The Washingtons Read online

  love is too dainty a food to live upon alone, and ought not to be considered farther, than as a necessary ingredient for that matrimonial happiness which results from a combination of causes; none of which are of greater importance, than that the object on whom it is placed, should possess good sense—[a] good disposition—and the means of supporting you in the way you have been brought up.

  The woman he courted in 1758 possessed all three of the qualities he praised—sense, disposition, and means.

  What made Martha Dandridge Custis fix on Washington as a husband? Did he seem to her, to use his own tepid terminology, merely an “agreeable partner”? Or did Washington’s attentions awaken in Martha feelings of passion and of romantic love? In contrast to several other Virginia planters free to marry at this date, he was not an especially appealing prospect, though respected, as we have seen, as a “useful” soldier. His account of the 1753 mission to Legardeur de Saint Pierre was, at the behest of the colony’s acting governor, published in Williamsburg the following year. Its sonorous title in full was The Journal of Major George Washington, Sent by the Hon. Robert Dinwiddie, Esq., His Majesty’s Lieutenant-Governor, and Commander in Chief in Virginia, to the Commandant of the French Forces on Ohio. He had come out well from Braddock’s fatal march on Fort Duquesne later in 1754. He had made continual small but shrewd land purchases in the frontier lands. But his brother’s widow, Ann Fairfax Washington, who had remarried and moved away, would own Mount Vernon until her death. Washington, who farmed the plantation, kept what income he could make from the tobacco he grew—in 1757, £4,000 odd.

  In short, the disparity in wealth between George Washington and Martha Dandridge Custis at the time of their meetings in March 1758 was striking. According to Washington’s own later testimony, Martha’s uncle Francis Dandridge, a wealthy merchant in London, censured the match. But sociable, confident Martha knew her own mind, whether she was out to marry wealthy Daniel Parke Custis or to plan a new life with a second husband. She withstood this disapproval and occupied herself with her tobacco trade, sending seventeen hogsheads of tobacco to Hanbury and Co. in London in June 1758: “as tob[acc]o is now very scarce, and it is certain very little will be made [out of] the ensuing [forthcoming] crop, I hope I shall get an uncommon price for this tobacco. Inclosed is a bill of lading for it. I wrote to you for insurance, which I don’t doubt but you have made.” Martha may have had help in framing the letter, but her business sense was admirable.

  Martha was indeed now an experienced businesswoman, having managed the estate for a year. She was confident in her commissions, whether asking Cary and Co. to procure items for herself, for her children, or for the plantation. When necessary, she was critical of what arrived, declaring a dress she had sent to be dyed as “very badly done.” In an order that included “a handsome bureau dressing table and glass, mahogany,” needles and pins, “4 handsome chafing dishes, raisins and currants,” there was also “for the negroes…6 dozen broad [field] hoes.” There was little, in short, that Martha, like other Virginian planters, did not procure from England in exchange for the hogsheads of tobacco she sent for sale there. The problem with this system of barter for the colonists was that their demands very often outstripped the value of the tobacco dispatched.

  Washington’s pursuit of Martha continued through the summer of 1758, as the following entry in his account book shows: “June 5—By Mrs. Custis’s servants 14/6.” Washington had returned on a brief visit to Williamsburg to requisition supplies urgently needed for Fort Loudoun, the frontier garrison at Winchester in western Virginia, where he was stationed with his regiment. But his visit to Martha seems to have been at the expense of normal civility. He did not stay to greet Francis Fauquier, the new lieutenant governor who arrived in the colony that same day. Dissembling slightly, he wrote to Fauquier in apology on June 17: “the business that carried me there was of too urgent a nature to admit of delay when I had once got it accomplished.”

  Had he also by now persuaded Martha to endow him with her hand and worldly goods? It is unclear at what point during the year, and whether by correspondence or in person, Washington and Martha agreed to marry. As has already been noted, only a few items of the couple’s correspondence with each other survives, and none from this period.

