Nonetheless Washington adhered (except for the provisions involved in freeing his slaves) almost altogether to the Virginia dynastic tradition. He did spread memorabilia and cash gifts to friends and faithful servants; he did make bequests for educational purposes, particularly to foster the establishment of a national university in the national capital; but no such provisions made more than a dent in the main body of his estate. Although he bequeathed to his longtime faithful secretary, Lear, lifetime use of the farm, he stipulated that it should return to his own estate at Lear’s death. That estate was left altogether to his blood relations or Martha’s.
Had he had children of his own, he would have died with the knowledge that the estate he had labored to amass would move down the years, augmenting the prosperity and the possibilities of his descendant. As it was, he sprinkled his holdings among more than twenty Washingtons, Custises and Dandridges.
He did have the possibility of establishing, if not a physical, a political heir. The Earl of Buchan had sent him a box, made of the oak that had sheltered Sir William Wallace after the Battle of Fallkirk, with the request that Washington would pass it, at his death, to the American who should merit it best. How Hamilton would have loved to be devised that box! Washington returned it to Lord Buchan.
Almost all the great rulers of history have wished to be enshrined in some grand edifice where their deeds could be emblazoned and posterity could come to worship. Almost all the great rulers of history have envisioned the pomp, the expressions of praise and of mourning, with which they would be interred. Washington did, it is true, decide that the old family vault at Mount Vernon was so cramped and decrepit that a better vault should be built. But he visualized no monumental structure dominating the streets of the national capital which bore his name.
In long-familiar ground near to his house at Mount Vernon, he had “marked out” an oblong “at the foot of what is called the Vineyard In-closure,” which commanded a broad view of the land and the river he loved. Here, so he commanded in his will, a tomb was to be built of brick, large enough to accommodate “such others of my family as may choose to be entombed there,” but yet no more than a modest family vault.
Preparing to be laid in his own soil with his relations around him, the hero stated “my express desire that my corpse may be interred in a private manner, without parade or funeral oration.”
On December 12, 1799, Washington entered in his diary: “Morning cloudy. Wind to northeast and mercury 33. A large circle round the moon last night. At about ten o’clock it began to snow, soon after to hail, and then to a settled cold rain. Mercury 28 at night.”
His secretary Lear, remembered that the storm started shortly after Washington had ridden out to inspect his farms. “As he never regarded the weather, he kept out from about ten (A.M.) till three o’clock.” After his return, Lear carried him some letters to frank. Having franked them, Washington said the weather was too bad for a servant to go to the post office.
“I observed to him,” so Lear’s account continues, “that I was afraid he had got wet. He said, No; his greatcoat had kept him dry—but his neck appeared wet and the snow was hanging on his hair.… He came to dinner without changing his dress. In the evening, he appeared as well as usual.”
Washington’s journal note for December 13 reads, “Morning snowing and about three inches deep. Wind at northeast and mercury at 30. Continuing snowing till one o’clock, and about four it became perfectly clear. Wind in the same place but not hard. Mercury 28 at night.” These were probably the last words that George Washington ever wrote.
Washington admitted to a sore throat, “but,” so Lear wrote his mother, “considering it as a trifling matter he took no measures to relieve it; for he was always averse to nursing himself for any slight complaint.” He did take the precaution of not riding out again in the storm. After the sky had cleared, he walked on the lawn between the piazza and the river to mark some trees he wished to have cut down. His voice was hoarse, but he made light of it. During the evening, he sat in the parlor with Martha and Lear, reading some newspapers that had come from the post office. “He was very cheerful,” Lear noted, “and, when he met with anything which he thought diverting or interesting, he would read it aloud, as well as his hoarseness would permit.”
After Martha had retired, Washington asked Lear to read to him the report of some debates in the Virginia Assembly. When he heard that Madison was supporting Monroe for the Senate, he became upset. He “spoke with some degree of asperity,” which Lear “endeavored to moderate, as I always did on such occasions.” Eventually, Washington regained his cheerfulness and prepared to set off for bed. Lear urged him to use some medicine.
“No,” said Washington. “You know I never take anything for a cold. Let it go as it came.”
Between two and three in the morning, Washington awoke Martha to say that he had suffered an ague and was feeling extremely unwell. Observing that he could scarcely speak and was breathing with difficulty, Martha was alarmed. She wished to summon a servant, but Washington would not let her do so, lest by getting out of bed she should catch cold. It seems to have been at this point that the hero decided he was going to die. As two of his physicians later put it, “He was fully impressed at the beginning of his complaint … that its conclusion would be mortal; submitting to the several exertions made for his recovery, rather as a duty, than from any expectation of their efficacy.”
Mount Vernon in winter (Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union)
At daybreak a maid came to make the fire. She was sent to get an overseer named Rawlins, who commonly ministered to sick slaves: Washington wished to be bled before the doctor (who had also been sent for) could get there. Lear was awakened. “A mixture of molasses, vinegar and butter was prepared, to try its effect in the throat; but he could not swallow a drop. Whenever he attempted it, he appeared to be distressed, convulsed and almost suffocated.”
