“Having finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theater of action. And bidding an affectionate farewell to this august body under whose orders I have so long acted, I hereby offer my commission and take my leave from all my employments of public life.”
* * *
It is Christmas Day, 1783. George Washington gallops through the gates of his Mount Vernon estate. His Excellency’s duty to his nation is complete.
Or so he thinks.
Epilogue
NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK
APRIL 30, 1789
2:00 P.M.
George Washington raises his right hand.
Since dawn, thousands have crowded around the Federal Building in Lower Manhattan, eager to witness the swearing-in of America’s first president. Washington is in plain view, standing on the second-floor balcony overlooking Wall Street. His hair is powdered white for the occasion, and he wears a brown suit, white silk stockings, and shoes with silver buckles. A ceremonial sword hangs down at his hip. Washington’s left hand rests on a Bible opened to the book of Genesis.
Robert Livingston, the chancellor of New York, stands opposite him, ready to administer the oath of office.1
“Do you solemnly swear that you will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and will, to the best of your ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States?”
* * *
George Washington is a restless man, one who quickly grew bored of his retirement in Mount Vernon. In the years immediately following the war he traveled into the American wilderness, revisiting lands he initially surveyed more than thirty years before. As befitting a man who had labored so diligently to forge the United States of America, Washington closely followed the actions of the Congress. In May 1787, he traveled to Philadelphia to represent Virginia at what would become known as the Constitutional Convention. The meetings took place inside the same room of the Pennsylvania State House where the Declaration of Independence had been approved, and where Washington once accepted his commission as commander in chief of the Continental Army. The familiarity of the surroundings was reinforced by Washington’s reunion with Alexander Hamilton, a growing force in national politics, and with Benjamin Franklin, now returned from Paris.2
Much to Washington’s surprise, he was elected president of the convention.
The delegates met throughout the summer. Washington’s leadership was evident to all: he kept the group on task despite several polarizing arguments that could have derailed the proceedings. The result was a document that reinvented the nascent American government, adding a second body to the Congress, establishing a judicial branch, and creating a role for a single individual to act as formal head of state. As with his wartime service, Washington was proud of his role in helping to create the U.S. Constitution.
All the while, George Washington was deeply in debt and struggling to pay the bills for his Mount Vernon estate. The time had come to restore a measure of financial stability for himself and Martha by concentrating on making a profit from his plantation.
Then, in September 1788, Alexander Hamilton wrote Washington, imploring him to take part in the election of America’s first chief executive, which was to take place between December 15, 1788, and January 10, 1789.
“If I should receive the appointment,” Washington replied to Hamilton with dismay, “the acceptance would be attended with more diffidence and reluctance than I ever experienced before in my life.”
In the end, however, Washington did allow his name to be placed on the ballot, along with those of seven other men: John Adams, John Hancock, John Jay, John Rutledge, Samuel Huntington, Benjamin Lincoln, and New York governor George Clinton.
The people voted overwhelmingly for Washington. John Adams came in second, and thus won the job of vice president. The Electoral College, another by-product of the Constitution, showed its approval of Washington by a unanimous vote.3
It was not until April 14 that a horseman galloped to Mount Vernon to inform the general of his victory. Two days later, George Washington set out for New York, this time to lead his nation.
* * *
“I do solemnly swear,” Washington states, repeating the oath back to Chancellor Livingston, “that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Washington pauses before adding, “So help me God.”
He then bends over the Bible and kisses its pages.
“It is done,” Livingston announces to the crowd. “Long live George Washington, President of the United States!”
As the crowd cheers lustily, thirteen cannon are fired in the distance.
* * *
America has its first president. The destiny of the republic is under way.
Postscript
George Washington served two terms as president of the United States. He remains the only American chief executive never to have lived in the White House. Though in debt at the start of his first term, he initially refused a salary but changed his mind when Congress asked him to set a precedent for those who would follow him into office. The general returned to Mount Vernon in 1797, at the conclusion of his second term, and briefly came back on the national scene on July 4, 1798, when war with France seemed imminent. He accepted President John Adams’s offer of a commission as commander in chief should that war occur. It did not. Thus, Washington resumed his plans to live out his days at Mount Vernon with Martha. However, on December 12, 1799, he spent the day on horseback, enduring snow and freezing rain as he inspected his property. Despite waking up with a sore throat the following morning, he once again rode through the snow to inspect his holdings. He awoke that night unable to breathe or swallow due to constriction of his throat. The affliction proved fatal. George Washington died on December 14, 1789, at the age of sixty-seven. Despite early efforts to place his body in a crypt below the Rotunda of the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, his remains are interred in a tomb at Mount Vernon. Martha Washington rests alongside her husband. Upon his death, she closed up their bedroom and moved to a separate upstairs bedchamber as a sign of mourning. She died on May 22, 1802, at the age of seventy after years of ill health.
