On the night of Saturday December 14, 1799, George Washington, 67 years old, died in his bed at Mount Vernon. His death was a family and medical drama, a source of endless controversy, and the opening act in a period of official and unofficial anguish throughout the United States. As the sad tidings spread, the country experienced a sense of collective and national loss never before known and rarely equaled since. The United States government, sitting in Philadelphia, received the news with reluctant incredulity and then began the long process of national mourning under the leadership of its president. Scattered across the country were other men who would one day succeed Washington as chief executive. Some were already national figures, while others remained in obscurity or in childhood, little dreaming that they would someday occupy the presidential office. Those of his successors who wrote in memory of him, as many of them eventually did, would find, in their reflections upon the life and death of Washington, that, for good or ill, their lives had been inextricably linked with his.
When General Washington returned home from the Revolutionary War, in late 1783, he believed that it marked his permanent retirement from public life and that he would rarely leave Mount Vernon again. In reality, though, a very different future awaited him. In the years to come, the Articles of Confederation, the makeshift national government that had replaced the Continental Congress, proved wholly inadequate for governing the growing United States. By 1786, national leaders had involved Washington in a plan to meet in Philadelphia to revise the Articles of Confederation. This Constitutional Convention promptly chose Washington as its presiding officer, scuttled the Articles, and set about creating a new national government. As the deliberations continued, Washington emerged as the obvious choice to fill the new position of President of the United States. By 1789, nearly all the states had ratified the Constitution, and the Electoral College had, indeed, named Washington as president. He began his presidency in the spring of that year, and, in 1792, agreed to serve another term. Finally, in 1796, he stood down. Vowing to return home, he declared, “No consideration under heaven, that I can foresee, shall again withdraw me from the walks of private life.”[1]
Although his retirement did not go as smoothly as he had hoped—Mount Vernon needed expensive repair and renovation, and he nearly found himself leading a war effort against France—Washington and his wife, Martha, did manage a relatively settled existence in the late 1790s. Washington was often gone for many hours at a time, inspecting the work of his scattered estates. This was how he spent the late morning and early afternoon of December 12, 1799.[2] Washington left Mount Vernon on horseback at about 10:00 that morning.[3] Soon afterward, rain, “hail” (presumably sleet),[4] and then snow began to fall.[5] He returned home at around 3:00.[6] When he entered, his faithful and longtime assistant, Tobias Lear, who cared for Mount Vernon when Washington was away, brought outgoing mail for him to frank.[7] Lear planned to have the letters carried to the post office right away, but Washington intervened, saying, “the weather was too bad” for anyone to make the trip.[8] Lear observed that Washington’s clothing was wet and noted that he had snow in his hair.[9] Washington dismissed his concerns, insisting that his coat had kept him dry, though Lear could see water on his neck.[10]
The following day, snow covered the grounds around Mount Vernon.[11] This kept Washington near the house.[12] The General was already complaining of a cold and a sore throat, but this did not prevent him from going out onto the snowy lawn to mark some trees for removal.[13] Lear noted that Washington was growing increasingly hoarse.[14]
The hoarseness had grown more pronounced by later that night, when Washington—apparently feeling well—sat reading aloud from the newspapers that had arrived earlier in the day.[15] The Virginia state assembly was in the process of electing a United States Senator and a governor.[16] Washington was interested, and asked Lear to read the accounts of the proceedings to him. Lear read to Washington, including comments made by James Madison about James Monroe.[17] Although of the same party and both devout followers of Thomas Jefferson, Madison and Monroe were not close, and Washington, no longer on good terms with any of the Republican leadership, intensely disliked Monroe, whom, as president, he had recalled from a diplomatic mission in France.[18] Lear did not elaborate on Washington’s comments but indicated that he (Lear) tried to “moderate” the General’s views, as he “always did on such occasions.”[19] When Washington went up to bed, Lear advised him to “take something” for his worsening cold and hoarseness.[20] Again, Washington brushed aside Lear’s concerns. “‘You know I never take any thing for a cold,’” Washington told his friend. “‘Let it go as it came.’”[21]
