The Washingtons

by Flora Fraser

  Martha’s children were growing up fast, as the guardian accounts that Washington kept so scrupulously and the invoices sent to Cary and Co. on their behalf attest. While the Washingtons strained to keep their own expenditures in check, they took pains to accord both children accoutrements that advertised their standing, including liveries for their attendants, crested silverware, and refined or “handsome” dress. Jacky, Washington was to inform a schoolmaster into whose care his stepson passed, was “a promising boy—the last of his family—and will possess a very large fortune.” Tobacco from the Parke Custis lands on the Pamunkey and York Rivers continued to yield well and to command substantial prices in London. Patsy, though she owned no land or slaves, had received a third of her father’s personal estate in cash, stocks, and bonds. Belonging, like her brother, to the first tier of Virginia planter families, she could expect to marry another of that charmed and wealthy circle.

  When Patsy was seven or eight, in 1764, Martha asked Robert Cary and Co. to pass a note to Mrs. Shelbury, a milliner in London’s Dean Street in Soho, who had previously supplied her with ruffles. “I have directed all the goods for Miss Custis’s use to be got from you,” Martha wrote, and instructed the milliner to send “Such things as Misses of her age usually wear here…if you can get those which may be more genteel and proper for her, I shall have no objections to [it].” Reverting to prudence, she made the proviso that if Mrs. Shelbury selected items of superior quality, she should do it “with frugality.” Patsy being so young, “a superfluity, or expense in dress would be altogether unnecessary.” Martha ordered for herself stays that she specified, with the Virginia summer heat in mind, must be “good, easy made and very thin.” She had one last instruction to give: “Mr Washington wrote to Mr Cary in February last to purchase of you a French [pearl] necklace & earrings for me. I would rather choose a blue Turkey stone [turquoise] necklace and earrings sent in their place, if the price does not exceed two guineas.” It was a woman’s prerogative to change her mind, even when the woman was of as firm a character as Martha.

  Prowess in the ballroom was deemed in the colony the mark of a gentleman or of a lady. Washington himself was for most of his life admired for his elegance and stamina on the dance floor, although Martha, with time, ceded her place to younger women. Jacky and Patsy, rising ten and eight, were inscribed annually as scholars of “Mr MacKay,” dancing master. Later they shared with other children of the neighborhood in classes that a Mr. Christian gave in one or another of their homes. Further tuition in the “polite arts” for the children was supplied by John Stedlar, an itinerant music master, originally from Germany, who had served in the recent war. The spinet, or small harpsichord, that occupied pride of place in the Mount Vernon parlor was Patsy’s province. A fine instrument, it had been procured by Robert Cary in 1761 from “Mr. Plinius, harpsichord maker in South Audley Street.” Washington had instructed the agent to ask for it “as for himself or a friend.” If it was known to be for export, the cabinetmaker would, he feared, supply something inferior and at an inflated price. Though Washington himself played no instrument, before her marriage to Washington Martha had sent for a copy of the “Bullfinch…a choice collection of…English songs set to music,” and there is an indication that she joined the lessons Stedlar gave. She later made a granddaughter at Mount Vernon do long hours of keyboard practice, and Patsy’s hours at the spinet were very likely arduous. In addition, Stedlar taught Jacky the “fiddle,” or violin, and requests for new “fiddle strings” over the years indicate that he persevered with the instrument.

  In the guardian accounts, valuable horses, handsome saddlery, and stabling bills feature over the years, as Jacky and Patsy became confident riders and ventured farther afield. Horsemanship was another central plank in the composition of Virginians, be they gentleman or lady. That Jacky should have a good seat in the saddle was essential. When he was older, there would be careful choices for him to make—of riding horses, hunters, and carriage horses for his personal use and stallions and mares for breeding. Patsy would in due course, like her mother, keep at least one riding horse.

