[Footnote 1:  Ford, XIV, 246-52.  I have copied Tobias Lear’s remarkable account of Washington’s death almost verbatim.]

Once read, honest Tobias Lear’s account of Washington’s death will hardly be forgotten.  It has a majestic simplicity which we feel must have accompanied Washington in his last hours.  The homely sick-bed details; his grim fortitude; his willingness to do everything which the physicians recommended, not because he wanted to live, nor because he thought they would help him, but because he wished to obey.  We see him there trying to force out the painful words from his constricted throat and when he was unable to whisper even a “thank you” for some service done, Lear read the unuttered gratitude in his eyes.  The faithful Lear, lying on the outside of the bed in order to be able to help turn Washington with less pain, and poor old Dr. Craik, lifelong friend, who became too moved to speak, so that he sat off near the fire in silence except for a stifled sob, and Mrs. Washington, placed near the foot of the bed, waiting patiently in complete self-control.  She seemed to have determined that the last look which her mate of forty years had of her should not portray helpless grief.  And from time to time the negro slaves came to the door that led into the entry and they peered into the room very reverently, and with their emotions held in check, at their dying master.  And then there was a ceasing of the pain and the breathing became easier and quieter and Dr. Craik placed his hand over the life-tired eyes and Washington was dead without a struggle or even a sigh.

The pathos or tragedy of it lies in the fact that all the devices and experiments of the doctors could avail nothing.  The quinsy sore throat which killed him could not be cured by any means then known to medical art.  The practice of bleeding, which by many persons was thought to have killed him, was then so widely used that his doctors would have been censured If they had omitted it.  Sixty years later it was still in use, and no one can doubt that it deprived Italy’s great statesman of his chance of living.  The premonition of Washington on his first seizure with the quinsy that the end had come proved fatally true.

The news of Washington’s death did not reach the capital until Wednesday, December 18th.  The House immediately adjourned.  On the following day, when it reassembled, John Marshall delivered a brief tribute and resolutions were passed to attend the funeral and to pay honor “to the memory of the Man, first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” The immortal phrase was by Colonel Henry Lee, the father of General Robert E. Lee.  President Adams, in response to a letter from the Senate of the United States, used the less happy phrase, “If a Trajan found a Pliny, a Marcus Aurelius can never want biographers, eulogists, or historians.”