Already beginning to show signs of a cold and sore throat the next day, a Friday morning 200 years ago, and despite continued bad weather, which included sleet, he went out briefly in the afternoon to mark some trees that he wished to have cut down. By evening he was very hoarse but still in good spirits. He insisted on reading sections of the newspaper out loud to his wife, Martha, and his private secretary, Tobias Lear, who was a major source of information about Washington's final illness.

By the early hours of Saturday morning, the 14th, the disease had progressed so rapidly that Washington awoke feverish, very uncomfortable, and with labored breathing. He would be dead before the day ended.

The general's painful malady
ngton's death uniformly downplay the horrific nature of his illness and the amount of suffering that he had to endure. It is, of course, impossible at this late date to assert with certainty exactly what malady struck the general. However, the latest and most convincing medical studies indicate that George Washington died from acute epiglottitis, caused by a virulent bacteria.

The epiglottis is a structure at the base of the tongue at the entrance of the larynx, or voice box, and in an infection it can swell up very dramatically. Washington's symptoms are a textbook case of acute epiglottitis. While the pain is intense, the truly frightening aspect of acute epiglottitis is the obstruction of the larynx, which makes both breathing and swallowing extremely difficult. Like any mortal, Washington had to face the terror of struggling and gasping for each breath. His constant restlessness and changing of positions throughout the day was part of his endless effort to meet this most basic of needs. Essentially, he was slowly choking to death.

The extreme difficulty of speaking and making his wishes known added to Washington's agony. As the doctors later reported, speaking, which was painful from the beginning, now became almost impractical--almost, but not quite. Washington somehow managed, through a remarkable display of willpower and self-control, to summon up the strength to communicate his most pressing thoughts to those around him.

Strength in the face of adversity
His communication that fateful day, both by word and action, reveal a great deal about the man and his character. In the words of his secretary, Tobias Lear, "He died as he lived."

One of Washington's most endearing traits is that he combined a sense of power with a sense of diffidence, hesitation, doubt, shyness. George Washington was a remarkable man. He knew he was a remarkable man. And he was revered by the American people as an almost godlike figure. He was feted, praised, honored and almost worshipped, in a way no other American has been. Nevertheless, Washington never lost sight of the shared sense of humanity. In Robert Frost's words, George Washington was "one of the few, in the whole history of the world, who was not carried away by power."

His diffidence and his shyness allowed him to keep a healthy psyche, to not let the constant adulation go to his head. He never saw himself as intrinsically superior to others. This basic respect and concern for others, combined with his charisma and his power, were two of the keys to his success as a leader. This concern for and sensitivity to others was not a thin veneer used to put on, to please or to deceive the people; it was an essential part of Washington's persona. So integral to his character that even in the midst of a mortal and very painful illness, he demonstrated it a number of times.

When he woke up with labored breathing and high fever, Martha wanted to summon help, to get out of bed and find a servant. Washington refused to allow her to do this. She was recovering from a serious illness herself, and he was worried. Even with the danger to his own health, he did not want to risk a setback for his wife. When his overseer was summoned to bleed the general, the man was nervous and anxious about performing such an operation on his illustrious employer. But George Washington reassured him: "Don't be afraid."

In the course of the long and agonizing day, Washington consistently apologized to those trying to care for him and ease his suffering for the trouble that he was causing them. He apologized, for example, to Lear, who was helping him move to different positions in the desperate quest to find sufficient oxygen, worrying that the effort would fatigue Lear. He even urged his personal body servant, a slave named Christopher Shields, who had been standing by his bed throughout the day, to sit down. How many powerful leaders, in the midst of an excruciating terminal illness, would either notice or be concerned with the fact that a personal servant had been standing on his feet for most of the day? Such actions speak volumes about Washington's character.

Equally striking as his concern for those around him was Washington's remarkable ability to remain awesomely organized to the end. Order, for Washington, was like a salve. Doctors Craik and Dick reported that during the period of his illness he economized his time in the arrangement of such few concerns as required his attention. His ability to do this while suffering was remarkable.