Early the next morning, Caroline, a servant, awoke Lear and told him to go to the Washingtons’ bedroom immediately.[22] Martha Washington met Lear at the door. The General had awakened Martha sometime between 2:00 and 3:00 saying that he was very sick.[23] He was feverish and could barely speak; his breathing was laborious.[24] Washington told Lear to send for his old friend and military colleague, Dr. James Craik in Alexandria.[25] Knowing it would take hours for Craik to arrive, Washington also instructed Lear to send for one of the Mount Vernon overseers, Albin Rawlins.[26] Lear sent servants for both men and then tried to sooth Washington’s throat with a home remedy, “a mixture of molasses, vinegar, and butter.”[27] Washington nearly choked to death on the remedy.[28]
Rawlins had acquired a reputation as “a bleeder in the neighborhood,”[29] primarily through his treatment of ailing slaves.[30] When he arrived later in the morning, he was too frightened to approach the living legend lying on the bed. Washington, barely able to speak above a whisper, turned to him and said, “‘Don’t be afraid.’”[31] Rawlins made an incision in Washington’s arm, but the General insisted that it was not large enough.[32] Martha Washington had grave doubts about this procedure, and implored the men to stop, but her husband overruled her, saying, “‘More. More.’”[33] Rawlins drained “about half a pint” of Washington’s blood, saw that it was not helping, and acquiesced to Mrs. Washington’s wishes.[34] Desperate to do something, Lear tied around Washington’s neck a strip of cloth soaked in “salvolatila” (presumably “sal volatile,” or ammonium carbonate, used as a smelling salt, a leavening agent, and a cough medication).[35] As Lear massaged the substance into the sick man’s neck, Washington whispered, “‘Tis very sore.’”[36] Next, the caregivers bathed the General’s feet in warm water in a vain effort to comfort him.[37] Washington asked to be dressed and helped from the bed.[38] He sat by the fire for two hours. In the late afternoon, he got up again but sat up only for a half hour.[39] Late in the day, he became concerned that a servant, Christopher, had been standing all day and requested that the man sit. He then asked to be undressed and returned to bed.[40]
Previously, Dr. Craik had instructed the Washingtons to call upon Dr. Gustavus R. Brown of Port Tobacco in the event of an emergency in which he (Craik) could not be readily reached.[41] Recalling this, Martha now asked Lear to send a messenger to Brown. Lear immediately wrote a dispatch to Brown and placed it in the care of Cyrus, a Washington servant.[42] The note read:
General Washington is very ill with Quincy. Dr. Craik is sent for from Alexa. but has not yet come down. Mrs. Washington’s anxiety is great, and she requests me to write you desiring you will come over without delay, as it is impossible for the General to continue long without relief. I expect Dr. Craik every moment, but cannot wait for his coming before the Messenger goes for you. The General complained last evening of a sore throat; this morning about 4 o’clock he was much distressed with it. He grows worse: can swallow nothing, and can scarcely breathe.[43]
Shortly after the messenger departed to locate Dr. Brown, Dr. Craik, Washington’s old friend, arrived. Alarmed, Craik applied a blistering agent to the outside of Washington’s throat, bled him again, and administered a gargle of vinegar and sage tea and an inhalant of vinegar and water.[44] None of these remedies produced anything more significant than a cough.[45] Dr. Brown had still not arrived, so Craik sent for Dr. Elisha Cullen Dick, who arrived at about 3:00. Again, the two men bled Washington. Brown arrived shortly thereafter. The three men consulted together, but none of their interventions seemed to benefit the patient.[46]
In 1917, a researcher discovered documents verifying an old story that Dr. Dick had proposed perforating Washington’s trachea to assist his breathing.[47] However, in the time it took Dick to go outside to retrieve his instruments, Brown and Craik, both older than he, had overruled the decision.[48] According to Ben Cohen in “The Death of George Washington (1732 –99) and the History of Cynanche,” the two older men likely held the orthodox view that the procedure was dangerous and undesirable. Cohen also indicated that Dick’s plan showed no intention to use a tube to maintain the airway (though the devices did exist in Britain) and expressed doubt that Dick had access to such instruments or had the knowledge to use them.[49] Cohen added, “Most of the patients on whom [Dick] had performed the operation had died.”[50] Dick never performed the procedure on Washington, and he later expressed regret that he had not.[51]
