Martha Washington (7 page)

At the center of planter hospitality was a separate dining room. Just a generation earlier, a room dedicated solely to eating meals was all but unknown in the colonies. Then, tables (as well as the best bedstead in many houses) had been placed in the parlor or the other common room, called the hall. During meals, the table was set with a motley array of pewter, pottery, and even wood; common drinking vessels were passed around; knives were the usual eating utensil, and prudent visitors carried their own in case there weren't enough to go around; spoons were often shared as everyone dipped into the serving vessels; and the few chairs in the household were supplemented by stools, benches, and chests. And those were the planter households!

The new fashion called for individual chairs, plates, flatware, glasses, and napkins for each diner. Chairs were expensive, highly prized status symbols. Besides those at the table, extras were proudly lined up around the dining room walls and down both sides of the entry hall, their stately march a testament to their owners' opulence and good taste. Planters bought an abundance of all the necessary items to provide for their dinner guests, but matched sets of everything were most desirable—a concept that would have dumbfounded previous generations of Virginians. Symmetry and balance ruled eighteenth-century taste.

Twelve yards of crimson damask arrived from London to cover the seats of the mahogany dining room chairs at White House. Not only was damask an elegant fabric, but crimson was a much more prized and expensive hue than common red. Half a dozen large damask tablecloths and a dozen napkins to match soon followed. The table could be laid with their set of gilt china or stylish blue-and-white Chinese export dinnerware. A matching tea set in the same patterned porcelain appeared at the new ritual of afternoon tea.

Silver—its reflective surface greatly admired in those dimly lit households—gradually replaced utilitarian pewter, brass, tin, and steel. Most novel of all, forks were now included in table settings along with knives and spoons. Forks were the first true dining revolution since the Middle Ages, in use so far only among the upper classes. Daniel inherited many silver display pieces that had belonged to the Parke family, but the Custis silver remained firmly in the hands of his father's tavern-keeping friends, despite a suit to reclaim his heirlooms. At last, giving up, he ordered a variety of serving silver, all engraved with the Custis crest. As fashion dictated, White House silver included coffee- and teapots, salvers, serving stands, candlesticks, pepper box, and sugar tongs, as well as flatware.

Never extreme in her dress, Patsy liked elegant fabrics, bright colors, and fashionable, but not exaggerated, styles. Daniel had to learn her taste; early in their marriage, he started to order green satin for a ball gown, only to scratch it out and amend it to her favorite blue. Patsy took pleasure in the luxury of buying a dozen pairs of kid gloves at a time or an ivory fan in the latest London fashion. Every year when the tobacco ships arrived, she unpacked her purchases from their chests—silk stockings for her slim legs, a black satin hat, white or flowered calico for a summer dress, purple and crimson pumps, a quilted crimson petticoat against winter's drafts, a scarlet riding habit.

With the happiness of a new husband, Daniel enjoyed lavishing gifts on Patsy. Probably the most delightful—and extravagant—of his gifts was a “chair,” lined with smooth blue English cloth, “for Mrs. Custis's use.” We can almost hear the pride with which he first wrote that phrase. A chair was a small one-person carriage with outsize wheels, whose high-perched seat resembled, or sometimes actually was, a chair. It took a good driver to manage this sporty vehicle and the well-bred horse that drew it. Patsy could tool around the neighborhood in her new chair or visit Williamsburg in a London-built coach drawn by a team of six. There was also a schooner tied at their dock, though she was less than enthusiastic about traveling by water.

But all these pleasures had to be paid for. A landowner who ignored his fields for endless parties or, worse yet, gambling would soon find himself bankrupt. Daniel applied himself closely to business, managing his home plantation and attending closely to overseers' reports from his other properties. He also kept careful watch on his English investments and lent money to other planters, land rich and cash poor, to be repaid when their crops were sold.

In the starkest economic terms, all planters' wealth rested on the backs of enslaved Africans. The flood of white indentured servants to the early colony—largely English, Irish, or Scots—had dwindled to a mere trickle by the 1750s. Africans had almost completely replaced them as plantation labor. Nearly a century before, Africans' ambiguous legal status had been decided: blacks in Virginia were no longer servants whose terms of indenture ended after a certain number of years, but slaves for life. Not only were they themselves permanent captives, but their descendants would inherit the status of their mothers.

