Martha Washington (9 page)

At White House, Jacky and little Patsy, two and a half and one, posed together in all their adult finery, he with a pet redbird perched on his wrist, she with a rose in her lap, pearls and ribbon in her wispy baby hair, the tip of a red shoe peeking out from beneath her gown. Wollaston painted separate portraits of Daniel and Patsy attired in their best, she in a silver lace and beribboned blue gown with a yellow petticoat and stomacher, her dark hair combed straight back and entwined with pearls, picking a white blossom edged with pink from a flowering bush. The price for all three works was a costly fifty-six pistoles, a Spanish gold coin that circulated in the British colonies; Wollaston's high prices reflected his popularity among the gentry.

The Custises' return to normality was brief. Three months after Fanny's death, both Jacky and the robust Daniel fell ill on July 4. Patsy immediately sent to Williamsburg for medicine, and when there was no improvement the next day, Dr. James Carter, one of the capital's leading physicians, came out to attend the patients. For three days, he administered a course of medications that suggests some sort of virulent throat infection—scarlet fever, a streptococcal infection, diphtheria, quinsy. Rather than dosing his terribly ill patients with the usual purges and emetics that formed colonial doctors' stock practice, Carter concocted medicinal pastes with honey to be smeared on their gums and tongues. These pastes were absorbed slowly rather than swallowed straight down. If Daniel and Jacky were suffering from severely ulcerated or swollen throats, they would have been unable to swallow.

Jacky survived, but Daniel died on July 8, after only seven years of married happiness. It was a terrible way to die, slowly suffocating as his throat closed up, and Patsy must have been with her husband and son throughout those awful days. The day of Daniel's death, she sent to the carpenter to build a black walnut coffin for his speedy interment. Oddly enough, in a time of hovering illness and swift death, many people waited until they were on their deathbeds to make a will and frequently left it too late. Daniel Custis was one of that number, dying intestate and leaving the inheritance of his family to fall under the rules of English common law. He was buried alongside his mother and his two children at Queen's Creek.

Patsy had little time to express her grief, other than in action. A local seamstress was called in to alter a gown and make mourning dresses for her; a tailor came to make black mourning suits for Jacky and the male house servants. In Daniel's account book, the date of his last memorandum was 1757, shortly before he died. Turning the page, the reader suddenly sees Patsy Custis's neat and well-formed handwriting as she took up her husband's responsibilities two weeks after his death, listing the items the plantations needed from England. She plunged straight in, ordering two seines, or large nets, for shad fishing in the Pamunkey. Her description of the desired nets is carefully detailed—thirty-five fathoms long and twenty feet deep, made of “the best three Thread laid Twine,” well fixed with leads and corks, “the slack Lines made of the best Hemp and full large,” along with spare slack lines. She went on to other mundane items such as starch, cotton for the slaves' clothing, pins, thread, and castile soap.

Then she turned to “One handsome Tombstone of the best durable Marble to cost about £100 [very expensive]—with the following Inscription and the Arms sent in a Piece of Paper on it, to wit ‘Here Lies the Body of Daniel Parke Custis Esquire who was born the 15th Day of Oct. of 1711 & departed this Life the 8th Day of July 1757. Aged 45 Years.' ” In her letter to Robert Cary, her English factor, she included two locks of hair for the jeweler, probably in a separate sealed piece of paper. She ordered two gold mourning rings in honor of Daniel and little Fanny, their tresses to be covered by clear crystal.

So, in a mixture of prudence and bravely borne grief, Martha Dandridge Custis marked the end of her first happy marriage. With two children to watch over, she had a future to plan and a long life ahead.

CHAPTER FOUR

U
nlike most widows in colonial Virginia, Patsy Custis was rich and independent, free to make any decision she pleased about her own future. In contrast, slave women were forced to keep working despite their sorrow; poor women might be reduced to beggary, their children taken away and apprenticed; the middling sort often ran their husband's businesses, taverns, or farms if they had sons old enough to work the fields; planters' widows had money and social position, but their property was sometimes controlled by male trustees set in place by the wills of distrustful husbands.

