His Excellency: George Washington (54 page)

23. Washington to Tobias Lear, 6 May 1794,
WW
33:358.

24. Advertisement, 1 February 1796, ibid., 433–66; Washington to David Stuart, 7 February 1796, ibid., 452–54.

25. For tentative offers on his various plots of western land, see the correspondence in
PWRT
1:56–57, 68–69, 483, 493–94, 507–9, 511–14. The quotation is from Washington to Robert Lewis, 17 August 1799,
PWRT
4:256–58. His list of slaves as of June 1799 is in ibid., 527–42. The staff at Mount Vernon suggest that his concern about cost was probably affected by a Virginia law that made him financially responsible for all emancipated slaves too old or infirm to work.

26. Washington to Frederick Kitt, 10 January 1798,
PWRT
2:16, for the effort to recover Hercules. For the Ona Judge story, see Washington to Joseph Whipple, 28 November 1796,
WW
35:297, and Washington to Burwell Bassett, 11 August 1799,
PWRT
4:237–38. Wiencek devotes an entire chapter to Ona Judge in
Imperfect God,
312–35.

27. The questionable letter, Martha Washington to Unknown Recipient, 18 September 1799, is in Joseph Fields, ed., “
Worthy Partners
”:
The Papers of Martha Washington
(Westport, 1994), 321. The fullest and most detached appraisal of the letter’s authenticity is by Peter R. Henriques,
The Death of George Washington: He Died as He Lived
(Mount Vernon, 2000), 77.

28. Schedule of Property, June 1799,
PWRT
4:512–27.

29. George Washington’s Last Will and Testament, 9 July 1799, ibid., 480. The staff at Mount Vernon notes that Washington made a few calculating errors when making his list of slaves. There were actually 316 slaves, of which 123 were owned by him, 153 by the Custis estate, and 40 rented from his neighbor, Mrs. French.

30. Ibid., 481. In a section of the will that has escaped notice by most scholars, Washington also freed thirty-three slaves that he had acquired in 1795 from his brother-in-law, Bartholomew Dandridge, in payment for back debts. Washington proposed a complex scheme for their gradual emancipation upon the death of the widow, Mary Dandridge.

31. Ibid., 477–511, for the full will.

32. The first scholars to emphasize the distributive implications of Washington’s will, and I follow their interpretation here, were Dalzell and Dalzell,
George Washington’s Mount Vernon,
220–22.

33. Washington to Elizabeth Willing Powel, 17 December 1797,
PWRT
1:519–21; Washington to Burgess Ball, 22 September 1799,
PWRT
4:318.

34. Ibid., 415–16, for the surveying expedition of the old Fairfax estate at Difficulty Run; Washington to Sarah Cary Fairfax, 16 May 1798,
PWRT
2:272–73.

35. Washington to Alexander Hamilton, 15 September 1799,
PWRT
4:297–301; Washington to Jonathan Trumbull Jr., 21 July 1799, ibid., 201–4. A plea from Gouverneur Morris to allow his name to be put forward for the presidency again arrived at Mount Vernon shortly after Washington’s death. See Gouverneur Morris to Washington, 8 December 1799, ibid., 452–54.

36. Washington to Patrick Henry, 15 January 1799, ibid., 317–20.

37. Washington to James Anderson, 13 December 1799, ibid., 455–77, for his final blueprint for reorganizing Mount Vernon.

38. The story of Washington’s final illness and hours is based on two versions compiled immediately after the event by Tobias Lear in ibid., 542–55.

39. The fullest secondary account, which provides the modern medical diagnosis of Washington’s infection, is Henriques,
The Death of George Washington.
Henriques’s account has guided my interpretation in this paragraph and the succeeding paragraphs of the chapter. A more succinct version of Henriques’s account is available as “The Final Struggle Between George Washington and the Grim King: Washington’s Attitude Towards Death and the Afterlife,”
GWR,
250–71.

40. On Christopher’s attempt to escape, see Washington to Roger West, 19 September 1799,
PWRT
4:310–11.

41. 
Eulogies of George Washington
(Boston, 1800), 4.

42. Flexner 2:13.

43. Noemie Emery,
George Washington
(New York, 1976), engages in interpretive speculations in several spots that have helped to prompt my own efforts here at the end. The Emery biography deserves a larger readership than it has apparently received, most especially for its psychological insights.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My goal at the start was to read
The Papers of George Washington
in their entirety with my own eyes. Though I achieved my goal, it quickly became apparent that other eyes would be necessary to challenge my interpretive instincts and correct my inevitable gaffes. I sent those sections of the manuscript dealing with slavery to Philip Morgan, those on Washington’s early career to Douglas Wilson, those on the presidency to Susan Dunn and James MacGregor Burns, those on the politics of the 1790s to Stanley Elkins. My peerless guide to the art on Washington was Paul Staiti.

