The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (9 page)

That night, about 3 a.m., Washington awoke Martha to tell her he was very ill. He was having difficulty breathing. She immediately began getting out of bed to call a servant. But he forbade her to do this. She had only recently recovered from a cold and the room, with the fire long since out, was icy. She lay beside him, listening to his labored breaths until 7 a.m., when a housemaid arrived to light the fire. Martha told her to summon Tobias Lear, who swiftly perceived that the disease was serious. He sent a servant racing to the Alexandria home of Washington’s close friend and personal physician, James Craik.

The doctor arrived around 9 a.m., and his diagnosis was dire. He thought Washington was suffering from “inflammatory quinsy,” a deadly form of sore throat. We now know the disorder was probably acute epiglottis, a bacterial infection of this small structure at the base of the tongue at the entrance to the larynx. Craik immediately called two other doctors who practiced in the vicinity and began putting blisters on Washington’s throat, hoping to draw the infection to the surface. Martha sat at the foot of the bed, watching the agonizing process, which accomplished nothing.

For the rest of the long day, Martha seldom took her eyes off the man she loved as he fought a losing battle with death. “I die hard,” he said to Dr. Craik at one point. “But I am not afraid to go.” The doctors tried everything in their limited repertoires, but the disease was beyond their knowledge as well as their skills. Finally, Washington summoned Lear to the head of his bed and told him he did not want to be buried until three days after his death. Lear was too overcome to do anything but nod. “Do you understand me?” Washington asked.

“Yes, sir,” Lear replied.

“’Tis well,” Washington said.

Those were his last words. About 10 p.m. his breathing became easier. The doctors did not know it, but this was the final stage of acute epiglottis. Tobias Lear took his hand. Dr. Craik sat by the fire, a study in
despair. Washington withdrew his hand and began taking his own pulse. Lear called to Dr. Craik, who rushed to the bedside. The hand fell from Washington’s wrist. Lear drew it to his breast. Dr. Craik put his hand over Washington’s eyes. Forty years of experience told him he was in the presence of death.

No one said a word for a long, sad moment. “Is he gone?” Martha asked in a voice that was amazingly strong and calm.

The weeping Lear could only make a convulsive affirmative gesture. “’Tis well,” Martha said. “All is now over. I have no more trials to pass through. I shall soon follow him.”
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XVII

That same day, Martha closed off the bedroom she had shared with her husband and moved to a smaller room on Mount Vernon’s third floor. She lived for another two years, presiding over the mansion with the same dignity and charm she had so regularly displayed as George Washington’s wife. She greeted a continuing stream of visitors with the same generous hospitality. Nelly and her husband, Lawrence Lewis, remained with her, as did the faithful Tobias Lear. She retained a lively interest in politics, and frequently startled visitors with her sarcastic comments on President Thomas Jefferson’s administration.

In these two years, Martha burned all the letters she had exchanged with her husband. It was a statement of how deeply she valued the private world of love and partnership they had enjoyed for forty years. She had shared George Washington with the larger world, but there was a limit to the public’s claims on their journey together. Only four letters survived the curtain Martha drew across their personal life. They were found in her writing desk by a granddaughter, after her death. Two were trivial notes she may have decided were not worth burning. Two were letters that she must have found it impossible to destroy—the ones Washington wrote to “My Dearest” in 1775, telling her of his appointment to command the Continental Army, and five days later, reporting his imminent departure for the camp at Cambridge.
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In the first months of 1802, a perceptive visitor, the Reverent Manasseh Cutler, saw deeply into Martha’s spirit in the hours he spent with her. “She frequently spoke of the General with great affection,” he recalled. “She
repeatedly remarked on the distinguished mercies heaven still bestowed on her, for which she had daily cause for gratitude, but she longed for the time to follow her departed friend.”
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In May of that year, Martha experienced a stomach upset and summoned Dr. Craik. Although it seemed to be just another case of bilious fever to the doctor, she abruptly asked him to stay with her. He remained at Mount Vernon for three weeks while she slowly slipped away. Nelly, Wash, the older daughters, and their children—all the members of her family—were at her bedside. They wept as Martha received holy communion and said farewell to each of them. But their grief was softened by the knowledge that she was almost visibly eager to join the man she had loved so long and so deeply in an eternity of happiness.