  Martha’s extant correspondence for 1758 consists of business letters, several of them about the Dunbar suit. One item in her 1758 invoice to Robert Cary and Co., which includes a request for “2 Dresden [lace] worked handkerchiefs [neckerchiefs],” is interesting. She required “One Genteel suite of clothes for myself to be grave but not Extravagant nor to be mourning.” As we have seen, after a year, should a suitable marital prospect emerge, she was free to discard further mourning. She sent a “night gown”—informal dress—to be dyed a “fashionable colour fit for me to wear.” She expected it to be “dyed better” than the one she had sent the year before. It would, besides, furnish a measure for gowns of “the best Indian [chintz]”—one dark, one on a “white calico ground, to be made of very fine Calico”—which she now commissioned.

  Nowhere else is marriage hinted at. We must guess at her feelings as she contemplated exchanging, with her children, a familiar landscape and family and friends she had known all her life for a life in remote northern Virginia. And if life on the majestic Potomac would be an unknown to conjure with, how much more so would be George Washington as a husband?

  In contrast to Daniel Parke Custis, George was Martha’s contemporary. He was, also unlike reclusive Daniel, ambitious, for all his talk of retirement, and of an adventurous spirit. Daniel had had dark good looks. Washington, pale-skinned and with chestnut hair, had fine, classic features. He was, besides, a man of unusual height and with a powerful physique. And last but not least, when Washington came calling, he was a serving officer in uniform. An entire chapter could be dedicated to the susceptibility of Eve, since time began, to Adam in military attire. Looking ahead to descriptions of George and Martha’s relationship in the course of what would prove a forty-year marriage, to employ vocabulary of the battlefield, we may posit that capable, sensible Martha was smitten by Washington. She remained felled by love all her life. But she also had a strong urge to care for and mother others. This impulse possibly originated in her position in the family where she was eldest of eight. She may also have responded to a fragility in her apparently stalwart suitor. Others, among them William Fairfax, had exerted themselves on behalf of Washington when he was younger. Initially, Martha may well have relished the prospect of cherishing her husband as much as the prospect of being cherished.

  George, for all his physical grace, was nervous at home and stiff and uncertain in company, except with intimates or fellow officers. Martha instilled in him a self-confidence that had hitherto been lacking. Under her tutelage he was to embrace possibilities of friendship and family life. As he grew in self-confidence at Mount Vernon, so he would be called on repeatedly to act as arbiter in vexed parochial and familial disputes. In due course, that local experience, born of partnership with Martha, would be of use in a great national struggle.

  All this year, whether stationed with his regiment in Winchester or campaigning with Forbes against the French at Fort Duquesne, Washington was making strategic and practical decisions with a view to settling at home. He had joiners add an extra story to the house, which had previously featured only a ground floor with two bedchambers, a parlor, and a dining room. He ran for the first time for the House of Burgesses in July and was duly elected to represent Frederick County, the district in which Winchester lay. But he makes mention of Martha only once, in a letter to Sally Fairfax of September 12, 1758. She had apparently responded to criticisms he had made of his superior officers in their conduct of the Ohio campaign. He protested: “If you allow that any honour can be derived from my opposition to our present system of management, you destroy the merit of it entirely in me by attributing my anxiety to the animating prospect of possessing Mrs. Custis.”

  Thereupon Wa
shington, though on the brink of marriage to Martha Dandridge Custis, writes to Sally Fairfax: “ ’Tis true, I profess myself a votary to love—I acknowledge that a lady is in the case—and further, I confess, that this lady is known to you.” The awkward code and flowery sentiments do not obscure the fact that “this lady,” far from being Martha, was none other than Sally herself. “I feel the force of her amiable beauties in the recollection of a thousand tender passages,” he continued, “that I could wish to obliterate, till I am bid to revive them—but experience alas! sadly reminds me how impossible this is.” He concludes: “there is a destiny, which has the sovereign control of our actions—not to be resisted by the strongest efforts of human nature.” The reader is at a loss to know if the “thousand tender passages” to which the bachelor colonel refers indicate unrequited passion, stolen kisses, or a full-blown affair. But he plainly sees his forthcoming marriage to Martha as a sacred undertaking—directed by “a destiny.”

