The Backstory: Stealing George Washington’s head

George Washington’s 293rd birthday is this weekend, and his death in 1799 was a shock to the brand-new United States of America. Everybody loved him and a lot of people wanted a piece of him…literally. That led to the plot to steal George Washington’s head.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So George Washington would have turned two hundred and ninety
three years old this weekend on February twenty second, if
he hadn't been killed by some over zealous primitive doctors
and also was immortal. But a few decades after his passing,
he almost had his head stolen. I'm Patty Steele. What
would anybody want to do with George's head? That's next

(00:22):
on the backstory. The backstory is back. Even though President's
weekend was last weekend, George Washington's birthday takes place this weekend,
February twenty second. He was born two hundred and ninety
three years ago, seventeen thirty two. We know that his
death at the age of sixty seven was likely caused

(00:44):
by over zealous doctors who thought that blood letting was
the best way to treat a patient. Pretty common at
the time, but it turns out that he had developed
a nasty throat infection and was having trouble breathing. All
but one of his doctors believed that by raining a
lot of the blood out of his body, they would
somehow make him well at the end of the night,

(01:05):
likely by cutting into his veins. They had drained over
forty percent of his blood. That weakened him and made
him less likely to be able to fight off the infection.
So the next morning George Washington died. It was December fourteenth,
seventeen ninety nine. Now George was frightened of being buried
alive and aware that his hours were numbered, he specifically

(01:28):
asked that he not be buried until he had been
dead for three days. While he wanted to be buried
in a crypt at home at Mount Vernon, folks in
Washington wanted their hero to be interred in a special
glass exposed vault in the floor of the rotunda of
the Capitol building. The plan was to have a permanent
ten foot hole covered in glass, which would look down

(01:49):
on a statue of George Washington standing above his own tomb.
Wow fancy, right. Martha Washington gave that idea a mild
thumbs up. The Capital wasn't even finished being built yet,
so for the time being, they put George's remain in
a separate crypt at Mount Vernon, and that was that.
Over the next thirty years, the family crypt fell into

(02:12):
total disrepair. The public traveled to Washington's grave to snag artifacts,
including plants, trees and flowers that surrounded it. Everything was
stripped bare. In fact, even the Russian ambassador to the
United States had an entire branch taken from a tree
next to the tomb, which he later presented to Alexander

(02:32):
the First. In eighteen thirty, GW's grand nephew, John Augustine
Washington the Second, owned Mount Vernon. The story goes that
he decided to fire one of his gardeners. Well, the
guy was furious. He wanted revenge, so he breaks into
the family crypt with the idea that he'd steal George
Washington's head. People in those days didn't love their relics.

(02:55):
The thought was he'd sell it in Europe, where George
was really admired, or perhaps even have it go out
on tour in a traveling display. But here's where the
gardener ran into a problem. John Augustine Washington had close
to ten kids and a boatload of in laws, many
of whom were buried in the crypt in a pretty
haphazard way. Turns out, time as well as wild animals

(03:19):
plus folks looking for souvenirs had all taken a real
toll in the crypt. Coffins had rotted. There were bodies
scattered all over the floor. There were at least twenty
people buried in the crypt. The gardener grabbed a couple
of heads, which later were identified as a man and
a little girl. The bodies of George and Martha Washington,

(03:40):
on the other hand, had been encased in lead before
their burial, so were spared this indignity, as they put it. Meantime,
the gardener was nabbed the next day in Alexandria, Virginia,
and the skull was returned to the crypt anyway. As
a result of the attempted theft, Congress decided once again
it wanted to take Washington's body and in tumbe him

(04:01):
in the Capitol as part of the celebration of his
one hundredth birthday on February twenty second, eighteen thirty two.
But John Washington refused, saying he had just built a
new and improved family crypt and he could not disturb
President Washington's perfect tranquility, as he put it. The bodies
of George and Martha Washington were moved to the side

(04:22):
in eighteen thirty one, and a security guard was hired
to keep an eye on the tomb. In eighteen thirty seven,
after a new and more fancy sarcophagus was built out
of Pennsylvania marble, the original lead interior coffins of George
and Martha were moved. That's when the coffin was unsealed
for the first and last time, so John Washington could

(04:44):
take a look at his uncle's body, maybe to ensure
no one else had tried to steal GW's head, or
maybe it was just morbid curiosity. Anyway, Harper's New Monthly
magazine said the corpse appeared to have suffered little from
the effects of time and was notable for its large dimensions.
In life, George Washington was more than six feet tall,

(05:05):
unusually large for the eighteenth century. The article said he
had a massive head, with tremendously large hands and size
thirteen feet. There have also been claims that locks of
hair were removed from George's head at that point when
they had the coffin open, because people love getting their
hands on that stuff, but nobody's for sure whether that happened.

(05:26):
But full on body snatching was a big problem throughout
the eighteen hundreds, and Washington wasn't the only president targeted.
Abe Lincoln's remains were nearly snatched in an election day
plot in eighteen seventy six, but those guys were foiled.
The body of Thomas Paine, the Revolutionary War influencer who
wrote Common Sense, was dug up in eighteen nineteen and

(05:48):
shipped to England, who was never returned, and over the
years his bones were split up. Where it is the
skull is somewhere in Australia, and a leg bone is
said to be in the wall of an English tavern.
Here's the thing. George Washington was a monumentally towering figure
for a brand new country just getting its footing. Everybody

(06:09):
wanted to celebrate him, be like him, have their kids
grow up to be like him. People then described visiting
his tomb as being a rapturous, almost religious experience, and
there was a sense that putting his bones in DC
would help bind the country together in the run up
to the Civil War. As one biographer said, the question

(06:30):
was whether Washington's memory belonged more to the state he
called home or to the country he created. So in
the race to capture a relic of George Washington, whether
it was a lock of his hair or his entire head,
the motivation seems to have been based on the desire
to somehow hold on to his physical presence in people's

(06:50):
lives for as long as they possibly could. Hope you're
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(07:13):
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(07:35):
Backstory with Patty Steele. The pieces of history you didn't
know you needed to know.