The Washingtons

by Flora Fraser

  The Fairfax presence on the Potomac was further reduced when the master and mistress of Belvoir left in the spring of 1760 for England. George William had still to settle a part of his father’s estate. While he was away, Washington supervised his friend’s Virginia estate and received in return intelligence from the metropolis. Fairfax wrote, in 1761, of rumors that George III, who had succeeded his grandfather the previous September, was to marry a Brunswick princess and that an “immediate peace” was to ensue. The young king took instead as his bride Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, and the Peace of Paris was not signed until 1763. Washington devoutly hoped that it would be “of long continuance and introductory of mutual advantages to the merchant & planter.” Like other Virginia planters, he had suffered from seizures by enemy French and Spanish vessels of ships bound for England with tobacco and with goods westward. There was no thought in his or Martha’s minds, busy as they were with the plantation and the children, that the British response to the peace would ultimately bring war in its wake. Washington was intent on procuring the land bounty—200,000 acres at the forks of the Ohio and elsewhere—promised him and those others who had joined the Virginia Regiment on its formation in 1754, once the war was at an end. These western lands, whenever they should be forthcoming, would substantially increase his acreage, and offered virgin ground for planting tobacco, if the Mount Vernon yield slowed. It was a crop that ultimately exhausted the soil, if intensively farmed. Virginia landowners, dependent on the plant as a cash crop, did not practice rotation.

  If the cultivation of tobacco at Mount Vernon brought anxiety, the house’s situation provided solace. One had only to open the door at the back of the hall to step onto lawns with sweeping views of Maryland across the river. Mount Vernon was now no longer the bachelor house devoid of comforts from which Washington had written to Sally Fairfax, begging for jellies to mend his health. Washington, inclined to be querulous, was a very contented married man.

  This is apparent in a letter that he wrote, only nine months after his marriage, to Richard Washington in England. He referred to “The longing desire, which for many years I have had, of visiting the great metropolis of that kingdom [London].” That desire, he now accepted, was unlikely soon to be satisfied: “I am now tied by the leg and must set inclination aside.” He was not complaining. “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.”

  The following year, 1760, Martha gave her brother-in-law, Burwell Bassett, who had been visiting, a letter to take home to his wife, Nancy: “Mr Bassett will inform you of the mirth and gaiety that he has seen.” The Washingtons’ relationship had to withstand one specific strain, as the years of their marriage multiplied. Martha had given her first husband four children. She and George were and remained childless. No reference to any “accident,” or miscarriage, no repining concerning the want of an heir, survives. It was not a time in which men doubted their fertility. We may assume that it represented a nagging anxiety at least, with hope and disappointment thrown in.

  Mount Vernon was now astir, after years of comparative neglect while Washington had been at the frontier. He later told his former fellow officer, Robert Stewart, that he “had provisions of all kinds to buy for the first two or three years; and my plantation to stock.” With a compound of capital investment and innovative methods of agriculture, he was convinced that he could stimulate both the quality and the price of the tobacco he grew at Mount Vernon. Among other books he sent for from Cary was one with the seductive subtitle A Plain, Easy, and Demonstrative Method of speedily growing Rich, by a Country Gentleman. He informed the London agent that he would now add to the Parke Custis freight he dispatched from the York and Pamunkey his own Potomac tobacco. George Washington had once been grateful to Colonel William Fairfax for the introduction to his namesake, the London agent Richard Washington. The illustrious London firms he now did business with—Cary and Co., Capel and Osgood Hanbury, and James Gildart—were more enterprising in procuring the “neat and fashionable” goods that the Washingtons were eager to acquire.

  Martha presided over a household that included thirteen house slaves, many of them Parke Custis dower slaves who had accompanied her north. On Doll, a cook-housekeeper, she relied. Lame Alice was a “sempstress,” or seamstress, charged annually, with others, with making clothes and stockings from cheap imported cloth for each of the field slaves. In the nursery quarters a boy named Julius wore the Parke Custis livery to proclaim his position as Jacky’s attendant. Molly, another seamstress, and Rose looked after his younger sister, Patsy. In the autumn of 1761 the children began lessons with a tutor, Walter Magowan, who took up residence at Mount Vernon. In the guardian accounts he kept for Jacky and Patsy, Washington charged half of Walter Magowan’s salary to each of the children. The children, Martha wrote proudly the following year, “learn their books very fast.”

