Martha Washington (13 page)

These golden years, as Martha would later remember them, flowed on seemingly untroubled at the local level. But their counterpoint was escalating economic and political divergence between the American colonies and the mother country. Both she and George were loyal subjects of their king, proud of their English heritage. No one at first imagined that the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 would lead directly to the violent break of the American Revolution. Most Virginians had expected to enjoy a halcyon time of peace and prosperity. Their traditional enemy, France, had been soundly defeated, forced to give up all her North American colonies, and her Indian allies were subdued. The seas were safe for British ships again without fear of capture or destruction, agriculture and trade were booming, and all should have been well. As George wrote to an English acquaintance: “I deal little in politics, and what to advance under the article of news I really know not. This part of the country, as you know, affords few occurrences worthy of remark.”

But like other loyal colonists, George would soon be forced to deal in politics. George III, who had ascended the throne in 1760, had no intention of leaving these jumped-up colonials in peace. A century of imperial wars had depleted the national exchequer and led to a monstrous, albeit unevenly imposed, tax burden in Great Britain. Working through a series of docile chief ministers and shifting parliamentary support, the young king determined to recoup some wartime outlays by taxing Americans.

Colonial leaders resisted each attempt to impose taxes and tighten royal control in a series of increasingly acrimonious disputes beginning in 1763. They sent agents like Benjamin Franklin to represent their interests in London, waged newspaper warfare, established intercolonial ties, wrote countless letters and broadsides, and formed committees to enforce their refusal to buy British goods. Boston took the lead, followed by New York City, both their genteel leaders and their mobs of ordinary citizens profoundly suspicious of British intentions and authority. Virginians watched and waited; radicals like Patrick Henry were ahead of the rest. The Proclamation of 1763, the Sugar Act, the Currency Act, the Stamp Act, the Quartering Act, the Declaratory Act, and the Townshend Acts—through the 1760s, the British Parliament passed and then repealed a string of measures, which seldom added to their revenues, eroded imperial control over the colonies, and drove more and more Americans toward defiance and ultimately revolution.

The end of the 1760s just as surely brought upset and changes in family life at Mount Vernon. In 1768, Walter Magowan went to London to be ordained as an Anglican priest, there being no bishopric in the American colonies. When he returned to Virginia, he became rector of a parish; both the pay and prestige were superior to continued service as a tutor. At fourteen, Jacky was old enough to be sent away to school. Even with a resident tutor, he had constantly taken off from his studies to go riding or shooting. Martha spoiled him, but so did his stepfather. It's hard to imagine that any coercion could have turned him into a scholar. After all, he didn't
need
to study very hard: when he came of age, he would be a very rich man indeed.

After asking for recommendations from among his acquaintances, George wrote to the Reverend Jonathan Boucher, an English clergyman who kept a boarding school in Caroline County, south of Fredericksburg; Boucher's sister assisted him in looking after the boys under his care. They determined to send Jacky there in the summer.

But as they weighed terms and possibilities for Jacky's schooling, a calamity befell the family. Beautiful little Patsy, just turning twelve, experienced a violent seizure, the first of many to come. It seems clear that she suffered from epilepsy, and puberty is one of the trigger points for the malady's first manifestation. Beginning in January 1768, her fits grew worse over the years, both in violence and in frequency. Patsy's care became the center of Martha's life and ironically made it easier for her to send Jacky away to school.

Epilepsy was untreatable by any medical knowledge of the day. The Washingtons spent much time and money consulting a variety of doctors (at least eight of them over the years), trying changes in lifestyle, mountains of medicines, and treatment with “simples,” that is, herbal remedies. Dr. William Rumney, an Englishman in practice in Alexandria, treated Patsy regularly for five years, coming down to Mount Vernon every few weeks to examine his patient and bring capsules, powders, pills, and decoctions. Throughout her ordeal, antispasmodics such as valerian and musk were the primary medicines prescribed—to no avail. At one point, poisonous but often used mercury and severe purging were ordered, Martha nursing and watching her daughter throughout. Another time, a blacksmith came and put an iron ring on Patsy's finger, based on an English folk belief that such rings prevented seizures. Later, they spent a month at Warm Springs, hoping the waters might be beneficial.

