Martha Washington (5 page)

As toddlers, girls and boys were dressed alike in linen shifts and “napkins,” as diapers were called; both wore long dresses for more formal occasions. Breeches for the boys and petticoats for the girls had to wait until they were reliably toilet trained; the shifts made changing wet or dirty diapers easy. The leading strings sewed to their garments at shoulder level were handy for teaching children to walk, pulling them out of danger, or controlling a temper tantrum. At five or six, however, children were customarily dressed in miniature versions of adult clothes, like little women and men.

Even before Patsy graduated from shifts to dresses, she began to learn genteel deportment when her soft little body was encased in stays, the boned corsets worn by girls and women to impose erect posture and to restrain easy movement. Never again would she be seen in public without them; uncorseted freedom was for slatterns and sluts.

Proper manners, posture, gestures, curtseys, bows, voice modulation, conduct toward social superiors and inferiors—all were signs of elite status, and the gentry trained their children young in such essential behavior. Their ideal was the British aristocracy; whatever their family origins, Virginia planters had become self-conscious members of the upper class.

Patsy would also learn other lessons important to a lady's role—to manage her wide skirts gracefully either walking or sitting, to decorate her home appropriately, to dress stylishly, to set a table correctly and symmetrically, to be sociable and gracious to guests, to carry on a conversation with the most ill-assorted company, to sing the popular airs of the day in her pleasant voice, and to do fine sewing, like needlepoint and embroidery.

Although she had probably been on horseback since she was a baby, Patsy had to learn to ride with style. The Dandridges had no carriage, just a wagon, so they rode most places. A poor seat on horseback—awkwardness, slouching, failure to control one's mount—was an embarrassment. Patsy might ride astride on the plantation, but she had to master the difficulties of riding sidesaddle for public occasions.

Virginians loved to dance and indulged themselves in that pleasure as often as possible. Peripatetic dancing masters made a circuit from neighborhood to neighborhood, gathering all the planters' children at one of their houses for lessons that would continue for two or three long days. These martinets didn't hesitate to box the ears of inattentive students without a word of protest from their parents, and in the evening the adults danced along with the children. Patsy's group for such vital lessons doubtless included her cousins, brothers, and neighbors. To the perplexity of outsiders, dancing helped create social cohesion in Virginia, as well as contributing to physical fitness; dancing well was essential to acceptance by society.

The intricate steps of minuets, French dances, reels, and country dances were taught thoroughly and practiced frequently. Dancers had to “mind the music and the step” very carefully indeed. Long lines, circles, or squares of dancers moved in rhythm through intricate patterns in limited spaces. Pity the awkward booby who turned left instead of right or tripped over his own feet. The grace, beauty, and courtliness of dancers were on display, an opportunity for social success or public humiliation.

Dancing was far more essential in the eighteenth century to a Virginia girl's education than reading, writing, or arithmetic, but Patsy's schooling in those more mundane areas was not neglected. Probably her mother was her teacher, since the Dandridges were not wealthy enough to employ a resident tutor; she received a solid basic education, better than that of some planters' daughters, inferior to that of most of their brothers. For the rest of her life she was a reader, enjoying novels and poetry and perusing daily the Anglican Book of Common Prayer and the Bible, especially the New Testament. She had a solid grasp of arithmetic, which she later used to financial advantage.

Patsy's letters were filled with variations in spelling and grammar. But so were most people's. Spelling, capitalization, and verb usage were not yet standardized in England, still less in the colonies. Form was important, and she wrote a passable hand, the lines fairly straight and even.

There was a wide gap in the rhetoric taught girls and boys. The admired style of the day—pretentious, florid, overflowing with ornamented sentences and lofty principles—was almost completely a masculine purview. Like most women, Patsy wrote letters that were short, direct, and to the point. No ornamental flourishes, no highfalutin sentiments, no musings on abstract subjects. Writing for her was a means of communication, not an opportunity to parade her learning.

