The Washingtons Read online

  The Fairfaxes were a sophisticated tribe, an English family who regarded London, rather than Williamsburg, as the center of their world. George Washington, who once copied out an entire etiquette book, Rules of Civility, looked to them as models of how to behave. But to English eyes the Fairfax establishment would have seemed more than a little wild and colonial. William, when governor of the Bahamas in the 1720s, had taken as his first wife Sarah Walker, a woman whose mother was a “free black”—the term in general use to denote an African in the Americas not a slave. Any child of a free black mother was born free, while any child born of a slave mother was born into slavery.

  Colonel William’s second wife had no African blood. She had this fault in the eyes of the local parson’s wife: though Deborah had a large house, four stepchildren, and two children at Belvoir to care for, Mrs. Green asserted, she “lay long abed.” Mrs. Fairfax took umbrage at this remark, and an estrangement between the two households developed. It would seem, though, the young women of the Fairfax family circle enjoyed remarkable license at Belvoir, before and after Deborah’s death in 1748.

  William was not afraid, despite his elder children’s African blood, to solicit favors from Fairfax relations. When planning to send his eldest son to school in England, he wrote, “he has the marks in his visage that will always testify to his [Fairfax] parentage.” George William was, despite this avowal, to find his African blood troublesome following his father’s death in 1757. While Washington was on sick leave at Mount Vernon that year, his neighbor was in England, trying to secure the post of collector of customs for the Northern Neck that his father had held. George William was also eager to convince an uncle in England, Henry Fairfax of Towlston, with a fortune to leave, that he was, in his wife Sally Cary Fairfax’s words, “not a negro’s son.” They feared that Henry might leave his wealth elsewhere.

  In Virginia, a free black grandmother was less of a hindrance. Lawrence Washington and John Carlyle, a grain merchant in Alexandria, had not hesitated to marry George William’s sisters, Ann and Sarah. George William had had no difficulty, in 1748, in marrying Sally Cary, the eligible daughter of Willson Cary of Hampton. Sally’s sisters Ann and Mary Cary, before and after they married, were frequent visitors to the estate on the Potomac. George Washington was young and impressionable. While at Belvoir in about 1750, though pining for “Sally,” an unidentifiable “lowland beauty” in Fredericksburg, he wrote: “I might, was my heart disengaged, pass my time very pleasantly as there’s a very agreeable Young Lady Lives in the same house (Colonel George [William] Fairfax’s Wife’s sister).” Mary Cary was probably this companion. Much later, in a letter to George William, he declared that he counted his days at Belvoir “the happiest moments of my life.” Surveys and—later—campaigns with the Virginia Regiment notwithstanding, he engaged vigorously in courtly correspondence with the ladies of the Fairfax circle. They, on the other hand, seem to have enjoyed driving the young man to distraction, as first one and then another toyed with his affections.

  Sally’s sister Ann became in 1751 the wife of Williamsburg lawyer Robert Carter Nicholas. In 1754 Mary Cary married too, elsewhere in Virginia. Washington’s attention shifted to another of the circle—George William’s sister, Mrs. Carlyle. But she wrote to him while he was on the frontier in 1754. He must not expect any further correspondence, she warned. “to be carried on (on my side) with the spirit it ought, to enliven you, which would be my desire if I could.” In a tantalizing sentence she hints at a previous flirtation: “Those pleasing reflections on the hours past ought to be banished out of your thoughts; you have now a nobler prospect, that of preserving your country from the insults of an enemy.”

  By the following year George William’s wife, Sally Cary Fairfax herself, is the target of an impassioned and querulous letter that the young man drafted. She had requested, when they had met recently, that he should inform others, in place of her, that he had reached camp safely. His drafted reply is full of crossings-out and substitutions: “This I took as a gentle rebuke and polite manner of forbidding my corresponding with you; and conceive this opinion is not ill founded when I reflect that I have hitherto found it impracticable to engage one moment of your attention.” Washington softened the tone of the letter he eventually sent, but had to wait till his return to Mount Vernon from garrison duties for a reply. It was a note written jointly with two other ladies: “if you will not come to us, tomorrow morning very early we shall be at Mount Vernon.” Although the ladies of the Fairfax circle enjoyed the attentions of this handsome young neighbor, sometimes he pressed too hard.

