Martha Washington (6 page)

A controlling temperament wasn't the only reason for John Custis's opposition to this marriage. His antagonism was also rooted in two generations of unhappy family life. His mother had died when he was a child, his father remarried, and he had spent his teens studying in London, far from family and friends. When he returned to Virginia, he set up a bachelor household. In his late twenties, he fell madly in love with a beautiful heiress, Frances Parke. In his infatuation, he penned passionate letters to “Fidelia,” following the prevalent style for classical pseudonyms. His sweetheart's family life made his own look cozy.

Both rich and rakish, her father, Daniel Parke, had married Jane Ludwell of Green Spring plantation when they were in their teens; within a few years, he left her and their two little daughters behind while he followed his military star abroad. Despite Jane's pleas for him to return home or at least to send money, Daniel had revisited Virginia only once in fifteen years. That visit was far from a success, since he brought along a mistress masquerading as his cousin and a bastard son, whom he left behind with the long-suffering Jane. As governor of the island colony of Antigua, he was murdered by rioting local planters because of his policies, licentiousness, or both. Parke was very wealthy, but the complications caused by the recognition of an illegitimate daughter in his will would trouble his descendants for years to come.

John Custis and his Fidelia married in 1705, but their chances of happiness were effectively nil. Both were astonishingly bad-tempered and determined to rule the roost. Soon their violent private and public altercations were the subject of common gossip throughout the colony. Pity the poor children brought up in such a terrible household: no doubt Daniel and his sister came in for their share of parental rage and verbal abuse.

Stories about the Custises' relationship are legion, the details perhaps apocryphal, but their unhappiness real. At one point, it is said that they refused to speak to each other for months (probably an improvement over their endless quarrels), sending messages through the butler. Or that while driving together in a gig and arguing furiously, John turned the team toward the shore of Chesapeake Bay and drove out into the water. Fanny demanded to know where he was going, and her angry husband replied, “To hell, Madam.” She is said to have responded, “Drive on, Sir.” They created their own little hell on earth.

Ultimately, the turmoil reached such a pitch in 1714 that the warring Custises signed a legal contract, mutually agreeing not to call each other “vile names or give . . . any ill language.” Within months after signing this sad document, Fanny died of smallpox at the age of twenty-eight, leaving behind a five-year-old daughter and three-year-old son. Custis never remarried, devoting himself to raising rare plants in his Williamsburg garden and making his children miserable—all to avoid any more mistakes in the name of love.

Increasingly frustrated by his son's determination to marry Patsy, John Custis threatened Daniel with disinheritance in 1748. He swore that he would leave all his unentailed estate to Jack, his mixed-race child by “young Alice,” one of his slaves. This little boy, who was about ten years old and recently freed, was one of the very few people the irascible old man cared about. But to his father's surprise, Daniel stood firm.

John Custis's confidants during this emotional period were Anne and Matthew Moody, tavern keepers near the Queen's Creek ferry outside Williamsburg. Almost every day, Custis rode out to his plantation and stopped at the Moodys'. They were the audience for his violent outbursts, benefiting as he began giving them pieces of valuable Custis family silver and furniture. When they demurred (according to their own account), Custis threatened to throw the silver out into the road rather than allow that Dandridge girl to enjoy it.

Through these nerve-racking months, there is no doubt that Patsy helped strengthen Daniel's resolution. Without her fortitude, he might well have let this chance for happiness drift away like all the others. Neither Daniel's arguments nor the support of Power and Blair seemed to be making any headway with his father.

Never one to wait around helplessly, Patsy somehow contrived to talk with the crusty old tyrant herself. Just how she managed it, we don't know. Like many bullies, Custis was impressed by strength of character: he actually found the spunky little lady engaging. It is tempting to imagine the scene in which the petite young woman, by now eighteen, reasoned with the bewigged seventy-year-old colonel.

Soon afterward, when James Power visited Custis's home, a brick house (two rooms down and two up, separated by passageways) in the middle of a very large garden on Francis Street, he found the old man in a calmer frame of mind. After all, the Dandridges were socially acceptable planters, not riffraff, and the size of the Parke/Custis fortune made a large dowry unnecessary. Seized by a bright idea, Power handed over a little horse and bridle he had just bought for his own son to Jack, pretending that they were a gift to the boy from Daniel. In 1749, for one of the few times in his long life, John Custis changed his mind. He consented to his son's marriage to the woman who had the nerve to stand up to him.

Power immediately wrote to Daniel Custis out in New Kent County: “This comes at last to bring you the news that I believe will be most agreeable to you of any you have heard—that you may not be long in suspense I shall tell you at once—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—nay, if possible, he is as much enamored with her character as you are with her person, and this is owing chiefly to a prudent speech of her own. Hurry down immediately for fear he should change the strong inclination he has to your marrying directly.”

John Custis made a will in Daniel's favor, making generous provision for little Jack, and died in November 1749 before he could change his mind again. Patsy and Daniel postponed their wedding for a few months of respectful mourning, meanwhile winding up the elder Custis's tangled bequests.

