The acute attacks of illness already touched upon by no means represent all the physical debility and suffering of Washington’s life. During the Revolution his sight became poor, so that in 1778 he first put on glasses for reading, and Cobb relates that in the officers’ meeting in 1783, which Washington attended In order to check an appeal to arms, “When the General took his station at the desk or pulpit, which, you may recollect, was in the Temple, he took out his written address from his coat pocket and then addressed the officers in the following manner: ‘Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray, but almost blind, in the service of my country.’ This little address, with the mode and manner of delivering it, drew tears from [many] of the officers.”

Nor did his hearing remain entirely good. Maclay noted, at one of the President’s dinners in 1789, that “he seemed in more good humor than I ever saw him, though he was so deaf that I believe he heard little of the conversation,” and three years later the President is reported as saying to Jefferson that he was “sensible, too, of a decay of his hearing, perhaps his other faculties might fall off and he not be sensible of it.”

Washington’s teeth were even more troublesome. Mercer in 1760 alluded to his showing, when his mouth was open, “some defective teeth,” and as early as 1754 one of his teeth was extracted. From this time toothache, usually followed by the extraction of the guilty member, became almost of yearly recurrence, and his diary reiterates, with verbal variations, “indisposed with an aching tooth, and swelled and inflamed gum,” while his ledger contains many items typified by “To Dr. Watson drawing a tooth 5/.” By 1789 he was using false teeth, and he lost his last tooth in 1795. At first these substitutes were very badly fitted, and when Stuart painted his famous picture he tried to remedy the malformation they gave the mouth by padding under the lips with cotton. The result was to make bad worse, and to give, in that otherwise fine portrait, a feature at once poor and unlike Washington, and for this reason alone the Sharpless miniature, which in all else approximates so closely to Stuart’s masterpiece, is preferable. In 1796 Washington was furnished with two sets of “sea-horse” (i.e., hippopotamus) ivory teeth, and they were so much better fitted that the distortion of the mouth ceased to be noticeable.

Washington’s final illness began December 12, 1799, in a severe cold taken by riding about his plantation while “rain, hail and snow” were “falling alternately, with a cold wind.” When he came in late in the afternoon, Lear “observed to him that I was afraid that he had got wet, he said no his great coat had kept him dry; but his neck appeared to be wet and the snow was hanging on his hair.” The next day he had a cold, “and complained of having a sore throat,” yet, though it was snowing, none the less he “went out in the afternoon … to mark some trees which were to be cut down.” “He had a hoarseness which increased in the evening; but he made light of it as he would never take anything to carry off a cold, always observing, ‘let it go as it came.’” At two o’clock the following morning he was seized with a severe ague, and as soon as the house was stirring he sent for an overseer and ordered the man to bleed him, and about half a pint of blood was taken from him. At this time he could “swallow nothing,” “appeared to be distressed, convulsed and almost suffocated.”

There can be scarcely a doubt that the treatment of his last illness by the doctors was little short of murder. Although he had been bled once already, after they took charge of the case they prescribed “two pretty copious bleedings,” and finally a third, “when about 32 ounces of blood were drawn,” or the equivalent of a quart. Of the three doctors, one disapproved of this treatment, and a second wrote, only a few days after Washington’s death, to the third, “you must remember” Dr. Dick “was averse to bleeding the General, and I have often thought that if we had acted according to his suggestion when he said, ‘he needs all his strength— bleeding will diminish it,’ and taken no more blood from him, our good friend might have been alive now. But we were governed by the best light we had; we thought we were right, and so we are justified.”

Shortly after this last bleeding Washington seemed to have resigned himself, for he gave some directions concerning his will, and said, “I find I am going,” and, “smiling,” added, that, “as it was the debt which we must all pay, he looked to the event with perfect resignation.” From this time on “he appeared to be in great pain and distress,” and said, “Doctor, I die hard, but I am not afraid to go. I believed from my first attack that I should not survive it.” A little later he said, “I feel myself going. I thank you for your attention, you had better not take any more trouble about me; but let me go off quietly.” The last words he said were, “’Tis well.” “About ten minutes before he expired, his breathing became much easier—he lay quietly—… and felt his own pulse…. The general’s hand fell from his wrist,… and he expired without a struggle or a Sigh.”

III
EDUCATION

The father of Washington received his education at Appleby School in England, and, true to his alma mater, he sent his two elder sons to the same school. His death when George was eleven prevented this son from having the same advantage, and such education as he had was obtained in Virginia. His old friend, and later enemy, Rev. Jonathan Boucher, said that “George, like most people thereabouts at that time, had no education than reading, writing and accounts which he was taught by a convict servant whom his father bought for a schoolmaster;” but Boucher managed to include so many inaccuracies in his account of Washington, that even if this statement were not certainly untruthful in several respects, it could be dismissed as valueless.

Born at Wakefield, in Washington parish, Westmoreland, which had been the home of the Washingtons from their earliest arrival in Virginia, George was too young while the family continued there to attend the school which had been founded in that parish by the gift of four hundred and forty acres from some early patron of knowledge. When the boy was about three years old, the family removed to “Washington,” as Mount Vernon was called before it was renamed, and dwelt there from 1735 till 1739, when, owing to the burning of the homestead, another remove was made to an estate on the Rappahannock, nearly opposite Fredericksburg.

Here it was that the earliest education of George was received, for in an old volume of the Bishop of Exeter’s Sermons his name is written, and on a flyleaf a note in the handwriting of a relative who inherited the library states that this “autograph of George Washington’s name is believed to be the earliest specimen of his handwriting, when he was probably not more than eight or nine years old.” During this period, too, there came into his possession the “Young Man’s Companion,” an English vade-mecum of then enormous popularity, written “in a plain and easy stile,” the title states, “that a young Man may attain the same, without a Tutor.” It would be easier to say what this little book did not teach than to catalogue what it did. How to read, write, and figure is but the introduction to the larger part of the work, which taught one to write letters, wills, deeds, and all legal forms, to measure, survey, and navigate, to build houses, to make ink and cider, and to plant and graft, how to address letters to people of quality, how to doctor the sick, and, finally, how to conduct one’s self in company. The evidence still exists of how carefully Washington studied this book, in the form of copybooks, in which are transcribed problem after problem and rule after rule, not to exclude the famous Rules of civility, which biographers of Washington have asserted were written by the boy himself. School-mates thought fit, after Washington became famous, to remember his “industry and assiduity at school as very remarkable,” and the copies certainly bear out the statement, but even these prove that the lad was as human as the man, for scattered here and there among the logarithms, geometrical problems, and legal forms are crude drawings of birds, faces, and other typical school-boy attempts.