WEBVTT - The Backstory: Stealing George Washington’s head 0:00:00.680 --> 0:00:03.880 So George Washington would have turned two hundred and ninety 0:00:03.920 --> 0:00:07.280 three years old this weekend on February twenty second, if 0:00:07.280 --> 0:00:10.640 he hadn't been killed by some over zealous primitive doctors 0:00:10.680 --> 0:00:14.840 and also was immortal. But a few decades after his passing, 0:00:15.160 --> 0:00:18.600 he almost had his head stolen. I'm Patty Steele. What 0:00:18.640 --> 0:00:22.320 would anybody want to do with George's head? That's next 0:00:22.360 --> 0:00:30.320 on the backstory. The backstory is back. Even though President's 0:00:30.320 --> 0:00:35.040 weekend was last weekend, George Washington's birthday takes place this weekend, 0:00:35.120 --> 0:00:38.200 February twenty second. He was born two hundred and ninety 0:00:38.200 --> 0:00:41.680 three years ago, seventeen thirty two. We know that his 0:00:41.800 --> 0:00:44.800 death at the age of sixty seven was likely caused 0:00:44.840 --> 0:00:48.360 by over zealous doctors who thought that blood letting was 0:00:48.400 --> 0:00:51.120 the best way to treat a patient. Pretty common at 0:00:51.120 --> 0:00:53.959 the time, but it turns out that he had developed 0:00:53.960 --> 0:00:57.560 a nasty throat infection and was having trouble breathing. All 0:00:57.600 --> 0:01:00.480 but one of his doctors believed that by raining a 0:01:00.480 --> 0:01:02.560 lot of the blood out of his body, they would 0:01:02.600 --> 0:01:05.080 somehow make him well at the end of the night, 0:01:05.520 --> 0:01:08.640 likely by cutting into his veins. They had drained over 0:01:08.760 --> 0:01:12.399 forty percent of his blood. That weakened him and made 0:01:12.480 --> 0:01:15.039 him less likely to be able to fight off the infection. 0:01:15.640 --> 0:01:20.199 So the next morning George Washington died. It was December fourteenth, 0:01:20.280 --> 0:01:24.280 seventeen ninety nine. Now George was frightened of being buried 0:01:24.319 --> 0:01:28.160 alive and aware that his hours were numbered, he specifically 0:01:28.200 --> 0:01:30.520 asked that he not be buried until he had been 0:01:30.560 --> 0:01:33.400 dead for three days. While he wanted to be buried 0:01:33.400 --> 0:01:36.040 in a crypt at home at Mount Vernon, folks in 0:01:36.200 --> 0:01:39.720 Washington wanted their hero to be interred in a special 0:01:39.840 --> 0:01:43.039 glass exposed vault in the floor of the rotunda of 0:01:43.080 --> 0:01:46.000 the Capitol building. The plan was to have a permanent 0:01:46.120 --> 0:01:49.760 ten foot hole covered in glass, which would look down 0:01:49.840 --> 0:01:53.840 on a statue of George Washington standing above his own tomb. 0:01:54.000 --> 0:01:58.480 Wow fancy, right. Martha Washington gave that idea a mild 0:01:58.520 --> 0:02:02.200 thumbs up. The Capital wasn't even finished being built yet, 0:02:02.560 --> 0:02:05.320 so for the time being, they put George's remain in 0:02:05.360 --> 0:02:08.480 a separate crypt at Mount Vernon, and that was that. 0:02:09.360 --> 0:02:12.240 Over the next thirty years, the family crypt fell into 0:02:12.360 --> 0:02:17.720 total disrepair. The public traveled to Washington's grave to snag artifacts, 0:02:17.919 --> 0:02:22.280 including plants, trees and flowers that surrounded it. Everything was 0:02:22.320 --> 0:02:25.600 stripped bare. In fact, even the Russian ambassador to the 0:02:25.680 --> 0:02:29.120 United States had an entire branch taken from a tree 0:02:29.160 --> 0:02:32.839 next to the tomb, which he later presented to Alexander 0:02:32.880 --> 0:02:38.200 the First. In eighteen thirty, GW's grand nephew, John Augustine 0:02:38.240 --> 0:02:41.880 Washington the Second, owned Mount Vernon. The story goes that 0:02:41.919 --> 0:02:44.919 he decided to fire one of his gardeners. Well, the 0:02:45.000 --> 0:02:48.520 guy was furious. He wanted revenge, so he breaks into 0:02:48.520 --> 0:02:51.600 the family crypt with the idea that he'd steal George 0:02:51.639 --> 0:02:54.919 Washington's head. People in those days didn't love their relics. 