The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

by Thomas Fleming

  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 removed the sweet innocent girl into a more happy & peaceful abode than any she has met with in the afflicted path she hitherto has trod…. This sudden and unexpected blow has reduced my poor wife to the lowest ebb of misery, which is increased by the absence of her son.15

  Washington wished he could persuade Martha’s mother, Fanny Dandridge, to move to Mount Vernon permanently, but no argument could entice this lady to join them. He had to depend on frequent visits from the Fairfaxes and his brother Jack and his wife, as well as the continuing presence of Nelly Calvert, to console Martha. He did his best to join them in this almost impossible task.

  For the next several months, Washington stayed close to Mount Vernon, canceling a trip to the West with Lord Dunmore, the new governor of Virginia, on which he had hoped to add to the thousands of acres he already owned beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains. He frequently persuaded Martha to join him in a light carriage, supposedly to visit his outlying farms. “Rid with Mrs. Washington to Muddy Hole, Doeg Run and Mill Plantations,” he wrote in his diary on one of these days—terse testimony to his attempts to offer Martha his company and sympathy. He became very fond of Nelly Calvert, who stayed at Mount Vernon for most of the summer of 1773. Her tact and skill in comforting Martha soon created a bond that made her a substitute daughter.

  X

  For a while Jack Custis was a consolation. His letters from New York were cheerful and full of determination to study hard and acquire the education Washington wanted him to have. “I hope the progress I make…will redown not only to my own credit, but to the credit of those who have been instrumental in placing me here,” he told Washington. He made a point of thanking his stepfather for “the parental care and attention you have always & upon all occasions manifested toward me.”16

  In September, after only three months of study, King’s College gave Jack a vacation—so he claimed. Washington arranged to meet him in Annapolis for the annual horse races and festivities connected with the meeting of the state’s assembly. Jack joined him for these revels and had a joyful reunion with Nelly Calvert. He and Washington stayed at Governor Eden’s mansion and spent five days enjoying balls, the theater, and the racetrack. They came home in good spirits to Mount Vernon, where Jack was greeted with fervent kisses by his delighted mother.

  During the next several weeks, Washington’s pleasure at presiding over this joyous reunion turned into angry disappointment. He was a busy man; Patsy’s death meant the legal transfer of much valuable property to Jack’s estate and to Martha’s holdings as well. Meanwhile, Jack was telling his mother how much he loved Nelly and how badly they both wanted to console her for Patsy’s loss by giving her grandchildren. Jack persisted in this campaign while he and Martha and Nelly traveled to Williamsburg with Washington to arrange for the transfer of Patsy’s property and give Martha a chance to visit her mother and other nearby relatives. On the way home to Mount Vernon, Martha told Washington that Jack had obtained her permission to abandon his education and marry Nelly as soon as possible. All her relatives agreed with her decision.

  Washington was infuriated, but what could he do? He had no desire to play the villain and oppose the young lovers, much less curtly inform Martha that she should wait patiently for grandchildren. Jack was so rich, it was difficult if not impossible to argue that a classical education was a vital necessity for him. Back at Mount Vernon, the defeated colonel wrote a letter to Myles Cooper, the president of King’s College, informing him of Jack’s decision. “I have yielded,” he all but growled, “contrary to my judgment & much against my wishes, to his quitting college…having his own inclinations—the desires of his mother & the acquiescence of almost all his relatives to encounter, I did not care, as he is the last of the family, to push my opposition too far; & therefore have submitted to a kind of necessity.”17

  Two months later, a resigned Colonel Washington summoned a warm smile as Jack married Nelly at her family home, Mount Airy. Martha, still in mourning for Patsy, did not come with him. The newlyweds made Mount Vernon one of their first destinations. Their brimming happiness undoubtedly gladdened Washington’s heart as much as Martha’s. He could only console himself with the thought that he had done everything in his power to make Jack a man worthy of his wealth and potential importance. Another consolation was Nelly herself. Everyone, even Jack’s grumpy former schoolmaster, The Reverend Boucher, agreed she was an exceptional young woman, as intelligent as she was beautiful.