L
ong before Sally Fairfax’s letters stirred speculations about George Washington’s relationships with women beyond his ostensible devotion to Martha Dandridge Custis, newspapers carried stories that suggested he was a womanizer of epic proportions.

The first of these tales appeared in 1775, soon after Washington reached Cambridge to take command of the impromptu army besieging the British in Boston. He found himself plunged into chaos. The army was closer to a mob, living in crude huts and tents with little or no concern for sanitation. There was a shocking shortage of gunpowder, and the haphazard fortifications erected against a British foray from Boston were next to worthless. Washington was soon bombarding Congress with requests for ammunition and trained engineers and complaining mightily about the undisciplined ways of his New England troops.

One of the general’s correspondents was Congressman Benjamin Harrison of Virginia. Older than Washington, he was known as a jovial man whose conversation was frequently racy. On August 17, 1775,
The Massachusetts Gazette; and the Boston Weekly News-Letter
, a newspaper published inside the British-occupied city, reported in gleeful terms that a royal navy warship had captured a letter from Harrison that revealed a side of General Washington that might surprise the public.

The letter began with several businesslike paragraphs about the diffi
culty of finding engineers and Congress’s anxiety to locate ammunition for the army. Then the tone abruptly shifted:

In a recent book on the sex lives of the presidents, the author gleefully accepted this letter as authentic. He stated that Harrison was Washington’s procurer in Philadelphia. He noted that the letter was soon published in England, as if this guaranteed its authenticity.
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Fortunately for those who prefer their history unflavored by fiction, the story of the letter’s seizure and publication can be explored in depth. We know that Harrison actually wrote it and gave it to a young Massachusetts lawyer named Benjamin Hichborn, who was about to leave Philadelphia for Boston. John Adams added two letters to Hichborn’s pouch—one for his wife, Abigail, the other for his friend James Warren. Hichborn decided the quickest route home was by way of Rhode Island. On a ferry from Newport to the mainland, he was seized by a boarding party from a British warship and was soon a prisoner in a cell aboard the flagship of the admiral commanding the British fleet in Boston harbor. The bloody battle of Bunker Hill had recently been fought, and the British assumed all-out war was now inevitable.

Hichborn had foolishly hesitated to throw his letters overboard. Ashore in Boston, the British high command read them with interest. All three made it clear that the Americans were getting ready to declare their independence and fight a war to defend it. John Adams assailed various people in Congress who hesitated to take this plunge. The British published both his letters, hoping to sow dissension in the rebels’ ranks. But there was nothing noteworthy in Harrison’s letter unless it could somehow be improved.

This turned out to be a fairly simple task. On the admiral’s staff was a fluent writer named Gefferini who was able to compose the authentic-sounding paragraph about Kate the washerwoman’s daughter and put it into the middle of the letter. Why are we sure of this? Because there are copies of the original letter in the Public Record Office in England—without the fraudulent paragraph. General Thomas Gage, commander of the British army, was an old friend of General Washington, and he forwarded the original to his superiors in London without comment or tampering.
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II

When the war shifted to New York, Washington found he was in a very different city and state from Massachusetts, where loyalists were only a handful. A committee of the New York legislature worked full time to detect conspiracies and ferret out spies. In June they discovered a loyalist plot to assassinate and/or kidnap General Washington. A member of his guard, Thomas Hickey, was arrested, convicted of treason, and hanged.

In 1777, the British used this plot to go to work on Washington’s reputation again. From London came a pamphlet, “Minutes of the Trial and Examination of Certain Persons in the Province of New York.” The printer, John Bew, claimed it was based on documents from the files of the New York Assembly committee that was ferreting out loyalist conspiracies. The records had been captured in New York when the Americans retreated from the city in late 1776.