0:02:55.360 --> 0:02:58.000 The thought was he'd sell it in Europe, where George 0:02:58.120 --> 0:03:01.320 was really admired, or perhaps even have it go out 0:03:01.360 --> 0:03:04.800 on tour in a traveling display. But here's where the 0:03:04.840 --> 0:03:09.240 gardener ran into a problem. John Augustine Washington had close 0:03:09.280 --> 0:03:12.640 to ten kids and a boatload of in laws, many 0:03:12.680 --> 0:03:15.160 of whom were buried in the crypt in a pretty 0:03:15.200 --> 0:03:19.600 haphazard way. Turns out, time as well as wild animals 0:03:19.639 --> 0:03:23.280 plus folks looking for souvenirs had all taken a real 0:03:23.400 --> 0:03:26.799 toll in the crypt. Coffins had rotted. There were bodies 0:03:26.800 --> 0:03:29.880 scattered all over the floor. There were at least twenty 0:03:29.919 --> 0:03:33.280 people buried in the crypt. The gardener grabbed a couple 0:03:33.280 --> 0:03:36.360 of heads, which later were identified as a man and 0:03:36.400 --> 0:03:40.120 a little girl. The bodies of George and Martha Washington, 0:03:40.160 --> 0:03:42.920 on the other hand, had been encased in lead before 0:03:42.960 --> 0:03:48.280 their burial, so were spared this indignity, as they put it. Meantime, 0:03:48.280 --> 0:03:51.280 the gardener was nabbed the next day in Alexandria, Virginia, 0:03:51.520 --> 0:03:54.680 and the skull was returned to the crypt anyway. As 0:03:54.680 --> 0:03:58.280 a result of the attempted theft, Congress decided once again 0:03:58.840 --> 0:04:01.800 it wanted to take Washington's body and in tumbe him 0:04:01.920 --> 0:04:04.440 in the Capitol as part of the celebration of his 0:04:04.520 --> 0:04:08.280 one hundredth birthday on February twenty second, eighteen thirty two. 0:04:09.000 --> 0:04:12.120 But John Washington refused, saying he had just built a 0:04:12.160 --> 0:04:15.320 new and improved family crypt and he could not disturb 0:04:15.360 --> 0:04:19.479 President Washington's perfect tranquility, as he put it. The bodies 0:04:19.520 --> 0:04:22.120 of George and Martha Washington were moved to the side 0:04:22.160 --> 0:04:25.320 in eighteen thirty one, and a security guard was hired 0:04:25.360 --> 0:04:28.800 to keep an eye on the tomb. In eighteen thirty seven, 0:04:29.040 --> 0:04:32.320 after a new and more fancy sarcophagus was built out 0:04:32.320 --> 0:04:37.000 of Pennsylvania marble, the original lead interior coffins of George 0:04:37.000 --> 0:04:40.840 and Martha were moved. That's when the coffin was unsealed 0:04:40.960 --> 0:04:44.599 for the first and last time, so John Washington could 0:04:44.640 --> 0:04:47.279 take a look at his uncle's body, maybe to ensure 0:04:47.360 --> 0:04:49.680 no one else had tried to steal GW's head, or 0:04:49.839 --> 0:04:53.880 maybe it was just morbid curiosity. Anyway, Harper's New Monthly 0:04:53.960 --> 0:04:57.520 magazine said the corpse appeared to have suffered little from 0:04:57.520 --> 0:05:01.480 the effects of time and was notable for its large dimensions. 