  Never far away lurked the medical men. Martha suffered from measles and then from whooping cough in the years following her marriage. Washington himself was plagued by episodes of the “ague,” or malaria. Only Jacky was in general in robust health. Patsy had worrying “fits” a year after her move north, in 1761, when she was only five or six. Martha wrote to Margaret Green, the local minister’s wife: “I have the pleasure to tell you my dear little girl is much better. She has lost her fits and fevers both, and seems to be getting well very fast. We carried her out yesterday in the chariot and the change of air refreshed her very much.” But these “fits and fevers” would recur, and increase in frequency and in severity, as Patsy grew older.

  The Reverend Green, when not officiating in church, acted as physician to the family. For a time Dr. Laurie of Alexandria tended, for a lesser fee, to the field slaves. They led a crowded existence in log cabins grouped together in the different quarters of the plantation. Diseases, malaria and smallpox included, spread easily. On occasion Laurie also doctored the family, not always satisfactorily. He appeared at the house one evening in April 1760—“I may add, drunk,” Washington noted. The doctor “blooded” Martha in the morning, but what Washington termed “his incapacity to attend the calls of his profession” increased. Well before the medic’s early demise, the Washingtons turned to Dr. William Rumney, a new doctor who had set up his stall in Alexandria. He treated sick slaves and in addition ministered to Patsy, as her fits and fevers worsened.

  Martha did not lose touch with her family in New Kent County. She visited her mother periodically at Chestnut Grove. She saw her brother, the lawyer Bartholomew Dandridge, when she was in Williamsburg with Washington, and was intimate with her sister Nancy Bassett. They corresponded freely about their home lives and about Dandridge family concerns. “I am very sorry to hear my mamma is still complaining and her staying at home so much as she does, I believe, is a great hurt to her,” Martha wrote in 1762. “I hope she is happier at home than she seemed when I was down.” Referring to their younger sister who, aged thirteen, was still living with their mother, she added: “I should be glad [if] you would take care of Betsy and keep her in proper order. She has her own way so much at home, I am afraid she will be quite spoiled.”

  Washington kept a kind of farmer’s journal. Here he entered weather conditions and dates on which plantings, fellings, and harvests had taken place. He jotted down prices paid, recorded visitors to Mount Vernon, and noted visits and journeys he and Martha and the children made. Entries for January 1760 offer a snapshot of the Washingtons’ early married life. When the diary opens, Martha is suffering from the measles, and Nancy Bassett is visiting. An entry for the second begins: “Mrs. Barnes”—a relation on his mother’s side living in the area—“returned home in my chariot, the weather being too bad to travel in an open carriage—which, together with Mrs. Washington’s indisposition, confined me to the house, and gave me an opportunity of posting my books and putting them in good order.” Three days later the Reverend Green
came to prescribe for Martha, and Sally Fairfax came visiting that same morning. “Just as we were going to dinner Captain Walter Stuart”—a former colleague of Washington’s in the Virginia Regiment—“appeared with Dr. Laurie.” Some of the slaves had come down with the measles. “The evening being very cold, and the wind high, Mrs. Fairfax went home in the chariot.”

  As the chariot did not return in time next day, the Washingtons were prevented from going to Pohick Church, an old wooden building soon to be replaced by a brick structure, about seven miles from Mount Vernon. Next day Mrs. Bassett accompanied her brother-in-law into Alexandria. They visited, among others, a merchant, Mr. Kirkpatrick. Here Washington commanded a keg of butter weighing seventy-one pounds, destined to be stored underground. Washington also asked Dr. Craik, the Virginia Regiment surgeon, now living in retirement, to find him a gardener. Following a visit by the Washingtons and Nancy to the Fairfaxes at Belvoir, on the twelfth George escorted his sister-in-law part of the way home to Eltham.

