later. The episode began in mid-June, when Henry Knox, secretary of war, wrote a well-meaning letter to Washington, fleshing out a farsighted approach to Indian affairs. Noting the bloody battles between Indians and American settlers on the frontier, Knox declared that the Indians, as rightful owners of the land, should not be deprived of it by violence or coercion. Rather, he advocated paying them for their land and concentrating them in a system of federally protected enclaves. Knox wanted to initiate this policy by negotiating a treaty with Alexander McGillivray, chief of the Creek Nation, whose hunting grounds extended over parts of modern-day Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi. The corrupt Georgia legislature was ready to make a mockery of any enlightened policy toward the Indians by selling to speculators millions of acres claimed by the Creeks and other southern tribes.
In early August Knox informed Washington that he had worked out a treaty with the Creeks, including several secret articles. Among other things, Knox wanted the executive branch to dominate Indian affairs as a way of bolstering presidential authority. As part of the treaty process, Washington planned to send a three-man commission to broker peace between Georgia and the Creeks, but when Knox drew up instructions for this parley, Washington thought he needed to consult the Senate about them. This time, instead of pouncing unexpectedly, he gave ample warning of his visit. He interpreted the “advice and consent” requirement of the Constitution to include such direct meetings with the Senate, but the ensuing contretemps changed the course of American history. When Washington arrived on August 22, he again occupied Adams’s seat, with Knox seated to his left. They delivered a copy of the treaty papers to Adams, who tried to read them aloud but was drowned out by traffic below. “I could tell it was something about Indians,” grumbled William Maclay, “but was not master of one sentence of it.”22 When the windows were shut, Adams read aloud the seven articles of the treaty, to be followed by a yea or nay vote on each. After he read the first one, Robert Morris stood and said he hadn’t been able to hear anything above the racket, forcing Adams to reread the whole treaty. He then recited the first article again, followed by an uncomfortable silence.
Some in the Senate believed that Washington wanted them merely to rubber-stamp treaties and appointments instead of exercising independent judgment. When Maclay requested a reading of the supporting treaties between the southern Indians and three southern states, Washington fixed him with an icy glare. “I cast an eye at the president of the United States,” Maclay wrote. “I saw he wore an aspect of stern displeasure.”23 Robert Morris moved that the papers brought by Washington be referred to a committee. When Maclay defended the propriety of this motion, Washington’s expression grew even more forbidding, and he hotly contested the idea of committing anything to a committee. *“ ‘This defeats every purpose of my coming here’ were the first words
that he said,” Maclay wrote in his diary. “He then went on that he had brought his Secretary at War with him to give every necessary information.”24 Washington refused to yield on the committee proposal, although he agreed to postpone the matter. In Maclay’s version of events, Washington, having shown flashes of temper, withdrew with “a discontented air” and a sense of “sullen dignity.”25
A couple of days later Washington returned to the Senate, which approved the three commissioners to negotiate with the Creeks. It proved his farewell appearance in the Senate chamber. In a decision pregnant with lasting consequences, Washington decided that he would henceforth communicate with that body on paper rather than in person and trim “advice and consent” to the word consent. For instance, when Washington appointed David Humphreys as a diplomat to the Court of Portugal in February 1791, Maclay noted that the choice was sent to the Senate as a fait accompli: “The president sends first and asks for our advice and consent after.”26
This decision may have done more to define the presidency and the conduct of American foreign policy than an entire bookshelf of Supreme Court decisions on the separation of powers. Where the Constitution had been sketchy about presidential powers in foreign affairs, Washington made the chief executive the principal actor, enabling him to initiate treaties and nominate appointees without first huddling with the Senate. It was an instinctive reaction from a man who had grown accustomed to command during the war. If a touch imperious, it was a far more realistic approach to foreign policy than constant collaboration and horse-trading between the president and Senate. For one thing, the presidency was continuously in session, unlike Congress, and it was much easier for one man to take decisive action, especially in an emergency. Washington’s decision also widened the distance between president and Senate, enabling the latter to function as an independent, critical voice in foreign policy rather than as a subordinate advisory panel.
