by Alexis Coe
Washington, between his military career and the profit he made from Mount Vernon, primarily through its tobacco crop, was better off than many; but he could be doing much better if he quit the military and became a full-time planter, a transition Martha could make possible.
“A SENSIBLE WOMAN CAN NEVER BE HAPPY WITH A FOOL”
“In my estimation more permanent & genuine happiness is to be found in the sequestered walks of connubial life,” Washington wrote, “than in the giddy rounds of promiscuous pleasure, or the more tumultuous and imposing scenes of successful ambition.”5 Later in life, for his beloved step-granddaughters Eliza, Martha, and Nelly Custis, Washington wished “a good husband when you want, and deserve one,” and offered them plenty of advice.6
Don’t be a reckless flirt
“It would be no great departure from truth to say that it rarely happens otherwise, than that a thorough coquette dies in celibacy, as a punishment for her attempts to mislead others, by encouraging looks, words, or actions, given for no other purpose than to draw men on to make overtures that may be rejected.”7
Make sure he’s really into you
“Have I sufficient ground to conclude that his affections are enjoyed by me?”
Let him come to you
“[T]he declaration without the most indirect invitation on yours, must proceed from the man, to render it permanent & valuable. And nothing short of good sense, and an easy unaffected conduct can draw the line between prudery & coquetry.”
Get to know your prospective spouse*
“Retain the resolution to love with moderation . . . at least until you have secured your game.”
Love blinds—and fades
“Love is a mighty pretty thing; but like all other delicious things, it is cloying; and when the first transports of the passion begins to subside, which it assuredly will do, and yield—oftentimes too late—to more sober reflections, it serves to evince, that love is too dainty a food to live upon alone.”
Do a background check
“Is he a man of good character? A man of sense? . . . What has been his walk in life? Is he a gambler? a spendthrift [(wasteful)], a drunkard?”8
It’s easier to love a rich man than a poor man
“Is his fortune sufficient to maintain me in the manner I have been accustomed to live?”9
Get advice from your loved ones
“[I]s he one to whom my friends can have no reasonable objections?”10
Be realistic
“Do not, then, in your contemplation of the marriage state, look for perfect felicity before you consent to wed. Nor conceive, from the fine tales the poets and lovers of old have told us, of the transports of mutual love, that heaven has taken its abode on earth; nor do not deceive yourself in supposing, that the only means by which these are to be obtained; is to drink deep of the cup, and revel in an ocean of love.”
Life is long, and people change
“. . . there is no truth more certain, than that all our enjoyments fall short of our expectations; and to none does it apply with more force, than to the gratification of the passions.”
To the great disappointment of their biographers, we don’t know what passed between Martha and Washington when he left that spring, or over the next few months. The couple destroyed all their correspondence, with the exception of a few forgotten letters posthumously discovered in the backs of desk drawers and other lucky places. But their next moves tell us their discussions were serious.
Before returning to his troops, Washington asked George Fairfax, Sally’s husband, to oversee the addition of a second floor at Mount Vernon, along with a grand staircase, and new chimneys. The additions doubled the number of rooms and made for a far more imposing outward appearance. He must have told Fairfax that he was expecting Martha and her children to join him, and Sally, perhaps sad to lose a virtuous admirer, or the drama of an illicit temptation, not only stopped writing to him but apparently forbade him to write to her.
And then, on May 4, 1758, Washington ordered a ring from Philadelphia.11 He may have proposed with it when military business conveniently called him to Williamsburg in June. That was, perhaps, their third meeting. Martha’s first husband had been dead a year. She was ready to move on.
She wrote to her London purveyor, Robert Cary & Company, to send her new gloves, a bit of fine lace, a silver chain, perfumed powder, shoes in a deep purple hue with a tiny heel, and new clothes that could be considered “grave but not Extravagent nor to be mourning.”12 She hired a mason, who erected a monument when Custis’s tombstone arrived from England. Then she waited for Washington to return from war.
CHAPTER 6
“I Cannot Speak Plainer”
[A]ll is lost!—All is lost by Heavens! our Enterprize Ruind,” Washington wrote on August 2, 1758.1 He was in command of the 1st Virginia Regiment, once again reporting to a British man with whom he was at odds.
Like Braddock, General John Forbes wanted to construct an entirely new road, which Washington found wasteful and unnecessary. So did the Cherokee and Catawba tribes supporting them. Rumor had it that the Indians would abandon the British if construction went ahead. But when Washington voiced his concerns, Forbes punished him for it. Washington’s regiment was tasked with working on the road in bad weather as food supplies dwindled and disease spread.
It was Washington’s third expedition against the French around what is now Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His first two—the Battle of Fort Necessity in 1754, and the Battle of Monongahela in 1755—had been disasters, and the stakes were high enough that the British Army had doubled its troops. But nothing about this experience, it was clear from Forbes’s behavior, would be that different on the ground.
