Washington: A Life (20 page)

ON JANUARY 6, 1759, coinciding with the celebration of Twelfth Night, George Washington and Martha Dandridge Custis, attired in the latest British fashions, were married at her White House residence. George was presumably resplendent in the blue velvet suit he had had specially shipped from London, while Martha made a fetching impression in a gown “of deep yellow brocade with rich lace in the neck and sleeves” accompanied by purple satin shoes.
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While never shrinking from a rich appearance, Martha, like George, shuddered at any hint of ostentation. We don’t know what the Custis children, Jacky and Patsy, wore, but their dress probably conformed to that in an earlier painting by John Wollaston, which presents them in the pampered apparel of little British aristocrats. In that portrait, Jacky sports a shiny blue coat over a light-colored waistcoat, while Patsy wears a silvery gown edged with lace.

The newlyweds were by no means prudish. In his first postnuptial order to London, George ordered four ounces of Spanish fly, a popular aphrodisiac prepared from dried beetles. At some point that year, he also drew up a list of books inherited from the Custis estate that may disclose something of the amorous interests of Daniel and Martha Custis, or perhaps of Daniel’s father. The couple possessed a copy of
Conjugal lewdness: or matrimonial whoredom
by Daniel Defoe and
The lover’s watch: or the art of making love
by Aphra Behn.
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After the weak-willed Daniel Custis, George Washington must have struck Martha as the most commanding of men. Where Daniel had been cowed by a despotic father, George usually stood up to his forbidding mother. As best we can tell, Mary Ball Washington boycotted the wedding and, according to Martha’s biographer Patricia Brady, may not have met the bride until the year after the wedding.
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It is hard to resist the impression of a lasting coolness between Martha and her mother-in-law. Over the next thirty years, there is no evidence that Mary Washington ever visited Mount Vernon. The only time she saw her daughter-in-law was during obligatory stops that George and Martha made in Fredericksburg en route to Williamsburg. George routinely dropped in to see Mary and his sister Betty Lewis, who had married Fielding Lewis, a wealthy merchant, and lived nearby. (Betty bore an uncanny resemblance to George. Indeed, it was said that had she thrown on a military cloak and hat, battalions would have saluted her.) Washington kept his visits to his mother brief. During one snowy stay with her in January 1760, he recorded in his diary that after “getting a few things which I wanted out of the stores, [I] returned in the evening to mother’s—all alone with her.”
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That he jotted down this detail suggests that being alone with Mary was an effort. In all likelihood, George and Martha Washington treated Mary Ball Washington as a slightly dotty, difficult woman, a troubled oddball whom they had to put up with and never expected to reform.

Marriage came at a critical moment for George Washington, who went from a young officer at the mercy of the British military establishment to a prosperous planter who didn’t have to truckle to anyone. He had married up in the world, as had Martha before him, and they both inherited a huge chunk of the Custis fortune. Once again an untimely death contributed immeasurably to Washington’s burgeoning wealth. Martha’s money made her husband one of Virginia’s richest men, enabling him to issue his own declaration of independence. The marriage brought eighty-five dower slaves under his control, doubling his labor force. As the Washington editor Dorothy Twohig notes, “With his marriage, [Washington] was now in control of one of Virginia’s largest and most profitable estates, including property in 6 counties amounting to nearly 8,000 acres, slaves valued at £9,000 Virginia currency, and accounts current and other liquid assets in England of about £10,000 sterling.”
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Then on March 14, 1761, Ann Fairfax Lee, the widow of George’s half brother Lawrence, died. Because she had no surviving child, George Washington suddenly graduated to full-fledged ownership of Mount Vernon, inheriting another five slaves. Once again he was the lucky beneficiary of a death in the family.

