Patriot Hearts (70 page)

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Real life is not tidy, and the story of any couple is the story of their families as well (and in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this included servants). I have dates for some; for others I do not. For others I have found several different birth and death dates, with as much as ten years’ variation for the same person. Fictional characters are marked with an asterisk*. Though many characters overlap from section to section, I have listed them by the section in which they primarily occur; and by the name under which they are primarily known in the book. A woman’s maiden name and alternate married names are in parentheses, alternate first names (either nicknames or real names for those dozen or so women all named Martha) are in brackets.

MARTHA

Anna Maria (Dandridge) Bassett
1739–1777—Favorite sister of Martha, married Burwell Bassett in 1757. Mother of Fanny Bassett Washington Lear, one of Martha’s many surrogate daughters.

Fanny (Bassett) Washington (Lear)
1767–1796—Martha’s favorite niece, successively married to George’s nephew (and secretary) Augustine Washington, then at his death to George’s secretary Tobias Lear.

Aaron Burr
1756–1836—The dark star of the Founding Fathers; briefly Washington’s aide-de-camp, then Colonel in the Continental Army, Senator from New York, Thomas Jefferson’s Vice President (and so far the only United States Vice President to serve while under indictment for murder), and would-be Emperor of Mexico.

Eleanor (Calvert) Custis (Stuart)
1758–1811—Jacky’s wife and mother of Martha’s four grandchildren. After Jacky’s death she married Dr. David Stuart of Alexandria, and had numerous (twelve in some accounts, sixteen in others) children by him.

Daniel Parke Custis
1710–1757—First husband of Martha Washington and father of her four children.

Jacky Custis
1754–1781—[John Parke Custis] Only child of Martha and Daniel Custis to survive to adulthood, father (by Eleanor Calvert) of Martha’s four grandchildren.

Patcy Custis
1756–1773—[Martha Parke Custis] Only daughter of Martha and Daniel Custis to survive childhood; suffered from seizures, and died of one at age seventeen.

Eliza (Custis) Law
1776–1832—Oldest daughter of Jacky and Eleanor Custis. Married Thomas Law in 1796.

Pattie (Custis) Peter
b. 1777—[Martha Parke Custis] Second daughter of Jacky and Eleanor Custis. Married Thomas Peter in 1795.

Nelly (Custis) Lewis
1779–1852—[Eleanor Parke Custis] Third daughter of Jacky and Eleanor Custis. Semiadopted by Martha and George at Jacky’s death. Married George’s nephew Lawrence Lewis in 1799.

Wash Custis
1781–1857—[George Washington Parke Custis] Only son of Jacky and Eleanor Custis. Semiadopted by Martha and George at Jacky’s death. Married Mary Ann Fitzhugh; their daughter, Mary, married Robert E. Lee. (Thus most of the Washington family mementos ended up at Arlington.) Three of their sons were also generals in the Confederate Army.

Nan Dandridge—
Daughter of Martha Dandridge Washington’s father, John Dandridge, by one of his slaves. She was employed in the Washington household at Mount Vernon and in 1780 gave birth to a child, William, by Jacky Custis.

“Citizen” Édouard Genêt
1763–1834—First minister sent by Revolutionary France to the U.S., he attempted to meddle in U.S. policy, commissioned American privateers to prey on British shipping, and tried to field, from the U.S., expeditions against France’s enemies. When, at Washington’s request, he was recalled, he defected to the U.S., married the daughter of the Governor of New York, and lived happily ever after.

Alexander Hamilton
1757–1804—[Hammy, Alec] Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury and much-loved surrogate son. Known for his financial brilliance, military and political ambition, wide-ranging amours, and verbal viciousness about his political opponents, a trait which eventually got him shot.

Uncle Hercules—
The Washington family cook, trusted and much-favored slave who took the opportunity of being in the North to escape to freedom, waiting to do so until the Washingtons were on their way back to Mount Vernon for the final time in 1796.

Ona Judge
b. 1778 (?)—[Oney] Martha’s beloved and trusted slave maidservant who escaped in Philadelphia to freedom in the North, to Martha’s speechless indignation.

Thomas Law—
Married Eliza Custis in 1796. Was about twenty years older than she, an English India merchant who had at least three illegitimate sons by Indian women, one of whom he brought with him and sent to Harvard. He and Eliza were divorced in 1810.

