by Flora Fraser
At the house remained a few items. All were of historical value, but none was associated with Martha Washington. After the Civil War, Miss Cunningham began to fill the house with other objects that had once had a place there. Many of those that first came back were intimately associated with Martha, including her granddaughter Nelly’s harpsichord and the Washingtons’ bed. There was, however, a limit to the Ladies’ Association’s interest in her. It was only of the president that Miss Cunningham spoke to her board when she retired in 1874 as regent of the association she had founded: “Ladies, the Home of Washington is in your charge. See to it that you keep it the Home of Washington! Let no irreverent hand change it: no vandal hands desecrate it with the fingers of—progress! Those who go to the Home in which he lived and died, wish to see in what he lived and died!”
Since then there has been a sea change at Mount Vernon. In fact, something of a revolution has taken place, though not one in which “vandal hands” have been involved. Today the governing body encourages its many visitors to view the estate as the home of all who lived there, including the slaves who worked in the house and in the fields. The Donald W. Reynolds Museum and Education Center at Mount Vernon and mountvernon.org, the associated website, further this work. The mansion itself is imbued with the presence of Martha Washington, thanks to research into different aspects of her life. Joseph E. Fields published in 1994 “Worthy Partner”: The Papers of Martha Washington. Ellen McCallister Clark’s admirable Martha Washington: A Brief Biography marked the bicentenary of her death in 2002. The marthawashington.us website at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, and the National First Ladies’ Library, Canton, Ohio, continue this work of reassessment. Mary V. Thompson, research historian at Mount Vernon, is the author of “In the Hands of a Good Providence”: Religion in the Life of George Washington (2008). She regularly draws on her fund of knowledge about George and Martha’s lives together to contribute to journals and other publications.
Can we know the Washingtons? If any image of Martha is known today, it is the grandmotherly “Atheneum” portrait of her painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1796. An enormous cap dominates. The image of Washington that is perhaps best known today is the one on the dollar bill, derived from a companion portrait by Stuart. The couple were then well into their sixties and had been married nearly forty years. A year later George was to dash a lady’s suggestion that a bundle of letters from his wife to him constituted “love letters.” But husband and wife had been more ardent earlier. In the first years of the war, an officer noted, “Mrs. Washington is excessive fond of the General and he of her. They are very happy in each other.”
What is above all necessary for the reader today to bear in mind is that, when Martha and George married, they were both in their mid-twenties. Martha was the elder by only eight months, and a very attractive and wealthy young widow. Since she was a girl, she had been living in the same Virginian parish, first at home, then as the wife of a much older husband. Following that first husband’s death, Martha is pursued by George, a colonel in the colonial service. He sweeps her north and away from her family and friends. If this book leaves the reader with any image, I hope it will be of a couple who were of an age and who were both friends and lovers.
There have been many visitors to Mount Vernon since the Ladies’ Association opened its doors to the public. Perhaps the most incongruous duo who ever stood before the Washington vault were Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Chiang Kai-shek. Resplendent in furs, FDR at their side, these wartime allies were photographed on February 22, 1943, the anniversary of the first president’s birth, about to lay a handsome wreath on his tomb. History does not relate whether Martha’s tomb was similarly honored. But in a radio broadcast on that same anniversary in 1935, Mrs. Roosevelt, who blazed her own trail at the White House, had spoken admiringly of Mrs. Washington: “She was a pioneer and maker of precedents, and we can be grateful that she took an interest in public affairs and did her duty in the way that she considered compatible with the standards and customs of the day.”
Queen Elizabeth II, when on a visit, as Princess Elizabeth, to Mount Vernon in November 1951 while her father was still king, is held to have remarked, “It’s a cosy little place.” Indeed, in England the home commonly termed “the mansion” would rank as a small manor house, albeit one with a spectacular view. More important, “cosy” is not an epithet that anyone would have used on viewing the house while Washington lived there alone in the late 1750s. Before the expectation of marriage to Martha dawned, in Virginia George was a lonely and even cantankerous young bachelor, with what he viewed as dismal prospects. It is with this lonely bachelorhood that The Washingtons: George and Martha, “Join’d by Friendship, Crown’d by Love” now begins.
