by Ron Chernow
As word of Washington’s resignation spread, his officers seemed genuinely crestfallen. He had done a superlative job of taking callow recruits, introducing discipline, and spurring them to function as more professional soldiers. His boon companion, Captain Robert Stewart, spoke for many when he wrote to Washington how he would miss “your constant company and conversation in which I have been so long happy.”21 Stewart’s letter confirms Washington’s high stature in Virginia, for he hoped that his friend would “continue the darling of a grateful country [i.e., Virginia] for the many eminent services you have rendered her.”22 Twenty-seven officers from the Virginia Regiment banded together to laud Washington in a farewell message. They extolled the same virtues that would be praised in the Revolutionary War and showed the same tender affection as their later counterparts. They hailed Washington’s “steady adherence to impartial justice” and “invariable regard to merit,” and they credited his “honor and passion for glory” as the source of his military achievements. They also eulogized him as “an excellent commander,” “sincere friend,” and “affable” companion.23 These were mighty tributes to bestow on a twenty-six-year-old. So while Washington might have alienated assorted politicians and generals, he retained the unswerving fealty of his men and the Virginia public at large.
Beneath the hard rind, Washington was far more sensitive than he appeared, and this heartfelt message from his men “affected him exceedingly,” he admitted.24 He had a fine sense of occasion, displayed in this early response to his men. Already adept at tearful farewells, he exhibited the succinct eloquence that came to define his speaking style. He began by calling the officers’ approval of his conduct “an honor that will constitute the greatest happiness of my life and afford in my latest hours the most pleasing reflections.”25 Unable to avoid a youthful dig at Dinwiddie and Forbes, he hinted at the “uncommon difficulties” under which he had labored. But it was the palpable affection he summoned up for his men that made the statement noteworthy. Washington thanked his officers “with uncommon sincerity and true affection for the honor you have done me, for if I have acquired any reputation, it is from you I derive it. I thank you also for the love and regard you have all along shown me. It is in this I am rewarded. It is herein I glory.”26
Had Washington’s military career ended with the French and Indian War, he would have earned scarcely more than a footnote in history, yet it is impossible to imagine his life without this important preamble. The British Empire had committed a major blunder by spurning the talents of such a natural leader. It said something about the imperial system that it could find no satisfactory place for this loyal, able, and ambitious young subject. The proud Washington had been forced to bow and scrape for a regular commission, and it irked him that he had to grovel for recognition. Washington’s military career would be held in abeyance until June 1775, but in the meantime he had acquired a powerful storehouse of grievances that would fuel his later rage with England.
In the fullness of time, Washington would win a prize infinitely more valuable than the royal commission he had lost. As a member of the British forces, he had begun to articulate a comprehensive critique of British fighting methods in North America. For a young man, he had acquired an amazing amount of experience, and these precocious achievements yielded a lasting reservoir of self-confidence. He had proved his toughness and courage in the face of massacres and defeats. He had learned to train and drill regiments and developed a rudimentary sense of military strategy. He had shown a real capacity to lead and take responsibility for fulfilling the most arduous missions. Perhaps most important, his experience in the French and Indian War made him a believer in a strong central government and a vigorous executive. Forced to deal with destructive competition among the colonies, dilatory legislative committees, and squabbling, shortsighted politicians, he had passed through an excellent dress rehearsal for the prolonged ordeal of the American Revolution.
PART TWO
The Planter
The earliest known portrait of Martha Washington, painted by John Wollaston in 1757, when she was still Martha Dandridge Custis.
CHAPTER NINE
The Man of Mode
ON JANUARY 6, 1759, coinciding with the celebration of Twelfth Night, George Washington and Martha Dandridge Custis, attired in the latest British fashions, were married at her White House residence. George was presumably resplendent in the blue velvet suit he had had specially shipped from London, while Martha made a fetching impression in a gown “of deep yellow brocade with rich lace in the neck and sleeves” accompanied by purple satin shoes.1
While never shrinking from a rich appearance, Martha, like George, shuddered at any hint of ostentation. We don’t know what the Custis children, Jacky and Patsy, wore, but their dress probably conformed to that in an earlier painting by John Wollaston, which presents them in the pampered apparel of little British aristocrats. In that portrait, Jacky sports a shiny blue coat over a light-colored waistcoat, while Patsy wears a silvery gown edged with lace.
