Martha Washington

by Patricia Brady

  Washington began assembling his military “family” at this time, the staff officers on whom he depended to write and file letters, carry orders and confidential messages, entertain visitors, act as sounding boards for his ideas, and provide companionship during the long, dull, anxious stretches of time between battles. The young men who served as aides-de-camp during the Revolution became a cadre of surrogate sons to him and to Martha when she eventually arrived at headquarters.

  During these months, George fully expected to be able to go home for a visit at the end of the year. At that time, armies settled into winter encampments and generally didn’t fight again until spring or even summer, depending on the weather, a sort of informal time-out. Foraging expeditions and occasional sorties, yes—but not full-scale battles. Feeding and clothing large numbers of men in action, as well as moving troops over frozen roads and fields, was simply too overwhelming a task for the logistics of the day. These downtimes coincidentally provided an opportunity for officers to take leave.

  But European armies were professional organizations of long standing, the officers and men falling into well-worn grooves, maintaining discipline and order until it was time to go into battle again. Not so for the American army, which was still just a conglomeration of state militias. By early October 1775, Washington realized that his army was at a crucial point. Without the commander’s presence, there was the terrifying possibility that all his work would be for nothing. Most of the soldiers enlisted for short terms and took off as soon as their enlistments were up—just keeping the siege manned and the troops supplied was an enormous task. Washington couldn’t leave now. So that year, he did what he would for all the years to come: he wrote to Martha, asking her to join him in winter camp.

  Many British officers entertained themselves in camp with all-night drinking bouts, high-stakes gambling, and a plethora of easily available sexual partners. The Puritan strain in American society called for greater discretion in their camp, but some men took the opportunity to kick off—or at least loosen—the marital traces. Not their commander. Whatever George Washington’s sexual experiences as a young man may have been, he had never led a dissipated life—even his love for the married Sally Fairfax had been well-nigh respectable. There would be no startling middle-aged outbreak: he was well aware that he set the example for his men, and he genuinely delighted in his wife’s company and their “domestic enjoyments.”

  Unlike many husbands of the day, he never ordered his wife to do anything. He simply invited Martha “to come to me, altho’ I fear the Season is too far advanced . . . to admit this with any tolerable degree of convenience.” After all, she had never been north of Annapolis and hadn’t much relished those trips; she had no experience of the bone-chilling weather in Massachusetts or the potential dangers of a winter trip there. George described “the difficulties . . . which attend the journey before her and left it to her own choice.” Then he waited for her response. And waited.

  The vagaries of the mail caused the long delay. It wasn’t until the twenty-second of the month, nearly a week after Martha had gone down to Eltham, that Lund received his cousin’s letters of October 2, 7, and 9, along with his accompanying letters for Martha. When Lund realized that George wanted his wife to come north, he sent a messenger with her letters the next morning. “I expect her home Imediately,” he wrote George, incorrectly, as it happened.

  But Martha wouldn’t be chivied into departing before she was ready, however much menfolk might fuss and fume. Lund’s messenger returned with a letter for George and the news that she wouldn’t return home for another week. Having made the trip to the Bassetts, she meant to finish up there before leaving. Lund was on pins and needles, assuring George that he would do everything to get her on the road as soon as possible.

  Lund was devoted to George Washington and his interests and proved his commitment time and again throughout the war years. When he wrote that “I will cheerfully do . . . every thing that lays in my power for you,” it was only one of many such avowals. But he chafed under Martha’s authority and the unlimited confidence George reposed in her. She could make whatever decisions she pleased, despite his objections, and he resented that power in a woman.

  During the autumn of 1775, he had several occasions to complain about Martha’s high-handedness. Throughout his life, George Washington valued his papers and maintained them carefully—diaries, letters, account books. His commitment to their preservation is the reason we know so much about him today. Martha herself packed her husband’s papers in a locked trunk to move them to a safer place when a British attack seemed possible. Lund was aggrieved that she left him out, imagining that she had jumbled all the papers. To his indignation, she took several sums of money for her northern journey without accounting to him for them. Although George had suggested that their friend Sarah Barnes might stay at Mount Vernon as the estate housekeeper that winter, Martha vetoed it, seeming “to think it will not answer.”

  She wouldn’t come back from Eltham, nor would she leave Mount Vernon when he thought she should. And then the final complaint: “This House has been so Crouded with company since Mrs. Washington came home that I fear many things is left undone that should have been done before she left home. I write in haste & a little confuse’d.” A woman who knew what she wanted and did it confidently put Lund off his stride, but George was never fazed.

  There are two sorts of travelers—those who fly out the door with the clothes on their backs and those who try to pack everything for any possible contingency. Martha was definitely one of the latter. Before she would leave home, she had to be satisfied that she had all the hams and blankets, clothes and endless hanks of knitting wool, and the million and one other things she needed for an absence of months. No one was going to push her out the door a day before she was ready to go.

