by Ron Chernow
As he rode or paddled by canoe, Washington remained attentive to the commercial prospects of this sparsely populated region. In negotiating leases with western farmers, he retained timber and mineral rights and even visited a coal mine. “The coal seemed to be of the very best kind, burning freely and abundance of it,” he remarked in his diary.45 While he negotiated forest paths and mountain passes that he knew from the French and Indian War, he appraised these wild places with a cool business eye. Even though he bought two hundred acres of the Great Meadows in December 1770, he included no mention of its history in his diary. Of the site where hundreds had been brutally slaughtered under General Braddock, Washington merely observed that it wasn’t level enough for agriculture. Not until 1772 did Washington and his veterans receive the land distributions they had long awaited. Washington was allotted more than twenty thousand acres on the Ohio and Great Kanawha rivers, augmented by another eleven thousand acres the following year, making him a major western landlord on the eve of the American Revolution.
As with all challenges to his integrity, Washington remained touchy on the subject of the bounty lands and whether he had taken unfair advantage of his men. Although he walked off with the finest properties, he also believed that he had devoted enormous time to surveying the area and that the whole operation hinged on his efforts. Suspicions about his conduct he thought unfair and baseless. When one officer, George Muse, accused him of shortchanging him of land, Washington didn’t mince words: “As I am not accustomed to receive such from any man, nor would have taken the same language from you personally, without letting you feel some marks of my resentment, I would advise you to be cautious in writing me a second [letter] of the same tenor. For though I understand you were drunk when you did it, yet give me leave to tell you that drunkenness is no excuse for rudeness.” 46 If Muse read the newspapers, Washington pointed out, he would have seen that he had been allotted the ten thousand acres he claimed, and he concluded by telling his former officer indignantly that he was sorry he had ever “engag[e]d in behalf of so ungrateful and dirty a fellow as you are.”47 While Washington was in the right here, the letter shows how his bottled-up anger could spew forth unexpectedly and why people intuited correctly that he had a terrible temper.
In his eagerness to unlock the riches of the heartland, Washington assigned a premier position to the busy river running by his home. If the Potomac could be improved by locks and other measures, he thought, it would emerge as the main thoroughfare for commerce with the interior, enhancing the value of his western holdings. In 1770 the attorney Thomas Johnson, who owned thousands of acres along the Potomac, tried to enlist Washington’s aid for modest improvements along the river. A short, stocky man of unbounded energy and enthusiasm, he kindled in Washington a lasting enthusiasm for the project. Not to be outdone in Potomac boosterism, Washington espoused a far more ambitious plan that would connect the river with “a rising empire” in the western country.48 Washington clearly foresaw the rich future of this wilderness expanse, if only it could be reached by water. Simple in theory but fiendishly complex in practice, his plan for Potomac commerce required not just endless locks but portages through the mountains of what is now West Virginia. This Potomac scheme would hypnotize his mind much as the vision of a mythical Northwest Passage once entranced transatlantic mariners. If the Potomac never became the grand commercial gateway he had envisioned, it was not for want of trying.
With considerable sophistication about business and politics that already belied his image as a mere planter, Washington told Johnson that they shouldn’t just rely on legislative grants and the uncertain force of “motives of public spirit.”49 Better to rely on self-interest and blatantly appeal to “the monied gentry” who would be drawn by prospective profits.50 To this end, Washington would devise a plan for a joint stock company that would receive charters from Virginia and Maryland and make the river navigable from Tidewater Virginia to the Ohio Country. It would pay back investors by charging tolls on river traffic. Washington himself steered a Potomac navigation bill through the House of Burgesses. Despite his insistence that the project would produce “amazing advantages” to both Virginia and Maryland, it foundered in the Maryland legislature because Baltimore businessmen feared it might divert trade from the Chesapeake Bay.51 When the project stalled momentarily, it provided Washington with yet another early example of the need for intercolonial cooperation.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Asiatic Prince
FOR SOMEONE of George Washington’s enterprising nature, Martha Washington was the ideal spouse, with a work ethic to match his own. General Nathanael Greene once commented that Virginia ladies “appear to be brought up and educated with habits of industry and attention to domestic affairs,” and Martha Washington certainly fit that description.1
Never the idle, pampered doyenne of Mount Vernon, she was involved in everything from distilling rose water to gathering ash for making soap. George Washington liked to say that “Virginia ladies pride themselves on the goodness of their bacon,” and Martha derived special pleasure from the ham and bacon cured in their smokehouse.2 Each day, after an hour dedicated to prayer and meditation, she supervised servants in cooking and cleaning and presided over her sewing circle of slaves, who produced up to twelve hundred yards of homespun cloth yearly. All the while, she retained a folksy, unpretentious style. It was said that even when she wore the same gown for a week, it somehow managed to remain spotless. A woman with a delicate constitution, Martha was often sick for weeks at a time with liver and stomach troubles, known as “bilious fever,” but she never let illness slow her down in performing her domestic chores.
