Washington’s last day was spent in a lovely but simple setting, a plain bedroom prettily decorated with a table, armchair, and dressing table. As he faced death, Washington’s indomitable poise was remarkable. With preternatural self-control, he had an overseer named George Rawlins bleed him before Dr. Craik arrived. When Rawlins blanched, Washington gently but firmly pressed him. “Don’t be afraid,” he said, and once Rawlins had sliced into the skin, making the blood run freely, he added, “The orifice is not large enough.”11 Martha showed better medical judgment and pleaded for a halt to the bleeding, but Washington urged Rawlins on, saying “More, more!” until nearly a pint of blood had been drained.12 A piece of moist flannel was wrapped around his throat while his feet were soaked in warm water.
As they awaited Dr. Craik, Martha summoned the eminent Dr. Gustavus Richard Brown of Port Tobacco. Dr. Craik, arriving first, perpetuated the medieval treatments already in use, emptying more blood and applying to the throat cantharides, a preparation made from dried beetles, to draw the inflammation to the surface. He also had Washington inhale steam from a teapot filled with vinegar and hot water. When Washington tilted back his head to gargle sage tea mixed with vinegar, he nearly suffocated. Alarmed, Dr. Craik summoned a third doctor, Elisha Cullen Dick, a young Mason from Alexandria, who had studied under Dr. Benjamin Rush. Upon entering, he joined Craik in siphoning off more blood, which “came very slow, was thick, and did not produce any symptoms of fainting,” wrote Lear.13 They also evacuated Washington’s bowels with an enema. Joined at last by Dr. Brown, they took two more pints from Washington’s depleted body. It has been estimated that Washington surrendered five pints of blood altogether, or about half of his body’s total supply.14 Dr. Dick recommended a still rare and highly experimental procedure—a tracheotomy that would have punched open a hole in Washington’s trachea, easing his breathing—only to be overruled by Craik and Brown. “I shall never cease to regret that the operation was not performed,” Dick said afterward, likening the three physicians to drowning men grasping at straws.15 It is highly improbable, however, that Washington would have survived such a procedure, given his already weakened state.
As Tobias Lear sat by the bedside, grasping his mentor’s hand, Washington issued some final instructions that reflect his preoccupation with both his posthumous fame and his solvency: “I believed from the first that the disorder would prove fatal. Do you arrange and record all my late military letters and papers. Arrange my accounts and settle my books . . . and let Mr. Rawlins finish recording my other letters, which he has begun.”16 When Lear remarked that he hoped the end wasn’t near, Washington smiled calmly and said that he regarded his own demise “with perfect resignation.”17
After Dick and Brown left the room, Craik lingered by his old friend. “Doctor, I die hard,” Washington said, “but I am not afraid to go.”18 Convinced the end was imminent, he told Martha to go downstairs to his study and remove a pair of wills from his desk drawer. He then took the earlier will—likely the one he drew up when named commander in chief in 1775—and told her to burn it, while saving the historic one drawn up in July, which freed his slaves. That Washington had preserved both wills may suggest some last-minute wavering on the manumission issue. It said much about his lifelong dependence on slavery that he was now attended by four slaves—Caroline, Charlotte, Molly, and Christopher Sheels. Sadly, the four slaves assigned to this deathwatch were all dower slaves who would reap no benefit from the emancipation section of the will.
Though he never complained, Washington was expiring in a particularly gruesome fashion and constantly gasped for air. Climbing into bed bedside him, Lear kept gingerly turning him over to try to relieve the congestion. “He appeared penetrated with gratitude for my attentions and often said, ‘I am afraid I shall fatigue you too much.’ And upon my assuring him that I could feel nothing but a wish to give him ease, he replied, ‘Well! It is a debt we must pay to each other and I hope when you want aid of this kind, you will find it.”19 Even in death, Washington never lapsed into self-absorption and remained singularly attuned to other people’s moods, showing the same sensitivity that had made him a uniquely effective political leader. At one point, noticing that Christopher Sheels had been standing since morning, Washington urged the young slave to sit down.
Handicapped by the benighted state of medical knowledge, the three doctors were utterly perplexed about what to do, and Washington showed compassion for their bafflement. “I feel myself going,” he told them early in the 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.”20 A couple of hours later they applied blisters and wheat bran poultices to his legs and throat, though they harbored little hope of an improvement. Washington had a horror of being buried alive, and around ten o’clock he conveyed this to Lear: “Have me decently buried and do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I am dead.”21 Lear promised to honor his wish, which consoled Washington, making his breathing a trifle easier. This fear of premature burial was common at the time; Elizabeth Powel, for instance, left instructions in her will that the lid of her coffin should not be screwed on until minutes before it was lowered into the earth.
While retaining complete control of his faculties, as best we can tell, Washington never sought religious solace or offered any prayers as he lay dying. That no minister was summoned may also reflect the doctors’ misjudgment of the proximity of death. With his stoic toughness, somber gallantry, and clear conscience, the patient was reconciled to his own mortality. Several times this most punctual of men asked what hour it was. Orchestrating matters until the very end, he had the presence of mind to take his own pulse and felt the life suddenly ebbing from his body. At that moment he perished. “The general’s hand fell from his wrist,” wrote Tobias Lear. “I took it in mine and put it into my bosom. Dr. Craik put his hands over his eyes.” Washington, he said, had “expired without a struggle or a sigh!”22 Christopher Sheels stood by the bedside, with Caroline, Charlotte, and Molly gazing nearby. Performing one final service for his master, Sheels emptied the keys from his pockets and passed them to Tobias Lear. It was December 14, 1799. Washington had died at age sixty-seven, long-lived by the tragically short standards of the men in his family.
All the while, at the foot of the bed, Martha Washington had sat in a motionless vigil, very much the Roman matron with her marble composure. “Is he gone?” she asked. With his hand, Lear indicated that Washington had died. “ ’Tis well,” Martha replied, repeating her husband’s last words. “All is now over. I shall soon follow him! I have no more trials to pass through.”23 This last line speaks volumes about the suffering she had silently withstood, the perpetual sacrifices she had made for her husband and her country. Haunted by this moment, she never slept in that bedroom again.
Washington died in a manner that befit his life: with grace, dignity, self-possession, and a manifest regard for others. He never yielded to shrieks, hysteria, or unseemly complaints. His doctors had treated him as if he were suffering from “quinsy,” or a throat inflammation. From a modern vantage point, it seems likely that a bacterial infection had caused his epiglottis—the flexible cartilage at the entrance to the voice box—to become grossly inflamed and swollen, shutting off the windpipe and making breathing and swallowing an agonizing ordeal. Along with the rounds of debilitating bleedings, Washington’s final hours must have been hellish, yet he had endured them with exemplary composure.