These sudden windfalls gave Washington new social standing and considerable freedom to maneuver. In time, this wealth would free up the better angels of his nature and give him the resources to back up his strong opinions. As John Adams later wondered, “Would Washington have ever been commander of the revolutionary army or president of the United States, if he had not married the rich widow of Mr. Custis?”
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Once he married, an air of contentment settled over Washington’s restless life. From Mount Vernon, he wrote serenely to Richard Washington, “I am now, I believe, fixed at this seat with an agreeable consort for life and hope to find more happiness in retirement than I ever experienced amidst a wide and bustling world.”
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This was the first, but hardly the last, time that Washington nursed a pastoral fantasy of withdrawal from all worldly cares, a fantasy that would be repeatedly mocked by the imperious call of political events.

Civic duties formed an essential part of the ethos of a gentleman, so it was fitting that on his twenty-seventh birthday, one month after his marriage, Washington assumed his seat in the House of Burgesses. Four days later he enjoyed a heady moment when his new colleagues, in a glowing resolution, thanked him for “his faithful services to His Majesty and this colony” and his “brave and steady behavior.”
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A boisterous chorus of
ayes
roared their unanimous approval of the resolution. No longer a youthful protégé, Washington now stood forth as a social peer of these well-to-do planters. Such attention always brought out a certain awkwardness in Washington, who was ill at ease with public oratory and uncomfortable with flattery, perhaps because he secretly craved it. With a touch of embellishment, one burgess remembered Washington’s flustered response: “He rose to express his acknowledgments for the honor, but such was his trepidation and confusion that he could not give distinct utterance to a single syllable.” The man who faced bullets with sangfroid never conquered his terror of public speaking. “He blushed, stammered, and trembled for a second, when the speaker relieved him by a stroke of address … ‘Sit down, Mr. Washington,’ said he, with a conciliating smile, ‘your modesty is equal to your valor, and that surpasses the power of any language that I possess.’”
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Washington was assigned to the Committee on Propositions and Grievances, which dealt with commercial and governmental matters. By the end of the year, drawing on his military experience, he sat on three committees that sorted through petitions from soldiers and army vendors. The taciturn Washington wasn’t the kind of glib burgess who sprang to his feet and orated extemporaneously. He practiced a minimalist art in politics, learning how to exert maximum leverage with the least force. Thomas Jefferson, who was to serve with Washington and Franklin in the Continental Congress, spotted their economical approach to power. “I never heard either of them speak ten minutes at a time, nor to any but the main point,” he later said of the two statesmen. “They laid their shoulders to the great points, knowing that the little ones would follow of themselves.”
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Later on Washington coached his stepson on how to be a Virginia legislator, reminding him to be punctual in attendance and “hear dispassionately and determine coolly all great questions.”
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Washington’s experience as a burgess educated him in politics no less thoroughly than his combat experience on the western frontier groomed him for future military leadership, creating a rare combination of talents that endowed him with the ideal credentials at the time the American Revolution erupted.

From the outset, Washington demonstrated his conscientious nature as a legislator and attended sessions until early April to support a bill to sustain the Virginia Regiment. Then he, Martha, and her two children set off for Mount Vernon, with Martha and the children installed in the glamorous Custis coach and George trotting alongside them on horseback. Because he was still refurbishing Mount Vernon, Washington felt apprehensive about subjecting his bride and stepchildren to the dust and din, paint and plaster, of an unfinished house. He wrote ahead to have the rooms aired and cleaned and beds made up in two rooms. The nervous young husband, wanting everything just right for his new family’s arrival, instructed John Alton to “get out the chairs and tables and have them very well rubbed and cleaned. The staircase ought also to be polished in order to make it look well. Inquire ab[ou]t in the neighborhood and get some eggs and chickens.”
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After Washington’s lengthy frontier sojourn, the house was stirring to life again, and Martha would soon describe it as a place of “mirth and gaiety.”
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If Martha’s wealth lifted Washington into the top ranks of Virginia planters, it didn’t emancipate him from all cares, for he was soon tangled in the legal complexities of the Custis fortune. Under the terms of the estate, George and Martha controlled one-third of the Custis property. The two children each received one-third of the income from the Custis assets, while only Jacky, as the male heir, would inherit eventually all the Custis land and slaves. In Williamsburg in late April, Washington won permission from the General Court to administer those portions of the estate vested in the two children. Being their legal guardian was a weighty, time-consuming task that required Washington to satisfy the court with annual reports on his fiduciary actions. Like every responsibility in his life, Washington executed this one with the utmost rigor, claiming that a stewardship demanded even more care from a stepparent than from “a natural parent, who is only accountable to his own conscience.”
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This arrangement, though it gave Washington extra wealth and power, also placed him in a curiously subordinate position vis-à-vis his stepchildren, making him effectively their employee and robbing him of the total paternal authority he might have wished.

