The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers by Thomas Fleming

James Madison violently opposed Hamilton’s vision of the United States as an industrial and commercial powerhouse. Their opposition morphed into a detestation of New York as the nation’s capital, because the city’s numerous wealthy merchants supposedly corrupted Congress. The Virginians wanted a rural capital beyond the reach of big-city temptations. These clashes, which soon spilled into the newspapers, made President Washington a very worried man.
    While the politicians called one another vicious names, Washington caught a cold that transmuted into pneumonia. This time, the fear that he was sinking toward death was more than a rumor. In an eerie replay of Jack Custis’s demise, four doctors watched helplessly while the president struggled for breath. Another physician was summoned all the way from Philadelphia but had nothing to offer but more hand-wringing. The storyspread throughout the nation, causing acute anxiety everywhere. “Every eye full of tears,” one senator wrote. 15
    Martha was at George’s bedside constantly. On the sixth day, one of the doctors grimly predicted the president’s imminent death. About four o’clock that afternoon, George broke into a terrific sweat—a sign the disease had reached its crisis. Within two hours, he was smiling at Martha and speaking in a low voice. Probably at Martha’s urging, he was soon taking rides with her in their carriage to escape the perpetual pressures of the presidency.
    The realization that Washington was mortal may have influenced the politicians to reach a major compromise. Jefferson agreed to round up southern votes for Hamilton’s financial plan and the New Yorker persuaded northerners to support a bill placing the permanent capital of the nation on the Potomac River in a newly created District of Columbia, carved from Maryland and Virginia. In the meantime, the federal government would move to Philadelphia, presumably less corrupt than New York. President Washington signed both bills and political tensions relaxed for a while. A booming market in government bonds and shares in the Bank of the United States began creating prosperity throughout the nation.
    XI
    There were times when Martha tired of public attention. It was often overwhelming. At one point she told her niece Fanny Bassett that she felt “more like a state prisoner than anything else.” When Washington left her in New York while he visited the New England states, she almost slipped into a depression. She wrote a remarkably frank letter to Abigail Adams’s friend Mercy Otis Warren, in response to a “very friendly” letter Mercy had sent her. Martha said she was pleased by “the demonstrations of respect and affection” that the president had received from the American people. It made the burdens of the presidency tolerable for him—and for her. “You know me well enough to…believe that I am only fond of what comes from the heart,” she wrote.
    But Martha still yearned for Mount Vernon, where she had thought when the Revolutionary War ended she and George would be “left to grow old in solitude and tranquility together.” Her problem, Martha confessed, was how acutely she missed her “grandchildren and domestic connections” in Virginia. But she was determined to be cheerful. “Everybody and everything conspire to make me as contented as possible.” She had learned from experience that “the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not upon our circumstances.” 16
    After seventeen months on public display, President Washington decided he and Martha could take a vacation. They headed back to Mount Vernon, where grandchildren and grandnieces rushed to join them. At one point there were no fewer than ten young people, from teenagers to toddlers, rampaging around the house. Martha loved every minute of the chaos. Washington rode out regularly to his outlying farms and soon regained his health. He and Martha began discussing a topic that