Washington: A Life (17 page)

 

 

AS GEORGE WASHINGTON introduced new splendor at Mount Vernon, he needed a wife to complete the pretty scene, and Martha Dandridge Custis made her timely appearance. Their speedy courtship began in mid-March 1758, right after Washington journeyed to Williamsburg to consult Dr. John Amson, who allayed his medical fright by reassuring him that he was recovering from dysentery. Relieved and elated, Washington rode off to nearby New Kent County to stay with his friend Richard Chamberlayne, who introduced him to his neighbor, the widow Custis. Her husband, Daniel Parke Custis, had died the previous July, as had two of her children in early childhood. She now lived with her four-year-old son John Parke (called Jacky) and two-year-old daughter Martha Parke (called Patsy) in baronial splendor on the Pamunkey River at a bucolic mansion known, prophetically enough, as the White House. Family legend suggests a spontaneous romance between George and Martha, but the mutual attraction may well have been anticipated. Though this was their first documented meeting, their social circles must have crisscrossed in the small, clubby world of the Williamsburg elite.

On leave from the Virginia Regiment, Washington courted Martha with the crisp efficiency of a military man laying down a well-planned siege. He spent that first night at the White House before returning to Williamsburg—he tipped the servants liberally to strengthen his image as a wealthy suitor—and dropped by twice more during the first half of 1758. A brisk competition had already arisen to snare the wealthy widow. A prosperous tobacco planter and widower named Charles Carter, who was nearly twice her age, had grown enamored of the short, attractive woman with the “uncommon sweetness of temper,” as he saw it.
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Carter had sired a dozen offspring in his previous marriage, and Martha, twenty-six, may have been intimidated by the prospect of being stepmother to this numerous brood. Carter faced stiff competition from Washington, a tall, handsome, young military hero with room both in his heart and in his home for a wife and two children. To a solitary, anxious widow, George Washington could only have appeared manly, rock-solid, and utterly fearless.

We cannot pinpoint the precise moment when George and Martha agreed to wed, but we do know that within weeks of their first meeting, George was transformed into a giddy man of fashion, urgently ordering expensive fabric for what must have been his wedding outfit. He directed his London agent to ship “as much of the best superfine blue cotton velvet as will make a coat, waistcoat, and breeches for a tall man, with a fine silk button to suit it and all other necessary trimmings and linings, together with garters for the breeches.”
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He also ordered six pairs of tony shoes and gloves. A month later he ordered a gold ring from Philadelphia that he doubtless intended to slip on the diminutive widow’s finger. Not to be outdone in brightening up a wardrobe, Martha ordered her London tailor to send her “one genteel suit of clothes for myself to be grave but not to be extrava[ga]nt and not to be mourning.”
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Throwing off her widow’s weeds, she packed off a nightgown to London “to be dyed of fashionable color fit for me to wear.”
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Though such letters may give the unseemly impression of an overly lusty widow, it was then routine, as a matter of economic necessity, for the bereaved to remarry quickly. The prolonged mourning rituals that came with the Victorian era would have seemed like futile self-indulgence in the eighteenth century.

By marrying Martha Dandridge Custis, Washington swiftly achieved the social advancement for which he had struggled in the military. Almost overnight he was thrust into top-drawer Virginia society and could dispense with the servility that had sometimes marked his dealings with social superiors. Marriage to Martha brought under his control a small kingdom of real estate tended by dark-skinned human beings. She had a bountiful collection of properties, including thousands of acres around Williamsburg, nearly three hundred slaves, and hundreds of head of cattle, hogs, and sheep. The property came, however, with a significant catch. Inasmuch as Daniel Parke Custis had died intestate, English common law decreed that only one-third of his estate could be claimed directly by Martha during her lifetime. She thus owned only eighty-five slaves, referred to as “dower” slaves, who would revert to Jacky Custis after her death. The other two-thirds of the estate were pledged to the financial support of the Custis children. George would serve as custodian of this wealth, entangling him in legal complications for the rest of his life. It’s worth noting that after her husband’s death, the practical Martha hadn’t thrown herself at the mercy of older male financial advisers but had had the pluck and fortitude to handle his business affairs by herself. Whether sending tobacco to England, placing orders with London merchants, or extending loans to neighbors, she gained an invaluable education in plantation management.

