Washington: A Life (123 page)

In April, shortly after his noble defeat over the slavery issue, Benjamin Franklin died. He was the only American whose stature remotely compared to that of Washington. During his final weeks Franklin had insisted that liberty should extend “without distinction of color to all descriptions of people.”
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In his will Franklin paid a typically ingenious compliment to Washington: “My fine crabtree walking stick, with a gold head curiously wrought in the form of the cap of liberty, I give to my friend, and the friend of mankind, General Washington. If it were a scepter, he has merited it and would become it.”
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After the Senate voted down a motion to wear mourning for Franklin, Jefferson turned to Washington for an appropriate tribute: “I proposed to General Washington that the executive department should wear mourning. He declined it because he said he would not know where to draw the line if he once began that ceremony.”
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One wonders whether, after the Quaker petitions, Washington had more than presidential etiquette in mind in the decision. The country was curiously devoid of public eulogies to Franklin; the National Assembly in Paris outdid Congress in its tributes, as the Count de Mirabeau paid eloquent homage to “the genius who liberated America and poured upon Europe torrents of light.”
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Washington very nearly followed Franklin to his grave. On Sunday, April 4, he reported in his diary: “At home all day—unwell.”
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Two days later he sat for a second portrait by Edward Savage, commissioned by Vice President John Adams. Unlike the earlier Savage portrait done for Harvard, which showed a man of magisterial calm, this one presented a far more troubled man, the left side of his face dipped in shadow. With a double chin protruding over his jabot and a prominent bag drooping under his right eye, he has a deeply unsettled look. People gossiped that a mysterious fever had gripped the president. “I do not know the exact state of GW’s health for a day or two last,” Pennsylvania congressman George Clymer wrote on April 11, “but it is observed here with a great deal of anxiety that his general health seems to be declining. For some time past, he has been subject to a slow fever.”
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Georgia congressman Abraham Baldwin agreed. “Our great and good man has been unwell again this spring,” he told a friend. “I never saw him more emaciated.”
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From April 20 through 24, in a concerted effort to rescue his health, Washington toured Long Island, traveling as far east as Brookhaven on the south shore before heading up to Setauket on the north shore, then circling back to Manhattan. Upon his return, everybody said Washington looked more robust; Robert Morris reassured his wife that the president had “regained his looks, his appetite, and his health.”
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The improvement did not last. By this point a severe influenza epidemic was proliferating in the city. James Madison had contracted it, and Washington imprudently asked him to stop by his house on April 27, which may have infected him with the influenza as well. On May 7 William Maclay informed Dr. Benjamin Rush that the president had “nearly lost his hearing” from the illness, which must have been a heavy blow for Washington.
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On Sunday, May 9, Washington noted: “Indisposed with a bad cold and at home all day writing letters on private business.”
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The next day he was confined to bed. By this time Madison, having rebounded from his illness, said that the president suffered from “peripneumony, united probably with the influenza,” and others mentioned pleurisy as well.
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This suggests that he suffered from a combination of labored breathing, sharp pains in his side, harsh coughing, and blood in his spittle. Whatever the original disease, it deepened into pneumonia. In addition to hearing loss, eyewitnesses mentioned that Washington’s eyes were rheumy and that he seemed prematurely aged. He was far from alone in a city seized by widespread illness. By mid-May the influenza had exploded in such epidemic proportions that Richard Henry Lee described Manhattan as “a perfect hospital—few are well and many very sick.”
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As fears mounted about whether the president would survive, three eminent doctors were consulted: Dr. Samuel Bard, Dr. John McKnight, and Dr. John Charlton. As Washington’s condition worsened, they decided on May 12 to summon Dr. John Jones, a surgeon from Philadelphia, who had been the personal physician to Ben Franklin. So as not to alert the public to Washington’s true condition, the presidential aides tried to sneak Dr. Jones in under conditions of extraordinary secrecy. “The doctor’s prudence will suggest the propriety of setting out as privately as possible,” Major William Jackson told Clement Biddle of Philadelphia. “Perhaps it may be well to assign a personal reason for visiting New York, or going into the country.”
