The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (3 page)

Thanks to Lawrence, George became a close friend of George William Fairfax. Seven years older than George, Fairfax accepted the elongated teenager as a companion at fox hunts at Belvoir and on trips to the Shenandoah Valley, where more Fairfax acres were being surveyed for sale. Under his genteel influence, Washington was soon spending the money he earned as a surveyor on stylish clothes and feeling at ease in the elegant atmosphere of Belvoir. To Mary Ball’s mounting exasperation, George spent more and more of his time on the banks of the Potomac.

Then came tragedy. Lawrence Washington was stricken with tuberculosis and slowly died before George’s grief-stricken eyes. In a desperate attempt to regain his health, Lawrence journeyed to the island of Barbados with George, hoping a winter spent in warm sunshine might restore him. The experiment proved fruitless for Lawrence—and doubly painful for George. He caught a bad case of smallpox, which he barely survived. Lawrence was as generous to his younger brother in death as he had been in life. He named George the heir of the Mount Vernon estate, if Anne
Fairfax Washington predeceased him. In the meantime, George leased the house and lands from her for a modest sum. When Anne died in 1761, he became Mount Vernon’s owner.
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V

Mount Vernon was young George’s refuge from Mary—and nearby Belvoir was a place where he met some of the most sophisticated young women in Virginia. Sally Cary Fairfax’s sisters and numerous friends were frequent visitors. George soon proved himself more than vulnerable to their charms. One belle, who remains nameless, inspired some of the worst poetry ever committed by an adolescent:

This atrocity may have been committed on behalf of “a lowland beauty” who particularly tormented George. He told his friend Robin during a sojourn in the Shenandoah Valley at Lord Fairfax’s hunting lodge that there was “an agreeable young lady” living in the house, but every time he looked at her, he thought of the “lowland beauty,” which was only “adding fuel to the fire.” There seems to be little doubt that George was powerfully attracted to the opposite sex—hardly surprising for a healthy, vigorous teenager.
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George’s romantic emotions slowly acquired a darker tinge. Sally Fairfax seems to have been a coquette who tantalized, teased, and dominated the men around her. She soon realized that one of her conquests was George Washington—a discovery that did not displease her. The contrast between the tall, muscular Washington and her short, precise courtier husband, whose greatest talent was assiduous flattery of his superiors, could not have been more complete. As they performed together in amateur theatrics, danced minuets in Belvoir’s ballroom, and exchanged gossip about the amorous doings of their contemporaries, George Washington fell violently in love with his close friend’s wife.

One of their favorite plays was
Cato
, written by the celebrated essayist and poet Joseph Addison in 1713. It was the most popular drama of the century; more to the point, it had two parts made to order for lovers and would-be lovers. Marcia was Cato’s devoted daughter; Juba was a North African warrior who rallied to Cato’s side when he resisted the rise of Julius Caesar. Marcia confessed her love for Juba, but Cato refused his approval because he was a mere colonial. Juba nevertheless remained devoted to the untouchable beauty.
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VI

By the time George realized what was happening to him emotionally, he was on his way to becoming Virginia’s best-known soldier. Grown to his full six feet two and one half inches, he stood, in the words of one eyewitness, “as straight as an Indian.” Thanks to his Fairfax connections, he was appointed a major of the militia at age twenty. The following year he won a skirmish against a French patrol that became the opening shots of the world’s first global conflict, the Seven Years’ War. Next, in spite of strenuous objections from his mother, George become a favorite aide of British general Edward Braddock and miraculously survived the rout of his army of regulars when they marched into western Pennsylvania to oust the French from Fort Duquesne, where Pittsburgh now stands. Ignoring four bullets through his coat and two horses killed under him, Washington was among the few who distinguished himself on that chaotic battlefield.

He staggered back to Mount Vernon a very tired man. A letter from William Fairfax reveals how closely the residents of Belvoir followed Washington’s military career: “Your safe return gives an uncommon joy to us and will no doubt be sympathized by all lovers of heroick
[sic]
virtue,” Fairfax wrote. He hoped a Saturday night’s rest would refresh the weary warrior enough to enable him to come to Belvoir in the morning.

