by Ron Chernow
As they awaited Dr. Craik, Martha summoned the eminent Dr. Gustavus Richard Brown of Port Tobacco. Dr. Craik, arriving first, perpetuated the medieval treatments already in use, emptying more blood and applying to the throat cantharides, a preparation made from dried beetles, to draw the inflammation to the surface. He also had Washington inhale steam from a teapot filled with vinegar and hot water. When Washington tilted back his head to gargle sage tea mixed with vinegar, he nearly suffocated. Alarmed, Dr. Craik summoned a third doctor, Elisha Cullen Dick, a young Mason from Alexandria, who had studied under Dr. Benjamin Rush. Upon entering, he joined Craik in siphoning off more blood, which “came very slow, was thick, and did not produce any symptoms of fainting,” wrote Lear.13 They also evacuated Washington’s bowels with an enema. Joined at last by Dr. Brown, they took two more pints from Washington’s depleted body. It has been estimated that Washington surrendered five pints of blood altogether, or about half of his body’s total supply.14 Dr. Dick recommended a still rare and highly experimental procedure—a tracheotomy that would have punched open a hole in Washington’s trachea, easing his breathing—only to be overruled by Craik and Brown. “I shall never cease to regret that the operation was not performed,” Dick said afterward, likening the three physicians to drowning men grasping at straws.15 It is highly improbable, however, that Washington would have survived such a procedure, given his already weakened state.
As Tobias Lear sat by the bedside, grasping his mentor’s hand, Washington issued some final instructions that reflect his preoccupation with both his posthumous fame and his solvency: “I believed from the first that the disorder would prove fatal. Do you arrange and record all my late military letters and papers. Arrange my accounts and settle my books . . . and let Mr. Rawlins finish recording my other letters, which he has begun.”16 When Lear remarked that he hoped the end wasn’t near, Washington smiled calmly and said that he regarded his own demise “with perfect resignation.”17
After Dick and Brown left the room, Craik lingered by his old friend. “Doctor, I die hard,” Washington said, “but I am not afraid to go.”18 Convinced the end was imminent, he told Martha to go downstairs to his study and remove a pair of wills from his desk drawer. He then took the earlier will—likely the one he drew up when named commander in chief in 1775—and told her to burn it, while saving the historic one drawn up in July, which freed his slaves. That Washington had preserved both wills may suggest some last-minute wavering on the manumission issue. It said much about his lifelong dependence on slavery that he was now attended by four slaves—Caroline, Charlotte, Molly, and Christopher Sheels. Sadly, the four slaves assigned to this deathwatch were all dower slaves who would reap no benefit from the emancipation section of the will.
Though he never complained, Washington was expiring in a particularly gruesome fashion and constantly gasped for air. Climbing into bed bedside him, Lear kept gingerly turning him over to try to relieve the congestion. “He appeared penetrated with gratitude for my attentions and often said, ‘I am afraid I shall fatigue you too much.’ And upon my assuring him that I could feel nothing but a wish to give him ease, he replied, ‘Well! It is a debt we must pay to each other and I hope when you want aid of this kind, you will find it.”19 Even in death, Washington never lapsed into self-absorption and remained singularly attuned to other people’s moods, showing the same sensitivity that had made him a uniquely effective political leader. At one point, noticing that Christopher Sheels had been standing since morning, Washington urged the young slave to sit down.
Handicapped by the benighted state of medical knowledge, the three doctors were utterly perplexed about what to do, and Washington showed compassion for their bafflement. “I feel myself going,” he told them early in the evening. “I thank you for your attentions, but I pray you to take no more trouble about me. Let me go off quietly. I cannot last long.”20 A couple of hours later they applied blisters and wheat bran poultices to his legs and throat, though they harbored little hope of an improvement. Washington had a horror of being buried alive, and around ten o’clock he conveyed this to Lear: “Have me decently buried and do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I am dead.”21 Lear promised to honor his wish, which consoled Washington, making his breathing a trifle easier. This fear of premature burial was common at the time; Elizabeth Powel, for instance, left instructions in her will that the lid of her coffin should not be screwed on until minutes before it was lowered into the earth.