As Patsy grew up, Martha tried to provide as normal an adolescence for her daughter as she could. They visited relatives and neighbors, even though they sometimes were forced to return home if her seizures were too severe. Friends were important to the young girl. Millie Posey, a neighbor girl whose mother had died, practically lived at Mount Vernon during these years, joining in Patsy's dancing lessons. Sally Carlyle came out from Alexandria and stayed a few days a month, sharing in music lessons. Patsy enjoyed the fashionable clothes and accessories of a great planter's daughter, attending a dance or two during her good spells, but during the bad times she sometimes had two fits a day. At heart Martha knew that Patsy's condition was hopeless. As her husband wrote, “The unhappy situation of her daughter has to some degree fixed her eyes upon [Jacky] as her only hope.”

In July 1768, after about a six-month hiatus in his lessons, Jacky moved to school with a servant and two horses. School didn't prove too taxing, as he frequently came home on long visits. For all his own English education, Boucher had no training as a schoolmaster and didn't manage to drill much Latin, Greek, or even arithmetic into his bored student's head. Most Virginia gentry schools were kept by Anglican rectors, and most of them were similarly lackluster.

In April 1769, George and Martha went down to Williamsburg for the spring legislative session. Her youngest sister, Betsy Dandridge, was with them; she had been visiting at Mount Vernon, and they were taking her back home. By now George represented Fairfax County, a sign of his rise in the world since his marriage. Although not yet a colonywide leader, he no longer disavowed an interest in politics, closely following the developing crisis with Great Britain. His particular mission at this time was to present the Virginia Resolves, written by his friend and neighbor George Mason, opposing taxation without representation and British infringements on Americans' rights. After heated discussion, the royal governor dissolved the assembly. Its members promptly reconvened at the Raleigh Tavern and agreed to an organized boycott of British goods until the taxes were repealed. Martha stayed at Eltham with the Bassetts, consulting still another doctor about Patsy, waiting eagerly for a report on the meetings before going back home to put the boycott into effect in their own lives.

Finding local substitutes for such British-manufactured goods as cloth, thread, pins, needles, hoes, scythes, wallpaper, stoneware chamber pots, hats, paper, windowpanes, and paint wasn't easy for people who were so accustomed to receiving annual deliveries from England. But Martha and George were committed to this political statement. The workshops at Mount Vernon had always produced quantities of homespun cloth, mostly for slaves' clothing. During the next years, they expanded their output. Martha trained and oversaw the estate's spinners, seamstresses, and knitters. Weaving was traditionally men's work in Britain and the colonies, and George oversaw the hiring of itinerant weavers to convert the spun flax and wool thread into the linen and woolen fabrics used and worn at Mount Vernon.

Jonathan Boucher accepted a parish in Prince George's County, Maryland, outside Annapolis, and moved his school there. In the summer of 1770, sixteen-year-old Jacky, or Jack, as he now preferred to be called, rode to the new location. His mother had agreed to his continuing as a student with Boucher, though she steadfastly opposed the clergyman's blithe suggestion that he guide the boy on a grand tour of Europe in another year or two. George was for a time intrigued by the idea, but Martha's common sense told her that such an extended trip with the indulgent minister could only lead to disaster for her son.

Annapolis was very convenient to Mount Vernon and as the capital of Maryland offered bountiful social opportunities. Jack came home often to attend dancing classes, go hunting, or just spend time gladdening his mother's heart. Kindhearted and loving, he was genuinely attached to Martha and Patsy, and they adored him in return.

Jack studied a little and socialized a lot. He became something of a fop, spending money on embroidered waistcoats and wrist ruffles, rings and silver knee buckles. As a matter of course, he had his own manservant and horses with him, went to the Annapolis races, bought lottery tickets, and enjoyed such expensive tropical treats as oranges and pineapples. Boucher wrote at one point, “I must confess to you that I never in my Life knew a Youth so exceedingly Indolent or so surprisingly voluptuous; one wd. suppose Nature had intended him for some Asiatic Prince.”

