Washington: A Life (18 page)

During the impasse over the proposed marriage, Martha made the courageous decision to appeal to John Custis directly at his Williamsburg mansion and beard the lion in his den. Somehow she reached into herself and found hidden reserves of strength. We don’t know what she said to sweet-talk this cantankerous man into agreement, but she won him over completely. Although he now hailed her as “beautiful and sweet-tempered,” he still didn’t consent to the marriage. Nonetheless, soon after Martha’s visit, a family lawyer named James Power gave a horse, bridle, and saddle to Black Jack and informed John Custis that this had been Daniel’s doing. The touching display of brotherly love finally made John Custis submit to his son’s marriage to Martha. As the lawyer told Daniel, “I am empowered by your father to let you know that he heartily and willingly consents to your marriage with Miss Dandridge—that he has so good a character of her, that he had rather you should have her than any lady in Virginia.”
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Power lauded the “prudent speech” that Martha made to her future father-in-law, but several scholars have speculated that Martha arranged the cunning gift to Black Jack, the master stroke of the drama. She had shown extraordinary coolness under fire, foreshadowing her ability to deal with incendiary situations later on. On May 15, 1750, Martha Dandridge, eighteen, at last wed Daniel Parke Custis, thirty-eight. Black Jack resided with the newlyweds at the White House until he died, probably from meningitis, eighteen months later.

 

 

BY EARLY APRIL 1758 George Washington was sufficiently recovered from his bout of dysentery that he traveled west to regain control of the Virginia Regiment. Due to his blossoming romance with Martha Custis, he had to deal with one piece of unfinished business: his lingering infatuation with Sally Fairfax. It seems likely that when her husband, George William, was detained in Great Britain on legal matters that winter, Sally frequented Mount Vernon and nursed George through his illness. We will never know whether their affair was consummated. Since Washington had retained the admiration of both his patron Colonel Fairfax and his son George William, it seems hard to believe he had ever lured Sally into outright infidelity. Both George and Sally would have recognized the forbidden, illicit nature of their bond, the fearful price they would pay in Virginia society for any major transgression. There was probably much saucy banter and teasing pleasantries—the stuff of eighteenth-century gallantry—mixed up with deep affection and flirtation in their relationship. At the same time, there is little doubt of George’s passionate attachment to this woman or the lasting power she exerted on his feverish imagination. His feelings for Sally Fairfax belonged to that brand of impossible, unattainable love for an older married woman that has filled the amorous fantasies of ardent young men throughout history.

On September 12, 1758, George Washington sat down at Fort Cumberland and penned a letter to Sally Fairfax that was an eloquent valedictory, not so much to their friendship, which would continue unabated, as to their sentimental affair. He had just received a letter from Sally, relayed by George William, who was helping to supervise renovations at Mount Vernon. Flooded with emotion at seeing the letter, Washington told her “how joyfully I catch at the happy occasion of renewing a correspondence which I feared was disrelished on your part.”
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That Sally had suspended the correspondence suggests that she feared Washington might be straying into dangerous territory and had to be pointedly restrained. In his response, Washington was probably motivated by two impending events: his marriage to Martha Custis and a hazardous military campaign against Fort Duquesne that would naturally have awakened thoughts of mortality. The letter is written with the stilted syntax that Washington exhibited whenever he grappled with strongly conflicting emotions.

At the outset of this coded letter, he made glancing reference to “the animating prospect of possessing Mrs. Custis,” leaving no doubt that he planned to proceed with the wedding. Then he went on to deliver a cunningly ambiguous love note in which he was obviously talking about Sally, while making it seem to prying eyes that he referred to Martha:

The reference to a “thousand tender passages” makes clear that Sally, not Martha, was the lady in question; George’s acquaintance with Martha was too brief to have packed in so many tender memories. He seemed to be saying that their love, defeated by the practical circumstances of life, was simply not meant to be. She was married to a rich man, and he was about to marry a rich woman, and George Washington, for all his high-flown rhetoric, was an eminently practical young man, not cut out for doomed, quixotic affairs. He ended the epistle with a frank admission of love: “You have drawn me, my dear Madam, or rather have I drawn myself, into an honest confession of a simple fact. Misconstrue not my meaning—’tis obvious—doubt it not, nor expose it. The world has no business to know the object of my love, declared in this manner to you, when I want to conceal it … I dare believe you are as happy as you say. I wish I was happy also. Mirth, good humor, ease of mind and—what else?—cannot fail to render you so and consummate your wishes.”
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This letter overturns the conventional image of a phlegmatic Washington and shows a much more passionate figure. It shocks as well because of his apparent betrayal of his friend and patron, George William Fairfax, and his fiancée, Martha. Any moral outrage must be tempered, however, by the overriding fact that George was honorably declaring an end to their amorous relationship on the eve of his marriage, which would call an irrevocable halt to such youthful folly. Sally Fairfax had always been somewhat coy and elusive with Washington, as evidenced by her recent discontinuance of their correspondence. Her coquetry, in the last analysis, was constrained by a self-protective instinct. She had also, as the letter makes clear, insisted that she was happy with her life. So why did Washington write such a daring letter? There is always the possibility that he was testing the waters with Sally one last time before he committed to marriage. Or perhaps, at the end, he wanted some final validation of his powerful longings for Sally, some recognition that she, too, had been deeply touched by taboo feelings. That he announced his love in such dramatic fashion confirms that he had never done so before and that he and Sally had left many things unsaid and probably undone. Whatever was the true situation, Sally must have recognized and treasured the frank admission of love, for she retained the letter until she died in 1811—a period of more than fifty years.

