Martha Washington (30 page)

After Congress adjourned in early March, Washington waited for the roads to improve before setting out on March 21 for his southern tour, the other half of his trip the previous year. Rumor suggested that his national policy was unpopular in the South, and he intended to find out. This trip of some two thousand miles completed his intention of visiting all the states of the Union. On his way south, the president spent four days at Georgetown talking sense to the local landowners, whose political animosities and greed were endangering the future of the new capital. Both going and returning, he stopped at Mount Vernon to check on things.

In his absence, Martha avoided a repetition of the past year's depression. She had a new miniature painted by Peale and took Nelly and Wash on several jaunts, including a visit with friends at a great estate in New Jersey, capped off with a stop at the Bristol Fair in Bucks County. Tobias Lear's mother came for a long visit, at Martha's invitation, to admire her new grandson.

That summer, everyone was sickly except Nelly. They decided not to make their usual trip to Mount Vernon, uprooting the entire household, but to stay quietly in Philadelphia. George Augustine Washington had spent some time on doctor's orders at one of the mountain spas in another futile attempt to improve his health, and Fanny had just given birth to a third child, Charles Augustine.

By August, George Augustine was so much worse that he was unable to sit a horse, much less manage a large plantation. Suddenly, all was action as Martha and George packed up children, servants, and aides and set off for Mount Vernon in September. Bob Lewis took over temporary management of the estate, and Washington asked Bob's brother Howell to join the presidential household. The whole caravan was back in Philadelphia by the time Congress convened on October 24, 1791.

The first year of the presidency had seen an encouraging display of cooperation in nation building. The next years were filled with rising controversy over just how the government was to operate. And as the president coped with dissensions among the men he trusted, the sad drama of his favorite nephew played itself out. It wasn't just the loss of someone he and Martha loved; both of them worried about how Mount Vernon could continue to operate without an experienced farmer in charge.

A plantation manager was hired at last, and the Washingtons went home annually during congressional recesses while George Augustine died slowly of tuberculosis. Sent away again to the mountains as his health spiraled downward, he was constantly spitting up blood, sometimes floods of it when his lungs hemorrhaged, and was at times unable to speak. In August and September 1792, he was bedridden and unable to walk—“a shadow of what he was.” Finally, he, Fanny, and their three children moved to her family home in New Kent County, hoping the warmer climate might be helpful. It wasn't. George Augustine died on February 5, 1793. He was buried in the family burial ground at Eltham, joining Martha's son, Jack, and her sister Nancy Bassett. George took this death especially hard, since George Augustine was his favorite of many nephews and the heir apparent to Mount Vernon.

It was clear as well that Fanny had contracted tuberculosis from her husband. Martha worried about her niece, urging: “I hope you will now look forward and consider how necessary it is for you to attend to your own health for the sake of your dear little Babes.”

Whatever the general public might have thought in 1791 and subsequently, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had decided that the nation was in jeopardy from the machinations of Alexander Hamilton. All his financial measures were leading down the gilded road to monarchy and damnation. Washington, in their developing view, was merely his dupe. Jefferson couldn't imagine that Washington seriously found Hamilton's plans better than his own for the nation—although at this point, Jefferson had few concrete plans other than opposing Hamilton. Jefferson took an extreme states' rights position, combating every attempt to strengthen the federal government, while the president was committed to creating a strongly united nation.

Foreign affairs, too, were a crucial factor in the development of political parties. Hamilton had fought the British bravely in the Revolution, but he still admired and wanted to emulate many British institutions. Jefferson had been in Paris when the Bastille fell in 1789 and was filled with enthusiasm and admiration for the French Revolution. Even as new rulers came and went and the shadow of the guillotine loomed, he stood fast in his love for France and hatred for Great Britain. To Hamilton, all this was violence and anarchy that might engulf the United States.

Alexander Hamilton was a brilliant man but a terrible politician. Neurotic impulses often ruled his behavior, and he suffered from the fatal delusion that he was a master manipulator, causing needless distrust and dislike. Thomas Jefferson actually
was
a master manipulator, especially in combination with the detail-oriented James Madison. As Hamilton and Jefferson came to stand for coalescing political parties, they fought over matters of substance, but there was an underlying personal hostility as well. They hated each other, each considering the other a hypocrite with secret plans who was trying to use the president for his own ends. And they were both right.

Agreeing to block Hamilton in Congress, Jefferson and Madison decided that they needed their own newspaper to combat the pro-government
Gazette of the United States
. Their friend Philip Freneau, a bad poet but an exceptional polemicist, shared their politics. In August 1791, Jefferson hired him as a translator for the State Department with the understanding that his official workload wouldn't interfere with the newspaper he agreed to publish.

In October, Freneau came out with the first issue of the
National Gazette
; by February, he had launched an unremitting barrage of criticism against Hamilton and all his plans, indirectly disparaging the president as well. Jefferson was aware that Washington “was extremely affected by the attacks . . . I think he feels those things more than any person I ever yet met with.” But although he claimed to be “sincerely sorry” for the injury to the president, such attacks were essential to his political aims. When Washington inquired about the coincidence of a government employee imported to publish a newspaper attacking that government, Jefferson equivocated. Technically, he told the truth while asserting a lie. Such specious defenses didn't impress Martha; she came to abhor the sly politician who used her husband so badly.