While retaining complete control of his faculties, as best we can tell, Washington never sought religious solace or offered any prayers as he lay dying. That no minister was summoned may also reflect the doctors’ misjudgment of the proximity of death. With his stoic toughness, somber gallantry, and clear conscience, the patient was reconciled to his own mortality. Several times this most punctual of men asked what hour it was. Orchestrating matters until the very end, he had the presence of mind to take his own pulse and felt the life suddenly ebbing from his body. At that moment he perished. “The general’s hand fell from his wrist,” wrote Tobias Lear. “I took it in mine and put it into my bosom. Dr. Craik put his hands over his eyes.” Washington, he said, had “expired without a struggle or a sigh!”22 Christopher Sheels stood by the bedside, with Caroline, Charlotte, and Molly gazing nearby. Performing one final service for his master, Sheels emptied the keys from his pockets and passed them to Tobias Lear. It was December 14, 1799. Washington had died at age sixty-seven, long-lived by the tragically short standards of the men in his family.
All the while, at the foot of the bed, Martha Washington had sat in a motionless vigil, very much the Roman matron with her marble composure. “Is he gone?” she asked. With his hand, Lear indicated that Washington had died. “ ’Tis well,” Martha replied, repeating her husband’s last words. “All is now over. I shall soon follow him! I have no more trials to pass through.”23 This last line speaks volumes about the suffering she had silently withstood, the perpetual sacrifices she had made for her husband and her country. Haunted by this moment, she never slept in that bedroom again.
Washington died in a manner that befit his life: with grace, dignity, self-possession, and a manifest regard for others. He never yielded to shrieks, hysteria, or unseemly complaints. His doctors had treated him as if he were suffering from “quinsy,” or a throat inflammation. From a modern vantage point, it seems likely that a bacterial infection had caused his epiglottis—the flexible cartilage at the entrance to the voice box—to become grossly inflamed and swollen, shutting off the windpipe and making breathing and swallowing an agonizing ordeal. Along with the rounds of debilitating bleedings, Washington’s final hours must have been hellish, yet he had endured them with exemplary composure.
The day after Washington died, Tobias Lear sent instructions to Alexandria for a mahogany coffin to house Washington’s remains. In all likelihood, Christopher Sheels performed the solemn rite of washing and readying his master’s cadaver. Abiding by Washington’s wishes, the funeral at Mount Vernon did not take place until four days after his death, on December 18, 1799. From beyond the grave, Washington was still stage-managing events, having stipulated in his will a desire to be “interred in a private manner, without parade or funeral oration.”24 After suffering through many tedious tributes, he wanted to temper public adulation, although he must have suspected that his humble wish would be ignored by a devoted public.
Instead of a lavish funeral, he had a simple military burial. At three P.M., a schooner anchored in the Potomac began firing minute guns, and the funeral cortège shuffled across the lawn, then swept down the hillside to the family vault. The mourners stepped softly to the muffled hush of drums and mournful, elegiac music. A Virginia cavalry unit led the march, trailed by infantry, a band, and four clergymen in black suits. Then came two slaves, Cyrus and Wilson, leading the general’s horse, which was plainly outfitted with a saddle and pistols stuffed in their holsters—an apt image for a legendary horseman who h
ad always looked magnificent astride a mount. The coffin was borne by six pallbearers, five of them Masons, followed by the mayor of Alexandria and the chief Mount Vernon employees. Conspicuously absent was Martha Washington, who likely stayed hidden in an upstairs bedroom, too traumatized to venture forth. For once, her sense of public duty deserted her. As a remembrance of her husband, she asked Tobias Lear to snip locks of hair from the corpse before it was deposited in the coffin. At the burial vault, the Reverend Thomas Davis pronounced the Order of Burial from the Episcopal Prayer Book. Then, testifying to Washington’s deep faith in the brotherhood of Freemasonry, Dr. Elisha Dick stepped forward and, in his capacity as Worshipful Master of Masonic Lodge No. 22 in Alexandria, officiated over rituals performed by Masons garbed in their customary aprons. As the coffin was stored in the vault overlooking the Potomac, eleven cannon fired volleys into the air, and infantry discharged their muskets.