  In later life at times of crisis Washington would invoke the name of “destiny” and also that of “Providence,” entities that he believed guided him at crucial moments. In England at this time, many valued reason and science above the traditional teachings of the Church and preferred to account for the workings of the world without recourse to prayer. In eighteenth-century Virginia, belief and politics were pragmatic. Washington joined the Freemasons’ Lodge in Fredericksburg and later that of Alexandria. Like his neighbors, he was churchgoing and served, with them, as a vestryman in the local parish. In this post they were responsible for appointing the minister, keeping up the fabric of the church, and administering justice and relief for the poor. In short, the “destiny” Washington invoked when about to embark on marriage was roughly equivalent to an Almighty who looked favorably on him.

  Washington wrote one more letter to Sally, on September 25. He ended it: “you ask if I am not tired at the length of your letter? No, Madam, I am not, nor never can be while the lines are an inch asunder to bring you in haste to the end of the paper…believe that I am most unalterably your most obedient and obliged George Washington.” “Unalterably” he might be Sally Fairfax’s, but this did not prevent George from proceeding with resolute steps toward his “sovereign destiny”—marriage with Mrs. Custis.

  4

  Mount Vernon, Fairfax County

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

  WASHINGTON ENDED HIS CAREER in the colonial service on a high note. He had helped, with the Forbes expedition in November 1758, to end the long French hegemony at the forks of the Ohio. It would be long before, in a very different conflict but also on American soil, he would again commit to war. Dr. James Craik, the regimental surgeon, wrote on December 20 from Fort Loudoun, Winchester: “We are very anxious here to know the fate of the troops, and who will be commander when the regiment meets with that irreparable loss, losing you.” Washington took a parting shot at higher authorities, bidding farewell to his fellow officers: “had everything contributed as fully as your obliging endeavours did to render me satisfied, I never should have…had cause to know the pangs I have felt at parting with a regiment, that has shared my toils, and experienced every hardship and danger, which I have endured.”

  By the time he wrote this letter, dated “New Kent County, 10th January, 1759,” Washington was a married man of four days’ standing. Twelfth Night—January 6—had seen the couple wed and the “widow Custis” take the name of Martha Washington. Martha’s granddaughters handed down to their descendants remnants of yellow brocade and lace and a dainty pair of sequined shoes they supposed her to have worn on the occasion. Probably the Reverend David Mossom, long-standing minister at St. Peter’s Church, New Kent, officiated, and we may assume members of Martha’s family were witnesses. Where the couple exchanged vows is in doubt. Later recollections of local inhabi-

  tants and Dandridge kin claim the White House as the locale and make mention of a wedding feast and festivities lasting several days. Possibly, despite the inclement season, the Washingtons married in Mossom’s handsome brick church in the New Kent woods and banqueted later at Martha’s home. The bridal couple’s feelings on the day about each other are also a matter of supposition. Much later Washington was to write, “I have always considered marriage as the most interesting event of one’s life—The foundation of happiness or misery.” He and Martha had now laid a foundation that would withstand in time the seismic shocks of war and revolution.

  Though it does not survive, the Washingtons’ marriage certificate was at least “properly…authenticated” when George sent it off to Robert Cary and Co. in early summer. From now on, he informed Cary, the firm was to address to him all letters “which relate to the affairs of the late Daniel Parke Custis, Esquire.” Martha’s days of superintending the family estates, corresponding with the London agents, and consulting with Williamsburg lawyers were over. Moreover from now on Washington, assuming the role of guardian as well as that of stepfather to her children, kept meticulous accounts on their behalf.

