The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (6 page)

Two months later, a resigned Colonel Washington summoned a warm smile as Jack married Nelly at her family home, Mount Airy. Martha, still
in mourning for Patsy, did not come with him. The newlyweds made Mount Vernon one of their first destinations. Their brimming happiness undoubtedly gladdened Washington’s heart as much as Martha’s. He could only console himself with the thought that he had done everything in his power to make Jack a man worthy of his wealth and potential importance. Another consolation was Nelly herself. Everyone, even Jack’s grumpy former schoolmaster, The Reverend Boucher, agreed she was an exceptional young woman, as intelligent as she was beautiful.

XI

Another event that stirred deep emotions in the master of Mount Vernon was a decision made by his neighbors, George William Fairfax and his wife, Sally. They were moving to England, perhaps permanently. George William had inherited property from a relative, and the bequest was being challenged in the courts by another member of the family. Behind the lawsuit lurked the accusation that George William had Negro blood and was disqualified from inheriting the dukedom when the now aged Lord Fairfax died. Like most English lawsuits of the era, this wrangle might take years to resolve. Washington could do little but extend his warmest wishes for success and promise to keep a close watch on a darkened, silent Belvoir.

A glum Washington noted in his diary that on July 8, 1773, George William and Sally came to Mount Vernon “to take leave of us.” The next day, he and Martha “went to Belvoir to see them take shipping.” In Sally’s trunks were the two tormented letters he had written to her fifteen years ago. How distant, how strange that yearning soldier must have seemed to Washington now! He was a different man, leading a different life, rich in peace and contentment. There were sorrows such as Patsy’s death and frustrations such as Jack Custis’s willful ways; disappointments occurred in almost every life. But he no longer lived on the brink of sudden death, clutching at the mere confession of Sally’s love as a consolation.
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XII

In the closing weeks of 1773, the problem of America’s relationship with England abruptly intruded on George Washington and his fellow Virgin
ians. On December 16, a group of Bostonians disguised as Indians dumped 342 chests of British tea into the harbor to protest Parliament’s tax on it. Tea was the only item still on the mother country’s revenue list; American boycotts and strenuous denunciations by pamphleteers had persuaded the imperial legislature to abandon all the others. But everyone knew the tea tax had been kept to “maintain the right” to extract cash from the defiant Americans. Boston agitators led by Samuel Adams had struck in the night to let the world know they were determined to resist any and all taxation without representation.

Most Virginians, including Washington, denounced the tea party as vandalism. No one but Yankee fanatics worried about the tea tax. Most of the 80,000 pounds of the brew drunk in Virginia was smuggled from the West Indies or England itself, where tax evasion was a national industry. But as the Virginians read their newspapers, they soon realized this tea was a special case, imported under a monopoly set up by Parliament to give the almost bankrupt British East India company some badly needed revenue. The tea would have sold at a price below even that of smuggled tea—probably inducing thousands of people to save a few pennies while affirming Parliament’s right to tax Americans.

When the British responded to the destruction of the tea by closing the port of Boston, and making General Thomas Gage the royal governor of Massachusetts, backed by several regiments of regulars, opinion in Virginia underwent a radical change. Especially alarming on this list of what the British called the “Coercive Acts” was a ukase cancelling Massachusetts’s right to elect the governor’s council. Henceforth its members would be appointed by the king. Another law specified that anyone accused of treason would be tried in England, not in the American colonies. Washington voted wholeheartedly with Virginia’s House of Burgesses to protest these encroachments on Massachusetts’s rights and proclaim Virginia’s solidarity with their fellow Americans. Soon he was one of seven delegates chosen to represent Virginia in a general congress that met in Philadelphia to discuss the crisis.

In the middle of this political turmoil, Washington had a painful personal duty thrust on him. George William and Sally Fairfax asked him to supervise the sale of Belvoir’s furnishings. George William’s lawsuit looked more and more interminable, and the couple had decided it might be better to stay in England permanently. They thought it would give
their argument more weight in court. George bought mahogany chests and tables, mirrors, and bedclothes, no doubt including Sally’s own. There was some consolation in bringing these purchases to Mount Vernon, but it was painful to see dozens of strangers buying up his old friends’ possessions from rooms where he had enjoyed so many happy hours. In retrospect, there was a fitting finality to the sale. It was a kind of farewell to Washington’s youth. But he did not see it that way at the time. He felt only sadness and regret.

