Washington [552]
A story, likely apocryphal, is told that one morning that September Washington awoke from a disturbing dream, which he narrated to Martha. An angel had appeared to him in a sudden burst of light and stood whispering in Martha’s ear. Martha then became pale and began to fade from sight altogether, leaving Washington feeling alone and desolate. According to lore, he interpreted this dream as a premonition of his own death and was oppressed for days by its lingering memory. Whatever the veracity of this story, it expressed a truth about the mortality-laden mood of the Washington household that fall. For nearly two months in September and October Martha tried to shake a fever that produced “uneasy and restless symptoms” and resulted in at least one midnight summons to Dr. Craik.24 No less stoical than her husband and sharing his philosophy of minimal medication, she at first refused to take any remedy that might moderate the fever, but she recovered by late October.
On September 20, while she was sick, Washington absorbed the additional bad news that the last of his siblings, his younger brother Charles, had died. “I was the first, and am now the last, of my father’s children by the second marriage who remain,” he remarked. “When I shall be called upon to follow them is known only to the giver of life.”25 In late November Martha’s younger sister Elizabeth Henley also died, meaning that she had outlived all seven of her siblings. George and Martha Washington must have felt that their remaining time was brief and that their accomplishments already belonged to history.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
Homecoming
AFTER LEAVING THE PRESIDENCY, Washington had sworn a whimsical pledge to friends that he would not “quit the theater of this world before the year 1800,” and it looked as if he might deliver on his half-humorous resolve to finish out the century.1 When Elizabeth Carrington socialized with the Washingtons that fall, she found them in good spirits, with Martha looking “venerable, kind and plain.”2 Though increasingly deaf, the ex-president was in a convivial mood and happy to relive the glories of yesteryear, staying up past midnight to spin out wartime narratives. On December 9 he bade nephew Howell Lewis a memorable farewell at the door of Mount Vernon. “It was a bright, frosty morning,” Howell recalled, “and . . . the clear, healthy flush of [Washington’s] cheek and his sprightly manner brought the remark . . . that we had never seen the General look so well.”3
Resigned to the close of his political career, Washington remarked in November that, with the ship of state now afloat, he was content to be “a passenger only” and would “trust to the mariners, whose duty it is to watch, to steer it into a safe port.”4 On December 12, he composed a last letter to Hamilton, applauding his plan for an American military academy. In a fitting finale to a patriotic life, he endorsed the concept wholeheartedly: “The establishment of an institution of this kind . . . has ever been considered by me as an object of primary importance to this country.”5 This was the last political letter that flowed from his prolific pen.
From his earliest days, Washington had led an outdoors life, trusting to his body’s recuperative powers and suffering poor health early in his presidency when he became too sedentary. Perhaps, as one relative later reflected, he had relied too much on his health and “exposed himself without common caution to the heat in summer and cold in winter.”6 In late November, renewing