The Painter's Chair (3 page)
Read The Painter's Chair Online
Authors: Hugh Howard
He composed a letter to James Anderson, his farm manager. The letter was short, little more than a cover note to accompany
the detailed three-year plan for his plantation. He had drafted the document earlier in the week, laying out crop rotations
for Mount Vernon’s five farms. He specified plantings field by field. In some, he wished to see turnip leaves rise from the
ground; at others clover, potatoes, or corn. Some were to be left as pasture. He instructed what care was to be given to the
sheep, cows, mules, “horned Cattle,” and hogs. As a scientific farmer, he corresponded with the leading American and English
agronomists of the day, and he wished to see the best ideas employed at Mount Vernon. His latest thinking was central to this
new plan.
When the storm ended that afternoon, he ignored the growing hoarseness in his throat. He ventured out for a time to mark some
trees on his “pleasure ground,” the manicured landscape in the vicinity of the Potomac riverside where he hoped he and his
guests might soon walk upon a new gravel path. In the evening he assumed a seat in the parlor, having received an afternoon
delivery of newspapers from the post office. He and Martha were joined there by Mr. Lear, once again, under the gaze of family
likenesses, including an anatomically awkward picture of Martha dating from her first marriage (a recent foreign visitor had
thought it a poor painting, not least because it portrayed her with “her ears uncovered”).
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A more sophisticated companion piece had come later. A work by Charles Willson Peale, it presented Colonel Washington, the
Virginia squire, as he had appeared in 1772.
At nine o’clock, the hour they usually retired, Martha went upstairs to sit for a time with Nelly. The General remained with
Lear, occasionally reading out diverting or interesting tidbits from the
Pennsylvania Packet
and
Pennsylvania Herald.
The two men discussed reports in the
Virginia Gazette
about the ongoing debates of the Virginia Assembly. Washington’s voice, thought Lear, was growing more gravelly by the hour,
and when Washington rose to retire for the night, his friend and secretary suggested that he might take something to treat
his cold.
The General declined. “You know I never take any thing for a cold,” he reminded Lear. “Let it go as it came.”
III.
December 14 . . . The Washingtons’ Bedchamber . . . Mount Vernon, Virginia
B
Y MORNING, THE greatest man in the world believed to a certainty that he was dying of a sore throat. Sometime after two A.M.,
he awakened Martha. He was very unwell, he told her, an ague (fever and chills) having overcome him. The house was cold, and,
not wanting her to catch a chill, the General insisted she remain within the warm confines of their tall four-poster bed.
During the quiet hours before the housemaid Caroline arrived to make a fire at daylight, man and wife huddled together in
the oversized bedstead. Purpose-built for the big-boned Washington, the mahogany bed was six feet, six inches in length and
a full six feet wide with the dimity hangings suspended around them.
The General’s health had scared them before. The previous year he had had one of his periodic bouts with malaria. Back in
1790, the government and the entire city of New York had waited for his fever to break when he battled the flu and pneumonia.
In 1789, a carbuncle was removed from his hip without anesthesia. Martha herself had suffered from a recurring fever, thought
to be malaria, earlier in the summer of this very year when Washington’s old friend, physician Dr. James Craik, had come to
Mount Vernon and prescribed “the bark.” This medicament, derived from the cinchona tree, was the only reliable treatment.
In the past, Washington’s sturdy constitution had allowed him to fight off attacks of dysentery, smallpox, tuberculosis, quinsy
(tonsillitis), and diphtheria. This day would be different.
UPON HER ARRIVAL at daybreak, the slave Caroline was immediately dispatched to summon Mr. Lear. He dressed hurriedly, and,
upon reaching the bedside, he found that Washington was “breathing with difficulty and hardly able to utter a word intelligibly.”
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Dr. Craik was summoned, and, in the course of the daylight hours, Washington was bled four times. More than five pints of
blood were taken from him.
By mid afternoon Drs. Elisha C. Dick and Gustavus Richard Brown had also arrived. The three doctors tried everything they
could think of to relieve Washington’s symptoms. He was given a mixture of molasses, vinegar, and butter to soothe his throat,
but he could not swallow it. His neck was bathed with sal volatile (an ammonia salt also known as harts-horn), and his feet
were soaked in warm water. A blister of Cantharides (sometimes called Spanish fly) was put on his throat. He nearly suffocated
when given a gargle of vinegar and sage tea.
By five o’clock, the man of the house had finally had enough. “Doctor,” he told Craik, who had been his friend since their
days of service to King George II during the French and Indian War, “I die hard; but I am not afraid to go; I believed from
my first attack that I should not survive; my breath cannot last long.”
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Speechless with grief, Craik found a seat by the fire. The death watch had begun.
JOHN ADAMS ONCE said of Washington that he possessed “the gift of silence.” Even as he lay dying, tossing and turning on his
deathbed, the sixty-seven-year-old Virginian kept his thoughts and emotions to himself. But he was planning for those he loved.
At Washington’s request, Lear summoned Mrs. Washington. The General asked her to bring him the two wills he had drafted. When
she returned from the study and handed him the documents, he examined the two sheaves of papers. One he handed back to her,
and, following his instructions, she fed the “useless” version to the fire.