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The street in front of Washington’s residence was again cleared of traffic and carpeted with straw to mute sounds. With such precautions, rumors inevitably circulated about Washington’s perilous condition. “Called to see the president,” William Maclay wrote on May 15. “Every eye full of tears. His life despaired of.”
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With Washington coughing up blood and running a high fever, Dr. McKnight hinted to Maclay that there was little hope of recovery and that death might be imminent. Beset by hiccups, Washington made strange gurgling noises that were interpreted as a death rattle. What one observer described as “a universal gloom” overspread a country long accustomed to Washington’s steady presence.
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On May 16, against all expectations and after the team of physicians had pronounced the case hopeless, the president rallied and underwent a startling improvement. At four in the afternoon he broke into a tremendous sweat, his coughing abated, and he spoke more clearly than he had in days. In a tone of joy and mild disbelief, Jefferson told his daughter that “from a total despair, we are now in good hopes of him.”
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On May 18 the president’s condition surfaced in a press that had preserved discreet silence. “The President of the United States has been exceedingly indisposed for several days past,” the
New-York Journal
informed readers, “but we are rejoiced at the authentic information of his being much relieved the last evening.”
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For the next two weeks, although a convalescent Washington could not perform presidential duties, he was now clearly on the mend. In early June he assured Lafayette that he was well out of danger and had rebounded “except in point of strength.”
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Throughout the ordeal, Martha Washington supervised the sickroom and behaved with stoic equanimity. To Mercy Otis Warren, she admitted that the tremendous display of public sympathy had been “very affecting” to her. Her self-possessed husband, she said, had gone through the crisis with typical composure: “He seemed less concerned himself as to the event than perhaps almost any other person in ye United States. Happily, he is now perfectly recovered.”
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From the time he was a young man, Washington had faced death with uncommon fortitude, and this time proved no exception. By May 20 his fever had ebbed, and two days later Richard Henry Lee found him sitting up in a chair. Helped by his naturally hardy nature, the president made rapid strides. “The President is again on his legs,” Philip Schuyler reported the next day. “He was yesterday able to traverse his room a dozen times.”
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A couple of days later he was even out riding. On May 27 Jefferson declared an official end to the crisis when he stated that Washington was “well enough to resume business.”
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The country had narrowly averted catastrophe, for John Adams, whatever his merits, would never have been the unifying figure needed to launch the constitutional experiment. Still, Washington remained in a weakened state, so drained of energy that he did not resume his diary until June 24.

As in the crisis of Washington’s infected thigh a year earlier, the federal government had been poorly prepared for this serious lapse in the president’s health. With Tobias Lear out of town, Major William Jackson effectively ran the presidential office. No official procedure for deputizing someone during a presidential illness existed, and Washington may have been reluctant to grant precedence to any cabinet officer. As he lobbied for his financial program, the high-flying Hamilton functioned as de facto head of state. In later unpublished comments about this anxious time, Hamilton said that Jefferson viewed him then for the first time as “a formidable rival in the competition for the presidential chair at a future period.” While others brooded about the president’s fate, Hamilton alleged, the situation “only excited the ambitious ardor of the secretary [of state] to remove out of his way every dangerous opponent. That melancholy circumstance suggested to him the probability of an approaching vacancy in the presidential chair and that he would attract the public attention as the successor to it, were the more popular Secretary of the Treasury out of the way.”
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Hamilton offered no proof to back up his assertion, and Jefferson likely would have made the same claim about Hamilton. Before too long the mutual suspicions simmering between the two men would burst into open warfare.

The president having withstood two grave illnesses, the capital was rife with copious opinions as to how best to preserve his precious health. A chorus of friends and physicians alike urged him to dedicate more time to exercise and lessen the strain of public business. Even in mid-June Washington could not quite get rid of the remnants of his chest pains, coughing, and shortness of breath and acknowledged the dreadful toll that dinners, meetings, and receptions had taken on his constitution. “Within the last twelve months,” he told David Stuart, “I have undergone more and severer sickness than thirty preceding years afflicted me with, put it altogether.”
