The Washingtons Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2015 by Flora Fraser

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Bloomsbury Publishing, London, in 2015.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Fraser, Flora.

  The Washingtons : George and Martha, “join’d by friendship, crown’d by love” / Flora Fraser.—First edition.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 9780307272782 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 9781101875858 (eBook) 1. Washington, George, 1732–1799—Marriage. 2. Washington, Martha, 1731–1802—Marriage. 3. Presidents—United States—Biography. 4. Presidents’ spouses—United States—Biography. 5. Generals—United States—Biography. 6. Generals’ spouses—United States—Biography. 7. United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Biography. I. Title.

  E312.19.F85 2015

  973.4’10922—dc23

  [B] 2014045521

  Cover image: The Washington Family, 1789–1796 by Edward Savage (detail), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C./Bridgeman Images

  Cover design by Kelly Blair

  Endpaper maps by David Lindroth

  v4.1

  a

  For

  Paul and Daisy, beloved New Americans

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Maps

  Prologue: Casting Lots for His Garments, July 1802

  “There was something in the whole scene…that shocked me.”

  BOOK ONE: THE COLONEL AND HIS LADY, 1758–1775

  1. Colonial Colonel

  “no prospect of preferment”

  2. Dandridge’s Daughter

  “I shall yearly ship a considerable part of the tobacco I make to you.”

  3. North and South

  “the animating prospect of possessing Mrs Custis”

  4. Mount Vernon, Fairfax County

  “Mr Bassett will inform you of the mirth and gaiety that he has seen.”

  5. Family Affairs

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

  6. Acts and Associations

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

  7. Fevers and Physicians

  “Miss Custis’s Complaint…rather Increases than abates.”

  8. The Schooling of Jacky Custis

  “His Mind…more ever turnd to Dogs Horses & Guns.”

  9. Death and Adjustment

  “the lowest ebb of Misery”

  10. Continental Army

  “the Crisis is arrived when we must assert our Rights”

  BOOK TWO: THE GENERAL AND “LADY WASHINGTON,” 1775–1783

  11. Taking Command, 1775

  “I have sent an Invitation to Mrs Washington to come to me.”

  12. Besieging Boston, 1775–1776

  “a number of cannon and shells from Boston and Bunkers Hill”

  13. New York and Philadelphia, 1776

  “the place shall not be carried without some loss”

  14. Retreat to the Delaware, 1776–1777

  “I think the game is pretty near up.”

  15. Morristown and Brandywine, 1777

  “Mrs Washington is excessive fond of the General and he of her.”

  16. Valley Forge, 1777–1778

  “No bread, no soldier.”

  17. Philadelphia and Middlebrook, New Jersey, 1778–1779

  “His Excellency and Mrs Greene danced upwards of three hours.”

  18. The Hard Winter: Morristown, 1779–1780

  “so extremely cold, that there was no living abroad”

  19. Home and Headquarters, 1780–1781

  “she reminded me of the Roman matrons”

  20. Victory on the York and Private Grief, 1781

  “General goes to Colonel Bassett’s where Mr Custis is very ill”

  21. Uncertainty and Disaffection, 1781–1783

  “this long and bloody contest”

  22. Peace on the Hudson, 1783

  “I now see the Port opening to which I have been steering.”

  BOOK THREE: AFTER THE WAR, 1784–1802

  23. Mount Vernon, 1784–1786

  “You will see the plain manner in which we live…”

  24. Conventions and Elections, 1787–1789

  “a tendency to sweep me back into the tide of public affairs”

  25. New York Houses, 1789–1790

  “The President to accept no invitations…”

  26. Market Street, Philadelphia, 1790–1793

  “events which are governed by the public voice”

  27. Second Term, 1793–1797

  “the Turpitude of the Jacobins touches him more nearly than he owns”

  28. Retirement, 1797–1798

  “Rooms to Paint—Paper—Whitewash &ca &ca”

  29. The Death of a President, 1799

  “I die hard; but I am not afraid to go.”

  30. Dissolution, 1799–1802

  “we found this excellent Woman grieving incessantly”

  Acknowledgments

  Abbreviations Used in the Notes and Bibliography

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  Also by Flora Fraser

  Illustrations

  PROLOGUE: CASTING LOTS FOR

  HIS GARMENTS, JULY 1802

  “There was something in the whole scene…that shocked me.”

  AN EXTRAORDINARY MEETING of Martha Washington’s heirs and legatees took place on Thursday, July 22, 1802, “up stairs” at Mount Vernon, the plantation home on the Potomac in Virginia where she had died two months earlier. Those gathered were mostly related either by blood or by marriage to Martha, George Washington’s widow. The “Private sales” that now took place were of personal effects that had belonged to the commander and president himself. Among these items, which had passed to Martha on George’s death in 1799, were a gold watch, chain, and seal, a box of shaving soap, Masonic aprons, sunglasses, a ruler, a “sandwich box,” and a hat.

