You Never Forget Your First

by Alexis Coe

weaver

  Daniel

  “about 19”

  Esther

  “about 18”

  x

  Thomas

  “about 17”

  house servant

  x

  Deborah

  “about 16”

  Peter

  “about 15”

  The letter stands as an exception to their otherwise warm and conspiratorial correspondence. While Lund’s widow burned much of their correspondence in 1796, we know that Washington’s cousin sent him weekly dispatches about Mount Vernon, which seemed to serve as the general’s wartime escape. As busy as he was, he always found time to think about his plantation. He drew up architectural plans to extend both ends of the house, ordered the replacement of “existing outbuildings with larger structures, creation of service lanes, development of the bowling green, and enlargement of the formal gardens.”7 But the execution was left to Lund, whom he trusted with all his affairs. (When Lund asked for a raise in 1778, Washington replied, “[I]t is my first wish that you should be satisfied.”8) Washington wouldn’t see it with his own eyes until 1781, when he was on the way to Yorktown, the last decisive battle of the war.

  * * *

  Eight years away from Mount Vernon was a price Washington was willing to pay, but as many away from Martha was not. He wanted his wife by his side, which meant she would have to face one of her greatest fears: medical intervention. “Mrs Washington is still here, and talks of taking the Small Pox, but I doubt her resolution,” Washington wrote to his brother John Augustine, from New York, in 1776.9

  There were plenty of rumors and anecdotal evidence to bolster Martha’s fears. Her sister-in-law Anne Steptoe Allerton, Samuel Washington’s fourth wife, died after receiving the inoculation. When Jacky received the treatment in 1771 (ahead of a European tour that never happened), Martha, according to Washington, was far too anxious to hear the details. She wished her son would just do it “without her knowing of it,” her husband wrote, so that “she might escape those Tortures which Suspense wd throw her into, little as the cause might be for it.”10

  “THIS MOST DANGEROUS ENEMY”

  The British and the Hessians brought smallpox with them when they arrived to quell the Revolution, and though Washington had been immune since contracting the disease in Barbados in 1751, he quickly learned that almost everyone around him was vulnerable. “I am very much afraid that all the Troops on their march from the Southward will be infected with the small pox, and that instead of having an Army here, we shall have an Hospital,” he wrote to General Horatio Gates in early 1777.11 The Virginia legislature, worried that inoculation would spread rather than contain the disease, made inoculation illegal. But the epidemic, which Washington called “this most dangerous enemy,” threatened to defeat the patriots; by 1776, 20 percent of his army had suffered or died from smallpox.12 Variolation, a new technique, was risky; at best, it put soldiers out of commission for weeks at a time. Still, Washington decided to move ahead with compulsory mass inoculations. Smallpox-related fatalities of soldiers and recruits dropped by 17 percent as soon as inoculation was introduced; by the end of the war, it had reached 1 percent.

  In the end, Martha’s desire to be with her husband outweighed her fears. When she finally assented to the inoculation, though, she passed up the military doctors in favor of civilian specialists in Philadelphia. There, John Hancock vied with other signers of the Declaration of Independence to see her through her recovery. Benjamin Randolph, who often rented out his lodgings to high-profile delegates and their wives—and who, coincidentally, had built the lap desk on which Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration—“has not any Lady about his House to take the necessary Care of Mrs. Washington,” Hancock informed Washington.13 But Martha never left Mount Vernon without her favored enslaved servants, and always traveled with at least one member of Washington’s military staff. She chose to convalesce at Randolph’s over Hancock’s, which seemed to be relatively brief and easy. Thirteen days after Martha was inoculated, Washington happily reported to Burwell Bassett, her brother-in-law, that she had made it through her “Fever and [had] not more than about a dozen Postules appearing.”14 Martha was soon reunited with Washington in New York, and would ultimately remain by his side for half of the war.

