Washington: A Life (138 page)

THE FORCE THAT COOLED, at least temporarily, the fervid agitation of the Democratic-Republican clubs was not political but medical: the yellow fever epidemic that lashed the capital during the summer of 1793. Later on John Adams was adamant that “nothing but the yellow fever … could have saved the United States from a total revolution of government.”
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One of its first victims was a treasured figure in the presidential household, Polly Lear, the wife of Washington’s secretary Tobias, who had assisted Martha with numerous household duties. Martha had converted her into another surrogate daughter, while George valued her as “an amiable and inoffensive little woman.”
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When Polly died on July 28, age twenty-three, Washington honored her with the sort of full-dress funeral that might have bid farewell to a cabinet officer. Deviating from his strict policy of never attending funerals, he led a procession that included Hamilton, Jefferson, Knox, and three Supreme Court justices as pallbearers. It was the one time that Washington attended a funeral as president. When Tobias Lear, after a seven-year association with Washington, resigned his post to make money in business, he was replaced by Martha’s nephew Bartholomew Dandridge and George’s nephew Howell Lewis. “In whatever place you may be, or in whatever walk of life you may move,” Washington assured Lear, “my best wishes will attend you, for I am and always shall be your sincere friend.”
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As August progressed, the yellow fever scourge spread from the wharves to the city’s interior: victims ran high fevers, spewed black vomit, hemorrhaged blood from every orifice, and developed jaundice before they expired. By late August the sights and smells of death saturated the city, especially the groaning carts, stacked high with corpses, that trundled through the streets as their drivers intoned, “Bring out your dead.”
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To stem the fever, the authorities tried burning barrels of tar, which polluted the air with a potent, acrid stench. The epidemic was by then carrying away twenty victims daily. Emptied by spreading panic, most public office buildings shut down, and government employees decamped from the city. The Supreme Court sat for only two days before deciding to swell the general exodus.

Whether from instinctive courage or a stoic belief in death as something fore-ordained, George Washington again behaved as if endowed with supernatural immunity. He showed the same sangfroid as when bullets whizzed past him during the French and Indian War. He urged Martha to return with their grandchildren to Mount Vernon, but she refused to desert him. By early September yellow fever had taken a grim toll on government workers: six clerks died in the Treasury Department, seven in the customs service, and three in the Post Office. On September 6, upon learning that Hamilton had shown early symptoms of the fever, Washington rushed to him six bottles of wine, coupled with a sympathetic message. Treated by his childhood friend Dr. Edward Stevens, Hamilton survived the disease and then fled with his wife, Elizabeth, to the Schuyler mansion in Albany. Since Martha wouldn’t abandon him, Washington opted to leave for Mount Vernon on September 10, departing in sufficient haste that he left behind his official papers. He and Martha invited Eliza Powel to escape with them to Virginia. Though deeply touched by the gesture, Powel decided that she could not abandon her husband, then the speaker of the Pennsylvania Senate, lest he get sick and require help. “The conflict between duty and inclination is a severe trial of my feelings,” she told the Washingtons, “but, as I believe it is always best to adhere to the line of duty, I beg to decline the pleasure I proposed to myself in accompanying you to Virginia at this time.”
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Her caution was prophetic: three weeks later her husband joined the growing list of fatalities. Ironically, Eliza was off at her brother’s farm at the time and experienced “a lasting source of affliction” for not having been present at her husband’s bedside at the end.
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After urging him to safeguard the War Department clerks, Washington left Henry Knox in charge as acting president, with instructions to submit a weekly report on developments in the now-deserted capital. The doughty Knox was the last high-ranking official to depart. “All my efficient clerks have left me from apprehension,” Knox reported in mid-September, noting that fatalities in the capital had zoomed to one hundred per day. “The streets are lonely to a melancholy degree. The merchants generally have fled … In fine, the stroke is as heavy as if an army of enemies had possessed the city without plundering it.”
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After Jefferson found only a single clerk toiling at the State Department, he decided it was high time to head for Virginia. By mid-October 3,500 Philadelphians, or one-tenth of the population, had succumbed to yellow fever, leaving the city, in Washington’s words, “almost depopulated by removals and deaths.”
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Eager to resume government operations and show that the republic could function even under extreme duress, Washington wanted to convene emergency sessions of Congress outside the capital, but he was unsure of their constitutionality. To his credit, he did not automatically assume autocratic powers in a crisis but tried to conform faithfully to the letter of the law. As alternate sites, he considered several nearby cities, among them Germantown, Wilmington, Trenton, Annapolis, and Reading. When he stopped at Mount Vernon, Jefferson, a strict constructionist, gave Washington his opinion that the government could lawfully assemble only in Philadelphia, even if Congress had to meet in an open field. Reluctant to be ham-strung by this restrictive view, Washington turned to the one person guaranteed to serve up a more liberal view of federal powers: Alexander Hamilton. In tapping his treasury secretary, Washington hinted broadly at his preferred outcome, telling him that “as none can take a more comprehensive view and … a less partial one on the subject than yourself … I pray you to dilate fully upon the several points here brought to your consideration.”
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Engaging in fancy semantic footwork, Hamilton cracked open the legal logjam by saying that Washington could
recommend
that the government meet elsewhere, although he couldn’t
order
it. Hamilton favored Germantown, close to Philadelphia, as the optimal site, and it was duly chosen.