  Washington’s affairs of the heart, by the time he reached the age of twenty-six, in February 1758, whether with “Sally” of Fredericksburg, with the Misses Cary, with Sarah Fairfax Carlyle of Alexandria, or with Sally Cary Fairfax at Belvoir, may be characterized as tentative and awkward. The objects of his attentions were generally unavailable. Sexual desire he probably satisfied, following other Virginia planters, with women, either servants or slaves, on the estate or with tavern “wenches” (serving maids) in Alexandria. Additionally, when stationed on the frontier, he may have engaged with women outside the fort. But did he take advantage of George William’s absence in England to pursue Sally Cary Fairfax more closely? Letters that Washington wrote to Sally in September 1758 hint at recent passionate passages. Notwithstanding, when Washington wrote to her in March 1758, on the same day that he had poured out his troubles to Stanwix, business was to the fore: “If you, or any of the young ladies have letters to send, or other commands that I can execute, I should be glad to be honoured with them, and you may depend upon my punctuality—please to accept my compliments yourself, and offer them to the young ladies, and believe that I am with great truth and sincerity, dear madam, your most obedient and obliged George Washington.”

  Next day Washington was off, on the move after months of leave. Williamsburg, the colonial capital, which lay a hundred miles south of Mount Vernon, was his destination. The careful log of expenditure that Washington kept, and which survives, allows us to follow the progress of an expedition that was to have several important outcomes. The most important, where this narrative is concerned, involved the payment of gratuities in March and June to servants of Mrs. Martha Dandridge Custis, a wealthy young widow with two small children. Following the death the previous year of her husband, Daniel Parke Custis, she had chosen to manage, on her own behalf and for her children, an extensive plantation known as the White House, situated on the banks of the Pamunkey, thirty miles west of Williamsburg. There were substantial holdings also in other parts of the colony. She had been grappling successfully, as well, with a lawsuit of long standing that threatened the estate. Martha Custis was, in short, a woman of considerable mettle, and one who was to become within the year Martha Washington.

  2

  Dandridge’s Daughter

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

  PETITE, AT FIVE FEET, with brown hair and hazel eyes, Martha Dandridge Custis was twenty-six in March 1758—she would turn twenty-seven on June 13—and was described about this time as an “agreeable widow.” The lawyers and tobacco agents who had had to reckon with her brisk correspondence since her husband Daniel Parke Custis’s death might have tempered this praise. Agreeable for certain, in Washington’s eyes, were a town house in Williamsburg, the White House on the Pamunkey River, and the Parke Custis acreage that Martha and her children had inherited on Daniel’s death. The whole comprised one of the larger fortunes in Virginia. There was one fly in the ointment—the so-called Dunbar suit. This lawsuit of forty years’ standing, in which plaintiffs in Antigua threatened the Parke Custis estate, had come to trial in the General Court in Williamsburg in April 1754 and been dismissed. It had then gone to the London Privy Council, which heard appeals from the colonies. In the summer of his death, Daniel had been waiting to hear the outcome of the plaintiffs’ appeal. In December 1757, Martha had learned that the dismissal had
been overturned on appeal. The plaintiffs could seek a retrial in Virginia.

  This lawsuit had its origins in ambiguous wording regarding the payment of debts in the will of Daniel Parke. This Virginian—Daniel Parke Custis’s maternal grandfather—had been rewarded for services to the Crown at the battle of Blenheim in 1704. Made governor of the Leeward Islands in the West Indies, he had proved corrupt and debauched in the post. Islanders in revolt against his arrogant rule had murdered him in Antigua in 1710. In his will of the previous year, he had left to his daughter Frances Parke Custis, wife of John Custis IV of Arlington, Virginia, and to her heirs, his considerable wealth and acreage in England and Virginia. The condition was that they bear the name of Parke, in which he took pride. Frances Custis’s young children, Daniel—Martha’s future husband—and his sister, adopted the name. Parke bequeathed a thousand pounds to his other daughter, Lucy Parke Byrd, wife of William Byrd II, again on the condition that her children—two daughters—adopt his name. But the governor’s will contained a surprise. Should Lucy Chester, an infant in Antigua, take the name of Parke, he willed her property in the Leeward Islands valued at £30,000. The child was popularly assumed to be her benefactor’s daughter, and her mother, Katherine Chester, his mistress. In Virginia the Custises were scandalized but were advised that a challenge to the will would be fruitless.

