Martha Washington (8 page)

Little Daniel was his father's delight, referred to in the yearly orders to London as “my son,” emphasis no doubt on the possessive. We can picture horseback rides with his father or carriage rides with his mother, the minute gentleman attired in his baby dresses topped with sailor jackets and a jaunty feathered hat ordered from London, uncut curls blowing in the breeze.

A month before Daniel's birth, another young boy had died in Williamsburg. John Custis had freed Jack, his “favourite boy,” as townspeople referred to his son, bought a small property for him, and entrusted several slave boys and money to the care of a nephew who was to turn them over to Jack when he came of age. John Custis's will instructed Daniel to house the boy, but it seems clear that Jack remained in town, most likely living with the Moodys at their tavern. Anne was fond enough of him to keep a portrait of “black Jack,” which later descended to her son. Wherever he lived, Jack fell ill with a pain in the back of his neck (perhaps meningitis) and died within twenty-four hours, shortly after midnight on October 9. His property, including the young slaves, remained firmly in the hands of his trustee. The records make no further mention of Jack's mother.

Although he wasn't a burgess, Daniel Custis would have joined the other leading planters and their families in the social seasons of Williamsburg. He and Patsy probably stayed at his father's convenient house, its gardens still lovely with Dutch tulips, pink dogwoods, horse chestnuts, and yews. Its four acres included a stable for the Custis coach and a kitchen, with room in the outbuildings for the servants they brought to town with them.

In April and December, Market Square was taken over by town fairs, with their stalls hawking every sort of merchandise, produce, and livestock. More entertaining were the “games and contests, cockfights, puppet shows, dancing and fiddling, and country activities” that attracted crowds from throughout the Tidewater. Planters strode through the crowds, arrayed in silks and satins, fine as fighting cocks with their ruffles and lace, lords of their little universe. Horse racing, card playing, dicing, and the heavy gambling that went with them added spice to it all.

Then there were the balls at the Governor's Palace, the black velvet night of Williamsburg illuminated by candles in the windows of every house. As the hundred or more guests converged, the palace glowed with light, brighter than any other building in the colony. Its public rooms—the grand hall adorned with flags and bayonet-tipped muskets, the parlor and dining room on the first floor, the formal reception room on the second floor, and the broad stairway—were lit by uncountable candles in lavish chandeliers and outsize globe lamps. Patsy would have joined the other women, probably in the parlor, shaking out their skirts, rearranging powdered tresses, and changing their street shoes for silk slippers, so delicate that they might be danced to shreds by the end of the evening.

A new lieutenant governor took office in November 1751, ushering in a fresh social and political era in Virginia. Robert Dinwiddie was an experienced colonial administrator, a stout middle-aged Scot who wore the plainest of white bobbed wigs; his family came with him—a much younger wife, Rebecca, and two little girls. Daniel waited nearly a month after his son's birth to ride into the capital and pay his formal respects.

The public celebration of coronations, battle victories, peace treaties, and royal births and birthdays was an essential element of imperial policy; British colonies around the world joined the motherland in reiterating their common heritage and loyalty through these grand events. Dinwiddie followed that policy with verve. At Williamsburg there were fireworks and general illuminations, militia parades with drums rat-a-tatting and fifes shrilling, cannons booming and volleys of muskets cracking, crowds of ordinary folk in the Market Square gathered around a great bonfire and drinking bumbo (rum punch) from the large barrels provided for them, and fashionable assemblies and balls for the gentry at the Governor's Palace.

Dinwiddie unveiled the new ballroom wing at the palace with the celebration of the king's birthday in November 1752. This elegant addition at the rear of the palace included a grand rectangular ballroom and an adjoining supper room. Tables for cards, dice, and backgammon were set up in the other rooms of the palace. The new formal gardens adjoining the ballroom—eight diamond-shaped boxwood parterres planted with periwinkles and English ivy, towering topiary cylinders of clipped holly, trained beech arbors, and a maze—brought an English country estate to mind. Even though she was five months pregnant with their second baby, Patsy and Daniel probably joined the other revelers at that celebration; no fashionable planter could bear to miss it.

Along with the governor's ballroom, the rebuilding of the Capitol was completed the following year, providing another large assembly room. Theater too was a major source of entertainment. Williamsburg had been a theater town on and off for more than thirty years, but the new playhouse, completed in 1752 on Eastern Street behind the Capitol, housed two successive companies of professional English actors, who played to packed houses. These troupes arrived with copies of the most popular plays of the London stage (scripts were often hard to come by in America), chests full of costumes, and brightly painted sets. Colonial audiences adored spectacle, and theater managers obliged them by “improving” the old standards with processions, dances, songs, crowd scenes, and duels with naked swords. So realistic were the sword fights that the empress of the Cherokees, in town for the inauguration of the governor's ballroom, almost sent her guards onstage to prevent a killing during a performance of
Othello
.

An evening at the theater—seven shillings, five pence for a box seat—was well worth the cost. To open, the troupe's lead actor delivered a poetical prologue filled with local references. Then the actors performed a well-known crowd-pleaser. During the times that Patsy and Daniel were in Williamsburg, such dramas as
Richard III
and the broadly comical
Lying Valet
were presented. This would be followed by an interval with instrumental music and songs, a jig or other solo dance, and perhaps a comic turn. The evening ended with an afterpiece, usually a short, raucous farce.

Back at White House in April 1753, Patsy gave birth to Frances Parke Custis, named for both her grandmothers. The middle name Parke was given to all the Custis children as a condition of inheritance under Daniel Parke's will. Ten months later, little Daniel fell ill with a fever. The warm, muggy air, sluggish streams, and swamps of the Tidewater bred swarms of mosquitoes, giving rise to numerous fevers. Everyone contracted malaria, but most people survived, suffering recurrent episodes of chills, sweating, and fever, known as the ague, throughout their lives. Daniel, however, died shortly after his second birthday.

