Washington [349]
Just as Washington’s postwar years were touched with many intimations of mortality, so Martha had many somber occasions to reflect on life’s brevity. In April 1785 an express messenger arrived at Mount Vernon bearing a double dose of dreadful news for her: her mother, seventy-five-year-old Frances Dandridge, and her last surviving brother, forty-eight-year-old Judge Bartholomew Dandridge, had died within nine days of each other. These deaths lengthened the already-long list of family losses Martha had endured, starting with the demise of her first husband and all four of her children. The death of her younger brother meant that, among her seven siblings, only her youngest sister, Betsy, was still alive. Like the Washingtons, the Dandridge clan seemed doomed to suffer untimely deaths.
The following year George Washington suffered two tremendous blows. He had always delighted in the bright young men in his military family, often finding it easier to befriend these protégés than his peers, and he had felt special warmth for Lieutenant Colonel Tench Tilghman, who handled his business matters in Baltimore. “I have often repeated to you that there are few men in the world to whom I am more sincerely attached by inclination than I am to you,” Washington had assured him.35 Genial and unassuming, Tilghman had entered fully into Washington’s confidence, and the latter was grief-stricken when the younger man died at age forty-one in April 1786. In a mighty tribute, Washington told Jefferson that his former aide had “as fair a reputation as ever belonged to a human character,” and he speculated that he mourned the death more keenly than anyone outside of Tilghman’s own family.36
Perhaps more consequential for America’s future was the demise of General Nathanael Greene at forty-three. Just as Washington and Greene had seen eye to eye on war-related matters, so they had viewed the country’s postwar turmoil with similar apprehension. Like Washington, Greene had developed a federal perspective and feared that the total autonomy of the states would culminate in feuding and anarchy. As he warned Washington, “Many people secretly wish that every state should be completely independent and that, as soon as our public debts are liquidated, that Congress should be no more—a plan that would be as fatal to our interest at home as ruinous to it abroad.”37 Unfortunately, Greene’s personal finances were in no less disorderly a state than those of the country at large: he had accumulated such heavy debts guaranteeing contracts for the southern army that it gave him “much pain and preyed heavily upon my spirits.”38 He also revealed to Washington in August 1784 that for two months he had experienced a “dangerous and disagree[able] pain” in his chest, which sounds like heart disease.39 In June 1786, while at his estate near Savannah, Georgia, he was seized at the table with a “violent pain in his eye and head,” followed by his death a few days later.40
Washington mourned Greene’s death for many months. Beyond personal grief, he knew that the country had lost a man cut out for bigger things. He had counted on Greene as a political ally and kindred spirit and said he regretted “the death of this valuable character, especially at this crisis, when the political machine seems pregnant with the most awful events.”41 It seems likely that, had Greene lived, Washington would have chosen him as the first secretary of war in preference to Henry Knox. Greene died in such dire economic