  Time passed. Frances Parke Custis and her sister, Lucy Parke Byrd, died young, as did wealthy Miss Chester in Antigua, soon after she had married a fellow islander, Thomas Dunbar. He accommodatingly altered his name to Dunbar Parke. But the governor’s will took on new life, though the orginal legatees were dead, in the early 1720s. Dunbar Parke claimed, as plaintiff, that Daniel Parke had wished to leave his insular property free of all encumbrance. It was therefore, he argued, for the Virginia heirs to meet some £6,000 of debts in Antigua that he had settled. John Custis IV hotly contested the claim. The wording of the will being ambiguous, for over twenty years both Antiguan plaintiffs and Virginian defendants enriched lawyers who disputed the point. Though Dunbar Parke himself died in 1734, his brother Charles adopted the name of Parke, and he and his children pursued the claim and brought it before the General Court in 1754.

  When Daniel Parke Custis chose her as a bride in 1749, Martha—then Miss Dandridge of Chestnut Grove of New Kent County and aged about eighteen—had known little of Chancery suits. Described then as “beautiful and sweet tempered,” she had had much to endure. Daniel’s father, John Custis IV, while a shrewd man of business and a botanist with a celebrated garden at his town house in Williamsburg, was also eccentric and quarrelsome. Having first seemed to favor the match, he then objected to Martha as a wife for his son. But Martha showed herself a confident young woman and one capable of dealing with an irresolute suitor and a volatile head of the family.

  Daniel, aged thirty-eight in 1749, was more than twenty years older than Martha, a bachelor who lived quietly at the White House on the Pamunkey River, tending his tobacco crop. Though handsome in a swarthy way and undeniably rich, he had at least once failed to succeed in a marital venture when his father could not agree on terms with the bride’s family. Unlike his father, who was a member of the Governor’s Council in the capital, Daniel took no part in public life beyond serving as an officer of the local militia and acting as vestryman at his parish church, St. Peter’s, New Kent. Martha’s father, John Dandridge, who was clerk of New Kent Courthouse, was also a member of this vestry. Like many others, he incurred John Custis’s wrath, according to friends of the old man. His crime was to have fathered a daughter so “much inferior…in point of fortune” to Daniel. Chestnut Grove, the modest Dandridge home where Martha grew up a few miles downriver from her suitor’s home, stood in only five hundred acres, and its workforce of slaves numbered fewer than ten.

  Not content with rejecting Martha on the ground of fortune, John Custis IV, it seems, also objected to her as a bride because of an animus he bore against the entire Dandridge clan. Martha’s wealthy and well-connected uncle William, though by then dead, had been an adver-

  sary of Custis’s on the Governor’s Council for many years. Custis expressed his displeasure by presenting Williamsburg friends Matthew Moody and his wife with gifts of furniture and horses and family plate. To remonstrances, he allegedly replied that he preferred the Moodys to have them “rather…than any Dandridge’s daughter or any Dandridge that ever wore a head…he had not been at work all his life time for Dandridge’s daughter.”