  Yet Washington’s most constant companion when he was away from home wasn’t Martha. It was William Lee, his enslaved manservant. Washington bought Billy Lee in 1768 for 61 pounds, 15 shillings; he paid an additional 50 pounds for his younger brother, Frank. They were described as “mulatto” in his ledgers, which suggests their father was a white man, possibly Colonel John Lee, whose widow, Mary, sold the brothers upon her husband’s death.15 Even before the war began, Billy Lee’s days were long and demanding. He would get up before Washington, who was an early riser himself, and prepare and lay out the general’s clothes. When Washington woke, Lee shaved his face and powdered and curled his hair. Lee, who was known as an accomplished horseman, rode alongside Washington on many of his outings, from surveying to foxhunting. During the war, he was as responsible for everything Washington needed, from his spyglass to his papers.

  Billy Lee is often noted and praised by contemporaries and historians for his constant presence during the war, without any reflection on or seeming awareness of the irony: Lee had no choice in the matter. The figurehead of American liberty was never far from a representation of its (and his own) deep-seated hypocrisy. And of course there wasn’t any question of Lee enjoying the same battlefield perks as his master. He received only one update about his family during the war: “If it will give Will any pleasure he may be told his wife and child are both well,” Lund wrote to Washington in late 1775.16 After that, there are no more references to Lee’s family.

  * * *

  “I am at a loss how to account for your long silence,” Betty, Washington’s sister, wrote to him. Their mother seemed so unsure of her own survival, she turned to Lund in desperation.17 “I shall be ruined,” Mary Washington wrote in 1778. “I never lived soe poor in my life butt if I can gitt Corn I am contended.”18 For eight years, Mary and Betty rarely heard from Washington and never saw him. They seemed to feel his absence and silence as much as the relentless wartime deprivations and instability they faced in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

  Mary, who would be seventy-five by the time the Revolution ended, had no shortage of fears and concerns to fuel her already anxious disposition. She watched Betty and Fielding Lewis, her daughter and son-in-law, stake their fortune on the war, and then she watched it ruin them. When she struggled to pay taxes and make ends meet, she could not ask them for help any more than she could her other sons; Charles, John Augustine, and Samuel were in similar straits—or far worse. (“In Gods name how did my Brothr. Saml. contrive to get himself so enormously in debt?” Washington wrote in 1783, when confronted by his younger brother’s burden. “Was it by purchases? By misfortunes? or shear indolence and inattention to business?”19) Mary tried to make do with what she had, selling her livestock and tools, but the profits weren’t enough.

  And her family kept dying on her. In 1775, at the age of fifteen, her grandson Charles Lewis succumbed to disease; he was one of five Lewis children who died before adulthood. Six years later, his father, Betty’s husband, died of tuberculosis. Within weeks, Samuel was gone, too, another victim of tuberculosis. Mary, like her son George, was strong and athletic, but there were dangers other than disease to worry about. Lord Dunmore often ordered or threatened military attacks on the populace; Mary also feared that her slaves would listen to his entreaties to rise up.

  In 1781, life in Virginia got much scarier. Benedict Arnold, fighting for the British
, took control of Governor Thomas Jefferson’s Richmond, then the capital of Virginia. Jefferson moved his operations to Monticello, while other Virginians fled the colony; everyone who remained was vulnerable—especially Washington’s family. Lafayette was concerned enough about a British attack on Fredericksburg that he made plans to evacuate them. Ultimately, though, the redcoats never came close to paying Mary a visit.

  But Washington did, unexpectedly, the one time Mary left town to accompany Betty, whose health deteriorated during the war, to the country for recovery. She was devastated. In a letter, Mary thanked him for the effort, although her tone was catastrophic: “I am afraid I Never Shall have that pleasure again,” she wrote, before signing, with unusual emotion, “Loveing & affectinat Mother.”20

  The war deprived Mary of security and family, and intensified her natural thriftiness and well-earned paranoia—which she talked about openly and often. Word of the widow Washington’s hardships and delinquent taxes reached Benjamin Harrison, who succeeded Jefferson as governor. The Virginia Assembly, hoping to ease the dire effect of currency inflation on the older population, had been supplementing their living with pensions. In 1781, Harrison wrote to Washington that officials discussed offering Mary one as well.21