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1 At the time of writing, she still holds that distinction.
BOOK ONE
The Colonel and His Lady,
1758–1775
1
Colonial Colonel
“no prospect of preferment”
GEORGE WASHINGTON, anxious by nature, was fractious in the spring of 1758 at Mount Vernon, his plantation home on the Potomac River in northern Virginia. Six years earlier the young man had seen his older half-brother Lawrence waste away from “decay,” as tuberculosis was then termed, and die at Mount Vernon while still in his early thirties. Now George himself had, as he wrote on March 4, 1758, to Colonel John Stanwix, a British officer serving in America and formerly his commander, “some reason to apprehend an approaching decay.” While serving with his regiment in northwestern Virginia the previous year, he had suffered for months from a “bloody flux,” or dysentery. In November he had retreated to Mount Vernon, a home that he rented from his brother’s widow. Here he dieted on medicinal jellies and brooded on his misfortunes. He wrote to Stanwix in March that his constitution was greatly injured: “nothing can retrieve it but the greatest care, and most circumspect conduct.”
To compound his dejection, as he informed Stanwix, Washington saw “no prospect of preferment”—or promotion—“in a military life.” He had served in the Virginia Regiment since it was raised in 1754, and he was now its colonel. But he had failed, like so many “provincial” or colonial officers, to win a commission in the regular British army. First settled by the Virginia Company in 1607, Virginia had come under the direct rule of James I of England in 1625. Within America the colony was often named the “Old Dominion.” It was the fifth dominion that the Crown claimed, Scotland, Ireland, and France, besides England, being the others. After the 1707 Act of Union united the English and Scottish thrones as the kingdom of Great Britain, Virginia’s seal featured the words “En Dat Virginia Quartam”—Virginia Makes a Fourth. (Ireland was to remain a separate kingdom until 1801, at which time the claim to France was finally dropped.) Twelve other colonies on the American eastern seaboard were established, the last being Georgia in 1733. New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island were known as the New England colonies. New York, with Pennsylvania and Delaware, constituted the middle colonies. Virginia and Maryland were known together as the Chesapeake colonies or, with North and South Carolina and Georgia, as the southern colonies. Britain had other colonies, too, on the Atlantic coast of America, both north and south of the thirteen colonies, as the above-named were known. Newfoundland and Nova Scotia were among those to the north; East Florida and West Florida, with other colonies in the British West Indies—notably Jamaica, Barbados, and the Bahamas—lay to the south. Meanwhile, Canada and Louisiana were part of colonial New France.
In principle, there was nothing to prevent colonial subjects from serving in the British army. In practice, the War Office in London advanced the claims of young Englishmen with “interest”—an influential patron—in the metropolis. As a result of his ill health and poor military prospects, as Washington now wrote to inform Stanwix, he meant to quit his command and retire from all public business. It was a dismal outlook for one who had turne
d twenty-six on February 22 of this year and who had exulted, till his recent illness, in physical strength and stamina. George had been born at Pope’s Creek, Westmoreland County, on land near that originally settled by a Washington ancestor in 1657. His birth date was February 11, 1732, according to the Julian calendar that Britain and its colonies then followed. After the Gregorian calendar was adopted in 1752, entailing a loss of eleven days in that year, Washington gave the date of his birth as the eleventh, Old Style. But he kept its anniversary on the twenty-second, New Style.
Washington’s physical strength was to become legendary later in his life. At Home House, the small plantation outside Fredericksburg, Virginia, to which his parents moved when he was young, he could pitch a stone across the wide Rappahannock River, according to “Parson” Weems. Mason Locke Weems is also author of the story that, when aged six, George swung at his father’s cherry tree with a hatchet and could not tell a lie. Though Weems published his narrative in 1800, the year after Washington’s death, the infant Hercules of myth was father of the flesh-and-blood man. George Mercer, the colonel’s aide-de-camp in the Virginia Regiment, reportedly wrote in a letter of 1760 that Washington was “straight as an Indian, measuring 6 feet 2 inches in his stockings.” His frame, according to this letter, was “padded with well developed muscles, indicating great strength.” This impression of “great strength” Washington conveyed for most of his life.