Washington’s mind remained lucid. Late in the afternoon, he summoned Martha, requesting that she bring two wills from among his papers.[52] He selected one of the two documents and handed it to her, indicating that it was invalid, and asked her to burn it.[53] She did so and placed the other in safekeeping.[54] Lear returned to Washington’s bedside. The General told his old friend to care for some of his papers. “‘I find I am going,’” Washington told Lear, “‘my breath cannot last long.’”[55] He asked Lear whether he (Lear) could think of anything important he should take care of, since he would soon be gone.[56] Lear, distressed, said he hoped Washington was not that near the end.[57] Washington smiled and said that the end was near, and that since it was “the debt that all must pay,” he “looked to the event with perfect resignation.”[58]
Several other times, Washington predicted his own speedy death. Late in the afternoon, he became restless and again expressed concern about the trouble he was causing his caregivers.[59] Lear physically turned him in the bed, and Washington complained that Lear would exhaust himself. Lear said his only desire was that Washington should be better.[60] Washington seemed touched by his friend’s attention and said, “‘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.’”[61] Around dark, Dr. Craik returned to see the patient. “‘Doctor, I die hard;’” Washington told him, “‘but I am not afraid to go; I believed from my first attack that I should not survive it; my breath cannot last long.’”[62] Moved by this, Craik said nothing, but went across the room and sat grieving by the fire.[63] Later, when all three doctors returned to his side, Washington told them, “‘I feel myself going, I thank you for your attentions; but I pray you to take no more trouble about me, let me go off quietly, I can not last long.’”[64]
In the early evening, the doctors applied more blistering agents, this time to Washington’s legs and feet.[65] Otherwise, perhaps taking their cue from the patient himself, the physicians withdrew and seemed to lose hope.[66] Even Lear seemed to accept the inevitable, and began penning messages to Washington relatives, instructing them to come at once.[67]
At around 10:00, Washington called to Lear. Struggling, he said, “‘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.’”[68] Lear said nothing, but Washington persisted. Looking at his friend, the General asked, “‘Do you understand me?’”[69] When Lear answered in the affirmative, Washington replied, “‘Tis well.’”[70] Washington took his own pulse and then died.[71] Martha sat at the foot of the bed. She asked, “‘Is he gone?’” Lear made some gesture to indicate that he was. Echoing her husbands last words, she replied, “‘Tis well, all is now over I shall soon follow him!’”[72]
The cause of Washington’s death was to be a source of almost endless controversy. Some doctors immediately began to criticize his care, particularly the excessive bleeding.[73] Another target for criticism was the two elder physicians’ denial of Dick’s request to perform a tracheotomy. One immediate critic of this decision was Washington’s friend, Dr. William Thornton, who arrived at Mount Vernon on December 16, two days after the General’s death. Finding the body frozen and awaiting interment, Thornton conceived a bizarre plan. He wanted to perform a tracheotomy on the body and slowly warm it in hope that Washington would emerge from what Thornton speculated was “a suspended state.”[74] In what must have been a surreal encounter, Martha Washington denied this unorthodox request.[75]
In his note summoning Dr. Brown, Lear had referred to Washington’s ailment as “‘Quincy.’”[76] Lear was no physician, however, and quincy, or “quinsy,” was an old and generic name for a sore throat.[77] Physicians were more likely to diagnose a form of “cynanche,” which involved not only soreness and inflammation of the throat organs and tissues, but also a potentially fatal obstruction of the airway.[78] By the late 19th century, with scientists’ growing understanding of microbes, the term fell out of use, as it did not convey any information about specific pathogens.[79] By the 1920s, the medical community was convinced that Washington had died of a lack of oxygen—“narcotized by carbon dioxide,”[80] one researcher called it—caused by constriction of the airway, the likely pathogen being streptococcus.[81] By the 1970s, doctors had identified the nature of the constriction itself as “epiglottitis” or a swelling and inflammation of the epiglottis.[82] Thus, in modern terms, Washington died of a swollen epiglottis, a complication of “strep throat.”