The newlyweds were by no means prudish. In his first postnuptial order to London, George ordered four ounces of Spanish fly, a popular aphrodisiac prepared from dried beetles. At some point that year, he also drew up a list of books inherited from the Custis estate that may disclose something of the amorous interests of Daniel and Martha Custis, or perhaps of Daniel’s father. The couple possessed a copy of Conjugal lewdness: or matrimonial whoredom by Daniel Defoe and The lover’s watch: or the art of making love by Aphra Behn.2
After the weak-willed Daniel Custis, George Washington must have struck Martha as the most commanding of men. Where Daniel had been cowed by a despotic father, George usually stood up to his forbidding mother. As best we can tell, Mary Ball Washington boycotted the wedding and, according to Martha’s biographer Patricia Brady, may not have met the bride until the year after the wedding.3 It is hard to resist the impression of a lasting coolness between Martha and her mother-in-law. Over the next thirty years, there is no evidence that Mary Washington ever visited Mount Vernon. The only time she saw her daughter-in-law was during obligatory stops that George and Martha made in Fredericksburg en route to Williamsburg. George routinely dropped in to see Mary and his sister Betty Lewis, who had married Fielding Lewis, a wealthy merchant, and lived nearby. (Betty bore an uncanny resemblance to George. Indeed, it was said that had she thrown on a military cloak and hat, battalions would have saluted her.) Washington kept his visits to his mother brief. During one snowy stay with her in January 1760, he recorded in his diary that after “getting a few things which I wanted out of the stores, [I] returned in the evening to mother’s—all alone with her.”4 That he jotted down this detail suggests that being alone with Mary was an effort. In all likelihood, George and Martha Washington treated Mary Ball Washington as a slightly dotty, difficult woman, a troubled oddball whom they had to put up with and never expected to reform.
Marriage came at a critical moment for George Washington, who went from a young officer at the mercy of the British military establishment to a prosperous planter who didn’t have to truckle to anyone. He had married up in the world, as had Martha before him, and they both inherited a huge chunk of the Custis fortune. Once again an untimely death contributed immeasurably to Washington’s burgeoning wealth. Martha’s money made her husband one of Virginia’s richest men, enabling him to issue his own declaration of independence. The marriage brought eighty-five dower slaves under his control, doubling his labor force. As the Washington editor Dorothy Twohig notes, “With his marriage, [Washington] was now in control of one of Virginia’s largest and most profitable estates, including property in 6 counties amounting to nearly 8,000 acres, slaves valued at £9,000 Virginia currency, and accounts current and other liquid assets in England of about £10,000 sterling.”5 Then on March 14, 1761, Ann Fairfax Lee, the widow of George’s half brother Lawrence, died. Because she had no surviving child, George Washington suddenly graduated to full-fledged ownership of Mount Vernon, inheri
ting another five slaves. Once again he was the lucky beneficiary of a death in the family.
These sudden windfalls gave Washington new social standing and considerable freedom to maneuver. In time, this wealth would free up the better angels of his nature and give him the resources to back up his strong opinions. As John Adams later wondered, “Would Washington have ever been commander of the revolutionary army or president of the United States, if he had not married the rich widow of Mr. Custis?”6 Once he married, an air of contentment settled over Washington’s restless life. From Mount Vernon, he wrote serenely to Richard Washington, “I am now, I believe, fixed at this seat with an agreeable consort for life and hope to find more happiness in retirement than I ever experienced amidst a wide and bustling world.”7 This was the first, but hardly the last, time that Washington nursed a pastoral fantasy of withdrawal from all worldly cares, a fantasy that would be repeatedly mocked by the imperious call of political events.