Hamilton leapt to arms, publishing articles in his own defense in the other paper and skewering Jefferson. To Washington, this “spirit of party” was terribly upsetting. To try to bring the opponents together, he began holding formal cabinet meetings. Surely, talking face-to-face, they could get over their difficulties. He saw the issue as northern vs. southern interests. He didn't yet realize that political parties had become a reality in the United States, with partisans committed to destroying the careers of their opponents. There would be no going back.

Washington had had enough of refereeing a progressively nastier game. Early in 1792, he informed Jefferson, Hamilton, Knox, and Madison that he would retire at the end of the term. The government was in working order, and he and his wife wanted to go home to enjoy the remainder of their lives.

When both Hamilton and Jefferson, as well as most other leaders, begged Washington to accept a second term, his sense of duty overcame his own desire for retirement. Martha was bitterly opposed to this decision and begged him to decline. She genuinely feared that her aging husband would not survive the presidency: his two close encounters with death and the partisan savagery among his cabinet members seemed reason enough for his retirement to a sensible woman. She was convinced that long hours, worry, emotional turmoil, and lack of regular country exercise were undermining his health. As far as she was concerned, her sixty-year-old husband had done all that could be expected for his country.

It was almost unbearably disappointing to Martha when George again bowed to duty. He agreed to accept a second term if the vote was unanimous. After a simple inauguration in the Senate chamber on March 4, 1793, the torments of the second term began, far crueler than anything she could have anticipated.

CHAPTER TEN

L
ess than a week after Washington's second inauguration, dramatic news arrived from France. Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette had been guillotined; Lafayette had barely escaped his country alive, only to be thrown into an Austrian prison. Many of the aristocratic French officers who had fought in the American Revolution, as well as their families, were imprisoned and later executed. Pro-French radicals toasted the death of the king and celebrated in the streets of Philadelphia and other American cities. Naturally, there was a strong conservative reaction against France among other Americans, particularly the wealthy, who tended to favor Great Britain. Washington was deeply skeptical about the future course of the French republic but had no inclination to support the British.

With Congress in recess, Washington went to Mount Vernon in April because his farm manager was dying—and soon learned that the France of Robespierre and the Jacobins was at war with England, the Netherlands, Prussia, and Russia. He rushed back to Philadelphia. By the terms of the treaty of 1784, the United States was obligated to support her French ally. But the France of Louis XVI had disappeared with his beheading. Was the treaty still binding? Jefferson said yes, Hamilton no. Washington stood firm in his belief that the young nation should avoid foreign entanglements and conflicts. The United States had everything to lose by plunging into war with neither an army nor a navy worth mentioning. At his urging, the Neutrality Proclamation was declared on April 22, 1793.

Every time the French government changed, a new minister with fresh instructions and objectives was sent to America. Edmond Charles Genêt, a particularly aggressive and undiplomatic envoy, had landed at Charleston on April 8. He acted as a free agent, not bothering to present his credentials to the government right away. For some weeks, he appealed directly to American citizens, commissioning privateers and talking of forming an army to attack the Spanish colonies. Republican newspapers supported this charismatic Frenchman and his government, demanding an end to neutrality and an alliance against France's enemies. On May 18, Genêt finally called on the president and then continued his gadfly activities in Philadelphia, vocally opposing the actions of Washington and his government—some thought fomenting a violent new revolution in the United States.

While trying to balance foreign and domestic affairs with the hostility among his cabinet members, Washington was also called on to advise Fanny Washington about her finances and future, as well as attend to the management of Mount Vernon. With a tenuous calm reigning in Philadelphia, he went home again in July for a week or so, celebrating the Fourth of July in Alexandria and installing his nephew Howell Lewis as temporary manager. Martha stayed in Philadelphia, where she invited friends and their children to view the fireworks on Market Street from the roof of her kitchen. She devoted herself to looking after the family and providing comfort for her sorely beset husband as he dashed back and forth from Virginia to Pennsylvania.

The deadly yellow fever epidemic that struck Philadelphia in July was an ominous note in keeping with the rest of Washington's second term. Yellow fever first broke out in North American port cities in the mid-eighteenth century. The virulent fever, carried by the
Aedes egypti
mosquito, required three factors to become epidemic. Philadelphia provided them all—the arrival of infected human victims, breeding grounds for clouds of mosquitoes, and thousands of people without immunity living crowded together. Ships from the West Indies, where the disease was raging that summer, arrived regularly at the Delaware River wharves, and the city's cisterns, wells, and swampy areas provided an ideal environment for mosquitoes. The streets around the docks were chock-full of immigrants, living cheek by jowl in decrepit buildings. They lacked immunity because they had never been exposed to the disease.

The outbreak started down on Water Street in July, a slum lodging-house tenant here, a sailor there, then a sharp increase in deaths throughout the neighborhood. City authorities tried to convince themselves that it wasn't the beginning of an epidemic, just the usual summer fevers among the poor. To Martha's great sadness, Polly Lear contracted a fever and died on July 26 after a week's illness, probably not yellow fever to judge by the absence of the typical symptoms. Tobias bore his loss “like a philosopher.” The Washingtons attended the funeral of the “pretty spritely woman,” and Hamilton and Jefferson overcame their differences long enough to join the other pallbearers.