Dr. Thornton’s speculations to the contrary, the father of his country was dead. On Sunday morning, Lear paid the doctors, ordered a coffin from Alexandria, and dispatched a series of letters. Most were to various Washington, Custis, and Ball (Washington’s mother’s family) relatives. One letter went to Washington’s beloved protégé, Alexander Hamilton, and another to John Adams, the president of the United States. Lear’s letter to the president read:
SIR: It is with inexpressible grief that I have to announce to you the death of the great and good General Washington. He died last evening between 10 and 11 o’clock, after a short illness of about twenty hours. His disorder was an inflammatory sore throat, which proceeded from a cold of which he made but little complaint on Friday. On Saturday morning about 3 o’clock he became ill. Dr. Craik attended him in the morning, and Dr. Dick, of Alexandria, and Dr. Brown of Port Tobacco, were soon after called in. Every medical assistance was offered, but without the desired effect. His last scene corresponded with the whole tenor of his life; not a groan nor a complaint escaped him in extreme distress. With perfect resignation and in full possession of his reason, he closed his well-spent life. I have the honor to be, with the highest respect, sir, your most obedient and very humble servant, TOBIAS LEAR.[83]
Separate word of Washington’s death seems to have reached Philadelphia at roughly the same time Lear’s letter reached President Adams. On Wednesday, December 18, a stage passenger told the sad news to a man on the street.[84] From there, the word reached Congressman John Marshall of Virginia. Marshall rushed into the House of Representatives, which was in session. Addressing the Speaker, Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts, Marshall announced, “Information, sir, has just been received that our illustrious fellow citizen, the Commander in Chief of the American army, and the late President of the United States, is no more. Though this distressing intelligence is not certain, there is too much reason to believe its truth. After receiving information of a national calamity so heavy and so afflicting, the House of Representatives can be but ill fitted for public business—I move you therefore, that we adjourn.”[85] The House and Senate both adjourned shortly thereafter.[86]
The young federal government faced unprecedented demands of protocol. One newspaper editor wrote that it was “reserved for the government of the Union to represent the nation in its universal grief and pay the highest honors to the memory of their best loved citizen, magistrate, and General, thus taken off from the summit of glory.”[87] Adams needed no one to tell him that, as president, he had a uniquely important role to play in the unfolding national drama. On December 19, he sent to both houses of Congress his official announcement of Washington’s death. Attached was a copy of Tobias Lear’s letter of December 15. Adams wrote, “The letter herewith transmitted will inform you that it has pleased Divine Providence to remove from this life our excellent fellow-citizen, George Washington, by the purity of his character and a long series of services to his country rendered illustrious through the world. It remains for an affectionate and grateful people, in whose hearts he can never die, to pay suitable honors to his memory.”[88]
Adams was treading carefully. He had been largely responsible for the Continental Congress’ act naming Washington commander of the Continental Army more than 24 years earlier[89] and had lived in the Virginian’s shadow ever since.[90] Still, the two men liked one another and had been on friendly terms, especially in the closing days of Washington’s presidency in Philadelphia.[91] Sensing the importance of his response to the General’s death, Adams rose to the occasion, skillfully conducting a diplomatic dance with Congress. Later on December 19, the House of Representatives adopted a resolution expressing condolences to Adams personally. A House delegation journeyed to Adams’ residence that same day and read the resolution to him. Adams responded with a prepared statement. [92] Not to be outdone, the Senate, a few days later, passed a more emotional resolution, likewise delivering it in person to the president. It read in part, “This event, so distressing to all our fellow-citizens, must be peculiarly heavy to you, who have long been associated with him in deeds of patriotism. Permit us, sir, to mingle our tears with yours. On this occasion, it is manly to weep.”[93] Adams responded with an uncharacteristically personal and heartfelt response. It read in part, “Among all our original associates in that memorable league of the continent in 1774, which first expressed the sovereign will of a free nation in America, he was the only one remaining in the General Government. Although with a constitution more enfeebled than his at an age when he thought it necessary to prepare for retirement, I feel myself alone bereaved of my last brother.”[94]
On Christmas Eve 1799, President Adams called upon all Americans to “wear crape on the left arm for thirty days.”[95] Thirteen days later, Adams proclaimed that February 22, 1800, Washington’s 68th birthday, was to be a day of official national mourning.[96] On that day, Adams, along with Vice President Thomas Jefferson and other federal officials attended a number of memorial services, including one conducted by the Society of the Cincinnati. The long national goodbye was finally over.