Washington was a man who strove to be in control. To someone who wants to be in control, this disease must have been even that much more challenging and frightening. As he once wrote his nephew, "Time is limited, every hour misspent is lost forever." Washington drove himself, and he drove those around him. And while George Washington's overriding concern had always been amor patriae, love of one's country, he devoted as much time as possible to his personal interests.

CORBIS

George Washington lies on his deathbed while others come to say their last good-byes. Washington died at the age of 67 from acute epiglottitis. Even during his final moments, the former President demonstrated concern for those around him and an obsession with the record of his own life. Life of George Washington: The Christian, color lithograph photographic print by Regnier Stearns.

Honor and courage
Washington firmly believed that all men, himself included, were driven by both interest and honor. And while the latter was always the more important to him, Washington was not an altruist unconcerned with his own interests. The result of his drive and ability had been the amassing of a considerable personal fortune, making Washington one of the richest men in America.

What he had acquired with ambition and protected with zeal he would distribute with infinite care. The end result was a remarkably detailed will that he drew up during the summer months of 1799. As he wanted to do it, he wrote a letter as he contemplated his death. His greatest anxiety was to leave all his affairs in such a clear and distinct form that "no reproach may attach itself to me when I have taken my departure for the land of spirits."

Late on the afternoon of December 14, Washington knew his departure was at hand. He asked his secretary to have Martha go to his study and retrieve two wills from his desk. When she returned with the wills, the general indicated which was the operative one and requested that the other one be burned, which she did.

Having taken care of the will, Washington then proceeded to make his longest recorded speech on his deathbed. Speaking to Lear, he said, "Do you arrange and record all my late military letters and papers, arrange my accounts, and settle my books, as you know more about them than anyone else. And let Mr. Rowlands finish recording my other letters, which he has began."

It is not coincidental that George Washington's longest speech, when speech was so difficult, involved concern with his personal papers. He was, from the first, fascinated with the record of his own existence. In Professor William Abbott's words, "Washington had an uncommon awareness of self." What he decided and what he did, and how others perceived his decisions and deeds, always mattered. This extreme interest and concern for his papers was closely connected with Washington's desire for fame and secular immortality, which were driving forces in his actions. The words of Shakespeare about Henry V could apply to Washington: "If it be a sin to covet honor, he was the most offending soul alive." A profound concern for his historical reputation was a major aspect of Washington's personality.

He strongly desired that in facing death he would do nothing to sully the reputation he had spent a lifetime building. The authors of a major biography of Washington emphasized another aspect of his character. The same self-discipline served Washington as a patient that had served him as a planter, as commander in chief and as president: duty. Duty was his governing principal. And this time his duty was to let the doctors do what they might for him, even though he felt there was no chance of recovery. Duty and courage were bywords for Washington, and he lived up to his creed.

Throughout the entire ordeal he displayed remarkable fortitude and patience. Grace in the presence of mortal danger comprised a key part of Washington's code of honor. And the ultimate test of honor was courage in the face of death. As far as the record demonstrates, Washington was one of those few men to whom death personally held no terror. The words of Shakespeare again, this time from Julius Caesar, describing the valiant men: "Cowards die many times before their death, the valiant never taste of death but once."

A stoic hero

	Washington and Stoic ideals
	It is fast becoming a cliché to talk of Washington in terms of the eighteenth century's definition of classical philosophy. But the stoic ideas, so prevalent in Virginia in the eighteenth century, of fame and honor and glory, and of public service, were a crucial part of the intellectual assumptions and attitudes toward power that shaped Washington's views of his leadership during the Revolution, and even more his conception of his role as president. To disciples of the Enlightenment, fame meant towering above one's peers, acquiring a reputation for virtue and integrity that would inspire future generations not only in the development of one's character but also in one's place in the social structure. These were all tenets that Washington accepted for himself. Washington acquired a knowledge of the classical precepts of public virtue, which he eventually adopted. But from the time he moved to Mount Vernon he associated mostly with men like his half brothers, educated in England and immersed in classical philosophy and literature--men who gave at least lip service to Stoic ideals. This sidebar was adapted from a lecture given by Dorothy Twohig at Columbia University on December 13, 1999.