A gregarious person, Martha Washington wanted a home crowded with people. With her husband preoccupied by business and politics, she took charge of her two children and enjoyed the demands of motherhood, one visitor noting that “her happiness is in exact proportion to the number of objects upon which she can dispense her benefits.”3 She had special cause to worry about her daughter, Patsy. In Charles Willson Peale’s watercolor of her at sixteen, Patsy is pretty and elegant, slight of build, her clear eyes sparkling with intelligence. The picture shows how lovingly the Washingtons spoiled her: her black hair is dressed with pearls, her dress edged with lace, and she wears costly garnet jewelry. Parental affection for Patsy was heightened by the fact that by age six she showed incipient signs of epilepsy. A sad irony of Martha Washington’s life is that this fretful mother, chronically worried about her children’s health, had a daughter with exactly the sort of terrifying illness she dreaded. In 1768 George and Martha were returning from Belvoir with twelve-year-old Patsy when she suffered her first full-scale seizure. As these ghastly convulsions occurred with greater regularity, Dr. William Rumney turned into a frequent visitor at Mount Vernon. He tried to halt the convulsions by bleeding and purging the girl, which only weakened her further. Although he prescribed a dozen different powders, including toxic mercury and the herb valerian, nothing appeared to alleviate the problem. As they watched the wrenching spectacle of this remorseless disease, George and Martha could only have experienced a paralyzing sense of helplessness.
Such is the nature of epilepsy that Martha would have been afraid to leave Patsy alone and would have made sure she was watched at all times. An epileptic child can drown while swimming or collapse into a seizure while descending a staircase. The convulsions can erupt at any time. In his diary for April 14, 1769, Washington told of the family setting out for a social visit when “Patcy being taken with a fit on the road by the mill, we turned back.”4 Since other children are often terrified when someone has a seizure, the disease would have isolated the adolescent girl. Even today, when it is treated with antiseizure medications, epilepsy is encrusted with baleful legends. In the eighteenth century, people commonly imagined that it signified diabolical possession or might even be contagious.
Given the rudimentary state of contemporary medicine, the Washingtons ended up mingling science with sup
erstition in coping with the illness. In an exasperating quest for a cure, they took Patsy to the leading physicians in Williamsburg, including eight visits to Dr. John de Sequeyra, the scion of a prominent family of Sephardic Jews in London. (This visit is the only time we know for sure that George Washington had contact with a Jew before the Revolution.) The Washingtons also consulted the pompous and self-important Dr. John Johnson, who pumped Patsy full of everything from ether to barley water, to no avail. In all, the Washingtons consulted at least eight physicians in their search to relieve Patsy’s symptoms.
Like many desperate parents, George and Martha Washington wound up in the hands of charlatans. In February 1769 a blacksmith named Joshua Evans came to Mount Vernon to forge an iron “cramp ring” for one of Patsy’s fingers. Popular superstition contended that such rings, if accompanied by suitable mumbo jumbo, could banish epilepsy. That summer the Washingtons took Patsy to the mineral waters at Berkeley Springs, hoping for relief. The resort had become more fashionable since Washington and his brother Lawrence had first visited there and now offered everything from gambling to horse racing. In its springs, the women wore prudish, old-fashioned garments, with lead weights secreted in the hems to ensure that water didn’t push up their gowns and indecently expose flesh. Writing from the spa, Washington informed a friend that Patsy was “troubled with a complaint” and “found little benefit as yet from the experiment” of taking the waters. “What a week or two more may do, we know not and therefore are inclined to put them to the test.”5 Washington never spelled out the nature of Patsy’s “complaint,” suggesting the stigma attached to discussing epilepsy openly.