In the spring of 1772, one worry was taken off George's mind when his mother, now in her sixties, agreed to move into a small white frame house in Fredericksburg on Charles Street within easy walking distance of his sister Betty's house. He bought the house for her, and she lived in comfort there until her death. Within a couple of years, he sold the farm on the Rappahannock, which was too far away from his central properties for effective management.

In May 1772, Jack brought home a young painter from Annapolis with a recommendation from Boucher. Charles Willson Peale was a former saddler who had studied with Benjamin West in London. Jack wanted the artist to paint a miniature of his mother, and she, of course, wanted images of both her children, now in their teens. Within a couple of days, even the reluctant and unenthusiastic forty-year-old George, “having yielded to Importunity,” donned his colonel's uniform from the Virginia Regiment (it still fit after thirteen years!) to pose for his first portrait. Martha's insistence led to the creation of the only image of George Washington before he became truly famous.

Fortunately, Peale was a technically proficient painter with the gift of capturing his subjects' personalities. At forty, Martha was still lovely, dimpled and slightly smiling, growing a bit plump, her dark hair pulled back with pearls. Jack at seventeen was fair, still very boyish, with light brown hair, flushed pink cheeks, a small mouth, and a slightly receding chin. Two years younger, Patsy is beautiful, with dark hair, big brown eyes, and strongly marked brows, but there's something wistful about this portrait, as though it's shadowed by her suffering.

In early 1773, the Washingtons began to think of sending Jack on to college. The College of William and Mary didn't have a very good reputation, in George's opinion, and he consulted Boucher about the rival merits of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and King's College (renamed Columbia University in 1784) in New York City, which the cleric far preferred.

In the meantime, Jack had been making his own plans. One of his school friends was Charles Calvert, the son of Benedict Calvert of Mount Airy, a planter and collector of customs for the Patuxent district of Maryland. The Calverts were the descendants of Lord Baltimore, the original proprietor of the colony, still wealthy and powerful at the end of the colonial era. The current Lord Baltimore didn't live in the colony; his brother-in-law Robert Eden served as governor. Married to the daughter of a previous governor, Benedict Calvert was an illegitimate but recognized member of the family, his social status secure but his wealth not comparable to that of the rest. Under Boucher's lax administration, the boys were allowed to visit the Calverts' town house or ride over to Mount Airy at will; Jack spent more and more time flirting with the two eldest Calvert girls.

Benedict Calvert wasn't about to discourage the attentions of the Custis heir. Although he was only eighteen, Jack fell in love with the Calverts' beautiful second daughter, Eleanor, and became secretly engaged. Nelly, as she was called, was only fifteen or sixteen at the time. It's hard to be exact about her age because the sources give different birth dates.

As his stepfather firmed up college plans, Jack decided to reveal his engagement. He came home on vacation in March, along with a party of prominent Marylanders that included Governor Eden and Benedict Calvert, who were passing through the neighborhood. For nearly a week, the Washingtons joined in the entertainment of these distinguished visitors. After they left for Williamsburg, however, Jack at last told his secret. Probably he approached his mother first. When he told his stepfather, George was as furious as he could have expected. There must have been some hot words on the subjects of duty, responsibility, and impropriety. It wasn't just that Jack was too young to get married, he had ignored Virginia mores by not consulting his family before becoming engaged, even though his fiancée came from a well-connected gentry family. It's clear, though, that Martha and George had different reactions to the engagement. For all his indignation, she was undoubtedly pleased.

On April 3, George wrote a letter to Nelly's father that fairly crackles with chagrin and anger. Jack's imprudence horrified Washington and, as he wrote frankly, he considered it “a Subject . . . of no small embarrassment to me.” Although he assured Benedict Calvert that the connection with Nelly's family would be extremely pleasing, Jack's “youth, inexperience, and unripened Education is, & will be insuperable obstacles in my eye, to the completion of the Marriage.” Waiting two or three years would give the young couple time to discover if their affection was fixed—if not, better to find out before marriage than after. Laying out Jack's great financial expectations (surely no surprise), he expected that Calvert would do “something genteel by your Daughter,” a polite request for a respectable dowry.