George and Martha Washington formed an oddly matched visual pair: she barely cleared five feet, and her hands and feet were as petite as George’s were famously huge. A portrait of Martha done shortly before Daniel died displays nothing especially soft or alluring to set a young man’s pulse racing. She wears a low-cut, satiny blue dress, shows a shapely figure and bosom, and wears her dark hair pulled back, adorned with pearls. The small head, set on its elongated neck, isn’t especially pretty: the forehead is too low, the hairline receding, the nose too hooked, the mouth too short, the jaw too round. Her hazel eyes are serious and watchful. It is the portrait of a plain, sensible young woman who already seems a trifle matronly. All the same, one suspects that the artist failed to catch the irrepressible warmth and charm that animated her features. The sitter’s soul is smothered by the stiff pose of a woman holding a blossom and staring at the viewer. It should also be said that Martha had the reputation of being a beauty in her youth. “She was at one time one of the most beautiful women in America and today there remains something extremely agreeable and attractive about her,” recounted a Polish nobleman several years before her death.
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From surviving artifacts, such as the purple satin shoes with high heels and silver sequins that she wore on her wedding day, we know that Martha Custis was a stylish young woman and even something of a clotheshorse.

In the eighteenth century, marriage was regarded more as a practical arrangement than as a vehicle for love, and the Washington marriage may never have been a torrid romance. But that aside, in selecting Martha Dandridge Custis, George Washington chose even better than he knew. She was the perfect foil to his mother: warm and sociable, always fun to be with, and favored with pleasing manners. She would give George the unstinting love and loyalty that Mary had withheld. By offering her husband such selfless devotion, she solidly anchored his life in an enduring marriage. Martha had the cheerfulness to lighten his sometimes somber personality and was the one person who dared to kid her “Old Man,” as she teasingly referred to him. Despite the many people in his eventful life, George Washington lacked a large number of close friends or confidants, and Martha alone could cater to all his emotional needs.

In every respect, Martha turned out to be an immense social asset to his career. She was the perfect hostess, with a ready smile, overflowing goodwill, and a genuine interest in her guests. With company, she was convivial and welcoming, where George tended to be more cordial and correct, and she worked her influence in a self-effacing style. “His lady is of a hospitable disposition, always good-humored and cheerful, and seems to be actuated by the same motives with himself, but she is rather of a more lively disposition,” observed one visitor to Mount Vernon. “They are to all appearances a happy pair.”
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Martha never craved wealth or status, perhaps because she already had it; nor did she feed her husband’s ambitions. She was never dazzled by his later fame and never put on airs. Nevertheless she faithfully supported George’s plans and bowed to the exorbitant demands of his career, if not always with unmixed enthusiasm. Direct, plainspoken, and free of frivolity, she lacked the feminine wiles that had so aroused George with Sally Fairfax. Abigail Adams captured Martha Washington perfectly when she said, “Her manners are modest and unassuming, dignified and feminine, not a tincture of hauteur about her.”
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In fact, she remained a bustling, hardworking housewife, occupied with domestic chores until the end of her life, and was fully equal to the administrative demands of Mount Vernon.

Eight months older than George, Martha Dandridge was born on June 2, 1731, in rural New Kent County, the eldest of eight children, three of whom died young. Her father, John Dandridge—a county clerk, militia colonel, and minor tobacco planter on the Pamunkey River—had married Frances Jones the previous year. Fifteen or twenty slaves worked the tobacco fields on their plantation, Chestnut Grove, which covered five hundred acres. Their agrarian household was fairly spartan, and Martha, or “Patsy,” was raised as a domestic helpmate to her mother. She grew up in a proper though hardly genteel house and was never too superior to perform house-work. The provincial world of Martha’s girlhood didn’t spoil young ladies. “She told me she remembered the time when there was only one single carriage in all of Virginia,” said a later visitor to Mount Vernon. “Ladies invited to entertainment arrived on horseback.”
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As the eldest child, Martha Dandridge was occupied with domestic skills that she later taught to indentured servants and slaves at Mount Vernon. Her industrious nature must have pleased George Washington. Both of them were early risers, used every moment profitably, and stuck to the same daily routines.