* * *
Back home in Virginia, everything about Washington’s life was changing—even when he was off fighting in the French and Indian War. His first attempt to claim a seat in the House of Burgesses had failed, but this time George Fairfax and friends campaigned on his behalf, which in the eighteenth century meant plying voters with beer and spirits. And it worked. Washington would represent Frederick County during the 1758–1761 legislative session. No doubt rumors about his impending marriage helped his image as a well-to-do planter.
Now that Washington was officially engaged, Sally Fairfax broke her own no-contact rule and sent him what must have seemed a curious letter. It has been lost—perhaps he didn’t think it was the kind of thing he should have hanging around—but his bold response on September 12, 1758, survives.
Yes, Washington admitted, he was eager to return to Virginia, and to the “annimating prospect of possessing Mrs Custis.” But neither that nor the disaster he was facing under General Forbes was the source of “my anxiety.”
Tis true, I profess myself a Votary to Love—I acknowledge that a Lady is in the Case—and further I confess, that this Lady is known to you. . . . I feel the force of her amiable beauties in the recollection of a thousand tender passages that I coud wish to obliterate, till I am bid to revive them.—but experience alas! sadly reminds me how Impossible this is . . . the World has no business to know the object of my Love, declard in this manner to—you when I want to conceal it.2
Perhaps Sally wasn’t ready to let go. She sent him another letter, which was again lost. His reply is somewhat terse.
Do we still misunderstand the true meaning of each others Letters? I think it must appear so, tho I woud feign hope the contrary as I cannot speak plainer without—but I’ll say no more, and leave you to guess the rest.3
With that, Washington, consumed by
a busy, happy life with his new family, left the youthful crush behind him.
Sally would not be as fortunate. After the Revolution, the Fairfaxes moved to London, where her husband’s noble relatives snubbed her; the state claimed their property back home as a penalty for remaining loyal to the crown, and her brother lost the family fortune. She later wrote to her sister-in-law, “I now know that the worthy man is to be preferred to the high-born.”4
* * *
On November 12, 1758, a French and Indian party approached British troops guarding cattle and horses. General Forbes ordered Washington to block the attack. He’d managed to take a few prisoners when, in the failing light, a second contingent materialized out of nowhere. His troops panicked. Virginians were suddenly firing on Virginians, mistaking their fellow colonists for the enemy. Fourteen of Washington’s own men were dead before he managed to stop the bloodshed. And by the time he finally reached Fort Duquesne, the French had burned it to the ground and moved on.
Washington may have found some pleasure in the French departure, but it was an anticlimactic resolution. Although the war continued, the campaign was over, and so was his military career.
On January 6, 1759, Martha and Washington were married. She wore a yellow brocade dress over a white silk petticoat, he a civilian suit. They would not stay in the area long. Washington, now a man of great wealth and stepfather to two young children, would make a proper home of Mount Vernon.
A month earlier, he had ridden to Williamsburg and resigned his commission. He’d given up on the British military and, though he did not yet realize it, the British Empire. The French and Indian War set colonists, who had undergone their own cultural and social development in the New World, on the path to independence. They were learning that their goals and values differed from those of the crown, and that their concerns, even when voiced by the most ambitious, gifted, and loyal among them, fell on deaf ears.
“My inclinations are strongly bent to arms,” Washington had written in 1754, when he was twenty-two, but he just couldn’t satisfy that desire in His Majesty’s forces. The next time he would join them on the battlefield, it would be to destroy them.5
CHAPTER 7
“What Manner of Man I Am”
In 1772, thirteen years after Washington hung up the uniform of a colonel in the Virginia militia, he squeezed himself back into it. Martha had chosen the artist Charles Willson Peale to paint his portrait, but it was Washington who had decided to pose as a military man. It was a curious choice, considering that he’d spent the intervening years as a gentleman farmer, and had the fine imported clothes to prove it. Those clothes would surely have fit him much better; in the portrait, the uniform appears slightly snug around his midsection, which had grown paunchier with lifestyle and age. His hair, though, was still reddish-brown, unpowdered beneath his campaign hat.
It was Peale’s job, Washington wrote, to describe “to the World what manner of man I am,” but the sword slung around his waist and the musket poking out behind him sent a clear message: George Washington was still very much “bent to arms.”1
His transition from rising military star to gentleman farmer, husband, and father had been smooth; his youthful renown, wealthy wife, considerable land holdings, and large plantation and home hit all the right notes in Virginia society. The House of Burgesses sessions had become, among other things, a good excuse for the relatively private Washingtons to party with the Williamsburg gentry—which George and Martha did, dancing the nights away, playing cards, and going on fox hunts. And he had established deep ties with the community, serving as churchwarden, town trustee, and justice of the court.
Washington spared no expense when it came to Jacky and Patsy in part because those expenses were deducted from the Custis estate. His stepchildren were tutored at Mount Vernon until Jacky, at thirteen, was sent around six miles away to school. Patsy stayed at home, where her parents showered her with adoration. Perhaps, as Washington’s ledgers indicate, she persuaded him to stop ordering books on Latin grammar in favor of those on music composition and song. He indulged her with regular dance lessons, too.