Only Adams bore the “presidential” responsibilities associated with Washington’s death. On the day Washington died, however, 11 future presidents lived throughout the country and beyond. Five of them, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, and James Buchanan were children, ranging in age from 4 to 17 years. They said little if anything about Washington’s death. William Henry Harrison was 26 in 1799, but he left no impression of Washington at the time. Nor did Harrison, as president, have the opportunity to reflect upon his first predecessor; he, himself, died on the 32nd day of his administration in 1841. Five other men, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson, were active in politics at the time of Washington’s death. All but Jackson knew the first president personally. Likewise, all but Jackson—who had taken his stand on the General three years before Washington’s death—would have much to say about the first president, though most of them would wait for years to say it.
Of the men who sat in the “German” church[97] in Philadelphia, on February 22, 1800, and paid final tribute to their fallen General, none had had a more troubled and complex relationship with Washington than his second successor, Vice President Thomas Jefferson. As fellow Virginians, fellow planters, and members of both Continental Congresses, the two men had shared much. When Jefferson returned from France in 1789, Washington named him the first secretary of state. Jefferson came to view Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton as a threat to liberty, however, and was appalled to realize—as he slowly did—that President Washington invariably favored Hamilton’s ideas over his own. Shortly after the beginning of Washington’s second term as president, Jefferson resigned and returned to Monticello. From there, he penned bitter letters charging a “Federalist conspiracy,”[98] with an innocent and naive Washington at its center.[99] In the summer of 1794, stung by Jefferson’s attacks, Washington broke off all contact with Jefferson “forever.”[100]
The 1800 memorial services must have been remarkably uncomfortable. By the time he joined his colleagues to bid goodbye to Washington, Jefferson was locked in a full-bore political war with the Federalists, including President Adams, who—in his view—had hoodwinked the father of their country. Probably fearful of leaks to the Federalist press, Jefferson proffered little opinion of Washington in the period immediately following his death. Years later, however, himself retired from a two-term presidency, Jefferson penned one of the most famous and insightful assessments of Washington. “I think I knew General Washington intimately and thoroughly;” Jefferson wrote to Dr. Walter Jones in 1814. He continued:
His mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first order; . . . Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence, never acting until every circumstance, every consideration, was maturely weighed; refraining if he saw a doubt, but when once decided, going through with his purpose, whatever obstacles opposed. His integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known, no motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision. He was, indeed, in every sense of the words, a wise, a good, and a great man. . . . On the whole, his character was, in its mass, perfect, in nothing bad, in few points indifferent; and it may truly be said, that never did nature and fortune combine more perfectly to make a man great, and to place him in the same constellation with whatever worthies have merited from man an everlasting remembrance. [101]
Even with Federalism dying, and with both Washington and Hamilton long dead, Jefferson was unable to resist including in his memorial a defense of his own actions, exonerating both Washington and himself in the permanent rupture of their friendship and association and characteristically deflecting the blame to the Federalists.
These are my opinions of General Washington, which I would vouch at the judgment seat of God, having been formed on an acquaintance of thirty years. . . . After I retired [as secretary of state], great and malignant pains were taken by our federal monarchists, and not entirely without effect, to make him view me as a theorist, holding French principles of government, which would lead infallibly to licentiousness and anarchy. And to this he listened the more easily, from my known approbation of the British treaty. I never saw him afterwards, or these malignant insinuations should have been dissipated before his just judgment, as mists before the sun. I felt on his death, with my countrymen, that “verily a great man hath fallen this day in Israel.”[102]
Jefferson was not the only future president at the Philadelphia memorial service, nor was he the only one who had seen politics ruin his relationship with Washington. In some ways, Congressman James Madison had been even closer to Washington than Jefferson had. Unlike Jefferson, both Madison and Washington had played important roles in the drafting of the Constitution in 1787, and Madison had been a key unofficial adviser to the president in his first term. Indeed, Madison helped Washington write his first farewell address when the president considered retirement in 1792.[103] Washington then decided to serve another term, however, and by the time the second term was ending, “Madison had become the primary leader of the Republican opposition to Washington’s policies in the Congress and was therefore a rather dramatic example of the party spirit that his former words had warned against.” [104]
Madison never took his ruptured relationship with Washington as personally as did Jefferson. Like Jefferson, however, he waited many years, until the political storms of the first party system had subsided (mostly in his favor) and his own two term presidency had ended, before pronouncing his clearest assessment of Washington. Strangely echoing Jefferson’s 1814 letter, Madison wrote, in 1819, “The Strength of his character lay in his integrity, his love of justice, his fortitude, the soundness of his judgment, and his remarkable prudence to which he joined an elevated sense of patriotic duty, and a reliance on the enlightened & impartial world as the tribunal by which a lasting sentence on his career would be pronounced. . . .”[105]