  Daniel Parke Custis feared that his father would go further. John Custis extravagantly favored “Black Jack,” a former slave whom he had freed in 1748 and on whom he had settled 250 acres. “Black Jack” was certainly the son of Custis’s slave Alice and very probably his own illegitimate son. Daniel feared that his capricious father would disinherit him in favor of the boy, and he hesitated to marry without his father’s consent. But seventeen-year-old Martha carried the day. The eldest of a large family, she knew what it was to deal with tantrums, and turned away Custis’s wrath with a “prudent speech,” according to Daniel’s friend and attorney James Power. Whereupon the contrary old man declared that he would rather his son married her “than any lady in Virginia.” Following this statement, and before he could recant, Custis fell ill, died, and was buried in the autumn of that year, leaving most of his worldly goods, including the mansion in town, to the son he had tormented. The will made provision for “Black Jack,” directing that he be accommodated with a house furnished with Russian leather chairs, black walnut tables, and feather beds. But the young man was not destined to enjoy such comfort for long. Within two years he had died of a fever. Meanwhile Daniel and Martha had married in May 1750 and set up home together at the White House.

  Daniel Parke Custis had already proved a good manager of the acres lying in and about New Kent County. “If everyone would take the same pains with their tobacco and fling away as much [substandard leaf] as I do,” he wrote to London merchant Robert Cary in 1755, “there would not be such complaints of the inspectors [in England] as there are.” He administered competently the enlarged estate that he inherited on his father’s death, and lived quietly with Martha at the White House. In six years they produced four children.

  The standard of living Martha now enjoyed was far higher than that at her childhood home. Both plantations were situated on ground close to the slow-moving Pamunkey River and shrouded from the summer heat by oaks, hickories, and maples. Low-lying agricultural fields and freshwater marshes formed part of a distinctive riparian terrain where bald eagles and great blue herons nested and fished. The shallow, winding river was the lifeblood of the locale, and at different points where the course narrowed, ferry crossings connected neighboring families. Many of those families were also connected by blood. It was a pleasant neighborhood and one with which Martha had been intimately familiar from birth.

  Before her marriage Martha had, it seems, spent some years “up the country”—possibly in the wealthier atmosphere of Elsing Green, her uncle William’s brick mansion, on the northern banks of the river. Elsing Green contained, among other treasures, one of the few picture galleries in Virginia—a nod, perhaps, to the Dandridge family’s artistic heritage: Martha’s paternal grandfather had been a master painter-stainer in London. Another London relative, recently dead, had been her uncle, Bartholomew Dandridge; a pupil of Sir Godfrey Kneller, he was a celebrated portrait painter, whose image of Frederick, Prince of Wales, was widely reproduced. In future years Martha was to play an important part in disseminating images of her second husband. Even during her first marriage, John Wollaston, an English painter popular in Virginia, obtained the commission, in 1757, to paint portraits of her and of Daniel. He also painted a double portrait of their children then living. A scarlet cardinal bird—emblem of Virginia—perches somewhat improbably on three-year-old Jacky’s fist. Jacky is breeched and in coat and waistcoat, while his sister, Patsy, only a year old, is propped up, doll-like, in a satin dress. Another portrait, The Custis Chil
dren, attributed to Matthew Pratt, probably dates from the time of her second marriage.

  Not only did Martha have an artistic eye. She also had, like many Virginians, a connoisseur’s approach to material goods. Luxurious apparel and furnishings, china and silver—all imported from England—were badges of rank in this society. At least once a year she ordered from London suppliers fashionable and costly clothes for herself and her children and household articles of quality, as Daniel Parke Custis’s invoice book, noting each year’s commissions, attests. Robert Cary and Co. in London was, historically, the London merchant house that had dealt with the major part of the Parke Custis tobacco. The trade that they entered into with Daniel was mirrored in the transactions between dozens of other houses or firms in British ports and other Virginian families. Each year Daniel shipped to London, together with the hogsheads (barrels containing a thousand pounds of tobacco) from the numerous plantations, an invoice listing the innumerable items required at the White House and elsewhere over the course of the following year. Upon reception of the shipload, Cary and Co. sold the tobacco, for prices that varied dramatically. At the same time they applied to ironmongers, mantua-makers, cobblers, and coachmakers—to name a few of the relevant suppliers—for the items requested on Daniel’s invoice. The credits from the tobacco sales and debits from the inventory purchases were entered. Six months later a ship bringing such goods as had been obtained would appear in the York River, with a load to be transferred to the Pamunkey tributary and ultimately to the Parke Custis estate.1