Free of grandiosity or false sentiment, the funeral was restricted to family, friends, neighbors, and associates—exactly as Washington might have wished. He had always been civic-minded, and the strong institutional presence—the government, the military, the church, the Masons—mirrored the priorities of his life. No less appropriate was the symbolic presence of the invisible workers who had made his epic success story possible: eight slaves, clad in black, all but one of them dower slaves with nothing to gain from Washington’s will. For the slaves, the sole immediate benefit of the funeral was that, after all the guests had departed, the “remains of the provisions” were circulated in their quarters.
The family vault where Washington was entombed had been dug into a grassy slope, topped by a knoll with juniper, willow, chestnut, and cypress trees. This crypt was so overgrown with vegetation that it seemed to disappear into the hillside and breathed a damp, moldy air of decay, causing Washington to leave instructions for a new brick vault. It speaks to Washington’s humility that the greatest man of his age was laid to rest in a communal tomb where nobody could single out his grave or honor him separately. All visitors could do was peer through the slats of a rough oak door into a gloomy, malodorous den of ancient coffins. Some souvenir hunters later reached in and tore swatches from the black velvet pall covering Washington’s coffin until it grew ragged with neglect. In 1818 an appalled traveler objected that Washington had been “permitted to remain in obscurity and neglect, without a mausoleum, monument, inscription, a stone, or anything else to point [where] the hero and statesman repose or any evidence of his country’s gratitude.”25 Another visitor left a still more horrifying description, comparing the vault to a “bake oven” and condemning it as “a low damp little place that is crammed with coffins, some of which are moldered to ashes and the bones are strewed on the pavement.” When this visitor spotted a skull on the ground, a gardener told him it belonged to Lawrence Washington, the beloved older half brother of the first president. In later years, after a new tomb was built at Mount Vernon, the coffins of George and Martha Washington were transferred to marble sarcophagi.
After his death, Washington’s will was made public and quickly became available in pamphlet form. If he had hoped that other slave masters would emulate his example in liberating his slaves, he was cruelly mistaken. Not only had the slave population of the United States grown rapidly for forty years, but the introduction of the cotton gin was ushering in a vast and terrifying expansion of slavery. By 1804 all the northern states had enacted laws for terminating slavery, but it persisted in the South in an entrenched form.
As soon as word of Washington’s death spread, church bells pealed in every city and business wound to a standstill. “Each man, when he heard that Washington was dead, shut his store as a matter of course, without consultation,” one Bostonian recalled, “and in two hours all business was stopped.”26 Starting with President Adams, government officials wore black clothing, army officers donned crape on their left arms, naval vessels flew their colors at half-mast, and the hall of Congress was draped in black. At her receptions Abigail Adams demanded that ladies restrict themselves to black gloves and fans.
No political figure felt more bereft than Alexander Hamilton, who owed so much to the older man’s steadfast patronage and understanding. “Perhaps no friend of his has more cause to lament on personal account than myself,” he told an associate, saying that Washington had been “an aegis very essential to me.”27 Such deep grief was not universal. Unable to conquer his envy, President Adams quietly recoiled at the Washington adoration and later griped that the Federalists had “done themselves and their country invaluable injury by making Washington their military, political, religious, and even moral Pope and ascribing everything to him.”28 It was all a plot, he insinuated, “to cast into the background and the shade all others who had been concerned in the service of their country in the revolution.”29
On December 19 John Marshall rose in the House to register the formal notification of Washington’s death. A week later a huge, subdued funeral procession snaked from Congress Hall to the German Lutheran Church. There General Henry Lee delivered his famous funeral oration in which he eulogized Washington as “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” while further noting that the deceased was “second to none in the humble and endearing scenes of private life.”30 For all the fervor in commemorating Washington’s death, Congress never made good on its intention to transfer Washington’s remains to a marble crypt in the Capitol, as he had perhaps expected.