The adolescent girl’s fits grew more horrifying and frequent, sometimes striking twice a day. They recurred so often that Washington, in alarm, began to compile a record of them in the margin of his almanac calendars. During one frightful period from June 29 to September 22, 1770, Patsy fell to the floor in convulsions no fewer than twenty-six times. To compensate for her medical tribulations, Washington treated the girl to extra clothing and trinkets whenever possible. In Williamsburg that summer he bought her a pair of gold earrings and a tortoiseshell comb. By the following year, as shown by invoices to Robert Cary, he was ordering liquid laudanum, a powerful opiate that may well have been administered to Patsy.
In a poignant letter of July 1771, Washington disclosed that Martha didn’t believe that her daughter would ever be cured or even survive into adulthood. Referring to her anxieties about her son, Jacky, Washington observed, “The unhappy situation of her daughter has in some degree fixed her eyes upon him as her only hope.”6 Washington harbored many reservations about Jacky, who was outwardly sweet and affectionate toward his mother and never less than respectful toward his stepfather. At bottom, however, he was a young wastrel who loved horse races, hunting, and outdoor pursuits far more than his studies. When Charles Willson Peale sketched a watercolor of him, he portrayed the eighteen-year-old Jacky dressed in a green coat with a red collar and a richly embroidered waistcoat. He had a round face with a small chin and slightly crossed eyes, a detail that subtly captured his restless, perhaps immature, nature.
Where Washington wrote about Patsy with unfeigned affection, with Jacky he always seemed to bite his tongue and resort to euphemisms. Something about Patsy’s sweet simplicity he found irresistible, whereas Jacky’s feckless nature was to him intolerable. To Washington fell the thankless task of being the family disciplinarian, and he had to tread delicately in criticizing Jacky for fear of antagonizing his indulgent mother. Lacking the full legitimacy of a biological father, he found himself in a predicament as he tried to reform Jacky’s habits without running afoul of Martha. Though he might be the master of Mount Vernon, George Washington was far less powerful in the tiny emotional domain of his nuclear family.
Having been denied an adequate education, Washington went to inordinate lengths to educate his stepchildren properly. Starting in 1761, he hired a young, self-effacing Scottish immigrant, Walter Magowan, to tutor the children at home, and they were soon introduced to the Greek Testament and Latin poets and other things George Washington never learned. Toward the end of 1767 Magowan surrendered the post and returned to England, hoping to be ordained as an Anglican minister. In seeking a new teacher for thirteen-year-old Jacky, Washington contacted the Reverend Jonathan Boucher, an Anglican clergyman who ran a small academy for wealthy boys in his home near Fredericksburg. In his introductory letter, Washington described Jacky as “a promising boy” who was “untainted in his morals and of innocent manners,” but then he tipped his hand and confessed his “anxiety to make him fit for more useful purposes than a horse racer.”7 He was trying to be loyal to Jacky and frank at the same time, a tenuous balancing act he would perform for many years. A toadying character straight out of a Jane Austen novel, Boucher, with a tug of the forelock, answered in an unctuous manner: “Ever since I have heard of Mast[e]r Custis, I have wish[e]d to call him one of my little flock.”8 In short order, Washington rode off to Boucher’s school with Jacky, Jacky’s young slave Julius, and two horses.
At first Boucher expressed high hope for his young charge, and Washington placed an order in London for one hundred books, many in Latin. A transparently insincere fellow, Boucher laid on the flattery with a trowel, telling Washington what he thought he wanted to hear. His first letter described Jacky as a little angel, “a boy of so exceedingly mild and meek a temper” that Boucher worried he might be too artless, with “all the harmlessness of the dove” and none of “the wisdom of the serpent.” Of this little paragon, he concluded, “I have not seen a youth that I think promises fairer to be a good and a useful man than John Custis.”9
A year later, having discovered Jacky’s profligate nature, Boucher whistled a different tune. “You will rem[embe]r my having complain[e]d of Jack’s laziness, which, however, I now hope is not incurable,” he wrote to Washington.10 The reverend’s dismay steadily deepened: “The chief failings of [Jacky’s] character are that he is constitutionally somewhat too warm, indolent, and voluptuous.” He trembled for the fate of the Custis fortune: “Sunk in unmanly sloth, [Jacky’s] estate will [be] left to the managem[en]t of some worthless overseer and himself soon be entangled in some matrimonial adventure.”11 Cognizant of the exorbitant wealth he would inherit, Jacky saw little need to apply himself to studies, which couldn’t help but distress his stepfather with his nagging work ethic.