Although Sally’s response has been lost, we can surmise its contents from Washington’s September 25 reply. Apparently she either feigned ignorance of the mystery lady’s identity, or pretended it was Martha. Washington stood his ground. “Dear Madam, do we still misunderstand the true meaning of each other’s letters? I think it must appear so, tho[ugh] I would feign hope the contrary as I cannot speak plainer without. But I’ll say no more and leave you to guess the rest.”
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Washington knew that any greater candor could wreck two marriages. That Sally refused to credit his love or openly reciprocate it suggests that she was an artful woman who had enjoyed having her vanity stroked by a handsome younger man. This would have made Washington the more appreciative of Martha, who was practical, honest, and straightforward. The youthful infatuation prepared Washington for the deeper joys of marriage, although the beguiling image of Sally Fairfax persisted in his memory. She would always be mixed up with recollections of Belvoir and an idyllic, sunstruck period of his youth. The Sally Fairfax saga may well testify to Washington’s repressed romantic nature, buried beneath many layers of reserve. But it’s even more a stoic tale of self-denial, previewing the supreme command he would attain over his unruly emotions. Washington’s storied self-control was not something inherited but achieved by dint of hard work, making it all the more formidable an accomplishment.

In later years Washington liked to philosophize about love and marriage and became a veritable Polonius with young relatives as he peppered them with sage advice. In 1795 he received a letter from his adopted granddaughter, Eleanor Parke Custis, who had attended a Georgetown ball and boasted of her indifference to the advances of young men there. Washington warned her bluntly of the often-unstoppable force of passion. “Do not therefore boast too soon or too strongly of your insensibility … to its power. In the composition of the human frame, there is a good deal of inflammable matter [W apparently meant flammable], however dormant it may lie for a time and … when the torch is put to it,
that
which is
within you
may burst into a blaze.” Washington went on to say that this mighty blaze “ought to be under the guidance of reason, for although we cannot avoid first impressions, we may assuredly place them under guard.”
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The author of these lines seemed knowledgeable about ungovernable emotions and how to tame them.

Perhaps the best proof that the relationship between Washington and Sally Fairfax stayed deep but platonic is that the Washingtons remained intimate friends with George William and Sally Fairfax before the American Revolution and even traveled with them. In all likelihood, George confessed to Martha his longtime flirtation, which had cooled and receded to its proper place. The febrile yearnings of youth had made way for a more mature love. It speaks to the strength of the Washingtons’ marriage that they were never threatened by the close proximity of Sally Fairfax, who remained a welcome guest at Mount Vernon and no less a friend to Martha than to George. There is something admirably grown-up, sensitive, and dignified about the way these two couples handled a most delicate situation.

IN THE SPRING OF 1758 George Washington entertained one last forlorn hope of a brilliantly climactic military campaign in the Ohio Valley. He was about to tender his resignation when he heard reports in March that the Crown planned to send a fleet with seven thousand men to North America and contemplated another operation against Fort Duquesne. The new commander, Brigadier General John Forbes, was a veteran Scottish officer who took a decidedly low view of colonial officers, maligning them as a “bad collection of broken innkeepers, horse jockeys, and Indian traders.”
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Hoping to curry favor with Forbes, Washington wrote to Brigadier General John Stanwix and badgered him “to mention me in favorable terms to General Forbes,” but “not as a person who would depend upon him for further recommendation to military preferment, for I have long conquered all such expectancies … but as a person who would gladly be distinguished in some measure from the
common run
of provincial officers.”
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Perhaps a chastened Washington meant it when he now said that he expected no royal commission. Contrary to his bias against colonial soldiers, Forbes singled out Washington as “a good and knowing officer in the back countries.”
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To augment the chances for victory at the Forks of the Ohio, the Virginia assembly decided to raise a second regiment, doubling its armed force to two thousand men, with George Washington as the presiding senior officer.

In early July at Fort Cumberland, Washington showed how fighting in the hinterlands had tutored him in Indian-style warfare. When he ran short of uniforms, he outfitted both himself and his men in Indian hunting shirts and leggings, helping them to emulate the light, mobile style of their fleet-footed adversaries. While admitting to Forbes’s chief aide that it was “an unbecoming dress” for an officer, he argued that “soldiers in such a dress are better able to carry their provisions, are fitter for the active service we are engaged in, and less liable to sink under the fatigues of a long march.”
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Even though Washington won permission to assume Indian dress, he still acknowledged the incontestable superiority of Indian warriors: “I cannot conceive the best white men to be equal to them in the woods.”
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A victim of political wrangling in Williamsburg, Washington was eager to renew his bid for a seat from Frederick County in the House of Burgesses. He probably wished to erase the memory of his poor showing three years earlier and establish through public service his credentials as an aspiring gentleman. Learning from past mistakes, he gave plenty of notice for his candidacy this time and assembled a cadre of active, energetic friends who cheerfully drummed up support in Winchester in his absence. Nonetheless they pleaded with him to come and politick in person. His friend Colonel James Wood, the town’s leading citizen, warned that there was “no relying on the promises of the common herd … There are many of us embarked on the same cause with you and a disappointment will sit heavy on us.”
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Leaving no stone unturned, Robert Rutherford told Washington that they were encouraging voters “with the greatest ardor, even down to Will the hatter and his oily spouse.”
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Washington secured permission to travel to Winchester to campaign, then chose to stay with his troops. This may have been from a sense of duty or from fear that he would miss a victorious battle. Washington had also begun to intuit the subtle art of seeking power by refraining from too obvious a show of ambition.