Death was a sadly commonplace family affair, and the little boy probably died in his mother's arms. Patsy herself may have laid out the body of her son, washing and dressing him in a white linen shroud. Since corpses were not embalmed, the carpenter would have worked through the night to make the small hexagonal coffin, the common shape at the time. The family burial ground at Queen's Creek, where the elder Daniel's mother and sister lay, was a few miles from White House. So the family would have driven over to meet the minister and other mourners, all bundled up against February's chill. Ropes creaked as slaves lowered the coffin into the cold ground; the parents would have thrown the first handfuls of earth and watched as their eldest child was buried. The next order to London included a “Tomb for my son,” no marble being available in Virginia.

No doubt it was during this afflicting period that Patsy Custis developed her lifelong anxiety about her children, which went hand in hand with her intense love for them. She delighted in their company but was always fearful of illness, accident, or death. Losing her firstborn son—she always favored boys—forever made her an overanxious mama.

At about the time of little Daniel's funeral, Patsy became pregnant again, and John Parke Custis (called Jacky), named for both his grandfathers, was born in the fall of 1754. In the summer of 1754, while Patsy was pregnant, the colony of Virginia briefly took center stage in world affairs, leading the British Empire into yet another war against France. The rivalry for international power between Great Britain and France had been played out for the past half century in a series of wars that raged throughout Europe and around the world. Their respective colonies were the bargaining chips when peace treaties, usually short-lived, were made. This time, the competition began over the rich Ohio Valley, whose lands were marked out for conquest by both British and French colonists. The region lay to the west of the British colonies of Virginia and Pennsylvania and to the south of French Canada—all bent on expansion. It was a question of who could get there first, seize the area, establish forts, make Indian allies, and bring in their own settlers.

One of Governor Dinwiddie's instructions was to block the French and encourage British settlement in the Ohio area. To affirm British claims, he sent out two small expeditions led by a little-known young officer named George Washington. These skirmishes against the French included the killing of a French officer who may or may not have been a diplomatic envoy, each nation affirming the opposite version. The incident set off a new war, which quickly spread to Europe and other European colonies. Called the Seven Years' War in European history, it was known by Americans as the French and Indian War, signaling their developing sense of national priority.

The French were always better at Indian diplomacy than the British, and they soon sent their Indian allies to attack Virginia's frontier settlements—marauding, sacking, burning, killing, carrying off prisoners. British refugees poured back over the Blue Ridge Mountains with tales of terror. New Kent County was far from the western frontier and danger, but the entire colony was in an uproar, and war became the center of everyone's attention.

Great Britain responded in 1755 by sending a force of British regulars under the command of General Edward Braddock. In one of the classic tales of American history, Braddock led his army out to meet the French again, only to be ambushed. This costly loss with its heavy casualties, including his own death, led colonists to discount unduly the effectiveness of the British army in American warfare. Braddock's aide George Washington led the surviving soldiers to safety. All of a sudden, at twenty-three, Lieutenant Colonel Washington was a somebody in Virginia.

The Custises no doubt discussed the colony's rising military star. If they knew him personally, it was not very well. A younger son of a middling planter near Fredericksburg, he had never had the money or the occasion to spend much time in Williamsburg, where they would have met. They did have an interesting connection through Washington's half-brother, Lawrence, and Patsy's uncle William Dandridge, who had served together as officers in the ill-fated British attack on Spanish colonial Cartagena fifteen years earlier. And, of course, there were the gentry intermarriages of acquaintances and cousins of cousins that kept everybody informed about who was who.

Political clamor and military alarms aside, life in the Tidewater continued to revolve around tobacco growing and family matters. In 1756, Patsy gave birth to another daughter, Martha Parke Custis, who had the Parke family's dark good looks—large brown eyes and curly black hair. At about the same time, Patsy's mother, Fanny Dandridge, age forty-six, produced her last child, a change-of-life daughter. That August, proud papa John Dandridge went to Fredericksburg, where he dropped dead of apoplexy, as a stroke was then called. The weather was so scorchingly hot that his body had to be buried immediately in the town cemetery; there was no time to take him home or to summon the family before the body decomposed. His loss was felt deeply by both families along the Pamunkey. Patsy's oldest surviving brother (John Jr. had died as a teenager), twenty-two-year-old William, took over the management of Chestnut Grove for his mother and younger siblings.

Daniel's orders to Britain now included items for the Dandridges, such as silk pumps of a color appropriate “for Second Mourning,” probably either purple or gray, for his mother-in-law. He proudly ordered for the three fine Custis children as well—fashionable hats, leather and silk shoes, a quilted cap, stays, an expensive “Dolly,” necklaces, kid gloves, ten shillings' worth of toys, ribbons for the girls, and a saddle and bridle for Jacky. Running about in her pretty red shoes, Fanny was old enough to begin learning her letters, so he sent for a slate and pencils. Alas for such plans. In April 1757, Fanny died just before her fourth birthday, joining her brother in the family plot at Queen's Creek.

Death was too common a visitor in colonial homes to allow grieving parents to withdraw from their daily lives. Patsy and Daniel had to continue about their regular routines, attend to the needs of their surviving children, and receive guests at White House. Within the three months following Fanny's death, a traveling portraitist, an Englishman named John Wollaston, came to stay with the Custis family. In the eight years since his arrival in America, he had made the rounds of New York, Maryland, and Virginia, painting more than three hundred three-quarter-length portraits of everyone who was anyone in the colonies. Reflecting the tastes of his elite clientele, he bestowed special attention on the “rich fabrics touched with subtle highlights” of their finest outfits.