As fears mounted about whether the president would survive, three eminent doctors were consulted: Dr. Samuel Bard, Dr. John McKnight, and Dr. John Charlton. As Washington’s condition worsened, they decided on May 12 to summon Dr. John Jones, a surgeon from Philadelphia, who had been the personal physician to Ben Franklin. So as not to alert the public to Washington’s true condition, the presidential aides tried to sneak Dr. Jones in under conditions of extraordinary secrecy. “The doctor’s prudence will suggest the propriety of setting out as privately as possible,” Major William Jackson told Clement Biddle of Philadelphia. “Perhaps it may be well to assign a personal reason for visiting New York, or going into the country.”34

The street in front of Washington’s residence was again cleared of traffic and carpeted with straw to mute sounds. With such precautions, rumors inevitably circulated about Washington’s perilous condition. “Called to see the president,” William Maclay wrote on May 15. “Every eye full of tears. His life despaired of.”35 With Washington coughing up blood and running a high fever, Dr. McKnight hinted to Maclay that there was little hope of recovery and that death might be imminent. Beset by hiccups, Washington made strange gurgling noises that were interpreted as a death rattle. What one observer described as “a universal gloom” overspread a country long accustomed to Washington’s steady presence.36

On May 16, against all expectations and after the team of physicians had pronounced the case hopeless, the president rallied and underwent a startling improvement. At four in the afternoon he broke into a tremendous sweat, his coughing abated, and he spoke more clearly than he had in days. In a tone of joy and mild disbelief, Jefferson told his daughter that “from a total despair, we are now in good hopes of him.”37 On May 18 the president’s condition surfaced in a press that had preserved discreet silence. “The President of the United States has been exceedingly indisposed for several days past,” the New-York Journal informed readers, “but we are rejoiced at the authentic information of his being much relieved the last evening.” 38 For the next two weeks, although a convalescent Washington could not perform presidential duties, he was now clearly on the mend. In early June he assured Lafayette that he was well out of danger and had rebounded “except in point of strength.”39

Throughout the ordeal, Martha Washington supervised the sickroom and behaved with stoic equanimity. To Mercy Otis Warren, she admitted that the tremendous display of public sympathy had been “very affecting” to her. Her self-possessed husband, she said, had gone through the crisis with typical composure: “He seemed less concerned himself as to the event than perhaps almost any other person in ye United States. Happily, he is now perfectly recovered.”40 From the time he was a young man, Washington had faced death with uncommon fortitude, and this time proved no exception. By May 20 his fever had ebbed, and two days later Richard Henry Lee found him sitting up in a chair. Helped by his naturally hardy nature, the president made rapid strides. “The President is again on his legs,” Philip Schuyler reported the next day. “He was yesterday able to traverse his room a dozen times.”41 A couple of days later he was even out riding. On May 27 Jefferson declared an official end to the crisis when he stated that Washington was “well enough to resume business.”42 The country had narrowly averted catastrophe, for John Adams, whatever his merits, would never have been the unifying figure needed to launch the constitutional experiment. Still, Washington remained in a weakened state, so drained of energy that he did not resume his diary until June 24.

As in the crisis of Washington’s infected thigh a year earlier, the federal government had been poorly prepared for this serious lapse in the president’s health. With Tobias Lear out of town, Major William Jackson effectively ran the presidential office. No official procedure for deputizing someone during a presidential illness existed, and Washington may have been reluctant to grant precedence to any cabinet officer. As he lobbied for his financial program, the high-flying Hamilton functioned as de facto head of state. In later unpublished comments about this anxious time, Hamilton said that Jefferson viewed him then for the first time as “a formidable rival in the competition for the presidential chair at a future period.” While others brooded about the president’s fate, Hamilton alleged, the situation “only excited the ambitious ardor of the secretary [of state] to remove out of his way every dangerous opponent. That melancholy circumstance suggested to him the probability of an approaching vacancy in the presidential chair and that he would attract the public attention as the successor to it, were the more popular Secretary of the Treasury out of the way.”43 Hamilton offered no proof to back up his assertion, and Jefferson likely would have made the same claim about Hamilton. Before too long the mutual suspicions simmering between the two men would burst into open warfare.

The president having withstood two grave illnesses, the capital was rife with copious opinions as to how best to preserve his precious health. A chorus of friends and physicians alike urged him to dedicate more time to exercise and lessen the strain of public business. Even in mid-June Washington could not quite get rid of the remnants of his chest pains, coughing, and shortness of breath and acknowledged the dreadful toll that dinners, meetings, and receptions had taken on his constitution. “Within the last twelve months,” he told David Stuart, “I have undergone more and severer sickness than thirty preceding years afflicted me with, put it altogether.”44 The next bout of illness, he predicted, would “put me to sleep with my fathers.”45 By nature a conscientious, hardworking man, Washington confessed to Lafayette that he could not stop doing all the things necessary “to accomplish whatever I have undertaken (though reluctantly) to the best of my abilities.”46

Washington heeded the doctors’ stark warning that he should get more outdoor activity. On June 6 he accompanied Jefferson and Hamilton on a fishing trip off Sandy Hook. It was a fine spring day, and the newspapers hoped the president felt reinvigorated by the sea air. “We are told he has had excellent sport,” one paper commented, “having himself caught a great number of sea bass and blackfish.”47 After resuming his diary, Washington jotted down many instances of riding in his coach or on horseback as he tried to pry himself away from his sedentary life. For health reasons, Washington also contemplated the purchase of a farm outside Philadelphia, which never happened.

Washington’s back-to-back illnesses in 1789 and 1790 contributed to the sudden aging of a man who had long been associated with graceful virility. The two episodes would have greatly deepened his sense that he was sacrificing his life for his country and that he would likely have little or no retirement beyond the presidency. Washington had grown more haggard during these medical emergencies. Fanny Bassett Washington wrote the following year, “The president looks better than I expected to see him, but still there be traces in his countenance of his two last severe illnesses, which I fear will never wear off.”48 The crises also left Martha Washington in a reflective, despondent mood. She told Mercy Otis Warren, “But for the ties of affection which attract me so strongly to my near connection and worthy friends, I should feel myself indeed much weaned from all enjoyments of this transitory life.”49