Washington's courage in the face of death is indisputable. The source of that courage is more controversial. To better understand it, a very brief look at the death of Virginia's other great popular figure of the eighteenth century, Patrick Henry, who died in the same year, is instructive.

Henry, suffering from severe intestinal blockage, met his death in June of 1799, with the courage of a convinced Christian. More than a decade earlier, Henry had written his sister, on the death of her husband, "This is one of those trying scenes in which the Christian is eminently superior to all others and finds a refuge which no misfortune can take away." Facing his own imminent demise, Henry used his courage in the face of death as further proof of the truth of the Christian religion. His wife recounted his death scene to their daughter: "He met his death with firmness, and in full confidence that through the merits of a bleeding savior, his sins would be pardoned."

Although the records of Washington's final hours are much more comprehensive than those of Henry, they leave a different picture. While no one can know what Washington was thinking on this subject on December 14, the complete lack of religious context is striking. According to the extant record of Washington's final hours, there was no reference to any religious words or prayers, no request for forgiveness, no fear of divine judgment, no call for a minister (although ample time existed to call one if desired), no deathbed farewell, no promise or hope of meeting again in heaven.

It is significant that Tobias Lear ends his own personal journal of Washington's death with the explicit hope that, Lear writes, he will meet Washington again in heaven. But a sense of fidelity to a true record kept him from putting such words into Washington's mouth. Perhaps Washington did not take a special leave of any of the family because, as a relative wrote, he had frequently disapproved of "the afflicting farewells which aggravated sorrows on those melancholy occasions."

George Washington did not draw his courage from a Christian idea of redemption in the hope of eternal bliss through the sacrifice of Christ. Rather, I think, he drew it from a number of sources: from a stoical courage; from a strong desire to play his last role on earth's stage in a praiseworthy fashion and to die a heroic death; from confidence in his own virtue; from an effort to live by the highest ideals; and, certainly not to be discounted, from a trust in a rather vague but all-powerful and benign providence that controlled human destiny.

In classic Stoicism, the true Stoic may fall victim to circumstances beyond his control, suffer and perhaps die. But his superior control over his passions calls forth admiration and leads to the reaffirmation of the dignity of man. Such control enabled Washington to reassure his close friend Dr. Craik, "I die hard, but I am not afraid to go." In the words of the musical "Les Miserables," based on Victor Hugo's epic novel, "There are storms that we cannot weather." The losing struggle for oxygen and the corresponding buildup of carbon dioxide ultimately overwhelmed the great general.

As Washington lapsed into unconsciousness, he closed his eyes, his hand that had been taking his pulse fell to his side, his countenance changed and Washington expired "without a struggle or a sigh." The great body, which had endured so much, the great mind so steady in its operations, so sure in its conclusions, was stilled.

Here was no more than an empty vessel, drained for the subsistence of a nation. Quoting Jefferson, who quoted the Bible: "Verily this day a great man has fallen in Israel." Certainly, the loss was irreparable to the nation.

	Knowledge Test
	Now that you have completed this free seminar, see what you have learned by answering a few short questions on "George Washington and the Legacy of Character."

But the fact that such an individual had lived at all was, and is, comforting and ennobling. The Right Reverend Bishop Carroll asserted, while Washington lived, that "we seemed to stand on loftier ground, for breathing the same air, inhabiting the same country, and enjoying the same constitution and laws as the sublime and magnanimous Washington."

Not only while he lived but even after his death, all Americans stand on loftier ground because of the fact that such a man as George Washington actually lived and is the father of their country. If ever a man deserved secular immortality and eternal remembrance from a grateful nation, that man was George Washington.