By the time of his death, Washington had poured his last ounce of passion into the creation of his country. Never a perfect man, he always had a normal quota of human frailty, including a craving for money, status, and fame. Ambitious and self-promoting in his formative years, he had remained a tightfisted, sharp-elbowed businessman and a hard-driving slave master. But over the years, this man of deep emotions and strong opinions had learned to subordinate his personal dreams and aspirations to the service of a larger cause, evolving into a statesman with a prodigious mastery of political skills and an unwavering sense of America’s future greatness. In the things that mattered most for his country, he had shown himself capable of constant growth and self-improvement.
George Washington possessed the gift of inspired simplicity, a clarity and purity of vision that never failed him. Whatever petty partisan disputes swirled around him, he kept his eyes fixed on the transcendent goals that motivated his quest. As sensitive to criticism as any other man, he never allowed personal attacks or threats to distract him, following an inner compass that charted the way ahead. For a quarter century, he had stuck to an undeviating path that led straight to the creation of an independent republic, the enactment of the Constitution, and the formation of the federal government. History records few examples of a leader who so earnestly wanted to do the right thing, not just for himself but for his country. Avoiding moral shortcuts, he consistently upheld such high ethical standards that he seemed larger than any other figure on the political scene. Again and again the American people had entrusted him with power, secure in the knowledge that he would exercise it fairly and ably and surrender it when his term of office was up. He had shown that the president and commander in chief of a republic could possess a grandeur surpassing that of all the crowned heads of Europe. He brought maturity, sobriety, judgment, and integrity to a political experiment that could easily have grown giddy with its own vaunted success, and he avoided the backbiting, envy, and intrigue that detracted from the achievements of other founders. He had indeed been the indispensable man of the American Revolution.
Washington had dominated American political life for so long that many Americans could not conceive of life without him. A widespread fear arose that, deprived of his guiding hand, the Republic itself might founder. One preacher wondered, “Will not darkness now gather in our land? . . . Who knows but [his death] is the loud harbinger of approaching calamity.”31 Perhaps as an antidote to such apprehension, Washington was smothered beneath national piety, and it became
difficult for biographers to reclaim the complex human being. The man immediately began to merge into the myth. As the subject of more than four hundred printed orations, Washington was converted into an exemplar of moral values, the person chosen to tutor posterity in patriotism, even a civic deity. In one eulogy Timothy Dwight compared Washington to Moses and noted, “Comparison with him is become almost proverbial.”32 Washington’s transformation into a sacred figure erased his tough, often moody nature, stressing only his serene composure and making it more difficult for future generations to fathom his achievements. Abigail Adams justly rebelled at the idealized portrait: “Simple truth is his best, his greatest eulogy.” 33 She was certainly correct that, to be convincing, Washington’s greatness did not need to be cleaned up or sanitized, only honestly presented.
A popular print called the Apotheosis of Washington showed him ascending to heaven above Mount Vernon. Seated on a throne, resting on a cloud, and caught in a thick shaft of celestial light, he was clad in white robes with an outstretched arm as a winged angel received him. As the Father of His Country evolved into a divinity, some clergymen wanted to insert his farewell address into the Bible as an epilogue. The departed leader’s image sprouted everywhere. “Every American considers it his sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington in his home, just as we have images of God’s saints,” observed a European traveler.34 Later deploring the “idolatrous worship” of Washington, Dr. Benjamin Rush saw it “manifested in the impious application of names and epithets to him which are ascribed in Scripture only to God and to Jesus Christ,” and he mentioned “our Savior” and “our Redeemer” as examples.35