* * *
After the war ended, Thomas Jefferson served as minister to France and then returned home to take the position of secretary of state during George Washington’s first term in office. Jefferson also served as vice president under President John Adams, whom he later defeated for the presidency in the election of 1800. Jefferson and John Adams were good friends throughout their long careers but had a major falling-out over political differences in the 1790s. They reconciled in 1812, thanks to the efforts of Abigail Adams and fellow Founding Father Benjamin Rush. For the rest of their lives, Adams and Jefferson engaged in lengthy correspondence about politics and world events. Thomas Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, at Monticello, where he is buried. John Adams died just hours later, in Quincy, Massachusetts, successfully making good on a personal pledge to remain alive until the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Not knowing of his friend’s death, Adams said shortly before his death, “Thomas Jefferson still survives”—a reference to the fact that they were among the oldest remaining signers of the Declaration. Adams is interred at United First Parish Church in Boston alongside Abigail, who died before him, in 1818.
* * *
Benjamin Franklin succumbed to pleurisy on April 17, 1790, in Philadelphia at the age of eighty-four. He was laid to rest alongside his wife, Deborah, in Christ Church Cemetery. He was busy almost to the end, serving as a member of the Constitutional Convention upon his return home from France in 1785, and then as president of Pennsylvania for three years afterward—a position similar to that of governor. More than twenty thousand people attended Franklin’s funeral.
* * *
William Franklin moved to England in 1782, where he li
ved for the rest of his life. He wrote to his father in 1784, requesting a reconciliation. It never occurred, although Benjamin Franklin did leave his son a small piece of property in Nova Scotia in his will. William Franklin died in 1813. He is buried in St. Pancras Old Church cemetery in London, but the site of the grave has since been lost.
* * *
Alexander Hamilton rose to prominence in American politics after the Revolutionary War. An ardent proponent of the U.S. Constitution, he served in Congress and then as secretary of the treasury during George Washington’s first six years in office. During that time, Hamilton was responsible for founding the U.S. Mint and the National Bank. He was famously blackmailed for a brief affair with a married woman in the early 1790s, an act for which his wife, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, eventually forgave him. In 1804, Hamilton engaged in a pistol duel with his longtime rival Aaron Burr, who was at that time the vice president of the United States. At issue were Hamilton’s beliefs that Burr was “despicable” and “a dangerous man,” opinions Hamilton had expressed in private but that were later printed in a New York newspaper, the Albany Register. The duel took place on a New Jersey bluff overlooking the Hudson River on July 11, 1804. Hamilton fired first, with some later believing he intentionally aimed high to miss Burr. But the vice president shot straight, and the lead ball entered Hamilton’s torso just above the right hip before ricocheting off his ribs and lodging in his spine. He was taken home, where he died the following day. He was forty-seven years old. Alexander Hamilton is buried in Trinity Church Cemetery at Broadway and Wall Streets in Manhattan. Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton survived her husband by fifty years, dying in 1854 at the age of ninety-seven. She is also buried on the grounds at Trinity Church.
* * *
Hamilton’s friend and ally during the Revolutionary War, the Marquis de Lafayette, led a stormy life upon his return to France. The nation’s unstable political climate saw Lafayette thrown in jail, exiled, and even burned in effigy for his outspoken views and opposition to Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Lafayette returned to the United States in 1824 for a two-year tour of the nation in anticipation of its fiftieth-anniversary celebration. He observed the tumultuous election of 1824, in which John Quincy Adams was elected president over Andrew Jackson. Among the places Lafayette visited was the Bunker Hill battlefield, where he laid the cornerstone for a monument and scooped up dirt from the site, which was later sprinkled over his own grave. Lafayette died in 1834 at the age of seventy-six. He is buried in Picpus Cemetery in Paris. Upon hearing the news of Lafayette’s death, President Andrew Jackson ordered both houses of Congress draped in black bunting for thirty days in memoriam.
* * *
One other veteran of Valley Forge also received the respect of a grateful nation. Baron von Steuben never returned to Germany, preferring to remain in New York with his companion, William North. He formally adopted North and another aide-de-camp, Benjamin Walker. In the absence of a wife and children, these two men became von Steuben’s heirs. The U.S. Congress granted him an annual pension, and the state of New Jersey showed its thanks by giving him title to a home and estate. After a series of financial misadventures, von Steuben moved to upstate New York, where he settled in the town of Rome. Upon his death in 1794, the estate was passed down to his heirs, North and Walker. It is still traditional in many parts of the United States to celebrate Von Steuben Day, in honor of the Baron’s September 17 birthday. In fact, the parade scene in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off memorably honors Von Steuben Day and the Baron’s German heritage.
* * *
Lord Charles Cornwallis sailed for England after the surrender of Yorktown, never returning to America. He was roundly criticized for his battlefield strategies but refused to retreat from public life. In America, his name will forever be synonymous with his loss to Washington, but his postwar actions would lead to a different legacy in England. Cornwallis went on to serve successfully for seven years as governor-general of India and then lord lieutenant of Ireland, a position he held from 1798 to 1801. Cornwallis returned to India, where he died in 1805. He is interred in an elaborate monument in Ghazipur, overlooking the Ganges River. Lord Charles Cornwallis was sixty-six years old.