The value of indentured servants lay in their labor and whatever special skills they possessed, limited by the number of years specified in their contracts. Their transportation and sale in the colonies was not hugely profitable for the sea captains who brought them on the outward voyage to America; the return voyage with holds packed with hogsheads of tobacco was the major source of income.

Because the African slave trade was built on the permanent possession of labor and the increase of generations, however, it became a source of massive international wealth in itself. European powers went to war more than once to control the profitable trade. In the colonies, slaves were a valuable commodity for merchants and an important portion of every planter's net worth, their humanity ignored.

Daniel had inherited nearly 300 enslaved blacks. More than 150 of them worked in the fields and residence at White House. On the Queen's Creek plantation outside Williamsburg, about 75 slaves toiled, with another 50 divided among three smaller quarters (as outlying plantations managed by overseers were known) in King William, Northampton, and Hanover counties. The field crews of men and women planted, hoed, weeded, suckered, picked, dried, and packed the tobacco that the colonial economy rested on. The men and an occasional woman plowed the fields; drove carts and transported hogsheads of tobacco; birthed and butchered livestock; fished and hunted; dug ditches and repaired roads; framed, built, shingled, repaired, and painted plantation fences and buildings. Other jobs shared out among women, old people, and the young were gathering and chopping the endless firewood needed for kitchen hearths and cold winters; gardening; feeding, tending, and herding livestock; cooking, cleaning, polishing, and generally tending to the planter family; and so on and on.

There is no indication that Daniel had any doubts about the justice of unfree labor. Nor did Patsy, it would seem. Like most British colonists (there were slaves in every colony), she apparently believed that slavery and the slave trade were part of the natural order of things. Slave labor was the bedrock of plantation success, and her upbringing had taught her to prize that success. North or south, only a very few Americans, primarily Quakers, had just begun to question and speak out against human bondage.

Patsy always treated the slaves in her power well, speaking pleasantly, granting favors easily, allowing sick leave, and looking after the elderly. Not for her the excesses of Daniel's aunt Lucy Byrd, who viciously whipped the maids whenever she was feeling out of sorts. But Patsy also expected able-bodied slaves to know their places and work hard. To her, slacking or running away was a dereliction of duty and a danger to the proper social order.

With little experience overseeing servants, Patsy found herself at eighteen the mistress of a large household staff that eventually grew to twelve slaves. They included two men who waited at table, a cook and her assistant, a washer, ironer, spinner, two seamstresses, and a lady's maid; additional servants were brought in as the Custis children were born. Despite her youth, Patsy proved very efficient at creating an orderly household, just as her mother had trained her.

Prints and maps on the walls, brightly colored upholstery, highly polished furniture and silver, and two tall, silvery-looking glasses made the parlor and dining room attractive and welcoming. In the winter, the house would have been cozy with its rugs, curtains closed against drafts, and fireplaces crackling warmly. Night came on early, the signal for candles and lamps to be lit. Patsy would have sewed, read, or just chatted with her husband in their island of light in the black, black night of the country before they retired to bed, its drawn curtains creating a warm and private place.

In a Virginia summer, coolness was all. Rugs were rolled up and stored, upholstered furniture disappeared under smooth linen slip-covers, and windows and doors were left open to create refreshing cross-drafts. Mirrors and chandeliers were covered with gauzy cotton to keep them from being marked by the ever present flies. Summer or winter, keeping the house clean was a constant chore or, rather, series of chores, what with flies, spiders, mosquitoes, roaches, and their leavings; dust and pollen that drifted in the open windows; rats and mice (special wire traps were ordered from London); dirt, mud, and barnyard filth tracked into the house; and soot and ashes from smoky chimneys.