  William Thornton, architect of the new “Federal City” nearby that Congress had named after the nation’s first president, was deeply offended. He wrote to Thomas Jefferson that the legatees had “cast lots for his [Washington’s] garments! There was something in the whole scene, and in the general proceedings, that shocked me. But it was a scene which, although devoid of feeling, was not without interest.” Public sales of items judged less personal had already occurred over the two previous days, in accordance with the will Martha had made in September 1800. They were held in order to provide for the education of two of her nephews and a great-nephew. They offered, besides, opportunities for an idolatrous public as well as family and friends to obtain certain paraphernalia of the marriage that is the subject of this book. Jefferson, president since 1801, wanted the large “terrestrial globe” that stood in his predecessor’s library. Martha’s grandson, Washington Custis—George Washington Parke Custis, in full—bought, among many other items, a “markee,” one of the campaign tents that had served General Washington and the Revolutionary army a quarter of a century earlier. Custis also purchased a trunk. His sister, Eliza Parke Custis Law, was later to claim that in it their grandmother had stowed her possessions when she joined her husband every winter of the war. George and Martha had alr
eady willed to friends and relatives other memorabilia, pictures, prints, and household items. These poignant sales, public and private, effaced further vestiges at Mount Vernon of a marriage that had endured and only strengthened over forty years.

  These sales also served to feed the cult of Washington the hero, the stern and judicious Father of the Nation. The cult reached its apogee with the dedication in the United States capital in 1885 of the Washington Monument, then the tallest building in the world. For the cult, Martha Washington was an irrelevance, even an inconvenience. No wife or Mother of the Nation was wanted in the virile nineteenth century. No woman’s portrait appeared on any U.S. postage stamp during that century. (Martha’s head eventually graced the dark lilac eight-cent stamp in 1902.) Admittedly, Martha was portrayed on the silver dollar certificate of 1886, becoming the only woman ever to have appeared on U.S. paper currency.1 Ten years later, though, when the beautiful Educational Series of 1896 was launched, Washington’s portrait joined Martha’s on the certificate. This pairing was a rare concession to the reality of the life of the Father of the Country. The numinous wording of the funeral address that Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee gave in 1799 lingered, and Washington was celebrated as “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Men—and women—forgot that Lee, who knew both Washingtons well, had also declared the founding father “to the dear object of his affections [Martha] exemplarily tender.” As the man faded from memory and the monument came into being, Washington was seen as a man of destiny, and men of destiny customarily bestride the world alone.

  No one during the Washingtons’ lifetime would have thought of ignoring Martha. Officers welcomed her arrival in camp during the bleak winter months at Valley Forge and Morristown. They knew that her husband’s temper, which was uncertain, would mellow with her arrival and his morale improve. Among Washington’s greatest achievements as commander-in-chief was keeping together for eight years an army of officers and other ranks who were, though paid, volunteers and, more often than not, on very short enlistments. He owed much to affable Martha, an assiduous hostess at headquarters to congressional committees, state representatives, and foreign envoys.

  Later, forging with her husband a presidential style in New York and Philadelphia, Martha Washington was strong, capable, and tough. Where her husband was concerned, she remained as romantic as a young bride all their married life. Her instinctive preference was for the man of action, not the head of state. Following George’s death in 1799, she commissioned a memorial miniature showing him as a younger man in military uniform. Her own age and grief are not disguised in a companion miniature. Following Martha’s own death and interment beside George in the vault at Mount Vernon, the miniatures were separated. In 2008 they were reunited at the Yale University Art Gallery, luminous and palpable souvenirs of a remarkable union.

  This book is necessarily an oblique look at the Washingtons’ marriage. Though they wrote constantly to each other when apart, very little of this correspondence survives. Martha burned all that she had at hand after George’s death, forestalling requests from his many contemporary biographers for a viewing. Accordingly, it is for the most part through the medium of their correspondence with others, and through contemporaries’ descriptions of their relationship, that I present their life together.

  There are two twentieth-century Washington experts to whom I owe much. John C. Fitzpatrick edited, in thirty-seven volumes, The Writings of Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources (1931–44). Douglas Southall Freeman wrote, in the 1940s and 1950s, a detailed multivolume biography, George Washington, based on Fitzpatrick’s Writings. The importance of the wealth that Martha brought George, her first husband having died intestate, pervades both works. The couple’s life together and apart is to be found nowadays on the page and in the ether in the form of The Papers of George Washington, the brainchild, in 1968, of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and of the University of Virginia. Invaluable, authoritative, both print and digital editions—as yet incomplete—have been the richest of seams to mine.

  I should mention, in connection with eighteenth-century letters, journals, and dispatches, that the originals are strewn with strange spellings and stray capitalizations, like so much salt and pepper. I have preserved, in my text, some of them to give a flavor of the whole. The authoritative texts are located at the sources indicated in the notes.

  John Adams posed a question, in 1816, that many have asked since: “Would Washington have ever been commander of the revolutionary army or president of the United States, if he had not married the rich widow of Mr. Custis?” I would answer that Washington’s marriage was, in more than one sense, the making of him. Martha imbued George not only with wealth but also with a confidence he had earlier lacked. Together this couple, loyal British subjects when they married in 1759, became disaffected with rule from London, with remarkable consequences for their union as much as for the future of the United States.

