Washington: A Life (85 page)

The presence at Yorktown of Jacky Custis as a volunteer aide to Washington has sparked a certain cynicism among historians. Before then Jacky had contributed only modestly to the war effort, serving for two years as a delegate in the Virginia assembly, where he showed a grandiosity that sometimes vexed his stepfather. He had also invested with Washington in a privateer that prowled the Atlantic in quest of British merchant ships. Yet he had never placed his life in jeopardy, leading to snickers that he went to Yorktown to bask in a major victory without having paid his dues. If it irked Washington to see the raffish Jacky mingling with brave, hard-bitten men who had sacrificed years to the cause, he never admitted it openly.

Amid the unsanitary conditions at Yorktown, Jacky Custis contracted camp fever. Since the condition often proved fatal, Jacky expressed a last wish to witness Cornwallis’s surrender and was lifted to a high spot atop a redoubt, giving him a panoramic glimpse of the ceremonies. Then he was carted thirty miles to Eltham in New Kent County, the estate of his uncle, Burwell Bassett. Martha Washington and Jacky’s wife, Eleanor (Nelly) Calvert Curtis, were summoned to attend him. Preoccupied with the aftermath of victory, Washington couldn’t extricate himself from Yorktown until November 5, when, alerted to Jacky’s perilous condition, he hastened to Eltham. By the time he arrived, he learned that the doctors’ ministrations had failed and that Jacky Custis was dying. The young man expired a few hours later, three weeks before his twenty-seventh birthday.

For a disconsolate Martha Washington, it was an indescribably sad moment. Having already lost three children, she had doted on Jacky, and Washington alluded to her “deep and solemn distress.”
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By some accounts, Washington had a profound emotional response to Jacky’s death, clasping his bereaved widow to his bosom and proclaiming that henceforth he regarded Jacky’s two youngest children as his own. One French observer described Washington as “uncommonly affected” by the death and said his friends “perceived some change in his equanimity of temper subsequent to that event.”
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In a less sentimental vein, biographer James T. Flexner wrote bluntly that Washington expressed “no personal grief.”
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If Washington reacted deeply to the death, it is not surprising, for it meant that he would have no chance to improve his strained relationship with his stepson. It was also a sobering reminder that, after years of war, he might not return to the happy home life he had pictured.

After spending a week at Eltham and attending to Jacky’s funeral, Washington escorted Martha and Nelly back to Mount Vernon, where they dealt with the fate of the three small girls and baby boy who had lost their father. The Washingtons decided to adopt informally the two youngest children, Eleanor Parke Custis, then two years old and like her mother called Nelly, and George Washington Parke Custis, seven months old. Such informal adoptions were commonplace in the eighteenth century, when life expectancy was shorter and children often lost parents. A gay, whimsical child, Nelly would turn into a vivacious, dark-haired little girl, while the baby boy, nicknamed Washy or Tub, had blond hair and blue eyes and inherited both his father’s charm and his wayward nature. With his solemn sense of responsibility, Washington took seriously his duties toward the children and wrote in his will that it had “always been my intention, since my expectation of having issue has ceased, to consider the grandchildren of my wife in the same light as I do my own relations.”
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These two adopted children reciprocated the intense love they received and treated George and Martha more as adored parents than as grandparents. In later years, when she had to spend time with her biological mother, Nelly expressed her absolute devotion to her surrogate parents: “I have gone through the greatest trial I ever experienced—parting with my beloved grandmama … Since my father’s death, she has been ever more than a mother to me and the president the most affectionate of fathers. I love them more than anyone.”
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Two years later Jacky’s widow, Nelly, married David Stuart of Alexandria, a physician trained in Edinburgh. They brought up the two eldest girls from the earlier marriage, Elizabeth Parke Custis and Martha Parke Custis, and added more children to the rich private lives of the Washingtons. Despite being a childless couple, George and Martha Washington had extensive experience in raising children and actually had much more of a family life, over a longer period, than most other married couples.

