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withdrawn—and it was never to return.

T HE INCOMING MAIL CARRIAGES FOR D ECEMBER 19, 1799, ARRIVED to a slumbering andsodden city. As it was a day of prayer for delivery from recent fevers, many of the shops would stay closed that day. At the Merchants’ Coffee House, however, where deals were struck amid tables of appraisers, stockbrokers, and lingering Chamber of Commerce board members, it was an ordinary Thursday for the more determined men of business. But one newly arrived letter from Virginia, when carefully sliced open, contained a shocking announcement:
    Alexandria, 15th Dec. 1799
    Dear Sir
,
    This is a day of mourning to us, and will be so to the United States, when the cause is known—
    G ENERAL G EORGE W ASHINGTON IS NO MORE .
    Word raced down Wall Street as another letter from Alexandria was opened to reveal the same stunning news about the sixty-seven-year-old statesman: “He made his exit last night between the hours of 11 and 12 after a short but painful illness of 23 hours.… We are all to close our houses, and act as if we should do if one of our own family had departed.”
    One man felt distinctly unmoved as he bustled about his business in the Insurance Room of the Merchants’ Coffee House. JohnShaw had a busy wine shop down on Pearl Street, and he was not about to waste time mourning the rebel whose war had stripped so many old gentry of land and business.
    “It is a pity General Washington had not died five and twenty years ago,” he snapped.
    The country was still sharply politically divided. Tradesmen and farmers naturally gravitated toward the party of Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson in their tavern talk, while their merchants and masters just as naturally took to John Adams and Alexander Hamilton’s moneyed Federalists. After all, Federalist control of the banks meant that if they wanted a line of credit for business, they had to back the party of Adams and Hamilton. But among some merchants that supported Hamilton and his Federalists, there remained a hangover of Loyalism from the war—and while the past decade had nurtured a vociferous American nationalism, they still retained warm feelings toward the old country. For a few coffeehouse patrons such as Shaw, it went beyond that: A couple of years earlier, one of them had indignantly raised aBritish flag over the Merchants’ before it got ripped down by an equally indignant patriot.
    I said
, Shaw repeated,
it’s a pity General Washington didn’t die five and twenty years ago
.
    No one rose to the provocation. Not everyone had loved the man, true, but he had led America through its darkest days. Now, after three years of bitter partisan battles under Adams, doubts were all that remained—and it was with a certain foreboding that publisher Charles Snowden hurried over to his
New-York Daily Advertiser
print shop to compose an elegy on the spot for his evening edition. “ WASHINGTON was our pride, our guardian, and our defense,” he quickly wrote. “Amidst threatening storms of some violence, amidst the more dangerous convulsions of party rage, it was still our consolation that WASHINGTON lived.”
    Now the country’s great unifier was gone. It seemed as if the partisans of Jefferson and Adams might crack the fragile republic apart by the following year’s election. For the British-leaning Federalists, there was the spectacle of France’s new democracy spinninginto frightening anarchy and ruin—while to French-leaning Republicans, the roundly condemned censorship of the Alien and Sedition Acts smacked of monarchy. And there were more subtle moral fissures slowly forming in this new country as well, the kind that could be seen right next to Washington’s death notice in the
New-York Gazette
, where there ran an ad headlined A NEGRO MAN TO BE SOLD CHEAP .
    But for now, at least, the city voiced a singular grief. Out on Wall Street, John Shaw ran into one of Washington’s old soldiers, Colonel Mansfield, who repeated what he’d