  Besides all her supplies, she brought family members with her to re-create their household away from home. Jack Custis went along as companion, escort, and mother’s delight; Nelly was happy to make one of the party, probably hoping that new sights would take her mind off losing the baby. One of George’s nephews and namesakes, his sister Betty’s son George Washington Lewis, came with them because he was joining Washington’s personal guard. The party finally set off about November 16. Along the way, they picked up Elizabeth Phillips Gates, wife of the adjutant general.

  Martha’s first journey to the northern colonies began to assume the quality of a triumphal procession. Since she first married, she had enjoyed position and status within a close-knit community. Now she was being recognized and feted by strangers as though she were “a very great somebody,” as she expressed it, her carriage met and escorted by honor guards of mounted troops, her party greeted by each town’s leading citizens. It was an amazing experience, her first realization that her husband had transcended his Virginia identity and become a truly American leader.

  Since he assumed command of the Revolutionary forces, Washington had become a patriotic icon to Americans badly in need of a national symbol to replace the king—very much against the general’s own inclination. Patriots began naming their sons George Washington, and he became the subject of laudatory poems by such writers as Philip Freneau and Phillis Wheatley.

  Reams of adulatory poetry and patriotic songs were written about the commander, but visual representations of the hero were even more important in a semiliterate age. Legislative bodies, colleges, and wealthy admirers desired paintings of Washington, while engravings by the hundreds, as well as flags and transparencies for parades and patriotic displays, were necessary to satisfy the desires of the general public. Through it all, George showed a wry acceptance of the public’s wish for visual images. To Martha’s bemusement, her image too began to be demanded as a symbol of the republican wife.

  Martha’s party arrived in grand, red-brick Philadelphia, that most elegant and sophisticated of colonial cities, on November 21. With the Congress meeting there, it was in effect the capital of the colonies. As M
artha wrote home, “I don’t doubt but you have seen the Figure our arrival made in the Philadelphia paper.” The travelers settled into comfortable lodgings to rest for a week before continuing on their long journey, becoming acquainted with Philadelphians and congressmen who came to pay courtesy calls on the commanding general’s wife. To Martha’s pleasure, a group of prominent citizens had organized a ball in her honor. Like any Virginian, she found celebrations and dancing as natural as breathing, completely compatible with her husband’s grave responsibilities.

  She had reached middle age in an extremely homogeneous society, and she had no experience of the social and cultural tensions that existed in a big city like Philadelphia with its Quakers, Presbyterians, Baptists, and political radicals of a puritanical bent. Her first hint of dissension came on the day of the ball when a delegation of four serious men called to express their “great regard and affection to her,” along with compliments on her husband’s “defense of our rights and liberties.”

  Of course, she thanked them graciously for their sentiments, but they hadn’t yet come to the real reason for their call. A ball, in their opinion, was an excess in “these troubled times”; then they appealed to her “not to grace that company to which, we are informed, she has an invitation to this evening.”

  Martha quickly recovered from any surprise and proffered her “best compliments” to her censors, assuring them “that their sentiments on this occasion were perfectly agreeable unto her own.” Though no doubt disappointed at missing the evening’s pleasure, she was well aware of her husband’s need to draw together troops and support from all the colonies and to respect many points of view, however restrictive they might seem. The ball was canceled after she sent her regrets to the hosts.

  Among the many Philadelphians she met was Joseph Reed, a congressman who had served briefly as Washington’s aide; the men corresponded regularly after Reed returned home. When the carriage got back on the road on November 28, Martha observed that “I left [Philadelphia] in as great pomp as if I had been a very great somebody.” Reed wrote to Washington that “Mesdames Washington, Custis, and Gates were very agreeable ladies. . . . No bad supply, I think, in a cold country where wood is scarce.” Every winter, when Martha and the other officers’ wives began arriving at headquarters, that stale old joke was trotted out. It was based on the reality that colonial buildings at night were nearly as cold inside as out and that warm bedmates made for a comfortable night’s sleep.

  They arrived safely in Cambridge on December 11, to the great relief of General Washington. He had been worried about their finding the way safely, asking Reed to give Martha “particular instructions and advice.” He sent one of his aides to escort the coach, asking him to send a messenger to headquarters a day ahead of their arrival. Although George complained that snow had turned the ground into an unpleasant white waste, she was positive as usual. “This is a beautyfull country, and we had a very plasant journey through New England, and had the plasure to find the General very well. We came within the month from home to the Camp.”

  Martha had a naturally calm and optimistic outlook on life, but she also worked at maintaining that attitude. As she later wrote, “I am still determined to be cheerful and to be happy in whatever situation I may be, for I have also learnt from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances; we carry the seeds of the one, or the other about with us, in our minds, wherever we go.”

  The village of Cambridge was surrounded with earthworks and chock-full of American soldiers, their officers occupying many of the principal houses. The men were armed with a wide assortment of weapons brought from home or acquired higgledy-piggledy. There were no standard uniforms: some wealthy officers supplied uniforms of their own fancy to their troops; in other units, men wore their everyday working clothes or leather hunting shirts and breeches copied from the Indians.

  The town common had become a parade ground. Harvard was closed down, its buildings serving as barracks. From the heights around Boston, colonial soldiers watched the British tear up wharves, fences, and abandoned houses for firewood. Sounds carried too in the crisp, cold air, as both sides listened to bugles and shouted commands, alert for the noises of an unexpected foray.