Jacky Custis left behind a murky legacy. Many years later his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, who was born a year after George Washington rode off to war, told how her father would hoist her on a table and force her to sing indecent songs that he had taught her in order to divert his inebriated friends. “I was animated to exert myself to give him delight,” she wrote. “The servants in the passage would join their mirth and I, holding my head erect, would strut about the table to receive the praises of the company. My mother remonstrated in vain.” Because he had been denied a son, Jacky told his guests that little Elizabeth “must make fun for him until he had.”
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It would be hard to imagine a stepson more alien to George Washington.

 

 

FOLLOWING YORKTOWN, Washington had to deal with another troubled dimension of his life: his prickly seventy-three-year-old mother. After Jacky’s burial, he stopped by Fredericksburg to see her and learned that she had gone west on a trip to Frederick County with daughter Betty and ailing son-in-law Fielding Lewis. Mindful of her waspish comments about his financial neglect, Washington dropped off ten guineas before riding on to Mount Vernon. The poorly educated Mary sent him a thank-you letter in which she misspelled his name. This letter, full of self-pity, solicited more money: “My dear Georg I was truly unesy by Not being at hom when you went thru Fredriceksburg it was a onlucky thing for me now I am afraid I Never Shall have that pleasure agin I am soe very unwell this trip over the Mountins has almost kill’d me I gott the 2 five ginnes you was so kind to send me i am greatly obliged to you.”
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Now that George had bought her a house in Fredericksburg, she wanted one beyond the western mountains—“some little hous of my one if it is only twelve foot squar.” In a postscript, she asked to be remembered to Martha, then crossed out the words “I would have wrote to her but my reason has jis left me.”
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The world might be buzzing excitedly about Yorktown, but Mary Washington resolutely refused to congratulate her son or even mention the event. “When others congratulated her and were enthusiastic in [George’s praise],” wrote Washington Irving, “she listened in silence and would temperately reply that he had been a good son, and she believed he had done his duty as a man.”
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Neither did she extend condolences or refer to Jacky’s death. Mary Washington had always been a peevish, egocentric woman, but one suspects that some mild form of dementia may have set in by this point. The failure to mention Jacky Custis’s death suggests a lapse in short-term memory, and her allusion to her reason having “left” her indicates an awareness of impaired mental faculties.

When Washington attended a ball in Fredericksburg to honor the French and American officers who had fought valiantly at Yorktown, Mary was told that His Excellency was coming for the occasion. “His Excellency!” she snapped. “What nonsense!”
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As during the French and Indian War, Mary seemed to regard her son’s long years of military service as a trick perpetrated to deprive her of his attention. Rumors of her Loyalist sympathies continued to make the rounds, and one French officer, the Count de Clermont-Crèvecoeur, was “amazed to be told that this lady, who must be over seventy, is one of the most rabid Tories.”
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George squired his aged mother to the Fredericksburg ball, the only occasion when we know for sure that the two appeared in public together. Perhaps George wanted to squelch rumors that he had abandoned his mother. Mary didn’t stay long at the dance. At nine o’clock she announced that “it was time for the old people to be at home” and left on her son’s arm.
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The ball was noteworthy as one of the last times that George Washington danced away the evening, displaying the graceful virility for which he was known. Before the decade was over, his body would become stiffer, his face worn and impassive, and history would forget the lithe, magnetic younger man who had led the Revolution.

FOR ALL WASHINGTON’S SKEPTICISM that the war had ended, his behavior that autumn and winter reflected an altered reality. He lingered at Mount Vernon for several weeks, consoling Martha and enjoying some much-needed rest. The man who had shuddered at the thought of prolonged separation from his restive army spent four leisurely winter months in Philadelphia, nestled in a town house on Third Street. From the moment he descended on the capital, Washington was lionized at every turn. Two artistic residents, Charles Willson Peale and Alexander Quesnay, unrolled giant transparent paintings of him in windows that, when lit from the back, projected his glowing vision into the night, showing laurel wreaths crowning his brow and an antique spear grasped in his hand as he crushed a British crown underfoot. The theater offered no surcease from his own omnipresent image. Washington attended a performance of
The Temple of Minerva,
perhaps the first serious American opera, only to hear the chorus thunder from the stage, “He comes, he comes, with conquest crowned./ Hail Columbia’s warlike son! / Hail the glorious Washington!”
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Washington was the honored guest at every gathering and admitted sheepishly to the Chevalier de Chastellux that his time was “divided between parties of pleasure and parties of business. The first, nearly of a sameness at all times and places in this infant country, is easily conceived … The second was only diversified by perplexities and could afford no entertainment.”
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Taking time to lobby the states, he urged them not to disband their regiments and asked Congress to renew its focus on pay and provisions to stifle any mutinous stirrings among his men.