History was taking charge of George Washington’s life. On August 30, Edmund Pendleton and Patrick Henry, two of the other Virginia delegates to the Congress, arrived at Mount Vernon to join him for the journey to Philadelphia and the first meeting of the Continental Congress. At dinner Martha listened to them discuss the confrontation with England. Pendleton was by nature a cautious man but Patrick Henry was his usual fiery self, determined to assert America’s rights no matter what the consequences. The next morning, Martha watched them depart with an uneasy mixture of pride and anxiety.
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XIII

In little more than a year, the quarrel with George III and his revenue-hungry Parliament led to bloodshed in Massachusetts. Sam Adams and his cousin John Adams, anxious to win the support of the rest of the country, backed Virginia’s Colonel Washington to head the impromptu New England army that rushed to besiege the British inside Boston. Three days after he received his commission from Congress, Washington wrote one of the most difficult—and revealing—letters of his life. It began with words that testified that Martha had become far more than an agreeable consort.

Those words bear witness to the deep and abiding happiness George Washington had achieved in his sixteen years of marriage to Martha Dandridge Custis. In the next few harried days, he made it clear that Martha’s peace of mind remained one of his foremost concerns. Washington wrote letters to Burwell Bassett, Jack Custis, and Jack Washington, in which he admitted “my absence will be a cutting stroke” upon Martha. He begged them to visit her as often as possible in the months to come. He had no idea that he was embarking on a venture that would keep him away from Mount Vernon for eight years.

On June 23, about to depart for Boston, Washington found time for one more hasty but equally revealing note:

I
n Massachusetts, General Washington wrestled with the myriad problems of creating an army. He missed his wife’s companionship—and her skills as a hostess. He was living in the house of the president of Harvard College and found himself constantly entertaining important visitors. In October he wrote Martha a note, urging her “to come to me, although I fear the season is too far advanced…to admit this can be done with any tolerable degree of convenience.” Martha was at Eltham, visiting her favorite sister, Nancy, and Nancy’s husband, Burwell Bassett, when George’s letter finally reached her. She stayed at Eltham for another week, thinking about the six-hundred-mile journey.

For someone who had a tendency to fear the worst, it was a daunting proposition. Late fall weather could make the roads impassable; numerous rivers and creeks would have to be crossed; roadside taverns were often dirty, inhospitable places. But she sensed George needed her. With Jack and Nelly Custis for company, she was soon on her way. Nelly had recently given birth to a baby who lived only a few weeks, and Martha hoped the trip would raise her daughter-in-law’s spirits.

The journey took on overtones of a triumphal procession. Washington made sure one of his aides, Joseph Reed, met them in Philadelphia. It was Martha’s first glimpse of the huge expansion of her husband’s fame. A troop of uniformed horsemen escorted her into the city, and hundreds of people thronged the sidewalks to get a glimpse of her. In the rooms Reed
reserved for them, a veritable stream of congressmen and prominent Philadelphians rushed to welcome General Washington’s wife. Martha was gracious and warm, but she did not get carried away. In an amused letter to a Virginia friend, she wrote, “I don’t doubt but you have see the figuer
[sic]
our arrival made in the Philadelphia paper…and I left it in as great pomp as if I had been a great somebody.”
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Reed was charmed by Martha and Nelly. In a note, he told Washington that he was sure they would be good company “in a cold country where wood is scarce.” In Cambridge, Martha swiftly solved George’s hospitality problems. She persuaded him to move to a larger house and was soon a cheerful presence at a bountiful dinner table. She charmed grumpy Yankees such as James Warren, speaker of the Massachusetts legislature, and his formidable wife, Mercy, a fierce intellectual who wrote satires and plays (under a man’s name) pillorying the British and would later turn out a three-volume history of the Revolution. Mercy told her friend Abigail Adams how impressed she was by Martha. She praised “the complacency of her manners” as well as her “affability, candor, and gentleness.”
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II

Martha Washington’s journey to Cambridge was the first of many trips she would take from Mount Vernon to join her husband during the next eight years of the War for Independence. Her importance as a wife and hostess would grow larger and more apparent to everyone—above all to her husband. She was the only person with whom Washington could relax and speak candidly. With most people he had to maintain the role of the confident, decisive commander in chief.

By 1778, Washington was being called “the father of his country” in the newspapers. He did his utmost to avoid acknowledging this tendency to view him as a demigod. At Valley Forge, on the night of February 22, 1778, General Henry Knox, commander of the artillery, sent a regimental band to serenade the commander in chief on his birthday—the first semi-official celebration of the day. Washington sent Martha out into the snowy road to thank the musicians and give them generous tips. She politely informed them that the general had gone to bed and that was why he was not thanking them in person.
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The chorus of adulation continued to grow. Poems and speeches hailed
Washington’s greatness. In France, Ambassador Benjamin Franklin kept a full-length portrait of him on the wall in his study. But fame seemed to have no impact on George and Martha’s loving relationship. If anything, they became even more intimate. Martha began calling him “my old man” and in private often addressed him as “Pappy.” No one sympathized more deeply with the commander in chief’s travails. More than once she wrote a friend, exclaiming that “the pore general” was looking weary and discouraged, as the war dragged on and on.