  Walter Magowan continued to reside at Mount Vernon and gave the children their formal lessons. Neither Martha nor George had inhibitions about speaking their mind when others failed to meet their rigorous standards. It is unlikely that they were anything but strict where Jacky’s and Patsy’s manners and deportment were concerned. Washington was also eager that Jacky should acquire an education that would distinguish the boy from so many of his peers who frittered away their lives—and patrimony—gambling, at the races, foxhunting, and neglecting their estates. Washington himself, like all his contemporaries, spent his share of time and money at the gaming tables and in taverns and sponsored race meetings in Alexandria and elsewhere. But he was ever moderate in these avocations. Keenly aware of the inadequacies of his own education, he now had the satisfaction of ordering, for Jacky and Magowan to look over together, Cicero’s De Familiaris and Erasmus’s On Follies. At thirteen, the boy began work on “the Greek testament.” Attendance at a “sleight of hand” performance the previous year in Alexandria, where Jacky incurred a charge of sevenpence, is a rare frivolity in the records Washington kept.

  The children were not without friends, either within the neighborhood or farther afield. Washington was to write to a rich merchant uncle of Martha’s in London in 1765 that they rarely saw his wife’s relations “below” more than once a year—“not always that.” In the case of the Bassetts, that was not strictly true. Not only did the Bassetts visit Mount Vernon, but now that Jacky and Patsy were older, Martha stayed with them in the autumn at Eltham, while Washington conducted business in Williamsburg. The elder Bassett children were of an age with Jacky and Patsy; the youngest child, Frances, or “Fanny,” was born in 1767. Martha’s mother, Frances Dandridge, stayed firmly on the Pamunkey, maintaining a home at Chestnut Grove for her youngest daughter, Betsy, who was, in 1764, fifteen and unmarried. The elder of Martha’s brothers, William, lived there too and farmed the small plantation for his mother. Between Martha and her mother appears to have prevailed that mixture of affection and irritation that can characterize relations between a mother and eldest daughter of strong wills. They may both have been grateful that Martha’s marriage had put several days’ traveling distance between them. Bartholomew, her younger brother, who had three daughters, lived, when in New Kent, at Pamocra, a “dower” Burbidge plantation come to him by marriage, and acted for Dandridge family members in Williamsburg when a lawyer was needed.

  As for the children’s paternal relations, there were no other Custises, and in practice Jacky and Patsy saw little of their Byrd connections. There was a brood of ten Carters at Cleve, an imposing mansion in Gloucester County, descendants of Daniel Parke’s daughter, Lucy Parke Byrd. But Cleve, on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, lay remote from Mount Vernon. Martha and George and the children, on the other hand, routinely saw much of Washington’s own brothers’ and sister’s families in northern Virginia. Washington was devoted to his only sister, Betty, sixteen months his junior, who resembled him in her features and even in her stature, it is said. Betty was the second wife of Fielding Lewis, an enterprising Fredericksburg merchant. Their palatial home, Millbrook, was a lively and luxurious resting place where the Washingtons and the children were accustomed to stay when journeying to Williamsburg. The elder Lewis cousins were of an age with Jacky and Patsy. George and Betty’s mother, Mary Ball Washington, remained at Home House just outside the town. This residence offered sparse comfort, but Mary Washington, as set in her ways as Frances Dandridge, could not be persuaded to move into town.

  Both George Washington’s elder half-brothers were now dead. He had three full brothers, all younger than he, all married and with children. Samuel, next in age to him, lived at Chotank in Stafford County, twenty miles east of Fredericksburg. At Chotank also lived a cousin, Lund Washington. In response to the demands of estate business, George offered him, in 1764, the position
of land agent. Eager to accrue funds to one day purchase a farm of his own, Lund accepted the job and took up residence with George and Martha. Next in order of the brothers came John Augustine. He and his wife, Hannah Bushrod Washington, lived at Bushfield Hall, on a tributary of the Potomac in Westmoreland County. Their circle included the Carters at Nomini Hall and the Lees at Stratford Hall, who provided Tidewater hospitality of a magnificence unknown in Alexandria and Fairfax County, when George and Martha visited. Washington was grateful for John Augustine’s help in managing Mount Vernon while he himself was on the frontier. He meant to will the estate to this brother or his heirs, should Martha fail to produce a son. But the couple at Mount Vernon still lived in hope. Washington, cautious, said nothing of his intentions. Charles, youngest of all the brothers, was a magistrate in Fredericksburg. Later he was to move west and found Charles Town in Frederick County.

