Washington [419]
By this point Washington had come down with a cold and an eye inflammation. Even before he left New York, he had received reports of an “epidemical cold” gripping the New England states.13 On the day he entered Boston, so many local citizens were wheezing with heavy coughs and chest colds that the illness was dubbed “the President’s Cough” or “Washington’s influenza.”14 Now it seemed that Washington himself had succumbed. Nonetheless he toured the Harvard College library and museum and went aboard the flagship of the French fleet, receiving maritime honors accorded only to kings. Bemused, he noted, “The officers took off their shoes and the crew all appeared with their legs bared.”15 Still the heartthrob of American females, Washington agreed to a request from the ladies at an elegant dinner to sit for a portrait that would grace Faneuil Hall. The smitten ladies, all aflutter, explained that “his benign countenance made such an impression on their hearts as they wish to recognize in his portrait in future.”16 From this portrait, copies were made that would hang in many Boston households.
On his trip Washington followed his ecumenical practice of praying in churches of various denominations, including Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Congregational. In Boston he attended a concert in King’s Chapel (Stone Chapel), where a young Danish artist named Christian Güllager, seated in a pew behind the pulpit, drew a rapid, unauthorized sketch of him. A week later, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Washington granted Güllager a two-and-a-half-hour sitting that produced a remarkably fresh and candid portrait of Washington that was perhaps influenced by the painter’s first glimpse of him in Boston. Leaning back in his chair, Washington seems to turn and suddenly catch the artist’s eye. His face is broad and open, his torso massive and powerful in a dark coat, and his aura commanding.
On October 28, as he toured the Boston Sailcloth Manufactory, Washington’s attention was distracted from the wonders of American manufactures by the wonders of American women. One observer spied Washington’s frisson of delight, saying that he “made himself merry on this occasion, telling the overseer he believed he collected the prettiest girls in Boston.”17 When feted that evening, Washington was again encircled by adoring women and recorded happily in his diary that “there were upwards of 100 ladies. Their appearance was elegant and many of them were very handsome.”18 So began a habit of counting the fashionable women as he basked in their attention. “He is much more open and free in his behavior . . . in the company of ladies . . . than when solely with men,” someone later noticed.19 Washington can be forgiven his wandering eye, for others noted the way pretty women gathered around him. One observer wrote that while Washington sat in state on a crimson velvet settee, “the ladies were very handsomely dressed and every one strove here, as everywhere else, who should pay the most respect.”20 It says much about Washington’s declining health that this once-celebrated dancer seemed not to take the floor at these functions. According to Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, after the war, Washington “would always choose a partner and walk through the figures correctly, but he never danced. His favorite was the minuet, a graceful dance, suited to his dignity and gravity.”21
After leaving Boston, Washington proceeded north along the coast, accompanied by four hundred cavalry, as the towns grew much less glamorous. In the fishing port of Marblehead, no fashionable women swooned over his presence. “The houses are