  XI

  Another event that stirred deep emotions in the master of Mount Vernon was a decision made by his neighbors, George William Fairfax and his wife, Sally. They were moving to England, perhaps permanently. George William had inherited property from a relative, and the bequest was being challenged in the courts by another member of the family. Behind the lawsuit lurked the accusation that George William had Negro blood and was disqualified from inheriting the dukedom when the now aged Lord Fairfax died. Like most English lawsuits of the era, this wrangle might take years to resolve. Washington could do little but extend his warmest wishes for success and promise to keep a close watch on a darkened, silent Belvoir.

  A glum Washington noted in his diary that on July 8, 1773, George William and Sally came to Mount Vernon “to take leave of us.” The next day, he and Martha “went to Belvoir to see them take shipping.” In Sally’s trunks were the two tormented letters he had written to her fifteen years ago. How distant, how strange that yearning soldier must have seemed to Washington now! He was a different man, leading a different life, rich in peace and contentment. There were sorrows such as Patsy’s death and frustrations such as Jack Custis’s willful ways; disappointments occurred in almost every life. But he no longer lived on the brink of sudden death, clutching at the mere confession of Sally’s love as a consolation.18

  XII

  In the closing weeks of 1773, the problem of America’s relationship with England abruptly intruded on George Washington and his fellow Virginians. On December 16, a group of Bostonians disguised as Indians dumped 342 chests of British tea into the harbor to protest Parliament’s tax on it. Tea was the only item still on the mother country’s revenue list; American boycotts and strenuous denunciations by pamphleteers had persuaded the imperial legislature to abandon all the others. But everyone knew the tea tax had been kept to “maintain the right” to extract cash from the defiant Americans. Boston agitators led by Samuel Adams had struck in the night to let the world know they were determined to resist any and all taxation without representation.

  Most Virginians, including Washington, denounced the tea party as vandalism. No one but Yankee fanatics worried about the tea tax. Most of the 80,000 pounds of the brew drunk in Virginia was smuggled from the West Indies or England itself, where tax evasion was a national industry. But as the Virginians read their newspapers, they soon realized this tea was a special case, imported under a monopoly set up by Parliament to give the almost bankrupt British East India company some badly needed revenue. The tea would have sold at a price below even that of smuggled tea—probably inducing thousands of people to save a few pennies while affirming Parliament’s right to tax Americans.

  When the British responded to the destruction of the tea by closing the port of Boston, and making General Thomas Gage the royal governor of Massachusetts, backed by several regiments of regulars, opinion in Virginia underwent a radical change. Especially alarming on this list of what the British called the “Coercive Acts” was a ukase cancelling Massachusetts’s right to elect the governor’s council. Henceforth its members would be appointed by the king. Another law specified that anyone accused of treason would be tried in England, not in the American colonies. Washington voted wholeheartedly with Virginia’s House of Burgesses to protest these encroachments on Massachusetts’s rights and proclaim Virginia’s solidarity with their fellow Ameri
cans. Soon he was one of seven delegates chosen to represent Virginia in a general congress that met in Philadelphia to discuss the crisis.

  In the middle of this political turmoil, Washington had a painful personal duty thrust on him. George William and Sally Fairfax asked him to supervise the sale of Belvoir’s furnishings. George William’s lawsuit looked more and more interminable, and the couple had decided it might be better to stay in England permanently. They thought it would give their argument more weight in court. George bought mahogany chests and tables, mirrors, and bedclothes, no doubt including Sally’s own. There was some consolation in bringing these purchases to Mount Vernon, but it was painful to see dozens of strangers buying up his old friends’ possessions from rooms where he had enjoyed so many happy hours. In retrospect, there was a fitting finality to the sale. It was a kind of farewell to Washington’s youth. But he did not see it that way at the time. He felt only sadness and regret.

