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By Root 26144 0

infantry, a band, and four clergymen in black suits. Then came two slaves, Cyrus and Wilson, leading the general’s horse, which was plainly outfitted with a saddle and pistols stuffed in their holsters—an apt image for a legendary horseman who had always looked magnificent astride a mount. The coffin was borne by six pallbearers, five of them Masons, followed by the mayor of Alexandria and the chief Mount Vernon employees. Conspicuously absent was Martha Washington, who likely stayed hidden in an upstairs bedroom, too traumatized to venture forth. For once, her sense of public duty deserted her. As a remembrance of her husband, she asked Tobias Lear to snip locks of hair from the corpse before it was deposited in the coffin. At the burial vault, the Reverend Thomas Davis pronounced the Order of Burial from the Episcopal Prayer Book. Then, testifying to Washington’s deep faith in the brotherhood of Freemasonry, Dr. Elisha Dick stepped forward and, in his capacity as Worshipful Master of Masonic Lodge No. 22 in Alexandria, officiated over rituals performed by Masons garbed in their customary aprons. As the coffin was stored in the vault overlooking the Potomac, eleven cannon fired volleys into the air, and infantry discharged their muskets.

Free of grandiosity or false sentiment, the funeral was restricted to family, friends, neighbors, and associates—exactly as Washington might have wished. He had always been civic-minded, and the strong institutional presence—the government, the military, the church, the Masons—mirrored the priorities of his life. No less appropriate was the symbolic presence of the invisible workers who had made his epic success story possible: eight slaves, clad in black, all but one of them dower slaves with nothing to gain from Washington’s will. For the slaves, the sole immediate benefit of the funeral was that, after all the guests had departed, the “remains of the provisions” were circulated in their quarters.

The family vault where Washington was entombed had been dug into a grassy slope, topped by a knoll with juniper, willow, chestnut, and cypress trees. This crypt was so overgrown with vegetation that it seemed to disappear into the hillside and breathed a damp, moldy air of decay, causing Washington to leave instructions for a new brick vault. It speaks to Washington’s humility that the greatest man of his age was laid to rest in a communal tomb where nobody could single out his grave or honor him separately. All visitors could do was peer through the slats of a rough oak door into a gloomy, malodorous den of ancient coffins. Some souvenir hunters later reached in and tore swatches from the black velvet pall covering Washington’s coffin until it grew ragged with neglect. In 1818 an appalled traveler objected that Washington had been “permitted to remain in obscurity and neglect, without a mausoleum, monument, inscription, a stone, or anything else to point [where] the hero and statesman repose or any evidence of his country’s gratitude.”25 Another visitor left a still more horrifying description, comparing the vault to a “bake oven” and condemning it as “a low damp little place that is crammed with coffins, some of which are moldered to ashes and the bones are strewed on the pavement.” When this visitor spotted a skull on the ground, a gardener told him it belonged to Lawrence Washington, the beloved older half brother of the first president. In later years, after a new tomb was built at Mount Vernon, the coffins of George and Martha Washington were transferred to marble sarcophagi.

After his death, Washington’s will was made public and quickly became available in pamphlet form. If he had hoped that other slave masters would emulate his example in liberating his slaves, he was cruelly mistaken. Not only had the slave population of the United States grown rapidly for forty years, but the introduction of the cotton gin was ushering in a vast and terrifying expansion of slavery. By 1804 all the northern states had enacted laws for terminating slavery, but it persisted in the South in an entrenched