Washington [54]
Once at Mount Vernon in mid-November, he consulted Dr. Charles Green of Alexandria, who forbade him to eat meats and prescribed a diet of jellies and other soft foods, lubricated with tea or sweet wine. With a lifelong bias against medication, Washington preferred to let illness take its course. At first his sister (or possibly sister-in-law) came to nurse him, but when she left and he looked attractively helpless, he attempted to lure Sally Fairfax to his bedside. In a note, he asked if he could borrow a book of recipes to prepare jellies, noting that “my sister is from home and I have no person that has been used to making these kind of things and no directions.” 52 It seems probable that Sally rose to the bait.
Every time Washington seemed to gain ground, the disease recurred with a vengeance. With some symptoms resembling tuberculosis, he grew terrified that he would follow in brother Lawrence’s footsteps. In February he even had to deny reports of his death circulating in Williamsburg. “I have heard of letters from the dead, but never had the pleasure of receiving one till your agreeable favor came to hand the other day,” his friend Robert Carter Nicholas told him wryly. “It was reported here that Colo. Washington was dead! As you are still alive, I must own myself obliged to the author of that report.”53 It said something about Washington’s high standing in Virginia society that the capital hummed with these rumors. When he left for Williamsburg on February 1, he was soon overcome by fever and had to turn around and return home. The physicians again admonished Washington that he jeopardized his life by taking such a journey. On March 4 he described to Colonel John Stanwix the “great injury” already done to his constitution and the need for “the greatest care and most circumspect conduct” if he was to recover.54 With only a slim chance of securing a regular army commission, the despondent Washington thought of “quitting my command and retiring from all public business, leaving my post to be filled by others more capable of the task.”55 The next day he left for Williamsburg, stopping en route to visit his mother. In the capital, Dr. John Amson assured him that his fears of consumption were unfounded and that he was indeed recuperating from the dysentery.
For someone with Washington’s robust physique, the dysentery must have had a profound psychological effect. His body had suddenly lost the strength and resilience that had enabled him to cross freezing streams and ride through snowy forests. And it was not the first time he had experienced a sense of physical fragility. By the age of twenty-six, he had survived smallpox, pleurisy, malaria, and dysentery. He had not only evaded bullets but survived disease with astounding regularity. If these illnesses dimmed his fervor for a military commission, they may also have reminded him of the forgotten pleasures of domestic life.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A Votary to Love
AFTER HIS WOUNDING CONFRONTATIONS with the haughty agents of British imperial power—Dinwiddie, Shirley, and Loudoun—Washington could only have concluded that his dreams of