When Washington wrote to Stanwix, in the spring of 1758, both health and strength were in abeyance. Upon his arrival at Mount Vernon the previous November, he had outlined to a neighbor, Mrs. George William Fairfax of Belvoir, the regimen that a local reverend, who doubled as physician, had prescribed for him: “He forbids the use of meats, and substitutes jellies and such kind of food…I have no person that has been used to making these kind of things, and no directions.” George’s younger brother John Augustine, with his wife, Hannah, looked after Mount Vernon and kept house while its tenant served with his regiment. Now, in his sister-in-law’s absence, George applied to Sally Fairfax: “I find myself under a necessity of applying to you for your receipt [recipe] book for a little while, and indeed for such materials to make jellies as you think I may—not just at this time—have. For I can’t get hartshorn shavings [gelatin] anywhere.” Of hyson, or green, tea, he wrote: “I am quite out, and cannot get a supply anywhere in these parts.” He begged also a bottle or two of “mountain or canary [sweet] wine.” The Reverend Charles Green had ordered him to take a glass or two each day, mixed with “water of gum arabic.”
The bachelor colonel had been confident that Sally Fairfax, whose husband was away on business in England, would provide. Not only did the Mount Vernon lands share a border with those of Belvoir, where her father-in-law, Colonel William, had built a handsome brick mansion in the 1730s. Lawrence Washington had married William Fairfax’s daughter Ann in 1743, when she was fourteen. Furthermore, in that same year Lawrence and George’s father, Augustine Washington, had died unexpectedly at home in Fredericksburg. Over the succeeding years George—aged eleven when his father died—completed a sketchy education in Fredericksburg and spent time increasingly at Mount Vernon. At Belvoir, Colonel William took an interest in the boy, and George Washington responded with enthusiasm.
Fairfax was a man of influence as well as one with close connections to the English nobility, being cousin and land agent to Thomas, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron. He also served on the Governor’s Council in Williamsburg and was at one time its president. As senior colonial official in the county, besides, he commanded, with the rank of colonel, the local militia. This was the home guard composed of able-bodied men in the neighborhood, who were formally under the command of the resident royal governor, or deputizing lieutenant governor. As in other colonies, they turned out, bearing arms, a few times a year for training by an adjutant. About a quarter of them trained more regularly and were known as minutemen, from the requirement that they respond at a minute’s notice to news of public danger or affray.
George Washington benefited greatly from Colonel William’s professional relationship with Lord Fairfax. This peer had inherited a vast tract of Virginia, five million acres in all, land that had originally been granted in 1649 by King Charles II, living in exile in France during the English Civil War, to several supporters. On his restoration as king in 1660, the grant assumed substance. By 1719 the land was vested in Lord Fairfax alone and was known as the Fairfax Proprietary. Eccentric but tenacious, he triumphed, in 1745, in a boundary dispute with the Virginia government in the Privy Council in London. His lands included the entire Northern Neck, as the peninsula between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers that jutted out into Chesapeake Bay was known. The extent of his land to the northwest satisfactorily settled, he made his home in the seclusion of the Shenandoah Valley and left it to his cousin William to administer the proprietary.
It is easy to see why life at Mount Vernon and at Belvoir attracted the young George Washington. His father had been a restless spirit who invested in land and iron mines with no great success. What little income Home House—the family farm in Fredericksburg and his inheritance from his father—yielded was swallowed up by the demands of George’s mother and younger brothers and sister who continued to live there. He was in need of a profession and an income. But his mother, Mary Ball Washington, in 1746 stood out against a plan endorsed by Colonel William that George should join the British navy. A friend wrote to Lawrence, who had himself served as a captain of marines in the Spanish Caribbean five years earlier: “She offers several trifling objections such as fond and unthinking mothers habitually suggest; I find that one word against his going has more weight than ten for it.”