This claim was true up to a point. A comparison of the actual minutes of the committee makes it obvious that Bew had the records on his desk when he wrote the pamphlet. All the witnesses were involved in the trial of Thomas Hickey.

There was no attempt to win sympathy for that unlucky conspirator. The meat of the pamphlet was testimony from two witnesses, who claimed that it would have been far easier to kidnap or assassinate General Washington than was generally believed. Why? The first witness, William Cooper, said that the general was in the habit of visiting a woman named Mary Gibbons, “late at night in disguise.” Mary was a spy who passed along everything Washington told her to a loyalist named John Clayford, who often talked about what he learned while drinking with other loyalists at the Serjeants-Arms Inn. One of the things Washington
supposedly told Mary was that “he wished his hands were clear of the dirty New Englanders.”

Witness two was a soldier named William Savage. He testified that while General Washington snored the sleep of a sexually satisfied man, Mary Gibbons went through his pockets and extracted numerous letters and documents that she slipped to John Clayford for quick copying and clandestine return.

The testimony of these witnesses was inserted into the overall minutes with the same skill displayed by the writer who altered the letter from Benjamin Harrison. The Mary Gibbons story, told with great sincerity and seeming plausibility, acquired a life of its own. It has inspired novels and nonfiction books portraying Mary as one of dozens of women with whom Washington enjoyed voracious sex. Its believability sinks to zero if we recall that Martha Washington was in New York at the time of George’s supposedly insatiable visits to Mary. Morever, there is no record of soldiers named William Savage or William Cooper in the American army. Nor has anyone ever heard of John Clayford, outside the pages of Bew’s pamphlet.
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III

The British pursued Washington’s infidelity as a topic in another pamphlet that John Bew published in 1777, titled “Letters from George Washington to Several of his Friends in the year 1776.” These letters were supposedly discovered in a satchel carried by Washington’s slave, Billy Lee, who was reportedly captured at Fort Lee, New Jersey, when that Hudson River bastion surrendered without a fight. Most of the letters concentrated on Washington’s political foibles. He repeatedly insulted New Englanders. He accused them of leaking his military plans to the British. At another point he told a friend that he considered the struggle hopeless, with such despicable allies. He also confessed that he was still loyal to the king and the war was a terrible misunderstanding.

In one letter, the British veered into Washington’s private life. Supposedly writing to Martha, he began it with “My Dearest Life and Love” and closed with “Your Most Grateful and Tender Husband.” Both are phrases that Washington never used in any surviving letter to her. The letter is dated June 24, 1776—the same period in which he was supposedly enjoy
ing his midnight visits to Mary Gibbons. It is addressed to Martha as if she were at Mount Vernon, and urges her to go to Philadelphia, where she can be inoculated against smallpox. After this advice, the general expatiates on how intensely he is hoping for negotiations with the “English commissioners” and an early “pacification.”
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We now know that these letters were probably written by John Randolph, the former attorney general of Virginia, who had remained loyal to the king and retreated to London before the fighting war began. He knew Washington well and was in touch with numerous loyalists who picked up the gossip about Washington’s dislike of New Englanders. The pamphlet was reprinted in New York by the loyalist newspaper editor James Rivington. When Washington read the letters, he was with his army at Valley Forge. He wrote an outraged letter to Congressman Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, condemning the British for being “governed by no principles that ought to actuate honest men.” In 1778, most Americans seemed to agree with this opinion. The letters were also dismissed and generally disbelieved in England, where Washington’s reputation remained high throughout the war.
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IV

In Washington’s second term as president, these 1777 forgeries underwent a rebirth and acquired a following of remarkably virulent proportions. The letters were reprinted in New York and Boston in 1795 and used to argue that Washington had been a secret enemy of numerous patriots during the Revolution, and in many ways had favored the English. This supposedly explained his declaration of neutrality in the war between England and Revolutionary France and his decision to sign a treaty that John Jay had negotiated with the British, which pro-French Americans regarded as a capitulation to London’s hegemony. Soon the letters were collected into a book,
Domestic and Confidential Epistles
, with a preface that solemnly declared they would be “regarded as a valuable acquisition by a very great majority of the citizens of the United States.”