Like Jefferson, Madison used his reflection to explain away Washington’s support of Federalism and thus his own shattered relationship with the first president. “If any erroneous changes took place in his views of persons and public affairs near the close of his life as has been insinuated, they may probably be accounted for by circumstances which threw him into an exclusive communication with men of one party, who took advantage of his retired situation to make impressions unfavorable to their opponents.”[106]
Unlike Jefferson and Madison, Washington’s fourth successor, and the last member of the “Virginia Dynasty,” could claim no intimate connection to Washington; quite the contrary. James Monroe’s relationship with the General was complex and somewhat bitter. Monroe had joined the Continental Army at eighteen, fought bravely, and was wounded at Trenton.[107] Washington then concocted a plan to create regiments of men from different states, naming Monroe as one of the officers.[108] The idea failed; the country was not ready for such a national approach.[109] The affair all but ruined Monroe’s military career. Even Washington was unable to restore his position within Virginia’s military hierarchy.[110] According to Flexner, this event had three long-term effects on Monroe: It led him to “study law with Jefferson,” “soured him on Washington,” and “convinced him that to an ambitious man state ties were of primary importance.” [111] Although Monroe, by 1794, was a devout Democratic-Republican, Washington offered him the Ministry to France at a time when he (Washington) was tormented by the war between France and Britain. In choosing Monroe, “Washington was scraping the bottom of the barrel—” wrote Flexner, “and he probably did not realize the extent of Monroe’s distrust for him.”[112] In France, Monroe proved more loyal to Jefferson than to Washington, failed to sooth the French anger over the Jay Treaty, and infuriated the president.[113] Finally, in 1796, Washington recalled Monroe.[114]
Washington had not realized that “in disapproval of him personally and of his administration, [and] in enthusiasm for the French Revolution, Monroe was more extreme than his friends Madison and Jefferson.”[115] Still, despite his extreme feelings and his perceived personal wrongs at Washington’s hands, Monroe, like Jefferson, found himself, decades later, defending himself and Washington in the same passages. “I was charged with a failure to perform my duty in my first mission, & recalled from it and censured,” he wrote to Judge John McLean in 1827, nearly three years after completing his second term as president. “The parties are since dead, and I am now retired to private life. I never doubted the perfect integrity of Genl. Washington, nor the strength, or energy of his mind, and was personally attached to him. I admired his patriotism, and had full confidence in his attachement to liberty, and solicitude for the success of the French Revolution.”[116] If his praise of Washington seems incredible, Monroe, at least, made no effort to blame Washington’s actions on manipulation by federalists or “monarchists.”
Monroe’s successor had no history of bad relations with George Washington. As John Adam’s son, John Quincy Adams may have been privy to some occasional grumbling about the General, but he always respected the man who had done so much to further his career. By the time Washington became president, in 1789, the younger Adams had more diplomatic experience than did men twice his age. In the years to come, he acquired still more. In 1794, Washington appointed Adams Minister to the Netherlands. The president was pleased with Adams’ performance in Holland. “‘I shall be much mistaken,’” Washington told [Vice President John Adams], “‘if in as short a time as can well be expected, he is not found at the head of the Diplomatique Corps.’”[117] With his presidency near its end, Washington wanted to move Adams from Holland to Portugal. John Adams the elder was elected president, however, and wanted his son moved to Prussia. Washington agreed.
John Quincy Adams was in Berlin, in early February, 1800, when he learned, weeks after the fact, of Washington’s death. To William Vans Murray he wrote:
General Washington we learn from the latest accounts by the way of England died after a very short illness on the 15th [sic] of December. He is gone to a better world, very few of whose inhabitants were while sojourners in this so deserving of it. If there be in that state room for the exercise of virtue, its powers must be more extensive and less clogged than on this wretched globe. But where all are glorious he will shine with more than a common luster. The world needs some consolation for the loss of such a man.[118]
Washington’s death obviously moved the normally stoic Adams. Later that same day, he wrote to Joseph Pitcairn. As others would over the years, he injected politics into the news of Washington’s passing. “I was very much affected with the account of General Washington’s death,” Adams told Pitcairn. “He is now beyond the reach of all bad passions which have attempted to shed some of their venom even upon him.”[119] For weeks, the news occupied his writing. In March, he wrote, with some satisfaction, to Secretary of State Timothy Pickering that “first consul Buonaparte [sic]” himself had “ordered black crapes to be suspended to the flags and colors of the French armies throughout the whole Republic for ten days, and that the bust of Washington shall be placed in the Tuileries, with those of many other illustrious military characters of ancient and modern times.”[120] Twenty-five years later, the man who mourned Washington so deeply from Europe would become his fifth successor in the presidency.