General Nathanael Greene, who rose to second in command of the American army, wrote to his wife, Caty, “Mrs. Washington is excessive fond of the general and he of her…they are happy in each other.” Throughout the war, Martha wore a miniature of Washington by Charles Willson Peale on a chain around her neck; he carried one of her beneath his shirt.

III

In 1776, Jack Custis reached the age of twenty-one and took over the management of his estate. With no apparent prodding from Martha, who was with her husband in New York, he wrote Washington a touching letter. Jack was “extremely desireous…to return you thanks for your parental care which on all occasions you have shown to me.” He had lost a father at an early age, but “few have experienced such care and attention from real parents as I have done.” Jack asked him to “continue your wholesome advice and reprimands whenever you see occasion.” He promised they would be “thankfully received and strictly attended to.” Meanwhile he would never cease looking for opportunities to testify “to the sincere regard and love I bear you.”
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Washington never even hinted that Jack should join the Continental Army; he knew that Martha would be prostrate with worry at the mere thought of him going into battle. Jack bought Abington, a handsome 900-acre estate near Alexandria, and demonstrated a modicum of patriotism by serving in the Virginia Assembly. He also invested a considerable sum in a privateer that would, like hundreds of similar warships, attack British merchant vessels. He remained deeply devoted to his Nelly, who gave him four children in the next six years. The fourth, a boy, was named George Washington Parke Custis. But running a plantation bored Jack. He was equally unenthusiastic about traveling to his plantations in the vicinity
of Williamsburg to make sure they were being properly managed by his overseers. Such responsibilities interfered with his favorite pleasures—betting on horses and cards, hunting, and partying.

When Jack decided to sell some of his more distant plantations, Washington was so dismayed that he took time he could not spare from the war to write him a long, earnest letter, urging him not to do it. The buyers paid Jack in paper dollars printed by the Continental Congress, money backed by nothing but the hope that the Americans would win the war. As the conflict dragged on, these dollars had begun to depreciate. Washington urged Jack to invest the money in land closer to his home while the dollars still had value. Jack ignored his advice.

Worse was to come. Jack did not gamble in the restrained style of his stepfather, and he was soon deeply in debt. One year, he bought some of Mount Vernon’s cattle. Washington assumed he would have them appraised and pay him a fair price. Jack had the appraiser examine only the worst beasts in the herd and applied the price to the rest of them. He then waited months while the dollar depreciated toward virtual waste paper and paid his stepfather in the now almost worthless currency. “You might as well attempt to pay me in old newspapers,” a furious Washington told him.
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He stopped signing his letters to Jack “with love.” But he could not do or say more. Jack remained Martha’s darling. She would not tolerate criticism of him from anyone, even George.

IV

If Washington had known some intimate details of Jack’s home life, he might have changed his mind and risked Martha’s wrath. When Nelly’s second baby was another girl, Jack expressed his disappointment so vehemently that Martha offered to raise the child. Nelly demurred, but Jack’s sulk about not having a son continued. When his oldest daughter, Eliza, was four or five years old, he decided she could entertain him and his friends at dinner parties. She had a good memory and loved to sing. Jack proceeded to teach her the lyrics of several raunchy songs. At the end of the dinner, when the table was cleared and serious drinking began, Jack would order Eliza to be brought to the dining room in one of her prettiest dresses.

Jack would lift the child onto the table and she would prance up and down, singing the salacious lines, while her father and his friends roared
with laughter. Nelly Custis protested, but Jack brushed her off, claiming “his little Bet could not be injured by what she could not understand—that he had no boy and she must make fun for him until he had.” Nelly gave up and left the little girl “to the gentlemen” and her father’s “caresses.” For a while, the experience made Eliza “think well of myself.” Later in her unhappy life, after a broken marriage and several failed affairs, Eliza would change her mind about this and many other things.
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V

The “long and bloody war,” as Washington sometimes called it, was in its sixth year with no end in sight when Washington received an anxious letter from an old friend, Benjamin Harrison, who was now the speaker of the Virginia assembly. Seventy-seven-year-old Mary Ball Washington had apparently asked some members of the legislature to propose a bill granting her a pension. She claimed she was “in great want, owing to the heavy taxes she was obliged to pay.” Implicit was the accusation that her famous son was allowing her to all but starve. An uneasy Harrison assured Washington that the assembly would be glad to pass the bill, but he thought it might be wise to consult him about it first.

