The day after Washington died, Tobias Lear sent instructions to Alexandria for a mahogany coffin to house Washington’s remains. In all likelihood, Christopher Sheels performed the solemn rite of washing and readying his master’s cadaver. Abiding by Washington’s wishes, the funeral at Mount Vernon did not take place until four days after his death, on December 18, 1799. From beyond the grave, Washington was still stage-managing events, having stipulated in his will a desire to be “interred in a private manner, without parade or funeral oration.”24 After suffering through many tedious tributes, he wanted to temper public adulation, although he must have suspected that his humble wish would be ignored by a devoted public.

Instead of a lavish funeral, he had a simple military burial. At three P.M., a schooner anchored in the Potomac began firing minute guns, and the funeral cortège shuffled across the lawn, then swept down the hillside to the family vault. The mourners stepped softly to the muffled hush of drums and mournful, elegiac music. A Virginia cavalry unit led the march, trailed by infantry, a band, and four clergymen in black suits. Then came two slaves, Cyrus and Wilson, leading the general’s horse, which was plainly outfitted with a saddle and pistols stuffed in their holsters—an apt image for a legendary horseman who had always looked magnificent astride a mount. The coffin was borne by six pallbearers, five of them Masons, followed by the mayor of Alexandria and the chief Mount Vernon employees. Conspicuously absent was Martha Washington, who likely stayed hidden in an upstairs bedroom, too traumatized to venture forth. For once, her sense of public duty deserted her. As a remembrance of her husband, she asked Tobias Lear to snip locks of hair from the corpse before it was deposited in the coffin. At the burial vault, the Reverend Thomas Davis pronounced the Order of Burial from the Episcopal Prayer Book. Then, testifying to Washington’s deep faith in the brotherhood of Freemasonry, Dr. Elisha Dick stepped forward and, in his capacity as Worshipful Master of Masonic Lodge No. 22 in Alexandria, officiated over rituals performed by Masons garbed in their customary aprons. As the coffin was stored in the vault overlooking the Potomac, eleven cannon fired volleys into the air, and infantry discharged their muskets.

Free of grandiosity or false sentiment, the funeral was restricted to family, friends, neighbors, and associates—exactly as Washington might have wished. He had always been civic-minded, and the strong institutional presence—the government, the military, the church, the Masons—mirrored the priorities of his life. No less appropriate was the symbolic presence of the invisible workers who had made his epic success story possible: eight slaves, clad in black, all but one of them dower slaves with nothing to gain from Washington’s will. For the slaves, the sole immediate benefit of the funeral was that, after all the guests had departed, the “remains of the provisions” were circulated in their quarters.

The family vault where Washington was entombed had been dug into a grassy slope, topped by a knoll with juniper, willow, chestnut, and cypress trees. This crypt was so overgrown with vegetation that it seemed to disappear into the hillside and breathed a damp, moldy air of decay, causing Washington to leave instructions for a new brick vault. It speaks to Washington’s humility that the greatest man of his age was laid to rest in a communal tomb where nobody could single out his grave or honor him separately. All visitors could do was peer through the slats of a rough oak door into a gloomy, malodorous den of ancient coffins. Some souvenir hunters later reached in and tore swatches from the black velvet pall covering Washington’s coffin until it grew ragged with neglect. In 1818 an appalled traveler objected that Washington had been “permitted to remain in obscurity and neglect, without a mausoleum, monument, inscription, a stone, or anything else to point [where] the hero and statesman repose or any evidence of his country’s gratitude.”25 Another visitor left a still more horrifying description, comparing the vault to a “bake oven” and condemning it as “a low damp little place that is crammed with coffins, some of which are moldered to ashes and the bones are strewed on the pavement.” When this visitor spotted a skull on the ground, a gardener told him it belonged to Lawrence Washington, the beloved older half brother of the first president. In later years, after a new tomb was built at Mount Vernon, the coffins of George and Martha Washington were transferred to marble sarcophagi.

After his death, Washington’s will was made public and quickly became available in pamphlet form. If he had hoped that other slave masters would emulate his example in liberating his slaves, he was cruelly mistaken. Not only had the slave population of the United States grown rapidly for forty years, but the introduction of the cotton gin was ushering in a vast and terrifying expansion of slavery. By 1804 all the northern states had enacted laws for terminating slavery, but it persisted in the South in an entrenched form.

As soon as word of Washington’s death spread, church bells pealed in every city and business wound to a standstill. “Each man, when he heard that Washington was dead, shut his store as a matter of course, without consultation,” one Bostonian recalled, “and in two hours all business was stopped.”26 Starting with President Adams, government officials wore black clothing, army officers donned crape on their left arms, naval vessels flew their colors at half-mast, and the hall of Congress was draped in black. At her receptions Abigail Adams demanded that ladies restrict themselves to black gloves and fans.

No political figure felt more bereft than Alexander Hamilton, who owed so much to the older man’s steadfast patronage and understanding. “Perhaps no friend of his has more cause to lament on personal account than myself,” he told an associate, saying that Washington had been “an aegis very essential to me.”27 Such deep grief was not universal. Unable to conquer his envy, President Adams quietly recoiled at the Washington adoration and later griped that the Federalists had “done themselves and their country invaluable injury by making Washington their military, political, religious, and even moral Pope and ascribing everything to him.”28 It was all a plot, he insinuated, “to cast into the background and the shade all others who had been concerned in the service of their country in the revolution.”29

On December 19 John Marshall rose in the House to register the formal notification of Washington’s death. A week later a huge, subdued funeral procession snaked from Congress Hall to the German Lutheran Church. There General Henry Lee delivered his famous funeral oration in which he eulogized Washington as “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” while further noting that the deceased was “second to none in the humble and endearing scenes of private life.”30 For all the fervor in commemorating Washington’s death, Congress never made good on its intention to transfer Washington’s remains to a marble crypt in the Capitol, as he had perhaps expected.

By the time of his death, Washington had poured his last ounce of passion into the creation of his country. Never a perfect man, he always had a normal quota of human frailty, including a craving for money, status, and fame. Ambitious and self-promoting in his formative years, he had remained a tightfisted, sharp-elbowed businessman and a hard-driving slave master. But over the years, this man of deep emotions and strong opinions had learned to subordinate his personal dreams and aspirations to the service of a larger cause, evolving into a statesman with a prodigious mastery of political skills and an unwavering sense of America’s future greatness. In the things that mattered most for his country, he had shown himself capable of constant growth and self-improvement.