The sun was up by the time the overseer appeared. He had brought his lancet, but he was white and trembling. Washington bared his arm and, speaking with difficulty, said, “Don’t be afraid.” The incision having been made and the blood running pretty freely, Washington observed, “The orifice is not large enough.”
At this, Martha, who was not sure that her husband was prescribing the right treatment, begged that too much blood should not be taken. She appealed to Lear “to stop it.” Lear tried to intervene, but the General put out his hand in an arresting gesture. As soon as he could speak, he said, “More!” However, Martha continued to plead, and the bleeding was stopped after a pint had been taken. While Lear applied various poultices and soaked Washington’s feet in warm water, Martha sent for a second doctor.
The first physician to arrive was his lifelong friend Dr. Craik. Craik used Spanish fly to draw blood into a blister directly from Washington’s throat; he also took more blood from Washington’s arm. The patient obediently tried to use a gargle of sage tea and vinegar, but the only result was that he was again almost suffocated. Craik urged him to cough. He tried, but could not do so. Craik sent for a third doctor and bled the General for a third time. “No effect however was produced by it, and he continued in the same state, unable to swallow anything.”
Between three and four in the afternoon, two horsemen galloped separately up the driveway to Mount Vernon: Dr. Elisha Cullen Dick of Alexandria and Dr. Gustavus Richard Brown of Port Tobacco. Recollections become a little contradictory at this point, but it seems that the two new physicians each in turn examined Washington. Then the three doctors withdrew for a conference.
The facts on the conference are more precise. Drs. Craik and Brown agreed on the diagnosis of quinsy (an extreme form of tonsillitis) and urged further debilitating treatment—more bleeding and blisters and also purges. Dr. Dick, who at thirty-seven was by far the youngest of the three, argued that Washington was suffering from “a violent inflammation of the membranes of the throat, which it had almost closed, and which, if
not immediately arrested, would result in death.” He urged an operation that would open the trachea below the infection so Washington could breathe.
At first Craik seemed convinced, but Brown persuaded him that the operation might be fatal. Suspecting that his colleagues were afraid to assume such responsibility in the case of a patient so famous, Dick said that he would take all blame for failure on himself. Still Craik and Brown would not agree. Then Dick urged that the patient be not bled again. He did not deny the therapeutic efficiency of bleeding, but felt that it should be applied to the elderly only sparingly. Concerning Washington, he said, “He needs all his strength—bleeding will diminish it.”
Later, after he had had time to think calmly, Craik wrote Brown they should have listened to Dick. Had they “taken no more blood from him, our good friend might have been alive now. But we were governed by the best light we had; we thought we were right, and so we are justified.” (Down the years doctors have speculated on the nature of Washington’s illness. One guess is diphtheria, another a virulent streptococcus infection of the throat. Either disease would, in the state of medicine at that time, have been fatal regardless of the treatment prescribed.)
As a result of the doctors’ despairing conference, Washington was bled for the fourth time: “the blood ran very slowly—appeared very thick,” but the operation “did not produce any symptoms of fainting.” When, towards four in the afternoon, Washington proved able to swallow a little, the doctors took advantage of this situation by giving him calomel and other purges.
“About half past four o’clock,” Lear recorded, “he desired me to ask Mrs. Washington to come to his bedside—when he requested her to go down into his room and take from his desk two wills which she would find there, and bring them to him, which she did.—Upon looking at them, he gave her one, which he observed was useless, as it was superseded by the other, and desired her to burn it, which she did, and then [she] took the other and put it away into her closet.”
Lear wrote his mother, “To the last moment he wished to be useful. As often as he could speak, he mentioned to me something he wished to have done.”
Later, as Lear sat by his bed holding his hand, Washington said, “‘I find I am going. My breath cannot continue long. I believed from the first attack it would be fatal. Do you arrange and record all my late military letters and papers—arrange my accounts and settle my books, as you know more about them than anyone else, and let Mr. Rawlins finish recording my other letters, which he has begun.’
“I told him this should be done. He then asked, if I recollected anything which it was essential for him to do, as he had but a very short time to continue with us. I told him, that I could recollect nothing, but that I hoped he was not so near his end. He observed, smiling, that he certainly was, and that, as it was the debt which we must all pay, he looked at the event with perfect resignation.”
As the afternoon wore on, the pain in Washington’s throat and his distress at his difficulty in breathing increased. He continually asked, “in so low and broken a voice as at times hardly to be understood,” what time it was. He tried for a while sitting up by the fire, but, finding no relief, asked to be returned to his bed. Then he kept trying to shift his tall frame into a more comfortable position. The smaller Lear would lie down on the bed beside him “to raise him, and turn him with as much ease as possible.” Washington would mumble the hope that he was not giving too much trouble. To one of Lear’s assurances of his eagerness to help, Washington 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.”
He asked when his nephew Lawrence Lewis and his stepgrandson George Washington Parke Custis would return from a trip. Lear said he believed about the 20th of the month. “He made no reply to it.”