On May 15, 1750, when Patsy was a couple of weeks shy of her nineteenth birthday, she married Daniel Custis at home in the parlor at Chestnut Grove. Weddings in colonial Virginia were very different from the traditions that would later develop in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Everyone simply gathered in the parlor and hall without any sort of procession. Brides wore their brightest-colored and most beautiful silk gowns. The very idea of their friends dressing in matching gowns or the groom in mournful black would have sent them into fits of laughter. The wedding party and guests, men as well as women, were like a rich, silken flower garden in the vibrant colors and combinations that suited their fancies.

Almost every wedding was celebrated at the bride's home. Churches stood by themselves out in the country with no place nearby for the festivities to follow. Although the Church of England required that weddings take place in the morning, most Virginia marriages took place in the afternoon or evening, a local adaptation to allow their many guests time to travel several miles by horseback, wagon, or coach. The ceremony was followed by dinner and dancing. At some point, the newlyweds would slip off to the room reserved for them, but the rest of the guests would continue to frolic long into the night.

The next morning, the bride and groom endured a good deal of covert observation, giggling, and sly nudges; in letters to their friends, guests often commented on whether or not the lady looked happy after her (presumably) first sexual experience. The festivities might continue for several days, with walks, games, card playing, flirting, eating, drinking, and yet more dancing. Like most plantation houses in 1750, Chestnut Grove was rather small. At house parties and weddings, women slept four or five to a bed, with the overflow occupying trundle beds or pallets. Men dropped off wherever they could—on chairs, cots in the hall, rugs, haystacks in the stable. But Virginians never minded a crowd as long as the entertainment was lively.

After a week or so, the newlyweds usually moved directly into their own homes. A honeymoon trip was unknown in the colonies. Where would they have gone if they had thought of such a thing? Hotels were nonexistent, and taverns were rough and dirty at best, places of drunken masculine bonhomie, with beds often shared with strangers as well as bedbugs and fleas. Home was really the only place where they could spend time together, fully enjoying their new closeness. At White House, the Custis plantation, Patsy and Daniel settled into the home where they would live throughout their marriage. It was only four miles from Chestnut Grove, but light-years away in the wealth and power it embodied.

CHAPTER THREE

I
t was quite a Cinderella story: Patsy Dandridge was now a wealthy woman with social position. Daniel Custis had inherited nearly eighteen thousand acres of prime farmland, houses in Williamsburg and Jamestown, nearly three hundred slaves, and several thousand pounds in English treasury notes and cash. But Patsy brought her husband an equally valuable gift—happiness. Motherless since he was a toddler, frustrated and humiliated by his father throughout his life, he was almost thirty-nine when he married and at last found an emotional haven.

Reaching from beyond the grave, John Custis had left a provision in his will for a tombstone inscription as wounding as anything he had shouted in a lifetime of rages:

This final barb thrown at his hated wife, thirty-five years dead and presumably beyond insults, must have been enormously hurtful to his son. The many years Daniel had lived with his domineering father and the succeeding years at his beck and call were dismissed contemptuously—his very existence of no importance in John Custis's bitter summation of his life.

No wonder Daniel reveled in living with a charming young woman who raised emotional support to an art form. Throughout their marriage, they remained at White House, a two-story frame house downriver from Chestnut Grove. Though no larger than the Dandridges' home, it was distinguished by the beauty of its setting. The house sat on a slight rise, its broad lawn sloping down to the wide, curving Pamunkey, opening to a serene view of golden marsh grasses and meadows on the far side of the river. There Daniel could enjoy the loving smile, kind eyes, and soft voice of his new wife. It must have seemed like heaven.

Virginia hospitality was famous throughout Britain's colonies, and Patsy was a born hostess who soon turned her hand to making a bachelor establishment fashionable. Like all the great planters, Daniel ordered luxuries, as well as manufactured items, from the London, Liverpool, Bristol, and Glasgow merchants who sold his crops. In 1749, he began keeping a memorandum book of the orders he sent annually via the tobacco ships. In it, he scrawled lists of goods—everything from china, satin suits, and nutmeg to scythes, grinding stones, and axes. Along with household inventories, this book with its faded ink, deeply water-stained by some long-ago soaking, is the key to picturing Patsy and Daniel's White House.

As the Custises were setting up housekeeping, the plantation elite was swept up in an enormous consumer revolution, a spiraling demand for European luxury goods in the colonies. Their forebears, even the richest, had lived simply; they had been too busy fighting for land and wealth to waste much time on display, and luxuries had been difficult to come by. By the 1750s, however, the leading planters were well established financially, and their trading system had matured. Most of them had done business for years with their own favored British merchants, who brokered their tobacco crops every year and were more than happy to seek out expensive items for their clients, permanently securing their business and encouraging them to build up the large debts that would be their downfall. Daniel Custis was exceptional in staying out of debt even as he enjoyed the new amenities of planter life.

The fluid social situation of the early colony had also hardened. Virginia's class system was now more rigid and clearly demarcated—from large planters, small planters, and merchants, through craftsmen, the poor, and indentured servants, down to African slaves, the fastest-growing and least privileged group in all Virginia. Through aping British gentry fashions (even if they were a few years out of date), the elite competed socially with their peers and set themselves still further apart from the common sort.