  He was mortified. Admitting he was “but little acquainted with her present situation,” Washington responded with a lengthy, defensive letter. He had, “at her request but my own expence, purchased a commodious house, Garden & Lotts (of her own choosing) in Fredericksburg, that she might be near my Sister Lewis, her only daughter.” He also passed the buck to Lund, the “Steward” he had tasked with caring for her while he was at war. And then he blamed taxes, “being the most unequal (I am told) in the world.” Mary was fine, Washington assured Harrison, and even if she wasn’t, he and his siblings “had the means of supporting her.” Any talk of a pension, he wrote, “may be done away, & repealed by my request.”22 And with a closing reference to “that arch traitor, Arnold,” the matter was closed.

  In the spring of 1783, he realized—far too late—that the overseer at Mary’s farm had, in Washington’s own words, “provided the most wretched management[,] equally burhensome to me, and teazing to her.”23 Whether he admitted as much to his mother, we’ll never know, but he did give her one thing she desperately wanted: a visit.

  Washington and Mary were finally reunited in 1784, when he came to Fredericksburg to be honored by the mayor. He arrived at the celebration with his mother on his arm, but she had to excuse herself early. Her son, perhaps finally understanding she was indeed struggling in her old age, was seen escorting her home.24

  * * *

  Jack Custis, Washington’s stepson, spent the war years as he had those before—being the playboy heir to the Custis fortune. Jack was “making a ruinous hand of his Estate,” Washington complained, as he continued to hear about his stepson’s thoughtless behavior. “[I]t is in your power to be punctual in your attendance,” Washington lectured him in 1781, after Jack showed up late for a meeting of the Virginia House of Burgesses.25 Jack never finished college, traveled to Europe, or made careful, studied decisions, but against all odds, he succeeded in an unlikely realm.

  When Washington went to war, the person closest to being his son became a father, and a decent one at that. Jack seemed to take fatherhood seriously—although his eldest daughter would later recall that he taught her some “very improper” songs and made her perform them for his dinner guests.26 Jack and Nelly’s first child, a daughter, was born in 1775 but died before they named her. Twin girls, born in 1780, would not make it three weeks. But four of their children lived until old age: Eliza (1776–1832), Patsy (1777–1854), Nelly (1779–1852), and George Washington Parke Custis (1781–1857). Throughout it all, Jack appeared to be by Nelly’s side.

  Perhaps it was the birth of a son that prompted Jack to suddenly decide, after spending the entire Revolution as a civilian, to join Washington in Yorktown. If he died, at least he had a male heir to take over the estate. Jack never officially enlisted, but he was readily accepted by Washington’s inner circle. “His patriotism led him to camp to participate in some degree of the dangers of his amiable and illustrious father,” explained Henry Knox.27 Or it was an attempt to finally please the man who had raised him since the age of four. In 1776, following the birth of his first surviving daughter, Jack had written a touching letter to Washington.

  I am extremely desireous (but I am at Loss for Words sufficiently expressive) to return you Thanks for your parental Care which on all Occasions you have shewn for Me. It pleased the Almighty to deprive me at a very early Period of Life of my Father, but I can not sufficiently adore His Goodness in sending Me so good a Guardian as you Sir; Few have experience’d such Care and Attention from real Parents as I have done. He best deserves the Name of Father who acts the Part of one. I first was taught to call you by that Name, my tender years unsusceptible of the Loss I had sustaind knew not the contrary; your Goodness (if others had not told Me) would always have prevented Me from knowing, I had lost a Parent—I shall always look upon you in this Light, and must intreat you to continue your wholesome Advice and reprimands whenever you see Occasion. I promise you they shall not be thrown away upon Me, but on the contrary be thankfully receiv’d and strictly attended to; I often wish’d to thank you personally, but my resolution fail’d Me; I thought I cou’d more strongly express my Gratitude in this Manner, but my slender Capacity cannot afford Words expressive enough to convey the high Idea I entertain of the many Obligations I have receiv’d from you. This you may depend on; I shall with the greatest Eagerness seize every Opportunity of testifying that sincere regard & Love I bear you; in which Nelly begs Leave to join Me.28

  We don’t know whether Washington’s response was loving and generous, or scolding and demanding; that letter has never been found.