Free of such galling conditions, Patsy controlled an immense property. English common law ensured the dower rights of the widows of property-owning men; such women automatically inherited one-third of their husbands' estates for their own lifetimes, and Patsy had no trustees to interfere with her decisions. By August 1757, she was hard at work ensuring her own and her children's financial well-being. Ordinarily, an inexperienced young widow might look to her father, brothers, or brothers-in-law for assistance. But her father was a year dead, her husband an only son, and her brothers even less experienced than she.

Her youngest brother, Bat, an attorney of twenty, acted as her go-between in early August, seeking general advice from two of the colony's leading attorneys. They approved of her intention to administer the estate herself, offering practical advice on maritime insurance for tobacco shipments and the suggestion that she hire a trustworthy steward.

Patsy followed through with the insurance but acted as her own steward, retaining the overseers already at work. Throughout August and September, she settled accounts, arranged for a power of attorney, and informed the Custises' British factors of Daniel's death. The tone of her letters is strikingly businesslike. These Londoners, Liverpudlians, and Glaswegians were businessmen, after all, not friends. She notified them all that she would be managing the Custis estate, requesting an up-to-date account from each of them. Expressing her hope that their association would be “agreeable and lasting to us both,” she made it clear that she expected them to sell her tobacco at a good price. The implication that she would otherwise take her custom elsewhere couldn't be missed. Patsy understood financial power and didn't hesitate to use it.

She continued Daniel's practice of lending money at interest to cash-strapped planters. With more than £1,000 of ready money in the house at his death (a tidy sum, worth about $15,000 to $20,000 today), she did a considerable amount of business, keeping careful records of all her loans. When the accounts of a Williamsburg attorney for a long-standing Custis estate suit failed to satisfy her, she had the horses hitched up and drove into town to confront him face-to-face—to his shrill and voluble indignation.

Luckily, Patsy had plenty of common sense. As the oldest child of a large family and the wife of a wealthy planter, she was accustomed to command in household and domestic matters. But she had no enduring desire to inhabit the rough world of men's affairs with its wheeling and dealing, anxiety over crops and prices, and management of a large labor force, both enslaved and free.

Besides, in colonial society it was considered wildly eccentric for a widow or widower to remain unmarried, and she could expect to turn over her responsibilities to a second husband sooner rather than later. Her late unmourned father-in-law was a rare exception: two or three marriages in a lifetime were the norm among Virginians at every social level. A decent period of mourning was expected, but the timetable could be startlingly short to modern eyes. A perfectly respectable courtship might begin within a month or two after a spouse's death and the marriage take place a couple of months later.

Patsy's own tastes, so decidedly domestic and sociable, made her eager to remarry. Still in her twenties, she could expect to bear more children. Two children were not nearly enough for her large heart. Mrs. Custis would not remain unmarried for lack of suitors. Control of such a large estate was temptation enough, but the prospect was further sweetened by her beauty and good humor. Baldly put, she was the colony's ultimate marital prize, and she could expect single men to start calling soon after Daniel's death.

Among the Virginia gentry, everyone knew everybody else's business, and gossip was the universal spectator sport. All Williamsburg, and therefore all the important planters in the colony, knew to the last shilling how much money Patsy Custis controlled. They knew, too, that she had no bothersome trustees to interfere with her remarriage. No doubt several gentlemen thought about wooing her themselves or urged their kinsmen to make the attempt: a wealthy marriage was advantageous to an entire family.

As an intelligent woman, though, she had to be careful in her choice of a second husband. At this time, she was a
feme sole
in English common law, free to make her own decisions about her property. Wealthy widows were the most economically and personally independent of all American women. As soon as she married, however, she would become a
feme covert,
her legal status, wealth, children, and place and manner of life controlled by her husband. Colonial husbands enjoyed almost unlimited legal power over their wives, even in the event of a separation. Overbearing or spendthrift stepfathers were unfortunately commonplace, a danger to be avoided by a woman with beloved children and their wealth to protect. Her own mother's unhappy girlhood experience with stepparents no doubt came to mind. In March 1758, eight months after her husband's death, two suitors began actively pursuing Patsy—Charles Carter and George Washington.