  Washington took his place for the first time in the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg and was appointed to an important standing committee. In addition, Speaker Robinson returned him the thanks of the House on February 26, 1759, for five years of “faithful services to his Majesty and this colony.” The assembly was grateful also for “his brave and steady behaviour” from the “first encroachments and hostilities of the French and their Indians to his resignation after the happy reduction of Fort Duquesne.” At the beginning of April, the new burgess obtained permission to be absent for the remainder of the House sessions. An urgent note that Washington wrote to John Alton on April 5 gives us the reason why: “I have sent Miles on today to let you know that I expect to be up tomorrow, and to get the key from Colonel Fairfax’s which I desire you will take care of.” Alton had formerly been his master’s “body servant,” or valet, and was now steward at Mount Vernon. “Enquire about in the neighbourhood, and get some eggs and chickens, and prepare in the best manner you can for our coming. You need not however take out any more of the furniture than the beds, tables and chairs, in order that they may be well rubbed and cleaned.” The Washingtons, with the Parke Custis children, were on their way home.

  Coming, in the spring of 1759, from New Kent County, where woods and fields and near neighbors had bounded her parish world, Martha was unfamiliar with the more dramatic scenery that northern Virginia offered. For the sluggish Pamunkey, whose many ferries facilitated neighborly visits, she had exchanged the majestic Potomac, three-quarters of a mile wide below the promontory on which Mount Vernon stood. Ferries were few and the wind often high, discouraging passenger traffic. However, a steady stream of visitors came by road, and Martha’s new home was a small but pleasing house, two stories high and recently faced with cream rusticated wood in imitation of stone. In its windows blinked “two hundred and fifty squares best Crown glass” with which Washington had replaced earlier and inferior windowpanes.

  The carriage entrance at the front of the house faced a bowling green, beyond which lay the road to Alexandria. The garden front at the back gave onto lawns above the river. Within, a central hall gave onto a bedroom, parlor, study, and dining room. Above were further bedrooms, reached by a substantial staircase situated close to the front door. Washington had always been eager that the house be stylishly equipped. From the “cold and barren frontiers” of Virginia, on garrison duty in 1757, he had commissioned Richard Washington, in London, to “procure [wall]paper for 5 Rooms,” to differ in their colors. Wanted also was “paper of a very good kind and colour for a Dining Room,” and two square mahogany tables, “to join occasionally.” All was to be “fashionable—neat—and good.” The agent had obliged and dispatched eight dozen yards of blue, green, and yellow Chinese and Indian floral wallpaper and twelve of crimson, with matching borders. In addition, “12 Mah[ogan]ay best gothick Chairs, wt. Pincushion Seats, stufft in the best manner & coverd with horse hair” crossed th
e Atlantic, and a “neat landscape—after Claude Lorrain” now surmounted a “fine, new, veined marble chimney piece slab, and covings.” For the master bedroom the Washingtons this year ordered a handsome canopy bed with blue and white hangings.

  No amount of imported finery could disguise the fact that the rooms at Mount Vernon were of small proportions. The hall was, in consequence, a room that was regularly used to accommodate larger or more important parties. In the spring of 1760, for instance, Washington extended an invitation to dine to Lord Fairfax, who was staying at Belvoir. The peer was generally to be found living in eccentric isolation at Greenway Court, a log lodge that he had built near Winchester. On this occasion he was graciously pleased to accept the invitation. Among the company who came with him was Bryan Fairfax, George William’s younger half-brother, who had recently ended up in jail in Annapolis after a long debauch. Apparently chastened by the experience, he had married Sally Fairfax’s younger sister, Elizabeth, and was now settled at a house in the neighborhood. He was now his elder half-brother’s heir and indeed stood third in line to inherit the barony of Fairfax from his noble cousin. Washington had, the previous autumn, obtained a commission for William Fairfax, George William’s younger full brother, in a British expedition headed north with the aim of seizing Quebec from the French. In the successful British assault that followed in September 1759, both the victorious general, James Wolfe, and his French opponent, fell. So too did Billy Fairfax. The French, this year, were to retreat to Montreal and, in the autumn, surrender there. The theater of war would shift to Europe and elsewhere.