He had signed and applied his seal to the fair copy of his last will and testament just a few months earlier, on July 9. “To
my dearly beloved wife Martha Washington,” he had written, “I give and bequeath the use, profit and benefit of my whole Estate,
real and personal, for the term of her natural life.” There were special bequests, including the sum of $4,000 to establish
a free school; sundry properties for various relatives, including an outlying farm to Nelly and Lawrence Lewis; all his books
and papers, which were to go to his most trusted nephew, Bushrod Washington; and, to the surprise of almost everyone, he ordered
that his slaves were to be freed after Martha’s death. After she died, he further specified, most of his land and other assets
were to be sold, and the proceeds distributed to his heirs in proportions laid out in the document.
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He had written it in his own hand. Washington was a disciplined penman, the horizontality of his lines and the slant of his
script always precise. The handwriting was not overly artistic, but careful and rarely hurried. He had invested many hours
in preparing the final copy of this twenty-nine-page document, and his scheme was carefully considered. He often used convoluted
language to distance himself from the subject at hand, but also for clarity. This will had few ambiguities, no excesses, and
little legalese (no “professional character” had been consulted). In life, this private man regarded this as the business
of no other aside from himself.
Late in the afternoon he croaked a question at Lear: When was Wash due back?
Washington had held out high hopes for George Washington Parke Custis, who had become almost a son to him. But the boy had
fallen well short of living up to the General’s hopes, just as the lad’s father before him failed to do. George Washington’s
own formal education had ended early with the death of his father; that was one reason for his expectations for Wash, who
had been unceremoniously dismissed from the College of New Jersey, after less than a year. Custis had performed no better
in a stint at St. John’s College in Annapolis. In the months since returning to Mount Vernon—he was still only eighteen—he
was under the tutelage of Mr. Lear, but no one mistook him for a serious student.
Wash and Lawrence Lewis, Mr. Lear advised, were not due to return for several days. The General had no choice but to accept
that he would see them no more.
Washington asked a service of Lear, who immediately agreed to arrange Washington’s military letters and papers and to tend
to his accounts. “He then asked,” Lear noted in his diary, “if I recollected anything which it was essential for him to do,
as he had but a very short time to continue among us. I told him I could recollect nothing; but that I hoped he was not so
near his end.”
Washington smiled in response. “He certainly was” nearing his end, the General told Lear, and as that “was the debt which
all must pay, he looked to the event with perfect resignation.”
His manners faultless even at the end, he thanked the doctors. “I feel myself going,” he told them in the early evening. “I
thank you for your attentions; but I pray you to take no more trouble about me, let me go off quietly; I cannot last long.”
By ten o’clock, the dying man found speaking almost impossible, but with a great effort he managed to address Lear once more.
“I am just going,” he began after a struggle. “Have me decently buried; and do not let my body be put into the vault in less
than three days after I am dead.” His throat constricted with emotion, Lear could not speak, but he bowed in assent.
“ ’Tis well,” said Washington.
He spoke no further, but his breathing seemed to ease. The General took his own pulse, and, after a while, Lear noticed that
his expression seemed to change. He summoned Dr. Craik from the fireside.
Craik put his hands over Washington’s eyes.
From the foot of the bed where she was seated, Martha asked in a firm voice, “Is he gone?”
When informed that he was, she echoed her husband’s last words with a surprising calm. “ ’Tis well,” she said, adding, “All
is now over, I shall soon follow him. I have no more trials to pass through.
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IN DEATH, AS in life, Washington was surrounded by images. At midnight, barely an hour after his death, his corpse was carried
down the stairs and his remains laid out in the New Room. Not far from his impromptu bier hung pre sentation proofs of John
Trumbull’s two history paintings,
The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, June 17, 1775
and
The Death of General Montgomery in the Attack on Quebec, December 31, 1775.
Washington had given the engravings a place of honor in his finest room and proudly showed them to his guests as the first
of a great series commemorating the events of the Revolution. In the same room hung another portrait of the General, this
one painted by Trum-bull and given by the artist to Martha. The small canvas portrayed the commander in chief and his horse
at a Hudson River crossing, Verplanck’s Point. It was, some thought, the most majestic portrait of the military Washington.
His fame was an irresistible lure. Washington had sat for other artists besides Peale, Trumbull, Savage, and Houdon. A French
noblewoman, the Marquise de Bréhan, had come in 1789, the year her country’s revolution began; Joseph Wright had made a bust
at Washington’s headquarters at Rocky Hill, New Jersey, in 1783. British artist Robert Edge Pine took a likeness at Washington’s
home in 1784. James Sharples, Walter Robertson, and even Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin had made images of
Washington from life. Saint-Mémin was aided by his mechanical contrivances, the physiognotrace and pantograph, which enabled
him to make a mathematically accurate outline of his subject’s head. Before his death, Washington sat for at least twenty-eight
different portraitists, some of them repeatedly. Not a few of the works that resulted lived at Mount Vernon as miniatures,
pastels, and other keepsakes.