THE DISCONTENT OF SOUTHERN PLANTERS was further inflamed in February 1790 when Quakers, clad in black hats and coats, filed a pair of explosive petitions with Congress. One proposed an immediate halt to the slave trade, while the other urged the unthinkable: the gradual abolition of slavery itself. Because they did not believe that God discriminated between blacks and whites, many Quakers had freed their own slaves and even, in some cases, compensated them for past injustice. Washington had torn feelings about the Quakers. The previous October he had sent an address to the Society of Quakers, full of high praise, asserting that “there is no denomination among us who are more exemplary and useful citizens.”15 At the same time the Quakers, as pacifists, had tended to shun wartime duty.
On the slavery question, Washington reacted with extreme caution. Although he had voiced support for emancipation in private letters, to do so publicly, as he tried to forge a still precarious national unity, would have been a huge and controversial leap. The timing of the Quaker petitions could not have been more troublesome. To David Stuart, he worried that the petitions “will certainly tend to promote” southern suspicions, then added: “It gives particular umbrage that the Quakers should be so busy in this business.”16 Washington and other founders who opposed slavery, at least in theory, thought they had conveniently sidestepped the issue at the Constitutional Convention by stipulating that the slave trade was safe until 1808. But because Benjamin Franklin, as president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, had signed one of the Quaker petitions, they could not be summarily dismissed. James Jackson of Georgia warned grimly of civil war if the petitions passed, claiming that “the people of the southern states will resist one tyranny as soon as another.”17 Responding to planter panic, James Madison led congressional opposition to any interference with slavery, unfurling the banner of states’ rights. Although Hamilton had cofounded the New York Manumission Society, he, like Washington, remained silent on the issue, hoping to push through the controversial funding program. In fact, virtually all of the founders, despite their dislike of slavery, enlisted in this conspiracy of silence, taking the convenient path of deferring action to a later generation.
Washington tended to conceal his inmost thoughts about slavery, revealing them only to intimates who shared his opposition. He knew of the virulence of Virginia’s reaction to the Quaker petitions, especially when Stuart told him that the mere talk of emancipation had alarmed planters and lowered the price of slaves, with many “sold for the merest trifle.”18 In replying to Stuart, Washington seemed to have no sympathy with the petitions, which he dismissed as doomed. On the morning of March 16 he met with Warner Mifflin, a leading Quaker abolitionist, and deemed the conversation important enough to record in his diary. Mifflin had decried the “injustice and impolicy of keeping these people in a state of slavery with declarations, however, that he did not wish for more than a gradual abolition, or to see any infraction of the Constitution to effect it.” Washington listened attentively to Mifflin, then employed his famous gift of silence: “To these I replied that, as it was a matter which might come before me for official decision, I was not inclined to express any sentim[en]ts on the merits of the question before this should happen.”19
The Quaker memorials ended up stillborn in Congress. In late March, under Madison’s leadership, legislators quietly tabled the proposals by deciding they lacked jurisdiction to interfere with the slave trade prior to 1808. “The memorial of the Quakers (and a very mal-apropos one it was) has at length been put to sleep” and will not “awake before the year 1808,” Washington informed Stuart.20 His failure to use the presidency as a bully pulpit to air his opposition to slavery remains a blemish on his record. He continued to fall back on the self-serving fantasy that slavery would fade away in future years. The public had no idea how much he wrestled inwardly with the issue. His final comments to Stuart on the Quaker petitions are complacent in tone, designed to conceal his conflicted feelings: “The introductions of the [Quaker] memorial respecting slavery was, to be sure, not only an ill-judged piece of business, but occasioned a great waste of time.”21
In April, shortly after his noble defeat over the slavery issue, Benjamin Franklin died. He was the only American whose stature remotely compared to that of Washington. During his final weeks Franklin had insisted that liberty should extend “without distinction of color to all descriptions of people.”22 In his will Franklin paid a typically ingenious compliment to Washington: “My fine crabtree walking stick, with a gold head curiously wrought in the form of the cap of liberty, I give to my friend, and the friend of mankind, General Washington. If it were a scepter, he has merited it and would become it.”23 After the Senate voted down a motion to wear mourning for Franklin, Jefferson turned to Washington for an appropriate tribute: “I proposed to General Washington that the executive department should wear mourning. He declined it because he said he would not know where to draw the line if he once began that ceremony.”24 One wonders whether, after the Quaker petitions, Washington had more than presidential etiquette in mind in the decision. The country was curiously devoid of public eulogies to Franklin; the National Assembly in Paris outdid Congress in its tributes, as the Count de Mirabeau paid eloquent homage to “the genius who liberated America and poured upon Europe torrents of light.”25
Washington very nearly followed Franklin to his grave. On Sunday, April 4, he reported in his diary: “At home all day—unwell.”26 Two days later he sat for a second portrait by Edward Savage, commissioned by Vice President John Adams. Unlike the earlier Savage portrait done for Harvard, which showed a man of magisterial calm, this one presented a far more troubled man, the left side of his face dipped in shadow. With a double chin protruding over his jabot and a prominent bag drooping under his right eye, he has a deeply unsettled look. People gossiped that a mysterious fever had gripped the president. “I do not know the exact state of GW’s health for a day or two last,” Pennsylvania congressman George Clymer wrote on April 11, “but it is observed here with a great deal of anxiety that his general health seems to be declining. For some time past, he has been subject to a slow fever.”27 Georgia congressman Abraham Baldwin agreed. “Our great and good man has been unwell again this spring,” he told a friend. “I never saw him more emaciated.”28 From April 20 through 24, in a concerted effort to rescue his health, Washington toured Long Island, traveling as far east as Brookhaven on the south shore before heading up to Setauket on the north shore, then circling back to Manhattan. Upon his return, everybody said Washington looked more robust; Robert Morris reassured his wife that the president had “regained his looks, his appetite, and his health.”29 The improvement did not last. By this point a severe influenza epidemic was proliferating in the city. James Madison had contracted it, and Washington imprudently asked him to stop by his house on April 27, which may have infected him with the influenza as well. On May 7 William Maclay informed Dr. Benjamin Rush that the president had “nearly lost his hearing” from the illness, which must have been a heavy blow for Washington.30
On Sunday, May 9, Washington noted: “Indisposed with a bad cold and at home all day writing letters on private business.”31 The next day he was confined to bed. By this time Madison, having rebounded from his illness, said that the president suffered from “peripneumony, united probably with the influenza,” and others mentioned pleurisy as well.32 This suggests that he suffered from a combination of labored breathing, sharp pains in his side, harsh coughing, and blood in his spittle. Whatever the original disease, it deepened into pneumonia. In addition to hearing loss, eyewitnesses mentioned that Washington’s eyes were rheumy and that he seemed prematurely aged. He was far from alone in a city seized by widespread illness. By mid-May the influenza had exploded in such epidemic proportions that Richard Henry Lee described Manhattan as “a perfect hospital—few are well and many very sick.”33