* * *
Among those on Cornwallis’s ship home was Benedict Arnold, who hoped to make a new start in England. For a time, Arnold was a celebrity, seen taking garden strolls with King George III, who delighted in speaking with someone who shared his views on the war in America. But Arnold’s decision to betray his country soon came back to haunt him. He was jeered in public and attacked as a money-crazed mercenary in the British press. One political cartoonist in London depicted him as a serpent. The traitor’s life became a series of failed businesses, recurring debts, and other misadventures. Eventually, he moved to Canada, hoping again to start his life anew, but that didn’t work out, either, and he eventually returned to London. Benedict Arnold’s health declined and he died penniless in 1801, at the age of sixty. He is interred in St. Mary’s Church on the banks of the Thames River in Battersea, England. Peggy Shippen Arnold, who remained with her husband throughout his life, survived him by just three years, dying of cancer at the age of forty-four. She is interred within the same crypt.
* * *
A memorial to Col. John André was erected in the nave of Westminster Abbey in 1782, paid for by King George III. Benedict and Peggy Arnold were observed paying a visit to the site in the winter of that year. In 1821, André’s body was exhumed from its resting place in America and reburied in front of the memorial on November 28 of that year. A small stone marks the grave. The wooden box that carried André’s bones home to England can still be found within the abbey’s triforium, unavailable for public viewing. However, “this remarkable repository of monumental statues and sacred relics,” as the triforium has been described, is in the midst of a major renovation, the completion of which will allow many such hidden artifacts to be put on display.
* * *
Banastre Tarleton, a man no less notorious than Benedict Arnold, returned to England a hero. The noted British artists Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds both painted his portrait, and the one by Reynolds still hangs in London’s National Gallery. Tarleton was elected to Parliament in 1790, where he staunchly defended the slave trade while still remaining a member of the British military, being promoted to major general in 1794. He maintained a fifteen-year affair with Mary Robinson, the former lover of King George IV, before finally marrying an illegitimate daughter of the Fourth Duke of Ancaster in 1798. Banastre Tarleton died in 1833 at the age of seventy-nine and is buried in Lancaster Cemetery in Lancashire, England.
* * *
The rivalry between Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion and Tarleton was the basis for the highly fictionalized Mel Gibson film The Patriot. Marion returned home after the war and lived a thoroughly normal life for the remainder of his days. A bachelor before the fighting, he married on April 20, 1786, at the age of fifty-four. He rebuilt his plantation, which had been burned in the war, and there he died in 1795, at the age of sixty-three. Marion is buried in the Belle Isle Plantation Cemetery in Berkeley County, South Carolina. His plantation, Pond Bluff, now lies at the bottom of nearby Lake Marion.
* * *
A visitor to London can find the tomb of Lord William Howe in Twickenham, in a cemetery called the Holly Road Garden of Rest. Howe requested a formal inquiry in Parliament to clear his name of any impropriety for failing to follow orders and link up with General Burgoyne in Saratoga. He was successful, but criticism over Saratoga would follow him for the rest of his life.
* * *
Like William Howe, Elizabeth Loring left America before the war ended. She and her two children moved to England to live with her father-in-law, and there is no evidence that she saw Howe again. Her husband, Joshua, joined her in England in 1783, and they had three more children at their new home in Reading. After her husband’s death in 1789, Loring petitioned the king for a pension to support herself. Thanks to a
recommendation from William Howe, the petition was granted, providing Elizabeth Loring an income until her death in 1831.
* * *
After the loss at Yorktown, British commander in chief Sir Henry Clinton was replaced and sailed home to England in 1782. He wrote a book blaming the defeat on Lieutenant General Cornwallis but otherwise did little after his return but serve in Parliament. Clinton died two days before Christmas in 1793, at the age of sixty-five. He is buried in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, where many members of British royalty are laid to rest.
* * *
King George III lived to the age of eighty-one, dying in 1820 after fifty-nine years on the throne. At the time of his death, the madness that had begun to manifest itself decades earlier finally incapacitated him, and he was no longer acting as king. The reign of George III is remembered largely for the loss of the colonies. George’s beloved wife, Queen Charlotte, died two years before her husband and is buried with him in the Royal Vault at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor.
* * *
The burial of John Paul Jones was not as exalted as the king’s. Unable to gain a command in the Continental Navy at the end of the war, he found work as an admiral for the Russian empress Catherine the Great. This posting lasted for one year, whereupon Jones settled in Paris. He was found dead in his apartment in the summer of 1792, the result of an infection that caused kidney failure. John Paul Jones was buried in the Saint Louis Cemetery, a property owned by the French royal family. In 1905, after a long investigation, the then U.S. ambassador to France, Horace Porter, discovered the site of Jones’s grave. The body was exhumed, and Jones’s remains were transferred to American soil. John Paul Jones now rests in a crypt beneath the chapel at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.
* * *
An estimated 400,000 Continental soldiers and state militia fought on the American side through the course of the war. There is no exact number.
Killing England Page 28