  At first, Martha found the preparations for war and the nonchalance of the soldiers and citizens bewildering. She wrote: “Every person seems to be cheerfull and happy here. Some days we have a number of cannon and shells from Boston and Bunkers Hill, but it does not seem to surprise any one but me; I confess I shudder every time I hear the sound of a gun.” She was driven up Prospect Hill to look down at “poor” Boston and Charlestown. The latter had only a few chimneys standing, but a number of fine buildings still stood in Boston. She observed: “God knows how long they will stand; they are pulling up all the warfs for firewood. To me that never [has] seen anything of war, the preparations are very terable indeed, but I endever to keep my fears to myself as well as I can.”

  Martha settled into a fine Georgian two-story frame house, well furnished, the property of a Tory, Major John Vassall, which had been taken over as the commander’s residence. It stood in a large fenced lot, whose garden must have been charming earlier in the year but was now blanketed with snow. She was happy to discover that although “the distance is long . . . the post comes in very regularly every week”—all the way from Williamsburg. Still influenced by traditional British formality, many people settled on calling Martha “Lady Washington” for want of an official title.

  As usual, her first concern was her husband’s comfort, allowing him freedom from domestic details to concentrate on his military responsibilities. The household was run by a steward, its expenses paid by one of Washington’s aides who also kept the accounts; she reorganized household affairs so that they ran more smoothly. His emotional comfort, however, was her primary care. Her deep devotion to her children and other family members paled before the burning intensity of her love for George Washington. He accepted her adoration without much thought. It was the atmosphere in which he breathed and lived, where he was most himself. She was at his side and on his side, sympathizing and supporting him through depression, failure, disloyalty, and anxiety about the future. With her, he needn’t pretend to be perfect.

  As army headquarters, the Vassall house was the commander’s office as well as the Washingtons’ home and staff quarters. Being the commander’s wife was something like being a fraternity house mother; Martha and George were in their mid-forties, living with a large group of men in their twenties—Washington’s aides-de-camp and a shifting number of other bachelor officers and visitors. The young men slept two or three to a bed and several to a room; they were always bustling back and forth on military errands, sometimes seeking out their own private entertainments of the sort not best shared with Lady Washington.

  This first winter camp in Cambridge, though far more comfortable than those to come, set the pattern for the rest of the American Revolution. The arrival of the commander’s wife signaled that other officers might bring their wives to join them. Martha loved nothing more than congenial company, and the Vassall house became quite gay with dinners and visits. Jack and Nelly, who soon discovered that she was pregnant again, were great social assets.

  The higher-ranking officers and their wives became part of a sociable circle, taking turns entertaining one another throughout the winter. Cambridge almost began to seem like home. That is, if one ignored the weather, the strange conglomeration of accents and manners, and the reason that had brought them all together. Martha made lifetime friends among the officers’ wives, but Elizabeth Gates wasn’t one of them. They came to dislike each other, especially later when Gates allowed himself to be considered a likely replacement in command by Washington’s critics, egged on by “that Medusa . . . [who] rules with a rod of Scorpions,” as another general described her.

  Curiosity had drawn visitors to Cambridge since the beginning of the siege. With bo
th armies out of action for the winter and Lady Washington in residence, the visits increased, including several congressmen come to look over this “continental” army that they were supporting. The entertainment of influential guests, who naturally expected dinner at headquarters and personal tours, had taken up too much of Washington’s time. Martha provided a screening process, greeting and chatting with them when they entered the house before taking them to meet the general and sometimes taking over their entertainment again after their shortened interviews.

  Among his line officers, George found two inexperienced, native-born leaders especially talented and congenial—Nathanael Greene and Henry Knox. While both enjoyed healthy strains of pride and egotism, they were loyal to Washington and could submerge their individual ambitions for the greater good. They were middle-class civilians of the sort who would never have stood a chance to become officers in the caste-ridden professional armies of Great Britain, France, or any of the German states.

  Nathanael Greene was a Quaker from Rhode Island who had been read out of his meeting when he joined the state militia. A farmer and smith from a moderately well-to-do family, Greene lacked military experience but learned fast. Nearly six feet tall, he was strong and well built, a good-humored man who smiled often. His physical presence and charisma helped him inspire confidence in a ragtag collection of men from different colonies. He leaped in one day from private to general in the Rhode Island militia and proved his ability over time.

  At camp, he was joined by his young wife, Catherine Littlefield Greene (twenty-two to his thirty-four). Nathanael was desperately in love with the very pregnant Kitty. A vivacious, sometimes reckless brunette, she became one of Martha and George’s great favorites. When she arrived in Cambridge, Kitty drove up to the Vassall house, where she talked with Martha in the paneled parlor. Then they went across the wide hall to the general’s office. Saucy and always ready with a quick response, Kitty was the sort of young woman George most enjoyed spending time with. He teased her about her “Quaker-preacher” husband, and she promised to name her baby for the general if it was a boy. True to her word, when she gave birth in January, she named her son George Washington Greene.