Further complicating this strange situation was that while Washington adopted Jacky and Patsy, they retained the Custis surname. The children arrived at Mount Vernon with their own slaves—Jacky had a ten-year-old named Julius, Patsy the twelve-year-old Moll—who wore the formal uniforms known as livery, and it must have been annoying, if not demeaning, for Washington to have them sporting the Custis crest instead of his own. In ordering clothing for these servants from London, Washington always gave explicit orders to “let the livery be suited to the [coat of] arms of the Custis family.”
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Such details of everyday life reminded Washington of where the real financial power resided in his family. In his diary, he sometimes referred to his stepchildren as “Jacky Custis” and “Patsy Custis,” as if they were temporary visitors.

Although Washington enjoyed children, his formal presence tended to freeze their jollity. “They felt they were in the presence of one who was not to be trifled with,” said his adopted grandson.
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Washington was a doting father to Patsy, a pretty girl with dark hair, who was very fond of music. Washington found it easy to spoil her and soon got her a spinet, an early form of the harpsichord, while Jacky studied the violin and flute. He also hired a dancing master at Mount Vernon for the two children. Washington had a more relaxed style with girls and used to say ruefully that he could govern men but not boys.
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Jacky was to be a chronic problem. A foppish boy, lazy, wayward, and indulged by his mother, he shared few traits with his energetic stepfather, and their temperamental differences only aggravated matters. Forever wary of intruding upon Martha’s relationship with her children, Washington was reluctant to apply discipline to Jacky and shielded her from knowledge of his many imperfections.

However genial as a hostess, Martha was a jittery mother, a mass of anxieties, much as her own mother had been. She had already endured so many deaths—her husband, two children, her father, a brother, a sister, and Daniel’s half brother, Black Jack—that she flew into a panic at even trifling signs of illness in her children. Three years into the marriage, Martha experimented to see whether she could stand to be away from Jacky. She failed the test miserably. Every time a dog barked or some other noise occurred, Martha worried that it heralded the arrival of a messenger with dreadful news about her son. “I often fancied he was sick or some accident had happened to him,” Martha said.
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Henceforth she traveled with George only if both children came along.

Whatever the periodic tensions caused by Jacky’s lax behavior, the marriage of George and Martha Washington proceeded happily, and they seemed united by strong desire and mutual need. Almost all observers found them exceedingly well matched. In later years the British ambassador’s wife found something closer to friendship than romance between them—“Washington was a more respectful than a tender husband certainly”—but even she could identify no quarrels.
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Something about this deep domesticity and respectability pleased Washington, who was never cut out for a gallivanting, footloose life. Martha gave him a secure, happy base for the myriad activities of a busy career. She was his dear companion, trusted adviser, and confidante long after lust faded, and they delighted in each other’s company. When Washington was appointed commander in chief of the Continental Army, he wrote to Martha that “I should enjoy more real happiness and felicity in one month with you at home than I have the most distant prospect of reaping abroad, if my stay was to be seven times seven years.”
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Neither George nor Martha was tormented by a romantic striving after an impossible perfection, and both understood the compromises that accompanied a successful marriage.