A thunderstruck Washington replied that he had no idea that his mother was having any financial difficulties. He had instructed his cousin Lund Washington, who was managing Mount Vernon, to answer all her requests for money without a moment’s hesitation. Moreover, Mary did not have a child “who would not divide the last sixpence to relieve her from any
real
distress.” He had told her this repeatedly. The general made it clear to Harrison that he and his brothers and sister would feel “much hurt” at having their mother a pensioner, especially when she had “ample income of her own.” He begged Harrison to block the bill and make the whole matter disappear as quickly and quietly as possible.
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VI

Not long after this contretemps with Mary, Washington visited Mount Vernon following an absence of more than six years. He was accompanied by General Comte de Rochambeau and other leaders of the French army. Martha, Nelly, and Jack and their four children greeted them joyously. The
soldiers spent only three days in the house before pushing on to Williamsburg, where the French and American armies were gathering to assault a British army entrenched in the nearby port of Yorktown. The sweet smell of victory was suddenly in the air, after so many years of discouragement.

Jack Custis asked his stepfather if he could join his staff as a volunteer aide. How could Washington say no? Yorktown was almost certainly going to be a siege rather than an all-out battle. There would be little or no danger for someone on a general’s staff. The British soon proved Washington correct; they retired inside their fortifications and tried to hold out, betting on the royal navy to rescue them. But a revived French fleet easily defeated a halfhearted attempt at seaborne relief, led by one of the most inept admirals in British history. The stunned redcoats realized they were trapped.

The siege lasted almost three weeks. For a while Jack enjoyed himself. On October 12, he wrote his mother a cheerful letter, telling her, “The General tho in constant fatigue looks well.” Like many soldiers, Jack Custis developed dysentery from eating army commissary food that had grown stale or partially spoiled and drinking water polluted by thousands of men living in the vicinity with only minimal sanitation. A few days later, he began running a high fever. Dr. James Craik, the same physician who had cared for Washington two decades earlier, diagnosed “camp fever”—the disease we now call typhus. He urged Jack to retreat from the battlefield to a house where he could stay in bed, drink good water (or better, liquor), and eat unspoiled food.
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Jack shook his head, determined to have his own way as usual. The siege was thundering to a climax. The British fortifications were battered wrecks from the ferocious day-and-night Allied bombardment. On October 17, a British officer waving a white flag appeared outside their works and delivered a letter from his commander, Charles, Lord Cornwallis, asking for terms. Two days later, the British marched out and surrendered their guns. By this time, Jack Custis was so weak that he could barely sit up in a carriage to watch the ceremony.

A distressed Washington joined Dr. Craik in virtually ordering Jack to go to Eltham, his uncle Burwell Bassett’s plantation, about thirty miles from Yorktown. The general stayed at Yorktown for the rest of October, dealing with the thousand and one details of the new situation created by the victory. Not until the first days of November did he set out for Mount
Vernon with his staff. On the way, he left his aides at a nearby tavern and rode to Eltham to check on Jack Custis.

Imagine his consternation when he was met at the door of the Bassett mansion by a weeping Martha; Jack’s wife, Nelly; and their oldest daughter, Eliza. Jack was dying. Washington raced upstairs to the sickroom, where several doctors were standing around Jack’s bed, their heads bowed in defeat. Jack’s breath was dwindling in his throat. Washington could only watch as he expired.
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The general’s first concern was Martha. She was overwhelmed with grief. Washington spent the next five days at Eltham, presiding over Jack’s funeral and doing his utmost to console his wife. It was a dismaying interlude at a time when everyone else in Virginia and the rest of the nation was celebrating the Yorktown victory. Her son’s death must have triggered an inner struggle for Martha. As her husband ascended to glory, she was plunged into despair. But she was consoled by Nelly and the four adorable grandchildren, and sustained by Washington’s strength and love.

Still fighting a war, the general asked Martha’s brother, Bartholomew Dandridge, to take charge of Nelly and the children and act as the executor of Jack’s estate. Dandridge refused to accept responsibility for the children, and when he got a look at Jack’s account books, he was soon moaning that everything was an unholy mess. Some historians have noted that Washington never uttered a word of grief for Jack. This may be true, but that does not mean he did not grieve for him. By now the general had no illusions about human nature. He had seen too many other men with character defects to judge Jack harshly; he could not deny a stepfather’s memories of tender moments. As a man who had lost his own father in his boyhood, his heart went out to Jack’s four children. He ruefully but willingly made them his responsibility.