Tobias Lear
1762 (?)–1816—George’s secretary and tutor to the Custis children. A New Hampshire man and Harvard graduate, he was introduced to Washington at the end of the Revolution. After the death of his first wife Pollie, he married Martha’s favorite niece Fanny (Bassett); upon Fanny’s death, he married another of Martha’s nieces, Fanny Henley. After Washington’s death, he organized the Presidential papers (and, it was rumored, selectively destroyed some that reflected badly on a quarrel between Washington and Thomas Jefferson): Jefferson appointed him First Consul to Saint-Domingue, and then Consul General to the Barbary States (where he made a great deal of money in bribes). Returning to the United States at the outbreak of the War of 1812, Lear, who suffered from headaches and depression, shot himself in 1816.

Pollie Lear
1770–1793—Tobias Lear’s childhood sweetheart from New Hampshire. After their marriage she acted as Martha’s secretary. She was one of the first casualties of the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in the summer of 1793.

General Charles Lee
1731–1782—Continental general and soldier of fortune, he was one of Washington’s rivals for the position of Commander in Chief.

Lawrence Lewis—
Son of George’s sister Betty; married Nelly Custis in 1799. A hypochondriac who later in life became dependent upon opiates.

James Monroe
1758–1831—Virginia planter, officer in the Continental Army, U.S. Senator, Governor of Virginia, fifth President of the United States. Was the third U.S. President to die on the Fourth of July.

Thomas Peter—
Married Pattie Custis in 1795. Their house in Georgetown still stands.

Dr. David Stuart—
Second husband of Jacky Custis’s widow Eleanor; father, by her, of many, many children.

George Washington
1732–1799—Virginia planter, Commander in Chief of the Continental Army during the Revolution, and first President of the United States.

Martha (Dandridge) (Custis) Washington
1731–1802—[Patsie] First First Lady. Formerly married to Daniel Custis.

George Augustine Washington
1763–1793—[Augustine] Son of George’s brother Charles, George’s secretary and overseer of Mount Vernon, first husband of Martha’s niece Fanny. Died of tuberculosis.

George Steptoe Washington
1771–1809—[Steptoe] Son of George’s brother Sam, of Harewood Plantation. Married Lucy Payne, sister of Dolley Madison.

Harriot Washington
b. 1777—Steptoe’s younger sister. At their father’s death, she was taken to live at Mount Vernon for a time, while her brothers were placed in boarding-school.

ABIGAIL

Abigail (Smith) Adams
1744–1818—Second First Lady, and mother of the sixth President of the U.S. Middle daughter of the minister of Weymouth, Massachusetts.

John Adams
1735–1826—Lawyer, member of the Continental Congress, Minister to France, and first U.S. Minister to England, second President of the United States.

Nabby (Adams) Smith
1765–1813—[Abigail] Daughter of John and Abigail Adams, married Colonel William Smith in England in 1786.

John Quincy Adams
1767–1848—[Johnny, Hercules] Oldest son of John and Abigail Adams, U.S. Minister to Berlin, helped negotiate the Treaty of Ghent (which ended the War of 1812), sixth President of the United States, afterwards Representative from Massachusetts, and lawyer who defended the mutinous slaves of the slave-ship
Amistad
. In 1848 he suffered a stroke on the floor of the House of Representatives, and died in the Speaker’s Chamber shortly thereafter.

Charley Adams
1770–1800—Second son of John and Abigail Adams. He married the sister of his sister Nabby’s husband; died of acute alcoholism at the age of thirty.

Thomas Adams
1772–1832—Third son of John and Abigail Adams.

Jack Briesler—
[John] Adams family servant. Married Abigail’s faithful maid, Esther Field.

Granny Susie (Susanna Boylston Adams) Hall
1709–1797—Married John Hall after the death of John Adams’s father in 1761. Lived long enough to see her son elected President; died about a month after his inauguration. Abigail described her as the mainstay of the entire family.

Peter Adams—
John’s brother and next-door neighbor in Braintree. A third brother, Elihu, joined the Continental militia at the siege of Boston and died in camp.

Samuel Adams
1722–1803—John’s second cousin (both were great-grandsons of Joseph Adams of Braintree, Mass.); master propagandist, radical revolutionary, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and eventually, first Lieutenant-Governor and then Governor of Massachusetts.

Michael Boyne*—
Sam Adams’s law clerk, Irish, anti-Federalist, and courted Abigail’s niece Louisa Smith.

Mary (Smith) Cranch
1741–1811—Older sister of Abigail Adams.

