Martha Washington (20 page)

Painfully dull for modern tastes,
Cato
features high-minded speechifying with hardly a moment of action. It includes such ringing lines as “It is not now a time to talk of aught but chains or conquest; liberty or death” and “What a pity is it that we can die but once to serve our country.” Its rhetoric seemingly influenced such American patriots as Patrick Henry and Nathan Hale.

In early April, four prominent Quaker women, including the diarist Elizabeth Bowen Drinker, arrived at Valley Forge. They came to ask Washington to help secure the release of their imprisoned husbands. A numerous and influential group in Pennsylvania, most Quakers held fast to their religious beliefs: they refused to join nonimportation agreements, to swear oaths to the new nation (or any other), or to take up arms, even in defense. Pennsylvania patriots believed their actions (or nonactions) favored the British and arrested a group of wealthy Quaker leaders, including Henry Drinker, Elizabeth's husband, and sent them to Winchester, Virginia.

The women were driven to Valley Forge in a coach and four with two black servants riding postilion. They passed quickly through outlying picket lines and were given a pass for headquarters. As Elizabeth Drinker recorded in her diary: “We arriv'd at about ½ past one; requested an audience with the General—set with his Wife, (a sociable pretty kind of Woman) until he came in.” A number of friendly officers were present, including one of Washington's favorite aides, Tench Tilghman, a Philadelphia merchant who knew the Drinkers well. Much of the Revolution's bitterness arose from pitting brother against brother, sister against sister.

The general “discoursd with us freely, but not so long as we could have wish'd, as dinner was serv'd, to which he had invited us, there was 15 of the Officers besides the General and his Wife, Gen. Green, and G[en]. Lee,” who had just returned from British captivity. After dinner, “we went out with the General's Wife up to her Chamber [bedroom], and saw no more of him.” Washington had given the ladies a pass for Lancaster, the state capital, but he had no power over the State of Pennsylvania. The Quaker prisoners were freed soon afterward, however, and returned to Philadelphia.

On May 10, 1778, wonderful, long-awaited news arrived at Valley Forge. France had recognized the infant United States and become her ally; the treaty had been signed in February. From now on, the war would be different. The euphoric commander in chief ordered a grand celebration for the following day. At nine o'clock on May 11, a cannon shot summoned the soldiers to line up for addresses by their chaplains, including a reading of a summary of the treaty and praise for the king of France. Another booming cannon at about eleven-thirty ordered them to retrieve their weapons from the huts. They fell in for a military parade and drill before Washington, showing off all they had learned from Steuben, before marching back to their encampments for dinner, a good deal of rum, and noisy merriment.

In front of the artillery park, the cleared space where cannons and mortars rested on their caissons, an amphitheater had been improvised out of officers' marquees. In an open space at the center, His Excellency and Lady Washington received the officers as they approached in columns, thirteen abreast, the arms of each rank linked together to signify “most perfect confederation.”

Afterward, they all enjoyed a cold dinner—sneered at by a European officer as “a profusion of fat meat, strong wine and other liquors” but heartily relished by almost everybody else. The presence of the generals' wives, the music from an army band—all were enjoyable, but the warmth and affability with which Washington greeted his officers was the supreme pleasure.

“I was never present,” wrote an officer, “where there was such unfeigned and perfect joy as we discovered in every countenance. The entertainment concluded with a number of patriotic toasts attended with huzzas. When the general took his leave, there was a universal clap, with loud huzzas, which continued till he had proceeded a quarter of a mile, during which time there were a thousand hats tossed in the air. His Excellency turned round with his retinue and huzzaed several times.”

The British response to the news of the French alliance couldn't have been more gratifying: gnashing of imperial teeth, impotent waving of imperial sabers, and the decision to withdraw from Philadelphia. With the French fleet now in the mix, the British decided to pull their army back to New York. Defense of the immensely valuable Caribbean sugar islands became a priority, besides defense of the home islands and targets in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. A last minute attempt to make peace with their former colonists, while retaining them within the empire, was doomed from the outset. General Sir William Howe's resignation was accepted, and he sailed away home, leaving Sir Henry Clinton as British commander, the third so far in the three years of the war.