Civic duties formed an essential part of the ethos of a gentleman, so it was fitting that on his twenty-seventh birthday, one month after his marriage, Washington assumed his seat in the House of Burgesses. Four days later he enjoyed a heady moment when his new colleagues, in a glowing resolution, thanked him for “his faithful services to His Majesty and this colony” and his “brave and steady behavior.”8 A boisterous chorus of ayes roared their unanimous approval of the resolution. No longer a youthful protégé, Washington now stood forth as a social peer of these well-to-do planters. Such attention always brought out a certain awkwardness in Washington, who was ill at ease with public oratory and uncomfortable with flattery, perhaps because he secretly craved it. With a touch of embellishment, one burgess remembered Washington’s flustered response: “He rose to express his acknowledgments for the honor, but such was his trepidation and confusion that he could not give distinct utterance to a single syllable.” The man who faced bullets with sangfroid never conquered his terror of public speaking. “He blushed, stammered, and trembled for a second, when the speaker relieved him by a stroke of address . . . ‘Sit down, Mr. Washington,’ said he, with a conciliating smile, ‘your modesty is equal to your valor, and that surpasses the power of any language that I possess.’”9
Washington was assigned to the Committee on Propositions and Grievances, which dealt with commercial and governmental matters. By the end of the year, drawing on his military experience, he sat on three committees that sorted through petitions from soldiers and army vendors. The taciturn Washington wasn’t the kind of glib burgess who sprang to his feet and orated extemporaneously. He practiced a minimalist art in politics, learning how to exert maximum leverage with the least force. Thomas Jefferson, who was to serve with Washington and Franklin in the Continental Congress, spotted their economical approach to power. “I never heard either of them speak ten minutes at a time, nor to any but the main point,” he later said of the two statesmen. “They laid their shoulders to the great points, knowing that the little ones would follow of themselves.”10 Later on Washington coached his stepson on how to be a Virginia legislator, reminding him to be punctual in attendance and “hear dispassionately and determine coolly all great questions.”11 Washington’s experience as a burgess educated him in politics no less thoroughly than his combat experience on the western frontier groomed him for future military leadership, creating a rare combination of talents that endowed him with the ideal credentials at the time the American Revolution erupted.
From the outset, Washington demonstrated his conscientious nature as a legislator and attended sessions until early April to support a bill to sustain the Virginia Regiment. Then he, Martha, and her two children set off for Mount Vernon, with Martha and the children installed in the glamorous Custis coach and George trotting alongside them on horseback. Because he was still refurbishing Mount Vernon, Washington felt apprehensive about subjecting his bride and stepchildren to the dust and din, paint and plaster, of an unfinished house. He wrote ahead to have the rooms aired and cleaned and beds made up in two rooms. The nervous young husband, wanting everything just right for his new family’s arrival, instructed John Alton to “get out the chairs and tables and have them very well rubbed and cleaned. The staircase ought also to be polished in order to make it look well. Inquire ab[ou]t in the neighborhood and get some eggs and chickens.”12 After Washington’s lengthy frontier sojourn, the house was stirring to life again, and Martha would soon describe it as a place of “mirth and gaiety.”13
If Martha’s wealth lifted Washington into the top ranks of Virginia planters, it didn’t emancipate him from all cares, for he was soon tangled in the legal complexities of the Custis fortune. Under the terms of the estate, George and Martha controlled one-third of the Custis property. The two children each received one-third of the income from the Custis assets, while only Jacky, as the male heir, would inherit eventually all the Custis land and slaves. In Williamsburg in late April, Washington won permission from the General Court to administer those portions of the estate vested in the two children. Being their legal guardian was a weighty, time-consuming task that required Washington to satisfy the court with annual reports on his fiduciary actions. Like every responsibility in his life, Washington executed this one with the utmost rigor, claiming that a stewardship demanded even more care from a stepparent than from “a natural parent, who is only accountable to his own conscience.”14 This arrangement, though it gave Washington extra wealth and power, also placed him in a curiously subordinate position vis-à-vis his stepchildren, making him effectively their employee and robbing him of the total paternal authority he might have wished.