In 1770 Jonathan Boucher became a rector in Annapolis, Maryland, and Jacky followed him there. Boucher’s scathing strictures on Jacky’s behavior came in private exchanges with Washington and probably weren’t communicated to Martha. Always concerned with Jacky’s health, she feared he would drown and urged Boucher not to let him swim too frequently. When Boucher devised an elaborate plan to chaperone Jacky on a grand European tour, Washington vetoed it as too expensive but probably suspected as well that Martha would never allow her son to travel for an extended period, especially on an ocean voyage.
In the end, Jacky became so uncontrollable that he started gallivanting about with friends after school and often spent the night elsewhere. Washington knew that Annapolis, with its horse races and theater, tempted his stepson with its many sinful haunts. “I would beg leave to request,” Washington told Boucher, “that [Jacky] may not be suffered to sleep from under your own roof . . . nor allow him to be rambling about at nights in company with those who do not care how debauched and vicious his conduct may be.”12 No longer feeling obligated to flatter Master Custis, Boucher dropped all pretense. “I must confess to you,” he replied, “I never did in my life know a youth so exceedingly indolent or so surprisingly voluptuous. One would suppose nature had intended him for some Asiatic prince.”13 When Boucher suggested that the best way to control Jacky was to send his two horses back to Mount Vernon, Martha furiously refused her permission.
In dealing with his stepson, Washington betrayed the exasperation of a hardworking man coping with a spoiled rich boy. Jacky was spurning the ver
y education that Washington had so sorely missed. Having never learned French himself, Washington told Boucher to teach it to Jacky: “To be acquainted with the French tongue is become a part of polite education and, to a man who has an[y idea] of mixing in a large circle, absolutely necessary.”14 Jacky never learned French or Greek or mathematics, as he was supposed to do.
One reason that Washington monitored Jacky’s education so narrowly was that he took seriously his role as guardian of the Custis estate. When he turned down Boucher’s request for the grand tour, he explained that its costs would exceed Jacky’s income, forcing him to draw down capital. This “might be deemed imprudent in me to allow without the sanction of the court, who are the constitutional guardians of orphans.”15 Jacky’s estate consisted of four plantations in New Kent County, 15,000 acres of land, somewhere between 200 and 300 slaves, and nearly 10,000 pounds in financial securities. One wonders how Washington felt about this devil-may-care stepson whose immense wealth easily rivaled his own.
In early 1773 Washington decided that the time had come to ship Jacky off to college. For Martha, William and Mary would have been the most desirable place, given its proximity to Mount Vernon, but Washington found the atmosphere at the Virginia school too lax. He wanted to send Jacky to the College of New Jersey (Princeton), but Boucher steered him instead to King’s College (predecessor to Columbia) in New York. Boucher argued that King’s was located in “the most fashionable and polite place on the continent,” and that he counted its president, Dr. Myles Cooper, as a personal friend.16 It is worth noting that Washington, taking a dim view of the moral climate in Virginia, wanted to educate his stepson in the North.
Once Washington decided in favor of King’s, Jacky introduced a fresh complication into the picture. This sexually precocious youth had spent considerable time wooing the opposite sex. “Jack has a propensity to the sex,” Boucher warned Washington, “which I am at a loss how to judge of, much more how to describe.”17 It was only a matter of time before Jacky became seriously involved with a young woman. In December 1771, when Jonathan Boucher moved again, this time to Prince George’s County, Maryland, he took along three students. One was Jacky and another was Charles Calvert, son of the wealthy Benedict Calvert of Mount Airy. Jacky courted Eleanor (Nelly) Calvert, Charles’s beautiful, dark-eyed sister, and by early 1773 had proposed to her. All this happened without the Washingtons’ knowledge. Shocked by the news, they tried, at a bare minimum, to slow things down. On April 3, 1773, Washington wrote an artful letter to Benedict Calvert, stating that he had heard of Nelly’s “amiable qualifications” and that “an alliance” with the Calverts would please him and Martha. He then went on to cite Jacky’s “youth, inexperience, and unripened education” as “insuperable obstacles . . . to the completion of the marriage.”18 Washington suggested that the marriage be deferred for two or three years until Jacky completed his education. In the letter, he distanced himself from Jacky and discreetly registered his disapproval without openly disavowing him. Benedict Calvert agreed that Jacky should spend two years at King’s College before marrying his daughter.