Three scholarly friends, each of whom knows a great deal more about Washington’s career than I did when I began, agreed to read all the chapters as they dribbled out. Robert Dalzell, Don Higginbotham, and Peter Henriques cheered and chastised me in the margins of multiple drafts. They were my version of Washington’s councils of war, or perhaps his star-studded cabinet. Mary Thompson, who oversees the archives at Mount Vernon, gave the penultimate draft a careful scan, and sent me a twelve-page list of suggested corrections. As with my last two books, I asked Stephen Smith, now at the Brookings Institution, to read the final draft for style and flow, and he solidified his reputation as the sharpest editorial eye inside the beltway. James Rees, who heads up Mount Vernon, weighed in graciously with his thoughts at the very end.

Taken together, it is no exaggeration to observe that I enjoyed the advice of a stellar crew. Because I was sufficiently stubborn to reject their advice on occasion, responsibility for the book itself must remain my own.

Three of my students at Mount Holyoke—Carin Peller, Gretchen Snoeyenbos, and Brittany Suttell—read early drafts of certain chapters and let me know whether I was on the right track. Dara Cohen, then at Brown and now at Stanford, was never properly acknowledged for her assistance with my previous book, and echoes of her advice also helped me with this one.

My technological incompetence has now achieved legendary status. The original manuscript was handwritten in black ink, then transcribed onto disk by Holly Sharac, who deciphered my scrawl with her customary grace. She also had a major role in deciding the title.

My agent, Ike Williams, negotiated the contract, held my hand, and took me to lunch in Boston, but most important, he read each chapter as it materialized and let me know what he thought. When the research or writing bogged down, we generated energy by talking about the Red Sox and redemption.

At Knopf, Luba Ostashevsky never put me on hold and Gabriele Wilson allowed me to lobby her about the cover. My editor, Ashbel Green, is generally regarded as the wisest man in the publishing business. His running argument with me about adjectives and semicolons never threatened the trust that three books together have created. I can never repay his confidence.

Only my youngest son, Alexander, remains in the nest, but he left many notes on my desk blotter urging me forward as he did his own homework. Peter, the eldest, first heard of the project as a Peace Corps volunteer in the jungles of Africa, then learned of its completion in the forests of northern Vermont, where he read the page proofs. Scott, my middle son, called in from rest spots on the Appalachian Trail, which he hiked more swiftly than I wrote. My wife, Ellen, endured nightly readings of the day’s work and the vacant stares of a husband more attuned to events two hundred years ago than to pressing household logistics. When times were truly tough, she never wavered.

The book is dedicated to a man who diplomatically declined to read my draft chapters because he wanted his former student to work it out on his own. Bill Abbot introduced me to early American history at the College of William and Mary years ago. He subsequently served as the founding editor of the modern edition of
The Papers of George Washington,
the meticulously constructed documentary edifice on which this book is based. Like Washington, he too is a patriarchal figure deserving a personal and professional salute.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joseph J. Ellis is professor of history at Mount Holyoke College. Educated at the College of William and Mary and Yale University, he was dean of the faculty at Mount Holyoke for ten years. His
Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001, and
American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson
earned the 1997 National Book Award. He has three sons and lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with his wife, Ellen.

ALSO BY JOSEPH J. ELLIS

Founding Brothers:
The Revolutionary Generation

American Sphinx:
The Character of Thomas Jefferson

Passionate Sage:
The Character and Legacy of John Adams

After the Revolution:
Profiles of Early American Culture

School for Soldiers:
West Point and the Profession of Arms
(with Robert Moore)

The New England Mind in Transition

PHOTOGRAPHIC PERMISSIONS

Washington portrait by Charles Willson Peale, 1772: Courtesy of Washington and Lee University

Washington portrait by Charles Willson Peale, 1787: The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Bequest of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr.

Washington presidential portrait by Rembrandt Peale, 1795: Art Resource

Washington presidential portrait by Gilbert Stuart, 1796: Art Resource

Washington bust by Jean Antoine Houdon: Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association

Sears, Roebuck catalog cover by Norman Rockwell, 1932: Courtesy of the Rockwell family

Washington Crossing the Delaware
by Emanuel Leutz, 1851: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Attack on Chew House by Howard Pyle, 1898: Delaware Art Museum

Photograph of case and decanters: Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association

Engraving of Mount Vernon, 1804: Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Assocation

Plans for the city of Washington, 1792: Virginia Historical Society

Census of slaves at Mount Vernon, 1799: Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2004 by Joseph J. Ellis
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

A portion of this book previously appeared in
American Heritage.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ellis, Joseph J.
His Excellency : George Washington / Joseph J. Ellis.
p.  cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN 1-4000-4376-X
1. Washington, George, 1732–1799.
2. Presidents—United States—Biography.
3. Generals—United States—Biography.  I. Title.
E
312.
E
245 2004
973.4'1'092—dc22
[
B
]
2004046576

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