Further complicating this strange situation was that while Washington adopted Jacky and Patsy, they retained the Custis surname. The children arrived at Mount Vernon with their own slaves—Jacky had a ten-year-old named Julius, Patsy the twelve-year-old Moll—who wore the formal uniforms known as livery, and it must have been annoying, if not demeaning, for Washington to have them sporting the Custis crest instead of his own. In ordering clothing for these servants from London, Washington always gave explicit orders to “let the livery be suited to the [coat of] arms of the Custis family.”15 Such details of everyday life reminded Washington of where the real financial power resided in his family. In his diary, he sometimes referred to his stepchildren as “Jacky Custis” and “Patsy Custis,” as if they were temporary visitors.
Although Washington enjoyed children, his formal presence tended to freeze their jollity. “They felt they were in the presence of one who was not to be trifled with,” said his adopted grandson.16 Washington was a doting father to Patsy, a pretty girl with dark hair, who was very fond of music. Washington found it easy to spoil her and soon got her a spinet, an early form of the harpsichord, while Jacky studied the violin and flute. He also hired a dancing master at Mount Vernon for the two children. Washington had a more relaxed style with girls and used to say ruefully that he could govern men but not boys.17 Jacky was to be a chronic problem. A foppish boy, lazy, wayward, and indulged by his mother, he shared few traits with his energetic stepfather, and their temperamental differences only aggravated matters. Forever wary of intruding upon Martha’s relationship with her children, Washington was reluctant to apply discipline to Jacky and shielded her from knowledge of his many imperfections.
However genial as a hostess, Martha was a jittery mother, a mass of anxieties, much as her own mother had been. She had already endured so many deaths—her husband, two children, her father, a brother, a sister, and Daniel’s half brother, Black Jack—that she flew into a panic at even trifling signs of illness in her children. Three years into the marriage, Martha experimented to see whether she could stand to be away from Jacky. She failed the test miserably. Every time a dog barked or some other noise occurred, Martha worried that it heralded the arrival of a messenger with dreadful news about her son. “I often fancied he was sick or some accident had happened to him,” Martha said.18 Henceforth she traveled with George only if both children came a
long.
Whatever the periodic tensions caused by Jacky’s lax behavior, the marriage of George and Martha Washington proceeded happily, and they seemed united by strong desire and mutual need. Almost all observers found them exceedingly well matched. In later years the British ambassador’s wife found something closer to friendship than romance between them—“Washington was a more respectful than a tender husband certainly”—but even she could identify no quarrels.19 Something about this deep domesticity and respectability pleased Washington, who was never cut out for a gallivanting, footloose life. Martha gave him a secure, happy base for the myriad activities of a busy career. She was his dear companion, trusted adviser, and confidante long after lust faded, and they delighted in each other’s company. When Washington was appointed commander in chief of the Continental Army, he wrote to Martha that “I should enjoy more real happiness and felicity in one month with you at home than I have the most distant prospect of reaping abroad, if my stay was to be seven times seven years.”20 Neither George nor Martha was tormented by a romantic striving after an impossible perfection, and both understood the compromises that accompanied a successful marriage.
While Washington left no direct comments about his marriage, he discussed marriage in general terms so often—he grew into something of a cracker-barrel philosopher on the subject—that we can readily infer his views about his own. He was an unabashed enthusiast for the institution and issued so many paeans to domestic felicity as to leave no doubt of his contentment with Martha. His advice to young relatives revealed that he had known the storms of passion as a young man but understood that they were fleeting and couldn’t form the foundation of a lasting relationship; one had to enter into a match based upon practical factors, such as personality, character, temperament, and money. This seems to reflect accurately the progression of Washington’s own feelings as he and Martha went from early love (albeit laced with realism about money) to the ripening friendship of later decades.