Sally added a saucy note, cosigned by two visiting women friends, accusing the hero of “great unkindness in not visiting us this night. I assure you that nothing but being satisfied that our company would be
disagreeable
would prevent us from trying if our legs would not carry us to Mount Vernon this night; but if you will not come to us, tomorrow morning, very early, we shall be at Mount Vernon.” This is a letter from a woman who knows she has a certain gentleman virtually at her beck and call.
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VII

Washington soon became the colonel of a regiment of Virginia regulars that struggled to defend the 700-mile-long frontier against French and Indian incursions. George William Fairfax wrote him admiring letters, vowing that he would be honored to serve under his leadership. But Fairfax never got around to volunteering, even when his younger brother Bryan joined the seemingly endless and extremely dangerous wilderness war and another brother became an officer in the British regular army.

Washington’s relationship to Sally Fairfax during these years resembled a roller-coaster ride. He wrote her letters from the frontier, hoping she would honor him with a reply. But when his messages became too emotional, she abruptly ordered him to stop writing to her. At another point, she apparently banished him from Belvoir. He accepted this treatment with remarkable patience.
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Late in 1757, Washington suffered a physical collapse and staggered home to Mount Vernon, seriously ill with dysentery, a nameless fever—probably malaria—and a cough that reminded him alarmingly of Lawrence’s fatal malady. He took to his bed in Mount Vernon and asked Sally to obtain various medicines a local doctor had recommended. George William Fairfax had sailed for England to deal with his difficult relatives. His father, William, had recently died, giving his British cousins a chance to bring up the ruinous suspicion that George William was a mulatto. Washington’s younger brother, John Augustine (“Jack”), and his wife, who had been staying at Mount Vernon as caretakers, were away. Sally brought Washington his medicines—special wines, jellies, and other delicacies beyond the ability of Mount Vernon’s kitchen. Was it during these months that some or all of “the thousand tender passages” occurred that Washington struggled to forget in the letter he wrote a year later?
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We simply do not know. The other letters Washington and Sally exchanged have all been destroyed, except for one or two fragments and a puzzling note that he wrote to her when he first arrived at Mount Vernon in 1757. It is as laconic and impersonal as one can imagine, asking for help with his medicines. In mid-February Washington received a letter from George William, reporting he had survived the perils of the wintry Atlantic. He forwarded it to Sally, adding: “When you are at leisure to favor us with a visit, we shall endeavor to partake as much as possible of the joy you
receive on this occasion.” This does not breathe deep passion, to say the least; it also suggests that Sally’s visits had been infrequent.
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During these months, Washington was a very sick man. He wrote a plaintive letter to the doctor who had treated him on the frontier, James Craik, reporting that he was not getting better. Dr. Craik replied that he was not surprised; his malady had “corrupted the whole mass of blood.” The physician ordered the patient to stay in bed and avoid any and all exertion, saying, “The fate of your friends and country [he meant Virginia] are in a manner dependent on your recovery.” This was flattering stuff, but not the sort of message that inspired a depressed, anxious man to become an impassioned lothario.
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VIII

Something else has to be factored into the situation at this point: Washington’s relationship to the Fairfaxes. William Fairfax had been almost as much a substitute father as Lawrence. After Lawrence’s death, William had regarded George as a member of the family and used his considerable power to push his military career whenever possible. When William Fairfax died, Washington had left his regiment and journeyed over the mountains to his funeral, ignoring the dysentery that was already making his life difficult. In a letter to his brother Jack, he remarked, “To that family I am under many obligations, particularly to the old gentleman.” To some extent these obligations extended to George William Fairfax. He had befriended George, the teenage country bumpkin, as Lawrence’s brother, and their relationship had remained close for the previous decade. There is not a hint in any of Washington’s letters of a change in opinion or attitude, even when he emerged as Virginia’s most notable military leader.