Like Daniel Custis, Charles Carter was a member of the ruling plantation elite, a son of the immensely wealthy Robert “King” Carter. Charles had been educated in England before taking over several thousand acres of prime tobacco land, as well as pursuing successful mercantile ventures. He was one of the colony's political leaders: he had represented King George County in the House of Burgesses since 1735 and routinely chaired important committees. Financially and socially secure, he would be a careful steward of the Custis family interests. At nearly fifty, he was still a fine figure of a man who dressed in the latest fashions and sported a modishly curled wig. His second wife had died just six months earlier, and he sorely missed the pleasures of marriage.

Charles Carter's elegant house on the Rappahannock was just ten years old; it was large and imposing, two stories with a seven-bay front on the river. Built of dark brick boldly set off by the contrasting light stone used for quoins and door and window surrounds, Cleve was a tribute to the sophistication and success of the Carter family.

Best of all, Charles was truly in love with Patsy. In a gossipy letter, one of his friends wrote that “C. C. is very gay” since “he has attacked the widow Custis.” Carter himself wrote to his brother that “Mrs. C_s is now the object of my wish.” The enforced celibacy of a widower made him miserable, and he eagerly anticipated “taking a Belov'd Wife.” He was frank about his emotional and sexual desires: “I am trying to restore to myself all the happyness I once could boast in the Arms of my dear Belovd Partner.” He praised Patsy's beauty, amiable mind, and “uncommon sweetness of Temper” and hoped to “raise a Flame in her breast.” Charles's suit suffered from two drawbacks. He was twenty-three years older than she, old enough to be her father, and she had already been married to an older man. He also had a round dozen children, ten of them living at home, ranging in age from two to twenty. There were two older married daughters, the eldest nearly as old as Patsy, and a grandson. Although Patsy wanted more children, she found the size of his family daunting, warning Charles frankly that she doubted her ability to do them all justice as a stepmother.

Her other suitor appeared on the scene at about the same time. A bachelor eight months younger than Patsy, he was far less socially and financially eligible than Charles Carter, but he had youth and powerful physical magnetism on his side. As the son of a second-tier planter who had died when he was a boy, George Washington had received a somewhat sketchy education. At sixteen, he had begun to make his way in the world as a surveyor before becoming a colonial military officer. His original inheritance consisted principally of a 260-acre farm on the Rappahannock and ten slaves, but his masterful mother was ensconced there with no plans to vacate, claiming all the land's profit for her own upkeep. During the five years he had served in the military, George gained increasing respect and social status in Virginia, as well as a measure of fame throughout British America, but his financial circumstances were far from secure.

In 1752, however, his older half-brother, Lawrence, died, leaving him secondary heir to Mount Vernon, a Washington family plantation of some 2,200 acres on the Potomac. With the death two years later of Lawrence's daughter, the place would eventually come to George, but it remained in the possession of Lawrence's widow throughout her lifetime. Remarried and living in Westmoreland County, she and her second husband agreed to lease Mount Vernon to him.

Since then, they had continued this arrangement as George tried to balance his military career and agriculture, leaving Mount Vernon in the care of his younger brother Jack during the growing season while he took the field with the Virginia Regiment across the Blue Ridge Mountains. The estate had not flourished, and he was growing increasingly frustrated with his divided interests. When the British government refused to grant his Virginia commission regular army rank, thus relegating him permanently to second-rate military status, the life of a full-time planter took on a new appeal.

Suffering from bouts of the bloody flux (dysentery), he had gone to Mount Vernon to recuperate. Lonely and depressed in his sparsely furnished house, George started to fear that he was dying. On March 5, 1758, he headed for Williamsburg to consult one of the capital's leading doctors, stopping to visit his mother and the Speaker of the House on his way south. Often repeated family lore holds that on this journey George happened to encounter Patsy Custis at a neighbor's house on the Pamunkey River, fell in love on the spot, and began his courtship on the spur of the moment. Neither the route he took, the details in his financial ledger, his health fears, nor his deliberate character support this fairy-tale version of events.