Esther Field—
Abigail’s faithful maid. Became pregnant by Jack Briesler while in England, married him there, but bore and lost the baby on the voyage home. Briesler and Esther remained in the Adams family’s service throughout their lives.

Elbridge Gerry
1744–1814—John’s erratic and independent fellow delegate to the Continental Congress, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a lifelong supporter of John Adams. It was the Republican redistricting of Massachusetts, while Gerry was Governor, in 1812, to rearrange the state so as to have more Republican senators, that gave rise to the term “gerrymandering.”

John Hancock
1737–1793—Merchant, tea smuggler, patriot, first signer of the Declaration of Independence, president of the first Continental Congress, and later Governor of Massachusetts.

Jamey Prince—
Free colored servant of the Adamses.

Betsey (Smith) Shaw (Peabody)
1750–1815—Younger sister of Abigail Adams. Her parson first husband ran a school in Haverhill, where the younger two Adams boys (Charley and Tommy) were boarded for the four years Abigail was with John in France and England.

Colonel William Smith
1755–1816—John’s secretary in the American Ministry in London, married John’s daughter Nabby in 1786.

Sarah Smith
1769–1828—Colonel Smith’s younger sister, who married Charley Adams in 1794.

William Smith
1746–1787—Abigail’s good-for-nothing younger brother.

Louisa Smith
1773–1857—Daughter of Abigail’s brother William, taken into the Adams household when John and Abigail returned from England, shortly after brother William’s death. She remained unmarried, as Abigail’s companion, until Abigail’s death in 1818.

SALLY

Aunt Martha Carr
1746–1811—Thomas Jefferson’s youngest sister, who married his best friend Dabney Carr in 1765. Carr died in 1773 leaving Martha with six children under the age of ten. Jefferson gave them all a home at Monticello, where Aunt Carr remained.

Peter Carr
1770 (?)–1815—One of Aunt Carr’s children, raised at Monticello. Much later in life, Patsy Jefferson claimed that Peter Carr was the father of Sally Hemings’s children, a claim disproved by DNA tests in 1998. He
was,
apparently, the father of a son by Sally’s sister Critta.

Sam Carr
1766 (?)–1855 (?)—Another of Aunt Carr’s sons, raised at Monticello.

Aunt Elizabeth Eppes—
Younger half-sister of Jefferson’s wife Martha (Patty). She assumed care of Jefferson’s daughters Maria (Polly) and Lucie Elizabeth on the death of Patty Jefferson.

Jack (John Wayles) Eppes
1773–1823—Son of Aunt Eppes and Maria Jefferson’s childhood sweetheart and eventual husband; lived for a time with the Jefferson household and acted as Jefferson’s secretary. U.S. Representative for Virginia, U.S. Senator. After Maria’s death in 1804, Jack married Martha Jones; he also kept as a concubine Sally Hemings’s niece Betsie Hemings, who is buried beside him at Millbrook in Virginia. Martha Jones Eppes reportedly asked to be buried someplace else, and was.

Betty Hemings
d. 1807—Mother of Sally Hemings by John Wayles, the father of Jefferson’s wife. Prior to becoming John Wayles’s concubine, she had three children by a fellow slave—Martin, Bett, and Mary (Mary was the mother of Jack Eppes’s concubine Betsie Hemings). She had six children by John Wayles: Robert, Jimmy, Peter (Pip), Critta, Sally, and Thenia. Later, at Monticello, she had a son (John) by one of the white carpenters there, and a daughter (Lucy) by a fellow slave. All the slaves manumitted by Thomas Jefferson were either Betty’s children or her grandchildren.

Sally Hemings
1773–1836—Daughter of Betty Hemings by John Wayles, the father of Jefferson’s wife; nursemaid to Jefferson’s daughter Maria (Polly) on her journey to join her father in France; maid to both the Jefferson daughters and later the servant in charge of Jefferson’s private quarters; Thomas Jefferson’s concubine for forty-two years and the mother of eight of his children including his only surviving sons. One of her grandsons fought as a Union soldier in the Civil War and died in the Confederate prison at Andersonville.

Jimmy Hemings
1765 (?)–1801—Son of Betty Hemings by John Wayles, taken to France with Jefferson in 1784 to be trained as a cook, returned with him to Virginia and was given his freedom, later traveled in Europe but died “tragically” (Jefferson’s word)—possibly from the effects of alcoholism, in 1801.