At first Washington attempted to ignore these exhumed attacks, but they circulated so widely that on his last day in office, he decided to write a letter to Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and “disown them in explicit terms.” He considered this act “a justice due to my own character
and to posterity.” Along with denying he ever wrote the letters, he pointed out that Billy Lee had never been captured during the Revolutionary War, nor had any part of his (Washington’s) baggage fallen into enemy hands. Pickering thought the letter was so effective that he released it to the newspapers.

One might think this would have ended the matter, but many booksellers simply printed Washington’s letter in the front of the book, apparently convinced that if he took so much trouble to deny the letters, they were probably authentic. As late as 1872 the book was being sold by a rare-book collector, who noted it had the Washington letter in it and commented, “To this day there are writers who from choice or warped moral vision give credit to lies rather than truth.”
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V

In 1871, an oil portrait of Thomas Posey was unveiled in the Indiana statehouse and a hitherto unnoticed chapter in Washington’s early life suddenly became headline news. Thomas Posey was an authentic American hero. He had volunteered for the Continental Army when the Revolution began and had served for the entire war, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He had repeatedly distinguished himself as a battle leader in many bloody clashes. Afterward, he served in the army of the 1790s as a brigadier general and was named territorial governor as Indiana moved toward statehood. Anything written about him was bound to attract attention, at least in the Midwest.

Not long after the portrait was unveiled, the Cincinnati
Daily Commercial
published an article by an unnamed man from Indianapolis asking, “Was Geo. Washington a father?” The writer declared that “none who are acquainted with the evidence…doubts the assertion that Posey was the son of George Washington.” The accusation was based on a claim that Posey’s parents had been tenants on one of Mount Vernon’s farms. After his father died in 1754, Posey’s mother had a liaison with the then unmarried George Washington and gave birth to Thomas. Thereafter, Washington supervised the boy’s education and saw that he had a decent home life when his mother remarried. General Washington named Colonel Posey to his staff during the Revolution and appointed him a brigadier general in the 1790s and finally territorial governor of Indiana.

Papers all over the Midwest ran the article, never bothering to check its wild divergence from easily ascertainable facts. Posey never spent a day on Washington’s staff during the Revolution, and the president was dead when Posey became territorial governor of Indiana. Instead, the
Daily Commercial
dispatched a reporter to Indiana. The newsman interviewed numerous unnamed persons who assured him that in “the generation that has passed away,” the tradition that Washington was Thomas Posey’s father was frequently discussed and widely accepted.

The kernel of truth in the story was Thomas Posey’s connection to Mount Vernon. He was the oldest son of Washington’s closest neighbor, Captain John Posey, who lived with his wife and five children at Rover’s Delight, just west of Washington’s plantation. John Posey had served on the frontier with the young Colonel Washington, courageously leading a company of soldiers who specialized in building fortified camps and roads, often under enemy fire. At home, Posey was always ready to join Washington in a fox hunt, followed by a few drinks at Rover’s Delight or Mount Vernon. Unfortunately, Posey’s few drinks frequently multiplied into many later in the evening and often continued multiplying for several days.

Captain Posey had a steady income from a ferry that he ran across the Potomac to Maryland, but he had no head for keeping track of his money. He began by borrowing small sums from Washington and soon owed him 750 pounds—the equivalent of perhaps $75,000 today. Worse, he could not even pay the interest on the debt. He owed more money to people in Virginia and in Maryland. Washington wrote him strenuous letters, but kept loaning him money even when it became obvious that he was never going to get it back. Meanwhile, Posey and his wife and children were always welcome at Mount Vernon. Their oldest daughter, Milly, became Patsy Custis’s favorite companion.