0:05:02.080 --> 0:05:05.240 In life, George Washington was more than six feet tall, 0:05:05.320 --> 0:05:08.960 unusually large for the eighteenth century. The article said he 0:05:09.000 --> 0:05:12.839 had a massive head, with tremendously large hands and size 0:05:12.880 --> 0:05:16.359 thirteen feet. There have also been claims that locks of 0:05:16.440 --> 0:05:19.360 hair were removed from George's head at that point when 0:05:19.400 --> 0:05:22.280 they had the coffin open, because people love getting their 0:05:22.320 --> 0:05:26.320 hands on that stuff, but nobody's for sure whether that happened. 0:05:26.800 --> 0:05:29.680 But full on body snatching was a big problem throughout 0:05:29.720 --> 0:05:33.320 the eighteen hundreds, and Washington wasn't the only president targeted. 0:05:33.760 --> 0:05:37.080 Abe Lincoln's remains were nearly snatched in an election day 0:05:37.120 --> 0:05:40.480 plot in eighteen seventy six, but those guys were foiled. 0:05:41.080 --> 0:05:44.800 The body of Thomas Paine, the Revolutionary War influencer who 0:05:44.839 --> 0:05:48.480 wrote Common Sense, was dug up in eighteen nineteen and 0:05:48.560 --> 0:05:51.520 shipped to England, who was never returned, and over the 0:05:51.600 --> 0:05:54.520 years his bones were split up. Where it is the 0:05:54.560 --> 0:05:57.640 skull is somewhere in Australia, and a leg bone is 0:05:57.640 --> 0:05:59.919 said to be in the wall of an English tavern. 0:06:00.640 --> 0:06:05.279 Here's the thing. George Washington was a monumentally towering figure 0:06:05.520 --> 0:06:09.120 for a brand new country just getting its footing. Everybody 0:06:09.160 --> 0:06:12.280 wanted to celebrate him, be like him, have their kids 0:06:12.320 --> 0:06:16.000 grow up to be like him. People then described visiting 0:06:16.040 --> 0:06:20.560 his tomb as being a rapturous, almost religious experience, and 0:06:20.600 --> 0:06:22.719 there was a sense that putting his bones in DC 0:06:23.240 --> 0:06:25.800 would help bind the country together in the run up 0:06:25.839 --> 0:06:29.760 to the Civil War. As one biographer said, the question 0:06:30.040 --> 0:06:33.320 was whether Washington's memory belonged more to the state he 0:06:33.360 --> 0:06:37.120 called home or to the country he created. So in 0:06:37.160 --> 0:06:40.240 the race to capture a relic of George Washington, whether 0:06:40.320 --> 0:06:43.119 it was a lock of his hair or his entire head, 0:06:43.760 --> 0:06:46.520 the motivation seems to have been based on the desire 0:06:47.000 --> 0:06:50.240 to somehow hold on to his physical presence in people's 0:06:50.279 --> 0:06:56.120 lives for as long as they possibly could. Hope you're 0:06:56.160 --> 0:06:59.720 enjoying The Backstory with Patty Steele. Follow or subscribe for 0:06:59.720 --> 0:07:03.120 freek to get new episodes delivered automatically, and feel free 0:07:03.160 --> 0:07:04.919 to dm me if you have a story you would 0:07:04.920 --> 0:07:08.000 like me to cover. On Facebook, It's Patty Steele and 0:07:08.080 --> 0:07:13.800 on Instagram Real Patty Steele. I'm Patty Steele. The Backstories 0:07:13.840 --> 0:07:17.960 a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks, the Elvis Durand Group, 0:07:18.040 --> 0:07:21.800 and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser. Our 0:07:21.840 --> 0:07:25.960 writer Jake Kushner. We have new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. 0:07:26.360 --> 0:07:28.560 Feel free to reach out to me with comments and 0:07:28.640 --> 0:07:32.560 even story suggestions on Instagram at real Patty Steele and 0:07:32.640 --> 0:07:35.640 on Facebook at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening to the 0:07:35.680 --> 0:07:39.400 Backstory with Patty Steele. The pieces of history you didn't 0:07:39.520 --> 0:07:40.560 know you needed to know.