Washington [555]
While retaining complete control of his faculties, as best we can tell, Washington never sought religious solace or offered any prayers as he lay dying. That no minister was summoned may also reflect the doctors’ misjudgment of the proximity of death. With his stoic toughness, somber gallantry, and clear conscience, the patient was reconciled to his own mortality. Several times this most punctual of men asked what hour it was. Orchestrating matters until the very end, he had the presence of mind to take his own pulse and felt the life suddenly ebbing from his body. At that moment he perished. “The general’s hand fell from his wrist,” wrote Tobias Lear. “I took it in mine and put it into my bosom. Dr. Craik put his hands over his eyes.” Washington, he said, had “expired without a struggle or a sigh!”22 Christopher Sheels stood by the bedside, with Caroline, Charlotte, and Molly gazing nearby. Performing one final service for his master, Sheels emptied the keys from his pockets and passed them to Tobias Lear. It was December 14, 1799. Washington had died at age sixty-seven, long-lived by the tragically short standards of the men in his family.
All the while, at the foot of the bed, Martha Washington had sat in a motionless vigil, very much the Roman matron with her marble composure. “Is he gone?” she asked. With his hand, Lear indicated that Washington had died. “ ’Tis well,” Martha replied, repeating her husband’s last words. “All is now over. I shall soon follow him! I have no more trials to pass through.”23 This last line speaks volumes about the suffering she had silently withstood, the perpetual sacrifices she had made for her husband and her country. Haunted by this moment, she never slept in that bedroom again.
Washington died in a manner that befit his life: with grace, dignity, self-possession, and a manifest regard for others. He never yielded to shrieks, hysteria, or unseemly complaints. His doctors had treated him as if he were suffering from “quinsy,” or a throat inflammation. From a modern vantage point, it seems likely that a bacterial infection had caused his epiglottis—the flexible cartilage at the entrance to the voice box—to become grossly inflamed and swollen, shutting off the windpipe and making breathing and swallowing an agonizing ordeal. Along with the rounds of debilitating bleedings, Washington’s final hours must have been hellish, yet he had endured them with exemplary composure.
The day after Washington died, Tobias Lear sent instructions to Alexandria for a mahogany coffin to house Washington’s remains. In all likelihood, Christopher Sheels performed the solemn rite of washing and readying his master’s cadaver. Abiding by Washington’s wishes, the funeral at Mount Vernon did not take place until four days after his death, on December 18, 1799. From beyond the grave, Washington was still stage-managing events, having stipulated in his will a desire to be “interred in a private manner, without parade or funeral oration.”24 After suffering through many tedious tributes, he wanted to temper public adulation, although he must have suspected that his humble wish would be ignored by a devoted public.
Instead of a lavish funeral, he had a simple military burial. At three P.M., a schooner anchored in the Potomac began firing minute guns, and the funeral cortège shuffled across the lawn, then swept down the hillside to the family vault. The mourners stepped softly to the muffled hush of drums and mournful, elegiac music. A Virginia cavalry unit led the march, trailed by