Washington [481]
What is indisputable is that the Democratic-Republican Societies led to a much more raucous style of American politics. Instead of discussing politics politely at dinner tables or in smoky taverns, these groups were likely to take to the streets in mass rallies. These government critics also had fewer qualms about chastising their leaders. By the end of 1793 the diatribes against Washington no longer dwelled simply on his supposed imitation of the crowned heads of Europe. Now the opposition sought to debunk his entire life and tear to shreds the upright image he had so sedulously fostered. That December, the New-York Journal said that his early years had been marked by “gambling, reveling, horse racing and horse whipping,” that he was “infamously niggardly” in business matters, and that despite his feigned religious devotion, he was a “most horrid swearer and blasphemer.”68 For George Washington, American politics had become a strange and disorienting new world.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Bring Out Your Dead
THE FORCE THAT COOLED, at least temporarily, the fervid agitation of the Democratic-Republican clubs was not political but medical: the yellow fever epidemic that lashed the capital during the summer of 1793. Later on John Adams was adamant that “nothing but the yellow fever . . . could have saved the United States from a total revolution of government.”1 One of its first victims was a treasured figure in the presidential household, Polly Lear, the wife of Washington’s secretary Tobias, who had assisted Martha with numerous household duties. Martha had converted her into another surrogate daughter, while George valued her as “an amiable and inoffensive little woman.”2 When Polly died on July 28, age twenty-three, Washington honored her with the sort of full-dress funeral that might have bid farewell to a cabinet officer. Deviating from his strict policy of never attending funerals, he led a procession that included Hamilton, Jefferson, Knox, and three Supreme Court justices as pallbearers. It was the one time that Washington attended a funeral as president. When Tobias Lear, after a seven-year association with Washington, resigned his post to make money in business, he was replaced by Martha’s nephew Bartholomew Dandridge and George’s nephew Howell Lewis. “In whatever place you may be, or in whatever walk of life you may move,” Washington assured Lear, “my best wishes will attend you, for I am and always shall be your sincere friend.” 3
As August progressed, the yellow fever scourge spread from the wharves to the city’s interior: victims ran high fevers, spewed black vomit, hemorrhaged blood from every orifice, and developed jaundice before they expired. By late August the sights and smells of death saturated the city, especially the groaning carts, stacked high with corpses, that trundled through the streets as their drivers intoned, “Bring out your dead.”4 To stem the fever, the authorities tried burning barrels of tar, which polluted the air with a potent, acrid stench. The epidemic was by then carrying away twenty victims daily. Emptied by spreading panic, most public office buildings shut down, and government employees decamped from the city. The Supreme Court sat for only two days before deciding to swell the general exodus.
Whether from instinctive courage or a stoic belief in death as something fore-ordained, George Washington again behaved as if endowed with supernatural