Breakfast, tea, and supper were rather small meals, usually including breads, cakes, and some combination of leftovers. But dinner was the meal where a housewife showed what she and her staff were made of. Dinner was served in midafternoon, about three o'clock, after the planter returned from riding over his fields and his wife had completed her domestic duties. Patsy and Daniel would have cleaned up, arranged their hair, and donned dressier clothes. At White House, dinner was served by two slave menservants, Breechy and Mulatto Jack, outfitted in livery of dark cloth trimmed with silver lace and horn buttons, replaced a few years later by scarlet suits trimmed with mohair braid. The meal was a little theater piece.

Guests—often a number of guests—arrived unexpectedly or by invitation several days a week. In the early years of the colony, the amount of food at dinner had corresponded roughly to the number of people eating. Now fashion demanded a very large array of foods every day, arranged on the sideboard and table in formally balanced patterns. Two full courses with wine throughout—the tablecloth removed after each course—would include soup; several meats, fricassees, great meat pies, fowls, and fish; gravies and sauces; fresh and pickled vegetables; bread, rolls, biscuits, and butter; pies, cakes, jellies, creams, tarts, and fruit compotes. The meal would end with the polished wood of the table exposed as the servants offered sugared fruit, crackers, pieces of Gloucester or Cheshire cheese cut from eight- or ten-pound imported wheels, and nuts, accompanied by still more wine and toasts to old King George II, absent friends, all the ladies, and any number of variations on these popular themes.

Besides the abundant foodstuffs from garden, pasture, river, and woods, Patsy added imported delicacies to her cuisine. Fine wines (their favorites were the white Rhenish and Canary wines and red Port, all of them rather sweet), beer, green tea, capers, olives, almonds, spices, raisins, currants, sugar, and anchovies were ordered regularly from England. So too were six pounds each of brown and white sugar candy to satisfy her sweet tooth. Good manners didn't require that diners stuff themselves, but it must have been difficult to resist such profusion.

Patsy was soon pregnant. Pregnancy, especially the first, was an exciting and hopeful time, the happy news quickly imparted to friends and relatives in person or by letter. There was no nonsense about expectant mothers secluding themselves: as long as she felt well, Patsy would have continued her household duties, and she and Daniel would have attended social functions. Special pregnancy stays helped maintain her erect posture without interfering with her swollen belly.

Joyful as pregnancy was, it was also shadowed by fear for the life of the mother, especially for a woman as tiny as Patsy. Childbirth was one of the leading causes of death among colonial women. The danger was particularly grave for first-time mothers, who sometimes died in labor, after hours or even days of futilely attempting to bring forth a very large or breech baby. Even if the mothers survived, their first babies often died from the trauma of their births.

Birthing was women's work, the husband firmly but kindly excluded from their bedchamber. When her time came, Patsy would have “called her women together”: the midwife, her mother, aunts, friends, and maids. The women clustered around the laboring woman, soothing and encouraging her, mopping her sweating forehead, holding her hands, providing cloths for her to clench in her teeth to stifle shrieks of pain. She would have remained partially upright during most of her labor, squatting on a low midwife's stool, sitting at the edge of a chair, standing from time to time, sitting on the lap of one of her helpers. What a relief for them all when a healthy baby finally dropped into the hands of the waiting midwife, who cleaned off the infant, cut the umbilical cord with a sharp knife, and made sure the child was wrapped warmly. On November 19, 1751, Patsy gave birth to a boy they named Daniel Parke Custis for his father.

After giving birth, she probably spent a month or so in “confinement,” resting in bed from her ordeal, regaining her health, and nursing little Daniel. Most elite women were aware of the importance of breast-feeding to their infants' health and often found a great deal of joy in “so sweet an office.” Only if Patsy had been very ill or had insufficient milk would she have called on a wet nurse from among the slaves. She probably continued nursing her son until he was a year or two old; weaning marked a major passage in a child's life, as well as a mother's, since she was likely to become pregnant again soon after taking the child from the breast. As the lady of the house, Patsy could revel in her baby in ways that poorer women could not. She could enjoy a clean, sweet-smelling infant, his clothes washed and diapers changed, because a slave nursemaid was brought into the house with Daniel's birth and tended to his daily needs before handing him back to his mama.