Washington [430]
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.”40 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.”41 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.”42 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 In later unpublished comments about this anxious time, Hamilton said that Jefferson viewed him then for the first time as “a formidable rival in the competition for the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.”43 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.”44 The next bout of illness, he predicted, would “put me to sleep with my fathers.”45 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.”46
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