  History was taking charge of George Washington’s life. On August 30, Edmund Pendleton and Patrick Henry, two of the other Virginia delegates to the Congress, arrived at Mount Vernon to join him for the journey to Philadelphia and the first meeting of the Continental Congress. At dinner Martha listened to them discuss the confrontation with England. Pendleton was by nature a cautious man but Patrick Henry was his usual fiery self, determined to assert America’s rights no matter what the consequences. The next morning, Martha watched them depart with an uneasy mixture of pride and anxiety.19

  XIII

  In little more than a year, the quarrel with George III and his revenue-hungry Parliament led to bloodshed in Massachusetts. Sam Adams and his cousin John Adams, anxious to win the support of the rest of the country, backed Virginia’s Colonel Washington to head the impromptu New England army that rushed to besiege the British inside Boston. Three days after he received his commission from Congress, Washington wrote one of the most difficult—and revealing—letters of his life. It began with words that testified that Martha had become far more than an agreeable consort.

  My Dearest:

  I am now set down to write you on a subject which fills me with inexpressible concern—and this concern is greatly aggravated and increased when I reflect on the uneasiness I know it will give you—It has been determined in Congress that the whole army raised for the defence of the American cause shall be put under my care and that it is necessary for me to proceed immediately to Boston to take upon me the command of it. You may believe me, my dear Patcy, when I assure you, in the most solemn manner, that, so far from seeking this appointment I have used every endeavour in my power to avoid it, not only from my unwillingness to part with you and the family, but from a consciousness of its being a trust too great for my capacity, and that I should enjoy more real happiness and felicity in one month with you, at home, than I have my most distant prospect of reaping abroad, if my stay was to be seven times seven years.20

  Those words bear witness to the deep and abiding happiness George Washington had achieved in his sixteen years of marriage to Martha Dandridge Custis. In the next few harried days, he made it clear that Martha’s peace of mind remained one of his foremost concerns. Washington wrote letters to Burwell Bassett, Jack Custis, and Jack Washington, in which he admitted “my absence will be a cutting stroke” upon Martha. He begged them to visit her as often as possible in the months to come. He had no idea that he was embarking on a venture that would keep him away from Mount Vernon for eight years.

  On June 23, about to depart for Boston, Washington found time for one more hasty but equally revealing note:

  My Dearest:

  As I am within a few minutes of leaving this city [Philadelphia] I could not think of departing without dropping you a line…. I go fully trusting in that Providence which has been more bountiful to me than I deserve, and in full confidence of a happy meeting with you sometime in the fall. I have not time to add more, as I am surrounded with company…. I retain an unalterable affection for you which neither time or distance can change….

  With the utmost truth & sincerity Yr entire

  Geo Washington21

  FROM GREAT SOMEBODY TO LADY WASHINGTON

  In Massachusetts, General Washington wrestled with the myriad problems of creating an army. He missed his wife’s companionship—and her skills as a hostess. He was living in the house of the president of Harvard College and found himself constantly entertaining important visitors. In October he wrote Martha a note, urging her “to come to me, although I fear the season is too far advanced…to admit this can be done with any tolerable degree of convenience.” Martha was at Eltham, visiting her favorite sister, Nancy, and Nancy’s husband, Burwell Bassett, when George’s letter finally reached her. She stayed at Eltham for another week, thinking about the six-hundred-mile journey.

  For someone who had a tendency to fear the worst, it was a daunting proposition. Late fall weather could make the roads impassable; numerous rivers and creeks would have to be crossed; roadside taverns were often dirty, inhospitable places. But she sensed George needed her. With Jack and Nelly Custis for company, she was soon on her way. Nelly had recently given birth to a baby who lived only a few weeks, and Martha hoped the trip would raise her daughter-in-law’s spirits.