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The next bout of illness, he predicted, would “put me to sleep with my fathers.”
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By nature a conscientious, hardworking man, Washington confessed to Lafayette that he could not stop doing all the things necessary “to accomplish whatever I have undertaken (though reluctantly) to the best of my abilities.”
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Washington heeded the doctors’ stark warning that he should get more outdoor activity. On June 6 he accompanied Jefferson and Hamilton on a fishing trip off Sandy Hook. It was a fine spring day, and the newspapers hoped the president felt reinvigorated by the sea air. “We are told he has had excellent sport,” one paper commented, “having himself caught a great number of sea bass and blackfish.”
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After resuming his diary, Washington jotted down many instances of riding in his coach or on horseback as he tried to pry himself away from his sedentary life. For health reasons, Washington also contemplated the purchase of a farm outside Philadelphia, which never happened.

Washington’s back-to-back illnesses in 1789 and 1790 contributed to the sudden aging of a man who had long been associated with graceful virility. The two episodes would have greatly deepened his sense that he was sacrificing his life for his country and that he would likely have little or no retirement beyond the presidency. Washington had grown more haggard during these medical emergencies. Fanny Bassett Washington wrote the following year, “The president looks better than I expected to see him, but still there be traces in his countenance of his two last severe illnesses, which I fear will never wear off.”
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The crises also left Martha Washington in a reflective, despondent mood. She told Mercy Otis Warren, “But for the ties of affection which attract me so strongly to my near connection and worthy friends, I should feel myself indeed much weaned from all enjoyments of this transitory life.”
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AFTER MOST OF THE STATES had ratified the Constitution by the summer of 1788, James Madison had broached to George Washington a topic that engaged both their emotional loyalties and their financial interests: the location of the future capital. Aware that New York and Philadelphia would emerge as serious candidates, Madison hoped the banks of the Potomac River might ultimately house the federal government. As flourishing population growth on the western frontier enhanced the prospects for a southern capital, Madison believed that time was on the South’s side. Washington’s red-hot enthusiasm for the Potomac had scarcely cooled, and he still embraced the river as the ideal portal to the interior and hence the optimal site for the capital. The Potomac was the natural “center of the union,” he had explained to Arthur Young. “It is between the extremes of heat and cold … and must from its extensive course through a rich and populous country become in time the grand emporium of North America.”
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Since it would exert far-reaching influence, the choice of venue for the capital was fraught with controversy. Most obviously, it would mean a commercial windfall for nearby property owners; Madison and Henry Lee scooped up land along the Potomac to profit from any future capital. The political leanings of the surrounding region would affect legislators isolated from constituents back home. Jefferson and other agrarians also wanted a capital remote from the noxious impact of large cities and northern manufacturing. Finally, many southern legislators preferred a southern city where they could transport their slaves without being harassed by abolitionists. So vexed was the capital question that Madison almost despaired of a satisfactory solution. “The business of the seat of government is become a labyrinth for which the votes printed furnish no clue,” he lamented in June 1790.
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The deadlock over the issue coincided with a stalemate over Hamilton’s plan to have the federal government assume state debts. Washington noted that the two debates had ensnared Congress in ceaseless rancor, telling David Stuart that June that “the questions of assumption, residence, and other matters have been agitated with warmth and intemperance, with prolixity and threats.”
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Washington’s fantasy of nonpartisan civility in politics was being rapidly eroded by growing polarization along north-south lines. Still recuperating from illness, he found it easy to stay aloof from the debates on assumption and the capital, but he clearly supported Hamilton’s objectives, echoing his treasury secretary’s belief that the “cause in which the expenses of the war was incurred was a common cause” and should be borne by the federal government.
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It was also universally known that he favored a Potomac capital. “It is in fact the interest of the President of the United States that pushes the Potomac,” William Maclay protested in his diary. “He by means of Jefferson, Madison … and others urges this business.”
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