After six months at Valley Forge, a very new American army was astir, ready to take to the field again. Martha went back to Virginia on June 9 as they prepared to break camp. On June 18, the British abandoned Philadelphia early in the day. Elizabeth Drinker reported that on that day, “when we arose, there was not one Red-Coat to be seen in Town.” Many of the staunchest Tories left with them, as they had at Boston. A quarter of an hour later, the American light horse entered the city. “[They] had drawn Swords in their Hands, Gallop'd about the Streets in a great hurry, many were much frightn'd at their appearance.” Within a week, order and new policies were in place; Congress returned to the city on July 2 in time to celebrate the anniversary of independence with skyrockets, gunfire, and crowds in the streets. Philadelphia remained under American control for the rest of the war.

The retreating British were harried by Washington's army and state militiamen every mile they marched across New Jersey. On June 28, the American forces attacked their rear guard at Monmouth Courthouse. For a while, it seemed that this might be the great American victory, until Charles Lee managed to turn victory to retreat. Lee was blasphemous, rude, and unbearably slovenly in a day when cleanliness wasn't one of the cardinal virtues, followed everywhere by a pack of snapping dogs, but all those faults had previously been justified by his presumed bravery and military skill. When Washington came up, he rallied the fleeing soldiers and loosed one of his titanic blasts of rage at Lee. More or less a draw, Monmouth was nevertheless heartening to the American public. The British suffered far greater casualties than the Americans and slipped away in the night. Lee was court-martialed and suspended from command; he left the army, along with the dogs—all equally unregretted.

Washington coped with the increasingly less able members of Congress, fighting for the men and arms to win the war, warding off their ill-advised efforts at directing campaign strategy. The plunging value of the continental dollar, compared with the solid worth of the British pound, threatened to bring the Revolution to a screeching halt. The dream that helped keep him going was a massive, coordinated French-American land-sea attack on the main British army ensconced at New York City, but it never happened. The remainder of 1778 and early 1779 brought instead bloody fighting on the western frontiers between Indian allies of Great Britain and territorial militias, leaving hundreds of dead men, women, and children on both sides; a failed American attempt to retake Newport with the aid of a French fleet; a southern initiative by a British force that captured Savannah and Augusta, Georgia; and the capture of British forts along the Mississippi by the Spanish. Washington was frustrated and angry, his temper frequently slipping out of his ironclad control.

Back home, Martha found her granddaughters more charming than ever. Although still longing for a son, Jack was delighted with his little girls. At nearly two, “Ms. Bet has grown very much, and is very saucy and entertaining. She can say any word but Washington.” Just a few months old, baby Patty “has grown the finest Girl I ever saw and the most Good natured Quiet little Creature in the World.”

Jack had been elected to the General Assembly that spring as the representative for Fairfax County. Never very confident of his own abilities separate from the power of his fortune, he had worried that he might not win. Letting his mother know the election date, he asked her to help bring him luck: “You must remember to set cross leg'd that day for me.”

Martha and George settled into what would become their routine for the remaining five years of a war that seemed to stretch out forever. She continued to go home every summer to see to home and family, while he remained with the army, fearing that it would disintegrate if he left. Every fall was a waiting game. Would the British pull out so that he could make at least a flying visit home? Every fall, the answer was the same: no. Martha then climbed into the carriage, journeying for many weary days to join George in whatever hellhole served as winter camp that year. Each year, she re-created a home for her husband that helped him endure delay, anxiety, and homesickness.

Some summers she managed to go south to New Kent and visit her family. Often she was too tired. Those weeks of jolting over bad roads in an aging carriage had started to exhaust her as she neared fifty. In November 1778, she sounded the same note that would continue for years. She—everyone—hoped that this would be the year the British would admit that their American colonies were lost for good and sail away. Delayed and intercepted mail aggravated her uncertainty—“my letters doe not come regularly to hand.” So she hoped and doubted: “I am very uneasy at this time. I have some reason to expect that I shall take another trip to the northward. The pore General is not likely to come to see us from what I can hear.”