Washington also received a valuable education in finance from Robert Morris, who had raised money for the Continental cause on his own credit. Because the states had refused to collect their quota of taxes, Morris couldn’t service the sizable debt raised to finance the war. He warned that creditors “who trusted us in the hour of distress are defrauded” and that it was pure “madness” to “expect that foreigners will trust a government which has no credit with its own citizens.”
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To end Congress’s servile reliance on the states for money, Morris proposed that it have the right to collect customs duties, and the fight for this “impost”—the first form of federal taxation—became a rallying cry for proponents of an energetic central government.

After George and Martha Washington had enjoyed their fill of Philadelphia politics and society, they took up residence in late March on the Hudson River in their new headquarters in the town of Newburgh. They occupied a two-story stone farmhouse with a pitched roof and twin chimneys, which sat high atop a bare bluff on the Hudson at a dreamy bend in the river. The heart of the house was the parlor, which Washington turned into his dining room, an eccentric space claiming the odd distinction of having seven doors and one window.

While there, Washington approved one of the war’s most adventurous schemes: a plot to kidnap Prince William Henry, son of King George III, along with the British admiral Robert Digby, both now resident in New York. Washington worried that all the talk of peace would sap America’s will and act as a “fresh opiate to increase that stupor” into which the states had fallen, giving them an excuse to renege on taxes and fail to complete their battalions.
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The kidnapping of Prince William Henry might serve to dishearten George III. As we have seen, Washington had long been beguiled by kidnapping plans, having first approved one for Benedict Arnold, then another for Sir Henry Clinton, and the plan for Prince William Henry followed a similar script. On a dark, rainy night, a squad of thirty-six men, dressed up as sailors, would board four whaleboats on the Jersey shore of the Hudson and row across to Manhattan. They would disable British sentinels, then grab the prince and admiral in their riverfront quarters. With his penchant for espionage, Washington was minutely involved in mapping out the operation.

On March 28, 1782, Washington sent a sober set of instructions to Colonel Matthias Ogden, the operation commander, setting the tone for the abduction. His overriding concern was that the abducted dignitaries be treated respectfully, not manhandled like ruffians. “I am fully persuaded,” he wrote, “that it is unnecessary to caution you against offering insult or indignity to the persons of the prince or admiral … but it may not be amiss to press the propriety of a proper line of conduct upon the party you command.”
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Washington knew that any abuse by the captors could translate into a propaganda victory for the British, yet in demanding gentlemanly treatment of the prisoners, he also betrayed some residual respect for royalty and rank. The plan was never carried out, and Washington was enraged at Ogden for snatching away his chance for a surprise victory. Many years later the U.S. minister to Great Britain showed Prince William Henry, now King William IV, Washington’s March 28 letter to Ogden. “I am obliged to General Washington for his humanity,” the king replied, “but I’m damned glad I did not give him an opportunity of exercising it towards me.”
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Despite Washington’s skepticism about British intentions, it was hard to discount the extraordinary upheaval that occurred in London in early 1782 when antiwar sentiment engulfed British politics and toppled Lord North’s ministry. In a spiteful mood, King George III reflected that it might be better if he lost America, since “knavery seems to be so much the striking feature of its inhabitants that it may not be in the end an evil that they become aliens to this kingdom.”
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That spring the Crown recalled Sir Henry Clinton and replaced him with the commander of Canada, Sir Guy Carleton, a move that threw into relief Washington’s own amazing longevity as commander in chief. When Carleton tested Washington’s position with peace overtures, the latter dismissed them as more examples of British trickery.