  The comings and goings of these Northern Neck relations, be it for a christening—but never at Mount Vernon—or a ball, for Christmas or Easter or for no special reason, were a source of enjoyment for George and Martha, as well as an obligation. All were made welcome by Martha. Sociable, practical, and familial, she was a consummate hostess. Return visits were obligatory, and the stays in each place prolonged.

  At home Washington had turned from growing tobacco to sowing wheat and had it in mind to grow hemp and flax, for which the British government had declared a bounty. He continued his attempts to improve all aspects of the estate. When he grafted, in March 1763, a “fine early May cherry,” and, the following March, “the black pear of Worcester…a large coarse pear for baking,” he acknowledged in both cases his benefactor, Colonel George Mason. In return, Washington was to keep Mason abreast of some extraordinary transactions that occurred in the House of Burgesses, beginning in December 1764. A Committee of the whole House sent an address, memorial, and remonstrance to King George III, the House of Lords, and the Commons respectively. They protested, though humbly, the news that a Stamp Act was to be passed in England in order to raise revenue for the defense of the American colonies. Legal papers, newspapers, magazines, and even playing cards were all to be printed on paper embossed or stamped in Britain. This paper was to be brought to the colonies and paid for in British pounds. Since Virginia’s foundation, it had been in the remit only of the colony’s legislature, the burgesses, to raise internal, or direct, taxes.

  The act was passed, despite all protests, in March 1765. “We might as well have hindered the sun’s setting,” Benjamin Franklin, agent for Pennsylvania, in London, was to write four months later to Charles Thomson in Philadelphia. He counseled “Frugality and industry.” Mason, like Washington, had a seat in the House but, long paralyzed by gout, went to Williamsburg rarely. He had, anyway, the habits more of a philosopher than of a politician and liked to read, sitting at a table in the Gunston Hall parlor, while his ten children streamed about him. Yet Mason made his mark as much as anyone in the colonial resistance that followed the passage of the act and, following its repeal in 1766, of other revenue acts that came after. He had had the run of his uncle John Mercer’s law library in youth, though he had never practiced. His chosen weapon was natural law, and his chosen conduit George Washington, a Potomac neighbor whose own scanty knowledge of law came principally from boundary disputes.

  Washington was, for all his lack of education, a diligent student and an able collaborator with Mason. It would appear, from a letter that he wrote in September 1765 to Martha’s uncle, London merchant Francis Dandridge, that the master of Mount Vernon regarded the Stamp Act as an “unconstitutional method of taxation.” He did not ally himself with that “Speculative part of the colonists” who regarded it as a “direful attack upon their liberties.” Samuel and Charles Washington were to become members of a brash Westmoreland Association that threatened violence against government officials. George sought Mason’s advice and returned to Williamsburg time and time again with his instructions in mind if not on paper. Martha was not only to play hostess to the pair as they consulted anxiously at Mount Vernon; she was to cheer their partnership all the way. The course they steered was to lead to an increase in intimacy with those who supported their initiative. But it led also to division between the Washingtons and those, like the Bryan Fairfaxes, who hesitated to criticize the London government. Of division between husband and wife, there would be none.