  The journey took on overtones of a triumphal procession. Washington made sure one of his aides, Joseph Reed, met them in Philadelphia. It was Martha’s first glimpse of the huge expansion of her husband’s fame. A troop of uniformed horsemen escorted her into the city, and hundreds of people thronged the sidewalks to get a glimpse of her. In the rooms Reed reserved for them, a veritable stream of congressmen and prominent Philadelphians rushed to welcome General Washington’s wife. Martha was gracious and warm, but she did not get carried away. In an amused letter to a Virginia friend, she wrote, “I don’t doubt but you have see the figuer [sic] our arrival made in the Philadelphia paper…and I left it in as great pomp as if I had been a great somebody.”1

  Reed was charmed by Martha and Nelly. In a note, he told Washington that he was sure they would be good company “in a cold country where wood is scarce.” In Cambridge, Martha swiftly solved George’s hospitality problems. She persuaded him to move to a larger house and was soon a cheerful presence at a bountiful dinner table. She charmed grumpy Yankees such as James Warren, speaker of the Massachusetts legislature, and his formidable wife, Mercy, a fierce intellectual who wrote satires and plays (under a man’s name) pillorying the British and would later turn out a three-volume history of the Revolution. Mercy told her friend Abigail Adams how impressed she was by Martha. She praised “the complacency of her manners” as well as her “affability, candor, and gentleness.”2

  II

  Martha Washington’s journey to Cambridge was the first of many trips she would take from Mount Vernon to join her husband during the next eight years of the War for Independence. Her importance as a wife and hostess would grow larger and more apparent to everyone—above all to her husband. She was the only person with whom Washington could relax and speak candidly. With most people he had to maintain the role of the confident, decisive commander in chief.

  By 1778, Washington was being called “the father of his country” in the newspapers. He did his utmost to avoid acknowledging this tendency to view him as a demigod. At Valley Forge, on the night of February 22, 1778, General Henry Knox, commander of the artillery, sent a regimental band to serenade the commander in chief on his birthday—the first semi-official celebration of the day. Washington sent Martha out into the snowy road to thank the musicians and give them generous tips. She politely informed them that the general had gone to bed and that was why he was not thanking them in person.3

  The chorus of adulation continued to grow. Poems and speeches hailed Washington’s greatness. In France, Ambassador Benjamin Franklin kept a full-length portrait of him on the wall in his study. But fame seemed to have no impact on George and Martha’s loving relationship. If anything, they became even more intimate. Martha began calling him “my
old man” and in private often addressed him as “Pappy.” No one sympathized more deeply with the commander in chief’s travails. More than once she wrote a friend, exclaiming that “the pore general” was looking weary and discouraged, as the war dragged on and on.

  General Nathanael Greene, who rose to second in command of the American army, wrote to his wife, Caty, “Mrs. Washington is excessive fond of the general and he of her…they are happy in each other.” Throughout the war, Martha wore a miniature of Washington by Charles Willson Peale on a chain around her neck; he carried one of her beneath his shirt.

  III

  In 1776, Jack Custis reached the age of twenty-one and took over the management of his estate. With no apparent prodding from Martha, who was with her husband in New York, he wrote Washington a touching letter. Jack was “extremely desireous…to return you thanks for your parental care which on all occasions you have shown to me.” He had lost a father at an early age, but “few have experienced such care and attention from real parents as I have done.” Jack asked him to “continue your wholesome advice and reprimands whenever you see occasion.” He promised they would be “thankfully received and strictly attended to.” Meanwhile he would never cease looking for opportunities to testify “to the sincere regard and love I bear you.”4

  Washington never even hinted that Jack should join the Continental Army; he knew that Martha would be prostrate with worry at the mere thought of him going into battle. Jack bought Abington, a handsome 900-acre estate near Alexandria, and demonstrated a modicum of patriotism by serving in the Virginia Assembly. He also invested a considerable sum in a privateer that would, like hundreds of similar warships, attack British merchant vessels. He remained deeply devoted to his Nelly, who gave him four children in the next six years. The fourth, a boy, was named George Washington Parke Custis. But running a plantation bored Jack. He was equally unenthusiastic about traveling to his plantations in the vicinity of Williamsburg to make sure they were being properly managed by his overseers. Such responsibilities interfered with his favorite pleasures—betting on horses and cards, hunting, and partying.