Like her future husband, Martha Dandridge grew up in a world where slavery was taken for granted, as were illegitimate children sired by the master. A few historians (though by no means all) believe that she had a young half sister named Ann Dandridge who was the offspring of her father and a slave woman of mixed black and Cherokee Indian blood. The little girl, who was likely much younger than Martha, didn’t know the true story of her identity. If the story is to be believed, Martha, to her credit, kept Ann Dandridge in the Custis family and brought her to Mount Vernon; to her discredit, she never emancipated her half sister, who wasn’t freed until 1802, after Martha’s death.
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Helen Bryan, a Martha Washington biographer, believes that Ann Dandridge was free, although perceived to be a slave, while the historian Henry Wiencek thinks she was treated as a slave, albeit a privileged one.
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George and Martha Washington never dropped hints in their letters about Ann Dandridge, who was all but expunged from their history and never listed in Mount Vernon records.

Martha Washington enjoyed a steady faith from the time of her childhood. Her father was a church vestryman, and she was an observant member of the Church of England until the Revolution. “After breakfast, she retired for an hour to her chamber, which hour was spent in prayer and reading the Holy Scriptures, a practice that she never omitted during half a century of her varied life,” said her grandson.
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As was palpable later on as she endured many family deaths, she retained a simple but intense belief in the afterlife. Her philosophic and religious outlook tallied well in most respects with George Washington’s. They both believed in a world replete with suffering in which one muddled through with as much dignity and grace as one could muster. Neither George nor Martha ever reacted to grave setbacks in a maudlin, self-pitying manner.

Before she died, likely for privacy reasons and perhaps by prior agreement with her husband, Martha Washington committed to the flames their entire personal correspondence; only a handful of messages survived the bonfire. From two of her surviving letters—one addressed to “My Dearest” and the other to “My Love”—we can tell that she adored her husband, and George wrote in the same vein.
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Martha had little, if any, formal schooling and had a habit of torturing the English language. Her grammar was poor, her spelling eccentric, her punctuation nonexistent. (She seemed to specialize in run-on sentences.) Nonetheless she was an avid newspaper reader and kept up with some of the best literature imported from London in the 1760s, including Oliver Goldsmith’s
The Vicar of Wakefield
and Samuel Johnson’s
Rasselas,
as well as gothic romance novels.

That Martha concealed a vein of steel behind her conciliatory manner—that she was much more than the sweet, grandmotherly little woman of popular legend—is manifest in the story of her marriage to Daniel Parke Custis. Daniel’s father, Colonel John Custis IV, was a rich, tyrannical man who had made life sheer misery for his equally difficult wife, Fidelia, née Frances Parke. Their marital spats were the stuff of legend on the eastern shore of Virginia. When the couple rode by the shore one day, John became so enraged at Fidelia that he drove their carriage straight into Chesapeake Bay. When Fidelia asked where he was going, John replied with a sneer, “To hell, Madam.” To which she retorted boldly, “Drive on, sir.”
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The tightfisted Custis, an overbearing father, was appalled when he learned that his bachelor son Daniel, in his late thirties, was secretly engaged to the adolescent Martha Dandridge. He had already vetoed a series of potential brides and dismissed Martha as a social-climbing commoner “much inferior in point of fortune” to his son, vowing that he would rather toss his silverware into the street than allow her to inherit it.
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Adding to this combustible mix was a mulatto son named Jack that John Custis had fathered with a slave called Alice. Once before John had threatened to disown Daniel and leave all his money to “Black Jack.” This seemed a distinct possibility if Daniel didn’t shelve his plans to marry Martha Dandridge. Far from hiding Black Jack, the irascible John Custis doted on him, and when the little boy was five, he submitted a petition to the governor to free the boy “christened John but commonly called Jack, born of the body of his Negro wench young Alice.”
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To celebrate his emancipation, the boy was given four slaves as playmates.
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Obviously John Custis didn’t rate very highly as a child psychologist.