Though a veteran of the Revolutionary War and a member of Congress at the close of Washington’s presidency, it is unlikely that Adams’ successor, Andrew Jackson, knew Washington personally. What is known is that his war experiences—he was captured, starved, and wounded by the British as a young teenager—left Jackson with a deep and abiding hatred for the British, and that because of this, he, like others at the time of the Jay Treaty controversy, became bitter toward Washington.[121] At the time of the great partisan rancor over the treaty, Jackson represented the new state of Tennessee in the House of Representatives. Jackson was not known for subtlety or sentiment, nor was he a cultivated Virginia gentleman, as were so many of Washington’s other antagonists. Infuriated at British offenses against American seamen, and believing Washington should fight, Jackson lashed out against the president, threatening to introduce a bill of impeachment.[122]
Jackson did not make good on his impeachment threat, but he did take one more opportunity to belittle Washington. As the president prepared for retirement in 1796, the House of Representatives drafted a purely laudatory resolution thanking Washington for his services to his country. Jackson and a handful of like-minded members refused unanimous consent to the resolution, instead seeking to insert more even-handing language pointing out areas of disagreement with Washington. Finally, the friendlier version of the resolution passed, 67 –12. Jackson was among the twelve.[123]
By the time of Washington’s death, two years later, Jackson was back in Tennessee, serving as a judge, and said little about his passing. Unlikely as it seemed in 1799, within three decades Jackson himself would be president. If time and circumstance softened others’ memories of Washington, there is little evidence that they ever did so for Andrew Jackson. He made passing complimentary references to Washington in state papers, but he never penned the kind of elegiac memorials that others did.
With the exception of William Henry Harrison, Jackson was the last president to have adult memories of George Washington, and the last of Washington’s political contemporaries to reach the White House. Thereafter, nearly all presidents, especially in the nineteenth century, would reflect, from time to time, on the life and example of Washington, though most of them would know of it—as do we—only from history. When James Buchanan, who was 8 in 1799, left the presidency in 1861, it marked the end of any personal memories of Washington among the presidents.
Had he not become ill, had his doctors not bled him white, had Dr. Dick performed a tracheotomy, perhaps Washington would have lived longer—perhaps much longer. Though unlikely, he might have lived another twenty years. In a sense, perhaps Washington’s death was yet another illustration of his uncanny sense of timing. Though not above partisanship, he died before becoming further entangled in the partisan warfare that would dominate 1800 and beyond. His death left the country bereft of the most universally beloved figure it ever had, or would, produce. His death stymied most of his contemporary successors, all of whom, save the Adamses, had become, in some degree, his political enemies. It left them uncertain how to balance Washington’s transcendental greatness against what was surely an undisclosed degree of resentment toward the man. Even Andrew Jackson, who did not hesitate to malign Washington when he was alive, did not dare malign him dead. The others, too, held their fire, attended the memorials, celebrated his birthday, and waited until they had mellowed to assure the world that they had loved Washington, and—more importantly—that the feeling had been mutual.
What, then, are we to make of the bitter divisions of the 1790s? What of the broken friendships and the denunciations they left in their wake? “That had nothing to do with Washington, himself,” one can almost hear these later presidents protest. “That must have been Hamilton’s doing.”
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[1] John C. Fitzpatrick, ed. Writings of George Washington, vol. 35 (Washington, D. C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1944), 99.
[2] Tobias Lear, “The Last Illness and Death of General Washington,” in Letters and Recollections of George Washington: Being Letters to Tobias Lear and Others between 1790 and 1799, showing the First American in the Management of his Estate and Domestic Affairs. With a Diary of Washington’s Last Days, kept by Mr. Lear, ed., Jared Sparks (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1932), 129.
[4] John Alexander Carroll and Mary Wells Ashworth, George Washington (a biography begun by Douglas Southall Freeman), vol. 7, First in Peace (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), 618n5.