The ledgers also pinpoint the beginning of Patsy’s decline. In 1768, the doctor’s bills began to accumulate, as did the prescriptions. Patsy took powders, pills, and herbs, but was still “sezied with fits.” Washington began tracking their frequency, length, and severity in his diary. During the summer of 1770, she had them on twenty-six different days, one “very bad.”2 The seizures, which we would now call epilepsy, must have been terrifying. Patsy most certainly lost consciousness and control of her limbs. She may have bitten her tongue or injured herself when, inevitably, they struck her when she was standing, causing her to fall down. Washington hired a live-in housekeeper, who was probably a nurse, to look after her at all times. He took her to Warm Springs, and to specialists. He wrote to experts for advice and new concoctions. Some seemed to work at first, giving the Washingtons hope, but then another fit would strike and send Patsy to bed.
When Patsy was well, she lived a full life. Washington ordered her finery from London, including a firestone necklace and satin dancing slippers. He took her riding and to church. She read Lady’s Magazine with her mother, called on friends, and went to a ball in Alexandria. But in a miniature portrait painted in 1772, Patsy, aged sixteen, looks pale and tired. A year later, she was dead.
The next day, Washington managed to write a heartbreaking letter to Burwell Bassett, who was married to one of Martha’s younger sisters, Anna Marie.
It is an easier matter to conceive, than to describe, the distress of this Family; especially that of the unhappy Parent of our Dear Patcy Custis, when I inform you that yesterday removd the Sweet Innocent Girl into a more happy, & peaceful abode than any she has met with, in the afflicted Path she hitherto has trod.
She rose from Dinner about four Oclock, in better health and spirits than she appeard to have been in for some time; soon after which she was siezd with one of her usual Fits, & expird in it, in less than two Minutes without uttering a Word, a groan, or scarce a Sigh.—this Sudden, and unexpected blow, I scarce need add has almost reduced my poor Wife to the lowest ebb of Misery. . . . 3
From then on, Martha wore Patsy’s miniature, set in a gold locket bracelet, on her wrist, and worried endlessly about the health of her remaining child.
From the very beginning, Washington had been excited to watch Jacky, heir to his late father’s sizable fortune, benefit from all the advantages his own father’s death had denied him. He provided Jacky with the best tutors, clothes, and introductions, but he could never give his stepson what he needed most: adversity.
Much to Washington’s dismay, his sweet, precocious boy grew into a pampered, rowdy, undisciplined teenager with an affinity for “Dogs, Horses and Guns.”4 He could have sent the boy abroad, either to school or, like Abigail and John Adams did with John Quincy, to be a teenage diplomat-in-training, but Martha preferred that he stay close to home. So Washington sent Jacky to a boys’ school in nearby Caroline County, Virginia, and spent the next few years receiving frustrating updates from the Reverend Jonathan Boucher. He had tutored a generation of wealthy ne’er-do-wells, but Jacky may have surpassed them all. “I must confess to You I never did in my Life know a Youth so exceedingly indolent, or so surprizingly voluptuous,” Boucher wrote on December 18, 1770. “One wd suppose Nature had intended Him for some Asiatic Prince.”5 In letters, Washington coached, pleaded, lectured, and encouraged Jacky through the Boucher years, with some success; he managed to complete his early schooling, and agreed to continue his education. When Patsy died, Washington had just returned from dropping off Jacky at the College of New York—though he wouldn’t last there long.
* * *
Jacky’s squandered opportunities were hardly Washington’s sole frustration. Civilian life offered him far more opportunities to acquire wealth and prestige, yet he kept butting up against the same obstacle that had dri
ven him to quit the army in the first place: unequal treatment of colonists. As a member of the Burgesses’ Committee on Propositions and Grievances, he was overwhelmed by petitions from soldiers and businesses to whom the crown owed money and land. And he had some personal grievances, too.
At Mount Vernon, Washington felt victimized by predatory merchants in London. His letters to Robert Cary & Company—a supplier that would not have dignified him with a response, let alone an account, before he took over Martha’s fortune—had become increasingly hostile over the years. He regularly accused them of attempting to “palm sometimes old, and sometimes very slight and indifferent goods upon us, taking care at the same time to advance the price.”6 There was no return policy on the second-rate goods they sent colonists, and no alternative option. Americans were dependent on London purveyors for everything from clothing to plows, the latter of which Washington complained bitterly “coud only have been us[e]d by our Forefathers in the days of yore.”7
Washington also blamed Cary & Co. for endangering his livelihood. The law required that colonists sell any tobacco they grew through England, but his crops fetched prices far lower than he deemed fair—not that Mount Vernon’s soil, regularly tested by drought and heavy rain, grew especially good tobacco. Like many land-rich, cash-poor Virginia planters, including Thomas Jefferson, Washington got behind on his payments to London purveyors, and was soon in debt.