  There was entertainment to be had in Alexandria in February, though the month also brought snow, ice, and rain. To promote the harbor town, the leading men of the town and of the neighborhood, including Washington, regularly acted as managers of balls and assemblies. From the beginning of their marriage, both Washingtons were regular in their attendance of these occasions, including, in January 1769, “the Monthly Ball”—probably a subscription affair. These provincial gatherings were not always of the standard that obtained in Williamsburg, let alone the far-distant metropolis that was London. Following the ball in February 1760 Washington had no complaint of the “music and dancing…the chief entertainment” provided. He and Martha stayed the night at the Carlyles’ imposing mansion in town and may not have reached it till late into the night. Inhabitants of other colonies, as well as visitors from Europe, were astonished at how hard and how long Virginians would dance. But he was offended by the supper the ball managers offered: only “great plenty of bread and butter,” some biscuits with tea, and coffee, “which the drinkers could not distinguish from hot water sweetened.”

  Later this summer Martha congratulated Nancy on the birth of a second daughter: “I wish I could say boy, as I know how much one of that sex was desired by you all.” She added, as an experienced mother: “I also hope you are out of all fear of sore breasts before this time.” Visits to Mount Vernon that Nancy planned did not always take place. She was rapidly becoming the mother of a large family. If her younger sister’s fecundity caused Martha to mourn the continuing want of an heir at Mount Vernon, she made no mention of it. After Nancy cried off a visit, owing to family illness at Eltham, in the spring of 1762, Martha wrote: “It was a very great disappointment to me your not coming as we had so long expected you…I have had a very dark time since I came home. I believe it was owing to the severe weather we have had. I think I never knew such a winter as it has been.” From Martha, so positive and cheerful in general, this is a remarkable admission. The weather did not usually so affect her. Possibly Nancy knew of another cause for Martha’s “dark time.” Thoughts of a miscarriage or hopes of pregnancy dashed arise. But this year Martha seems to have been in a nervous state generally, and the Washingtons’ marriage suffered accordingly.

  She told Nancy in August 1762 of a fortnight’s visit she had paid with her husband to his brother, John Augustine Washington, in Westmoreland County. She had taken Patsy with her but left Jacky at Mount Vernon “for a trial, to see how well I could stay without him.” It was a disaster. “If I at any time heard the dogs bark or a noise out, I thought there was a person sent for me. I often fancied he was sick or some accident had happened to him.” The upshot was, she no longer felt able to accompany Washington when he went down to the House sessions in Williamsburg. She wrote to Nancy: “nothing but my children’s interest should prevent me the satisfaction of seeing you and my good friends.” There is more than a hint that she pined for the gaiety of the colonial capital. “If I could leave my children in as good care as you can, I would never let Mr Washington come down without me,” she wrote. But she was adamant. Martha committed herself to the care of Jacky and Patsy at Mount Vernon. Washington came and went to the Parke Custis estates “below,” and to Williamsburg, on increasingly vexatious business.

  “I do not like to recriminate on a subject,” he wrote ominously to Cary and Co., going on to do exactly that, on April 26, 1763. Another agent, he was informed, had sold George William Fairfax’s tobacco for twelve shillings a hundredweight. It was, Washington wrote, “of the same kind exactly” as some he had shipped to Cary, and for which he had received a much lesser sum. He could “conceive no reason therefore” why his neighbor’s tobacco should so far outsell his. The truth was, the soil varied dramatically between even neighboring plantations, owing to a number of factors. But he might well complain of the prices the London agents paid for his crops. Not only were all his—expensive—efforts to improve his farmland failing; other sums, gone to rescue Mount Vernon from neglect, had, as he told his friend Robert Stewart, “swallowed up, before I well knew where I was, all the money I got by marriage—nay more, brought me in debt.” He had just received a statement of his account with Cary and Co., showing that he was in their debt. It was, he wrote to Stewart, “transmitted to me with the additional aggravation of a hint at the largeness of it.”