  During the monthlong Battle of Yorktown, Jack’s role could generously be described as “civilian aide.” He spent much of the time updating his mother on Washington’s health (“tho in constant Fatigue, looks very well”) and trying to spot runaway slaves fighting for the other side.29

  When the British surrendered on October 19, 1781, the battlefield was littered with the rotting corpses of soldiers and their horses, which polluted the water and the air, spreading “camp fever,” or typhus. Jack quickly fell ill, but Washington wouldn’t have him treated in an overcrowded, malaria-infested makeshift hospital; he ordered Jack be spirited by carriage to his aunt’s home in Eltham, Virginia, thirty miles away, and sent word for Nelly and Martha, who were headed to camp to dance at the victory ball, to meet him there. And then, in an illuminating demonstration of priorities, Washington abruptly left Yorktown, where negotiations over the British surrender were underway, to be with his family. He went silent. His aides waited nervously, unsure of what to do until, at long last, a letter that Washington wrote to Jonathan Trumbull Jr. arrived.

  I came here in time to see Mr. Custis breathe his last. [A]bout Eight o’clock yesterday Evening he expired. The deep and solemn distress of the Mother, and affliction of the Wife of this amiable young Man, requires every comfort in my power to afford them—the last rights of the deceased I must also see performed—these will take me three or four days; when I shall proceed with Mrs Washington and Mrs. Custis to Mount Vernon.30

  The heartbreak didn’t end after Yorktown. Washington had grown fond of the men who served under him, and he spent the next year saying goodbye, in one way or another, to many of them. “I often asked myself, as our Carriages distended, whether that was the last sight, I ever should have of you? And tho’ I wished to say no—my fears answered yes,” he wrote to Lafayette, who, having secured independence and nationhood for the United States, returned to his native France, eyes firmly fixed on the monarchy. Alexander Hamilton went to Congress in New York. Others died in the waning skirmishes of the war. “Poor Laurens is no more,” Washington wrote to Lafayette in 1782, upon learning John Laurens, who had ser
ved as his aide-de-camp, was killed by redcoats while foraging (or plundering, as the British argued in their defense) in South Carolina.31

  When Washington finally returned home to Mount Vernon two years after Yorktown, the mansion house was bigger, fuller, and poorer than ever. At first, the recently widowed Nelly lived there with her four children. When she remarried two years later, she left the two youngest, Nelly and Washy, to be raised by their grandparents. Washington also took on three of Samuel Washington’s children, for a total of five children to clothe, educate, and feed—and he was solely responsible for paying off his late brother’s debts.32 Worse, Lund had incurred large debts keeping Mount Vernon up and running during the Revolution, but had failed to collect “many years arrears of rent” from the estate’s tenants.33 And worst of all, Lund had not paid himself a wage since Valley Forge, hoping the estate would recover from crop failure and inflation by the time the war ended; it had not. Washington owed his cousin five years’ back pay. It was a shocking turn of events for a man who had been so financially comfortable at the beginning of the war that he refused to take a salary.

  CHAPTER 13

  “From Whence No Traveller Returns”

  The long war aged Washington. When it began, he was forty-four years old, spent most nights at Mount Vernon, and his hair, auburn in his youth, was a deep shade of brown, powdered white by Billy Lee. By the time it ended, Washington was fifty-two. He had slept in nearly 280 different beds, never for very long. His hair had grayed and his face was deeply creased; he suffered from rheumatism and poor eyesight; his stomach had given in to gravity, and his teeth were worse than ever. Martha, seven months his senior, was feeling it, too. “Billous Fevers & Cholic’s attack her very often, & reduce her low,” Washington wrote to George William Fairfax.1