Despite worn-out coach springs, she left as soon as she got word. When she reached Philadelphia in mid-December, she received George's instructions to wait there for him. A week later, he arrived to talk Congress out of backing a foolhardy plan to attack Canada. Once they had their commander in town, congressmen had quite a lot to discuss with him, as he grew increasingly restless. Because of short supplies, Washington had ordered his men into several small winter encampments along the western bank of the Hudson. Headquarters, convenient to all the camps, would be Middlebrook, New Jersey.

The contrast between the riches of Philadelphia and the poverty of the army was painful to the Washingtons. Congress had no direct taxing powers, and the states were loath to contribute their share. Lafayette returned to France to make the strongest possible case to the king for money, munitions, and an army to defeat the British. But despite Washington's bitter indictment—“Speculation, peculation, and an insatiable thirst for riches seem to have got the better of every other consideration”—he couldn't avoid the entertainments and balls offered by the wealthy Philadelphians whose support he needed.

By this time, Martha no longer danced, but she never interfered with her husband's vigorous enjoyment of the exercise, even when he danced three hours straight with Kitty Greene at camp. He was always requested to lead out the dance with the most distinguished lady present, and all the women wanted to dance with the hero. Among the powerful elite of the city, Samuel and Eliza Willing Powel, Robert and Mary White Morris, and the rakish bachelor Gouverneur Morris (no relation to Robert) became their friends. Between them, the two Morrises helped contrive to keep an army in the field in its most desperate hours.

Sarah Franklin Bache wrote to her father, Benjamin, in Paris: “I have lately been several times invited abroad with the General and Mrs. Washington. He always inquires after you in the most affectionate manner, and speaks of you highly. We danced at Mrs. Powell's on your birthday [January 6], or night I should say, in company together, and he told me it was the anniversary of his marriage; it was just twenty years that night.” Certainly an evening together in the elegant second-floor ballroom of the Powel house was preferable to the previous two anniversaries, when they had been separated by warfare.

Delightful as these evenings were, they gave Washington “infinitely more pain than pleasure,” according to Nathanael Greene. The commander's sense of urgency drove him to get back to the army before it crumbled. Finally, he was given permission to leave, and he and Martha left the city on February 2. The
Pennsylvania Packet
reported: “During the course of his short stay (the only relief he has enjoyed from service since he first entered into it), he has been honored with every mark of esteem which his exalted qualities as a gentleman and a citizen entitle him to. His Excellency's stay was rendered the more agreeable by the company of his lady, and the domestic retirement which he enjoyed at the house of the Honorable Henry Laurens, Esquire [the president of Congress], with whom he resided.”

The weather was mild, with none of the suffering of the previous winters, though food was sparse and poor. There was little snow or frost, and spring came early. The Washingtons lived in the brand-new, two-story Wallace house, a large white frame house in Middlebrook, New Jersey. For the first time since Cambridge, Martha and the aides had room to turn around without tripping over one another.

Having dinner at the commander's house was an honor prized by both officers and civilians. It certainly wasn't the food—described by George jocularly, but probably accurately, as ham and roast beef with a dab of greens or beans, finished up by an apple pie if the cook felt like obliging. Also as usual, Martha enchanted all their guests with her ageless charm. As army surgeon James Thatcher recorded, “Mrs. Washington combines in an uncommon degree, great dignity of manner with the most pleasing affability.”

A lot was happening at home in Virginia, and Martha felt out of touch when Jack and Nelly failed to write. Jack had finally bought his own home after five years of marriage, but he and Nelly hadn't quite decided when to move in. They were pleased with Abingdon, a fine house and nine hundred acres outside Alexandria, even though Washington considered it a bad bargain. Nelly was also expecting a new baby at any moment. Martha didn't know where they were or what was happening to them, and she didn't like it. In fact, Jack and Nelly had returned to Mount Airy, where Nelly gave birth to a third daughter on March 21—Eleanor Parke Custis, another Nelly, now that both grandmothers had a namesake.