Washington decided to convene a cabinet meeting there in early November. On October 28 he packed and left Mount Vernon, teamed up with Jefferson in Baltimore, and arrived in Germantown on November 1. The small village was scarcely impervious to the troubles crippling the nearby capital, and hundreds of Philadelphia refugees milled about, fearful of venturing back to their homes. After renting the meager home of Isaac Franks, Washington had furniture carted out from Philadelphia. The sage of Monticello was reduced to sleeping in a bed tucked into the corner of a local tavern. As the weather cooled, the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia waned, although the city would still struggle for months to return to normal. In early December, amid lightly falling snow, Washington saddled his horse and returned to a place sadly transformed by disaster. “Black seems to be the general dress in the city,” Martha noted. “Almost every family has lost some of their friends.”
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Out of respect for the dead, plays and dances were canceled, and as the town’s foremost citizen, Washington took the lead in dispensing charity to widows and orphans left stranded by the epidemic.

Members of Congress were now rapidly flocking back to the capital, and as soon as Washington learned on December 2 that a quorum had been mustered, he decided to deliver his fifth annual address to Congress the next day, escorted for the last time by his first-term cabinet, the warring triumvirate of Jefferson, Hamilton, and Knox. As war raged in Europe, Washington felt the need to combat pacifist fantasies and insisted upon the need for sufficient “arms and military stores now in [our] magazine and arsenals.”
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As always, he touted military preparedness as the best way to prevent war and gently raised the question of whether militias were adequate to the country’s defensive needs. He also defended his neutrality proclamation and explained the rationale behind the seeming betrayal of the historic French alliance. Beyond its policy particulars, the speech reaffirmed that the government had weathered the yellow fever epidemic and would now revert to some semblance of normality.

 

WHILE THE TEMPORARY CAPITAL suffered from the horrors of yellow fever, the permanent capital was beginning to emerge in all its splendor. That September Washington had been on hand in the federal city for the ceremonial laying of the cornerstone for the U.S. Capitol. Among his endless responsibilities, he was bogged down in administrative minutiae related to the new capital, having to approve personally, for example, the contract for a bridge over Rock Creek. The Residence Act of 1790 had stipulated that government buildings in the district should be ready by December 1800, and an impatient public clamored for visible signs of progress.