[16] Carroll and Ashworth, George Washington, 619n16.
[18] Carroll and Ashworth, George Washington, caption to illustration of James Monroe appearing between pages 69 –70.
[29] Dr. James Craik and Dr. Elisha Cullen Dick, “Medical Report of Washington’s Death,” quoted in George E. Kahler, “Washington in Glory, America in Tears” (Ph. D. diss., College of William and Mary, 2003), 49.
[30] Harlow Giles Unger, The Unexpected George Washington (Hoboken, N. J.: John Wiley and sons, 2006), 262.
[35] “A hydroalcoholic solution containing approximately 2% ammonia and 4% ammonium carbonate and the aromatics: lemon oil, lavender oil, and myristica oil. Used mainly by inhalation to produce reflex stimulation in persons who have fainted or are at risk of syncope.” From “Sal volatile,” in Biology Online [database on-line] (accessed April 2008); available from http://www.biology-online.org/dictionary/Sal_volatile; Internet.
[43] Carroll and Ashworth, George Washington, 621n23.
[47] Ben Cohen, “The Death of George Washington (1732 –99) and the History of Cynanche,” Journal of Medical Biography 13, no. 4 (2005): 230.
[58] Ibid. This quotation is from Lear alone, not Washington.
[73] Thomas M. Boyd, “Death of a Hero, Death of a Friend: George Washington’s Last Hours,” Virginia Cavalcade, 33, no. 3 (1984): 139.
[74] Boyd, “Death of a Hero,” 143.
[76] Carroll and Ashworth, George Washington, 623.
[77] Cohen, “The Death of George Washington,” 230.
[80] Edwin Lee Miles, “George Washington Didn’t Have to Die,” Manuscripts 49, no. 4 (1997): 302.
[81] Boyd, “Death of a Hero,” 143.
[82] Cohen, “The Death of George Washington,” 230 –31.
[83] The American Presidency Project [database online], Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (hosted), Gerhard Peters (database). Available from the World Wide Web: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=65683.
[84] Kahler, “Washington in Glory,” 52n34.
[88] The American Presidency Project; Kahler, “Washington in Glory,” 52 –53.
[89] Unger, The Unexpected George Washington, 101 –02.
[90] Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York: Random House, 2000; Vintage Books, 2002), 217.
[91] Unger, The Unexpected George Washington, 237 –239.
[92] Kahler, “Washington in Glory,” 54; Woolley and Peters, The American Presidency Project.
[93] The American Presidency Project.
[94] Ibid.; Kahler, “Washington in Glory,” 55.
[98] Ellis, Founding Brothers, 140.
[101] Jefferson to Dr. Walter Jones, 2 January 1814, in The Complete Jefferson: Containing his Major Writings, Published and Unpublished, Except for his Letters, ed. Saul K. Padover (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearch, Inc., 1943), 924.
[103] Ellis, Founding Brothers, 148 –49.
[104] Ellis, Founding Brothers, 149.
[105] James Madison, “Detached Memoranda” [recipient unknown] , 1819, in James Madison: Writings, Jack N. Rakove, ed. (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1999), 748.
[107] James Thomas Flexner, George Washington, vol. 5, Anguish and Farewell 1793 –1799 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1969), 145.
[116] Monroe to John McLean, 5 December, 1827, in The Writings of James Monroe: Including a Collection of his Public and Private Papers and Correspondence now for the First Time Printed, ed. Stanislaus Murray Hamilton, vol. 7, 1824 –1831 (New York: AMS Press, 1969), 129.
[117] Unger, The Unexpected George Washington, 228.
[118] Adams to William Vans Murray, 4 February 1800, in Writings of John Quincy Adams, Worthington Chauncy Ford, ed. vol. 2, 1797 –1801 (New York, Greenwood Press, 1968), 451.
[119] Adams to Joseph Pitcairn, 4 February 1800, in Writings of John Quincy Adams, 451n1.
[120] Adams to Timothy Pickering, Berlin, 8 March 1800, in Writings of John Quincy Adams, 454.
[121] Marquis James, The Life of Andrew Jackson, Complete in One Volume (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1940), 76.
[123] Ibid., 79 –80; Annals of Congress, 4th Cong., 2nd sess., 16 December, 1796.