  Washington had prided himself on being a good manager. He was disconcerted to find he was in the company of those Virginians who ignored their balance sheets with the agents in London and spent profligately. He had been too complacent. With Martha, he had ordered luxuries as well as staples too freely. The first period of contentment in the Washingtons’ marriage was at an end. Now husband and wife had to pull together if they were to escape the specter of debt that hung over every colonial planter’s head. In mitigation, he wrote to Stewart, he owed to no one in Virginia, unlike many others whose estates the public gazettes ultimately offered for sale. The land bounty he was owed, when paid, would bring more acreage in the west. George was resourceful and determined, and Martha was to prove as tenacious in her pursuit of economy as she had been eager for opulence.

  5

  Family Affairs

  “a promising boy…and will possess a very large fortune”

  THE WASHINGTONS HAD TO CONTEND with the unfavorable character of the tobacco trade. Furthermore, the Peace of Paris, signed on February 10, 1763, by Britain, France, and Spain, brought in its wake Native American incursions in the backcountry. These threatened the stability of George’s investments westward. Although he had not as yet received his portion of the land bounty due to members of the Virginia Regiment who had signed up in 1754, since first serving on the frontier and even before that he had been accruing parcels of land there. With the peace, ownership of all lands in North America east of the Mississippi formerly French passed to Britain. Native Americans long settled in those regions regarded their new overlords with mistrust. Sir Jeffery Amherst, British commander-in-chief in North America since September 1758 and governor of Virginia since September 1759, refused to pay village chiefs the customary tribute. Moreover, British colonists from Virginia and elsewhere settled in the West without regard for Native American claims on the land. Urged on by a charismatic chief, Pontiac, the different Indian nations combined to attack British garrisons and settlements. Disturbed, George conducted a tour of inspection of his western lands, which were mostly rented out to tenant farmers. He wrote on his return home in July 1763: “it is melancholy to behold the terror that has seized them [the frontier Virginians], and the fatal consequences that must follow, in the loss of their harvest and crops; the whole back country being in forts or flying.”

  Political affairs in London and in Williamsburg were no less alarming. That May the House of Burgesses had been unexpectedly ordered to assemble. The value of current money, as opposed to sterling, which the colony had issued over six years of war with the French and Indians, had fallen steeply. It was now about a third of sterling’s value
. Other colonial currencies had similarly depreciated. When the House assembled, Governor Francis Fauquier informed the representatives that the Board of Trade required them to supply to British merchants greater “security in recovering sterling debts due from this colony to them.” In consequence, a Currency Act forbidding further issue of current money was making its way through Parliament in London. This announcement effectively blocked the colony from raising and funding regiments to combat the turmoil on the frontier. Instead, militia were drafted to aid the British regiments, which were part of a force policing the colonies following the peace, at an annual cost of £225,000.

  The turbulence in western Virginia lessened after a royal proclamation designed to appease the Native Americans was issued in October. It forbade colonists to settle west of a “Proclamation Line,” or boundary line, running from Georgia in the south as far as New England and the length of the Appalachian mountains. The lands west of this line were reserved for Native American occupation. Colonists with farms beyond the line and others who viewed the West as ripe for development were not the only losers. In the “Indian Reserve,” too, lay the acres that had been promised in 1754 to Washington and others. In addition, the proclamation instructed colonial governors to make land grants to all veterans of the war, ranging from 50 to 5,000 acres depending on rank. The latter area was due Washington, as a colonel of his regiment. This land also, lying west of the line, the Virginia governor was powerless to grant. Washington regarded the concession to the Native Americans as what he later termed a “temporary expedient” and did not give up hope of claiming, at a later date, the land due him. He interested himself in a project to drain the Great Dismal Swamp that lay south of Williamsburg, convinced that there was “excessive rich” land under the mass of reed and fallen tree branches that clogged the desolate expanses. His crops at Mount Vernon were a more pressing concern. In July he wrote to his brother-in-law Bassett of “rust” that blighted the wheat, and of “continual and excessive rains” that had caused weeds and grass to grow in abundance and smother his maize and tobacco. In short, though the French and Indian War was at an end, the Virginia planter’s lot in the mid-1760s was not an easy one.