Disclaiming any special talent as an architect, Washington nonetheless endorsed a design for the new home of Congress sketched by Dr. William Thornton, a versatile doctor, inventor, and abolitionist. Thornton came up with a clever amalgam of classical architecture and modern American themes. Jefferson rejoiced in the building’s style as “Athenian” and, to emphasize the parallel with antiquity, changed its name from the plain-sounding Congress House to the far more grandiose Capitol.
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Washington was especially enamored of the dome, which he thought would lend “beauty and grandeur to the pile,” its visual effect enhanced by a magnificent colonnade.
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Washington’s approval also helped the Irish architect James Hoban win the commission for the President’s House, later known as the White House. “He has been engaged in some of the first buildings in Dublin,” Washington wrote admiringly of Hoban, “appears a master workman, and has a great many hands of his own.”
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The White House cornerstone was laid on October 13, 1792. As in all matters pertaining to the capital, Washington wanted an elastic design that would accommodate future growth. “It was always my idea … that the building should be so arranged that only a part of it should be erected at present,” he told the commissioners, “but upon such a plan as to make the part so erected an entire building, and to admit of an addition in future.”
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Curiously enough, the Supreme Court was then held in such low regard that it did not merit its own edifice and had to settle for a room in the Capitol.

Washington’s strategy of building slowly and allowing for future expansion was an apt metaphor for his strategy for developing the entire country. An unintended metaphor perhaps cropped up in the composition of the downtrodden workforce laboring to complete the capital. Washington had favored importing indentured servants to do the building—he praised Germans for their steady work habits, Scots for their mechanical abilities—but there was no way that a southern capital could emerge without drawing heavily on slaves, given the local shortage of free labor. Hundreds of slaves pulled up stumps, leveled trees, made bricks, and scooped out trenches. Because Congress had authorized no money to acquire property and construct buildings, the project had to subsist on the proceeds of land auctions, and using slave labor helped cushion the budgetary stringency. By 1795 three hundred slaves were hard at work in the federal district, hurrying to finish public or private buildings.

On September 18, 1793, at Mount Vernon, Washington greeted a fife and drum corps from Alexandria and presided over a festive procession to install the cornerstone of the Capitol. After he crossed the Potomac, many Masons gathered to receive him, appareled in their order’s ceremonial garb. The grand parade to the Capitol site proceeded under the auspices of Lodge No. 22 of Alexandria and the Grand Lodge of Maryland and its assorted chapters. Officiating as Grand Master, Washington donned the elaborately embroidered Masonic apron that, in happier times, had been a gift from Lafayette’s wife. To the sharp reports of cannon, Washington stepped into a trench, hoisted a trowel, and spread cement on the cornerstone before pouring oil, corn, and wine over it as spectators offered up Masonic chants. Incorporated into this southeast corner of the Capitol was a silver plate engraved with the words “the year of Masonry 5793.”
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That Washington performed Masonic rituals at the new capital proved not that he was in thrall to a secret society but probably something more banal: that he believed that the “grand object of Masonry” was “to promote the happiness of the human race,” and that nobody could possibly object to such an inarguable, community-minded goal.
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After parading by the President’s House, the gathering settled down to celebrate by dining on the barbecued remains of a five-hundred-pound ox.

With the town named after him, Washington was especially solicitous about the course of its building campaign and bought four lots there. At many points he prodded the three commissioners to speed up their work, insisting that they live in the federal district to expedite flagging construction. As he surveyed the muddy terrain, he worried that, should the project lag behind schedule, the southern states might well lose the capital to the avid boosters of Philadelphia. “The year 1800 is approaching with hasty strides,” he warned. “So ought the public buildings to advance towards completion.”
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The pace of progress seemed so sluggish that James Madison began to despair that the capital would ever escape from the great “whirlpool of Philadelphia.”
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Whenever the project stagnated, Washington purchased more parcels to give things a timely fillip. He preferred selling individual lots to modest investors rather than multiple lots to large speculators, persuaded that the former would work harder to make long-term improvements. At every turn, Washington advanced his pet project for a national university in the new capital where students could attend congressional debates and absorb the basic principles of representative government. It had long disturbed Washington that American students attended universities abroad, where they might imbibe foreign ideas inimical to a republican polity.