Mrs. Washington’s will prevailed, her half-brother, the merchant Joseph Ball, adding, from London, his disapproval of the scheme: “as for any considerable preferment [promotion] in the Navy, it is not to be expected, [as] there are always too many grasping for it here [in England], who have interest [connections], and he has none.” Colonel William stepped into the breach and became young George’s patron. He dispatched him in 1748, when the boy was just seventeen, to survey Fairfax Proprietary lands on the south branch of the Potomac River, west across the Blue Mountain range. While the boundary of the Northern Neck had been in doubt, there had been extensive occupation of the area. Now Lord Fairfax’s tenants were eager to obtain valid grants from the “Proprietor,” as the peer was known. A profitable position for Washington followed a year later when he was appointed county surveyor for Culpeper County, a newly established district in southwestern Virginia. Over the next few years, he conducted 199 surveys in that county and in other parts of western Virginia.
The environs of Mount Vernon and Belvoir were undergoing substantial change. In 1749 Colonel William Fairfax acted in concert with the “Proprietor,” with George Mason of neighboring Gunston Hall, and others to found a new harbor town on the Potomac. Alexandria, as the Fairfax County town was named, swiftly became a thriving port and a center for neighborhood business and gaieties, including horse races and assemblies. More somberly, the market square saw the sales of African Americans, who worked in these founders’ households and fields. Alexandria was to become a town of some importance to Washington.
In 1752 Lawrence died, and his only child, a daughter, survived her father by only two years. George would inherit Mount Vernon one day, if he outlived Lawrence’s widow, Ann, who remarried and moved away. For the moment he rented the plantation from her. But five adventurous years—mostly on the frontier with New France—elapsed before ill health led Washington to seek a permanent residence at the plantation and release his brother John Augustine.
In December 1753 Robert Dinwiddie, lieutenant governor of Virginia—deputing for the royal governor, the Earl of Albemarle—dispatched Washington, then a major in the county militia, on a mission to tell the French commander, Jacques Legardeur de Saint Pierre, to leave the forks of the Ohio. The Frenchman refused.
The following spring
the Virginia Regiment was raised, specifically to defend the colony’s interests at the forks of the Ohio against French Canadian incursions from the north. Washington, now a lieutenant colonel of the regiment, was dispatched again by Dinwiddie with more aggressive orders and was joined by Mingo allies, members of the Iroquois Confederacy. Both the British and the French governments wooed the Six Nations, important Native American tribes—among them the Mohawks, the Oneidas, and the Senecas—who inhabited the region. They were known collectively as the Iroquois. While each tribe was autonomous, they had long before formed a defensive confederacy, with an elected Grand Council of fifty sachems, or elders. The Virginians and their Native American allies ambushed a French patrol, shots were fired, and the enemy commander, Joseph Coulon, Sieur de Jumonville, was brutally killed by the Mingo. Hostilities had begun between European powers in North America that were to become known as the French and Indian War and endure till 1760. Spreading to a wider world, the conflict would—as the Seven Years’ War—end only in 1763. Knowing little of such mighty consequences or that, in a few months, he would surrender a stockade, Fort Necessity, to the French, Washington wrote to his brother, John Augustine, a few days after the Jumonville affair, “I fortunately escaped without a wound, tho’ the right Wing where I stood was exposed to & received all the Enemy’s fire and was the part where the man was killed & the rest wounded. I can with truth assure you, I heard Bulletts whistle and, believe me, there was something charming in the sound.”
During a campaign the following year that became notorious, ending in defeat and death for the British commander, Edward Braddock, Washington acted a hero’s part and in 1756 was commissioned colonel of the Virginia Regiment serving in frontier garrisons. He hoped that Lord Loudoun, currently royal governor of the colony as well as commander-in-chief of the British forces in America, would take the Virginia Regiment into the army establishment. But Loudoun, following the example of previous noble incumbents, never visited Virginia, instead relying on lieutenant governors—usually British commoners—to act in his place. Washington’s hopes for a regular British army commission faded. Living in retirement at Mount Vernon, as he now intended to, he would cease to jockey for position in the world and depend on neighbors such as George Mason of Gunston Hall and the Fairfaxes of Belvoir to enliven his existence.