  Martha gave Washington a role as a paterfamilias, though he fathered no children. He was an attentive guardian, at Mount Vernon, to her children by her first husband and, later, in Virginia and in presidential residences to two of her four Parke Custis grandchildren. All four of her grandchildren regarded Mount Vernon as their personal fiefdom and were accordingly resentful when Judge Bushrod Washington, the president’s nephew and principal heir, inherited the plantation, following Martha’s death. They bid at the various sales in 1802 for the most mundane objects. One granddaughter, Martha Parke Custis Peter, acquired, thanks to her husband, Thomas Peter, “four cracked bowls” and a broken thermometer, as well as costly looking glasses. The Peters had a home, Tudor Place, built in Washington, D.C., in which their heirs lived till 1983. On public view there now are one of Washington’s wartime camp stools and pieces from the Sèvres china service used during the presidency.

  Martha’s only grandson, Washington Custis, was prone even in old age to refer to himself as the “child of Mount Vernon.” He was imaginative with his acquisitions. At Arlington House, the home he had built across the Potomac from the Federal City of Washington, he staged an agricultural fair near the riverbank every spring on his birthday. Guests were invited to watch imported merino sheep being sheared and to toast “the best specimens of sheep and wool.” The “markee” which had sheltered George Washington in the Revolutionary War was a central attraction.

  Bushrod Washington, a Supreme Court associate justice till his death in 1829, lived little at Mount Vernon. The house was depleted. The estate was difficult to manage. His uncle’s slaves had been manumitted before Martha’s death, and her dower slaves had passed into the keeping of her grandchildren thereafter. Andrew Jackson, fresh from victory over the British at the battle of New Orleans, was shocked in 1815 to find the Washingtons’ tomb overgrown with cedars. The estate lacked both attention and funds and, after Bushrod’s death in 1829, continued to deteriorate under the care of two further relatives. The cult of Washington only amplified as time and disuse erased all traces of his domestic life with Martha at Mount Vernon.

  Washington Custis displayed at Arlington House, among other relics, the general’s uniform, his battle sword with its hanger, and his camp chest. Custis was custodian, as he saw it, of the Washington legend. It was a legend in which Martha did not feature. Nevertheless, the house was hung with portraits that had come to Custis by descent from his grandmother, including those painted at Mount Vernon and elsewhere during the Washingtons’ marriage. Custis’s daughter and heir, Mary—Martha’s great-granddaughter—married, in 1831, fellow Virginian Robert E. Lee, son of “Light Horse Harry.” They brought up their many children at Arlington House, and the young Lees received firsthand knowledge of the relics and portraits from their Custis grandfather, who died only in 1857.

  At the outbreak of the Civil War, Lee became General Robert E. Lee of the Confederate army, and his wife, Mary Custis Lee, fled south as Union troops approached Washington, D.C. Some of the souvenirs fro
m Washington’s military career that Washington Custis had accrued at Arlington were left behind when Mrs. Lee headed south. They passed into government hands, and the grounds of Arlington were destined to become a world-famous military cemetery. Mrs. Lee, before she fled, had spirited south family portraits, papers, and silver. They were buried outside Lexington when Union troops neared that town, and dug up after the conflict ended. The papers, Mrs. Lee recorded, were found to be “destroyed by mould and damp and were perfectly illegible.” Robert E. Lee ended his days as president of Washington College, Lexington, later renamed Washington and Lee University. Here, in the Lee Chapel and Museum, the portraits of George and Martha, and of her children, that were ferried south from Arlington are still located. The majority of the papers, restored, are now in the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond. They include incomplete guardian accounts for Martha Parke Custis’s children in tattered quarto books. Martha’s hand in the upbringing of these children and Washington’s concern for their well-being are everywhere to be seen in these records, once kept so painstakingly, so far from Richmond. At Mount Vernon Washington kept “exact copies of the [guardian] Accts settled with the General Court annually” in a “Marble colour’d folio Book” ledger. In the 1980s, dilapidated, disbound pages of accounts in Washington’s handwriting at Washington and Lee University Library, Lexington, were identified as the complete contents of this folio book, restored, and reordered.

  The long journey toward a revival of interest in Martha Washington may be said to have begun in advance of the Civil War. Mrs. Robert Cunningham, a southern lady who had been brought up near Mount Vernon, passed near the house and grounds on a nostalgic river cruise in 1853 and wrote to her invalid daughter in Philadelphia: “I was painfully distressed at the ruin and desolation of the home of Washington, and the thought passed through my mind: Why was it that the women of his country did not try to keep it in repair, if the men could not do it?” The rest is, as they say, history. Her daughter, Miss Ann Pamela Cunningham, successfully made it her business to solicit funds from ladies of “the Union,” and on April 6, 1858, John Augustine Washington III, the then owner, sold the estate to the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union for $200,000.