  6

  Acts and Associations

  “many Luxuries which we lavish our substance to Great Britain for”

  FROM LONDON IN AUGUST 1765, Virginia Regiment veteran Robert Stewart had written to Washington. He entrusted his letter to George Mercer, formerly Washington’s aide-de-camp at Fort Loudon and then in England. Mercer, wrote Stewart, “returns to collect a Tax upon his native Land.” Earlier in the summer, thanks to the influence of his father, John Mercer, George had been appointed stamp distributor for Virginia. With the cargo of taxed paper that he now brought across the sea came Stewart’s more welcome letter to Washington. The veteran recalled “the many very pleasant days I have so agreeably passed in your most desirable Company” and sent his “dutiful and affectionate respects” to “Your Lady.”

  Many very pleasant and sociable days continued to occur at Mount Vernon. Washington was more than usually occupied on his farms. He was sowing and reaping hemp and flax for the first time with mixed results. The children’s social circle was widening as they got older. Patsy was friends with a group of girls from Alexandria—the daughters of merchants John Carlyle, William Ramsay, and John Dalton—who accompanied their elders when they visited Martha. Visits to “the play” in town amused the whole Washington family. Churchgoing also, with the opportunities for display, was not entirely without its rewards. It was impossible, however, to ignore the coming enactment of the Stamp Act on November 1. On this date George Mercer would attempt to sell his sheaves of stamped paper in Williamsburg. Virginians, preeminent among Americans in their resistance to the act, intended to refuse to purchase it. Washington discussed the implications in a letter he addressed in September to Francis Dandridge, Martha’s surviving paternal uncle in London.

  This elderly, rich, and dying relation had apparently broken off a correspondence with his niece when she married her second husband. “I should hardly have taken the liberty, Sir, of Introducing myself to your acquaintance in this manner, and at this time,” wrote Washington, “lest you should think my motives for doing of it arose from sordid views.” A letter he had received this summer from Cary and Co. had given him “Reason to believe that such an advance on my side would not be altogether disagreeable on yours.” The legacy-hunter was disappointed. When Dandridge died later that year, he left £600 to his sister-in-law, Martha’s mother, and nothing to Martha. Like tobacco, flax, and hemp, bequests required intensive cultivation.

  In Stewart’s August letter to Washington, he had referred to copies circulating in London of “some very warm and bold Resolves,” passed by the Virginia legislature. These were the so-called Virginia Resolves, or Resolutions, that young Patrick Henry, lawyer turned burgess, had unexpectedly submitted late in May of that year. They were carried in the House, admittedly by a narrow margin and at a time when most planters, Washington included, had left for home. Four of the Resolves Henry proposed made innocuous reference to the original settlers of Virginia, and to the charters granted them by James I. These entitled colonists to all “liberties, privileges and immunities” enjoyed by British subjects “abiding and born in the realm of England.” The audacious fifth Resolve, referring to the Virginia legislature’s right to tax the colony, asserted: “every Attempt to vest such Power in any person or persons whatsoever other than the General Assembly aforesaid has a manifest Tendency to destroy British as well as American Freedom.” The reference to the Stamp Act passed in London and taxing Virginians was clear.

  Thomas Jefferson, then a young clerk, observed from the lobby the violent debate that followed. He was to write of Henry: “He appeared to me to speak as
Homer wrote.” The speaker of the House, John Robinson, challenged Henry with the cry of “Treason.” The burgess, in midflow, concluded a sentence that had begun “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell,” with the more peaceable phrase “and George the Third may profit by their example.” But he added, gazing defiantly at Robinson: “If this be treason, make the most of it.”

  Following the passage—by one vote—of this last Resolve, it was revoked the following day. Governor Fauquier made haste, on June 1, having once given his assent to bills presented, to dissolve the House. After a new House of Burgesses was elected in July, he issued proclamation after proclamation to prorogue it. As a result, no representatives could attend the Stamp Act Congress that New York hosted that autumn. But the damage was done. Over the course of the summer, all five Resolves circulated throughout the colonies. General Gage, commander-in-chief in North America, wrote home to Secretary of State Henry Conway that they “gave the signal for a general outcry over the continent.”