Craik came in and approached the bedside. “Doctor,” Washington managed to enunciate, “I die hard, but I am not afraid to go.… My breath cannot last long.” Lear noted: “The doctor pressed his hand, but could not utter a word. He retired from the bedside, and sat by the fire absorbed in grief.”
The other two physicians entered. They ordered that the sufferer be painfully pulled up into a sitting position. “After repeated efforts to be understood,” so wrote Craik and Dick, he “succeeded in expressing a desire that he might be permitted to die without further interruption.” As Lear quoted him, “I feel myself going. I thank you for your attention. You had better not take any more trouble about me; but let me go off quietly; I cannot last long.” Medical science, however, cannot give up trying. The doctors, although they admitted they were “without a ray of hope,” applied blisters and also poultices of wheat bran to Washington’s legs and feet.
Everyone noted that at no point in his illness did Washington complain or refer to his agony. As the evening lengthened into night, he limited his convulsive efforts at speech to asking what time it was. His breathing became a little easier, and then a fear struck him—the fear of being buried alive. Summoning all his powers, he managed, after several false starts, to say to Lear, “I am just going. Have me decently buried, and do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I am dead.”
Lear bowed assent, being too moved for words. Washington fixed his gaze. “Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“’Tis well.” These seem to have been the hero’s last words.
The night dragged slowly on. The two younger doctors, not being intimates of the family, waited downstairs. From the windows of the second-floor room, lamplight threw glistening squares on meager snow. Within, Dr. Craik sat, as he had for hours, staring into the fire. Washington’s body servant, Christopher, stood by the bed, a post he had not deserted since morning, although Washington had several times motioned him to sit down. A group of house servants—“Caroline, Molly and Charlotte,” and some others—stood near the door. Lear was hovering around the head of the bed, intently trying to interpret every gesture and do what he could to ease the sufferer. Martha was sitting near the foot of the bed.
No one thought to look at a clock, so we only know for sure that it was approaching midnight when Washington withdrew his hand from Lear’s and felt his own pulse. Lear called Craik, who came to the bedside. Washington lifted his arm and then his “hand fell from his wrist.” As Lear reached out for the limp hand, Craik put his own hand over Washington’s eyes. There was no struggle, not even a sigh.
In a calm, controlled voice, Martha asked, “Is he gone?”
Unable to speak, Lear held up his hand in a signal of assent.
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
Bibliography
My four-volume biography, on which this book is based, was published as follows: George Washington: The Forge of Experience, 1732–1775 (Boston, 1965); George Washington in the American Revolution, 1775–1783 (Boston, 1968); George Washington and the New Nation, 1783–1793 (Boston, 1970); and George Washington, Anguish and Farewell (Boston, 1972). The reader is referred to the bibliography and source references of the apposite volume for documentation on specific matters discussed in this book.
My desire to escape from the legends and misinformation that have accreted around Washington down the years, to determine what actually took place, dictated that I base my work as far as possible on original sources. For background, I have often relied on the writings and conclusions of others, but my picture of Washington is constructed almost completely from a new study of what he did and wrote.
Washington’s own file of papers—diaries, financial accounts, letters and documents written or received by him, and other materials to about seventy-five thousand folios—is in the Library of Congress. The complete archive has been published by the Library on twenty-four reels of microfilm with a printed index: Presidential Papers Microfilm: George Washington Papers (Washington, D.C., 1965).
There have been a number of printed compilations of Washington’s papers but all previous such w
orks were superseded by two sets edited by John C. Fitzpatrick: George Washington’s Diaries, 4 vols. (Boston and New York, 1925) and The Writings of George Washington, 39 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1931–1944). Although containing only occasional quotations from letters to Washington, Fitzpatrick’s edition of the Writings presents almost everything that Washington wrote which had come to light by 1944. Manuscripts discovered since then are in many collections. I have been assisted in finding them by the archives compiled at Mount Vernon, and more recently by a project that got under way in 1968. The University of Virginia and the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union are undertaking, under the editorship of Dr. Donald Jackson, a new and complete publication of Washington’s papers. Including all communications sent to Washington, this set, which may well not be finished in this century, is expected to run to well over one hundred volumes. No volume of it has yet appeared. However, Dr. Jackson, on whose advisory board I serve, has been most helpful in answering my queries.
There are two important compendia of letters to Washington: Stanislaus Murray Hamilton’s Letters to Washington, 5 vols. (Boston and New York, 1898–1902) quotes all such documents in the Library of Congress written between February 22, 1753, and July 1, 1775. Jared Sparks’s Correspondence of the American Revolution: Being Letters of Eminent Men to George Washington, 4 vols. (Boston, 1853) is a selection tiny in relation to the vast archive that remains from this later period of Washington’s activity.
Many publications contain papers of Washington’s various coadjutors. The most important are included in the list of titles at the end of this statement. As the result would be too extensive, I have made no effort to particularize here the collections in which I found unpublished manuscripts.
Published biographies of Washington are as innumerable as the leaves in a forest. They fall into three major categories: the historically sound, the goody-goody, and the debunking.
Washington- The Indispensable Man Page 44