In fact, it can be argued with some force that this role of military hero only made the possibility of George realizing his desire for Sally Cary Fairfax more remote. In a sense George had become the man Lawrence might have been—and that only intensified his sense of obligation to the Fairfaxes. Honor was the brightest word in Lawrence Washington’s vocabulary—a beacon that both guarded and guided his conduct. The thought of doing something that Lawrence would have judged grossly dishonorable was a more than believable reason why George chained his desire deep
within himself. It was another lesson in the harsh school of self-control in which destiny seemed to be matriculating him.

This does not mean that George Washington was inhibited by puritanical views of sexual conduct. Puritanism was almost as foreign to eighteenth-century Virginia as Mohammedanism. Life on the frontier was by no means devoid of women. Every eighteenth-century army had “camp women” who were married or pretended to be married to soldiers and followed them into the war zone. One of his officers wrote to Washington while he was home on leave, wondering if he was “plunged in delight…& enchanted by charms even stranger to the Ciprian Dame.” A Ciprian Dame was an available woman, sometimes a prostitute. Another officer wrote him from South Carolina, telling him that the local women lacked “the enticing heaving throbbing alluring…plump breasts common with our northern belles.” Such letters have enabled some writers to imagine a blazing covert affair between Sally and George that lasted months or even years.
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Far stronger is evidence that suggests Washington struggled to put Sally out of his mind and future. George pursued several other women, notably strong-willed Mary Philipse, heiress to a swath of the Hudson River Valley. But his efforts were halfhearted—proof, it might seem, either of his longing for Sally or of Mary’s temperamental resemblance to Mary Ball Washington. This was the situation in March 1758 when the ailing bachelor, still convinced that he was in his final days, mounted his horse and rode slowly to Williamsburg to see Dr. John Anson, the best physician in Virginia, hoping against hope that this medico might have a cure but fearing that he would deliver a death sentence. Before he departed, George told his British superior on the frontier, Colonel John Stanwix, that he had “ruined [my] constitution” and was thinking of “quitting my command.” He was convinced that he had tuberculosis and foresaw little but “approaching decay.”
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To Washington’s amazement and delight, Dr. Anson assured him that he was recovering nicely and had prospects of living to a vigorous old age. The reincarnated patient strode into Williamsburg’s spring sunshine and began thinking about what to do with the rest of his life. One of his first thoughts was marriage. The sequence inclines this writer to wonder if during the long winter of his illness, he and Sally had not told each other—or at least hinted—that they realized their love had no future.
Another scenario, perhaps more likely, has Washington reaching this glum but unavoidable conclusion during the long, lonely night hours in his sickbed.

Realistically, in 1758 Virginia, there was no way that Colonel George Washington could marry Sally Cary Fairfax. It would have triggered an immense scandal that would have made them both social outcasts. A clandestine affair could easily have led to the same result. Either way, Washington would have exposed himself to a ruinous lawsuit from her outraged husband. Lurking in the background of both their minds was the memory of an earlier sex scandal: Lawrence Washington had sued a neighbor, accusing him of raping Anne Fairfax before her marriage. The lawsuit had been reported in salacious detail in newspapers throughout Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Before it was over, everyone wished Lawrence had never mentioned the incident to anyone, no matter how much the vile deed may have haunted his wife.
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IX

With marriage on his mind, Colonel Washington rode from Williamsburg to the nearby estate known as The White House, on the Pamunkey River, to visit Martha Dandridge Custis. They undoubtedly knew each other already. The elite society of eastern Virginia was fairly small, and Martha and her husband, Daniel Parke Custis, had participated in its lively social world with enthusiasm. George and Martha had probably met and may have danced at more than one fancy-dress ball in Williamsburg.

A recent widow, Martha was receiving a veritable stream of suitors. In Virginia during these years, money was frankly accepted as a significant item in a marriage. Newspapers regularly stated the amount of a bride’s net worth. Elizabeth Stith, for instance, was described as “a very amiable lady with a fortune of a thousand pounds sterling.” Cash was often the baldly stated reason for mingling youth and age. Such women aspired to—and often expected—a certain amount of respect and independence. In Martha Dandridge Custis’s case, she could expect a great deal of respect and virtually unlimited freedom of choice. She was the richest widow in Virginia.