Religion was fundamental to Patsy's upbringing. The Dandridges were regular churchgoers, riding four miles along dirt roads through overhanging woods, welcomed by the ringing bell well before the imposing square brick tower of their church came into view. St. Peter's stood alone in the woods, coming alive on Sundays when all the neighborhood arrived, tying their horses to the trees that surrounded the church. Her father was a vestryman, one of the powerful board of laymen who directed parish activities. Patsy became a devout member of the Church of England; daily prayers were one of her lifelong emotional supports.

Church attendance was about more than religion in those hard-working times. Sundays and court days were the highlights of rural social life. Both before and after church (and during, for many of the menfolk who remained outside), neighbors took the opportunity to visit and do business in the churchyard. Sociability also ruled at court days, the monthly sessions where county officials, including John Dandridge, dealt with legal matters at New Kent's courthouse. Invitations flew, and both church and court were followed by dinners, barbecues, fish feasts, visits of a day or a week, dances at a neighbor's house. It was primarily at these house parties that marriageable young women like Patsy spent time with potential suitors.

Williamsburg, though, was the center of colonial social life, boasting about a thousand permanent residents by 1748. During the spring and fall court sessions, which were often combined with a meeting of the legislature, the city's population almost doubled as planters and their families flooded in for business, politics, law-suits, or simple pleasure. These “Public Times” were crowded with entertainments and social events—balls, assemblies, teas, dinners, horse races, theater.

The town was laid out on a plan worthy of a far grander place. The carefully leveled main street, Duke of Gloucester, was six poles wide—wide enough for two or even three wagons to pass abreast. It stretched straight as a string for almost a mile, bounded at one end by the college and at the other by the ruins of the burned Capitol building, in the process of being rebuilt. Bruton Parish Church and the Governor's Palace were situated on a crosswise axis. The two-story brick palace had inspired some wealthy planters to imitation in their own elegant new mansions. It faced the Palace Green, with falling gardens that sloped down to an ornamental canal overhung with trees; the iron front gates opened onto a forecourt with four long oval parterres of clipped yaupon holly, the beds planted with pastel periwinkles.

To most colonial Virginians, Williamsburg was an exciting metropolis with its grand public buildings, taverns (some with assembly rooms for social events), and racetrack. A number of the wealthier planters, not including John Dandridge, owned brick or frame town houses, enclosed with fences to keep the town's pesky dogs and hogs out of their gardens. What with an apothecary, jeweler and silver-smith, wigmaker, shoemaker, general store, printer, saddler, blacksmith, milliner, gunsmith, cabinetmaker, and more, sandy Duke of Gloucester Street seemed to offer no end of tantalizing shops. It was the biggest town that Patsy had seen in her young life.

Besides the dances and other social events in New Kent, she probably accompanied her parents to a ball or two in Williamsburg. At home and in the capital, she would encounter prospective husbands and take her place in Virginia society as a beautiful young woman. Patsy Dandridge's childhood and education were behind her at seventeen, her character essentially formed. The first chapter of her adult life was about to open.

CHAPTER TWO

P
retty Patsy Dandridge was plenty old enough to think of marriage in 1748. Fashions in beauty change with every generation, and seventeen-year-old Patsy's looks were just right for hers. She was what the English called a pocket Venus, a petite, cuddlesome armful. Barely five feet tall, she had the tiny hands and feet that were considered marks of gentility. With dark brown hair and strongly marked eyebrows, smooth white shoulders sloping down to full breasts, bright hazel eyes, and a ready smile displaying beautiful white teeth (a rarity for the time), she epitomized the feminine ideal for many Virginians.

She had long since met every eligible bachelor and widower in her neighborhood and farther afield. But in the eyes of potential husbands, her beauty, social graces, sex appeal, and personality didn't quite offset her biggest deficiency—money. For Virginia planters, as for the gentry in Britain and throughout the British colonies, marriage was not a matter to be decided by individuals on the basis of love alone. It was a serious family affair, in which money, landownership, social position, religious affiliation, dowry, and parental consent balanced and often outweighed personal attraction—especially for the daughters of the family. The Dandridges' fortune wasn't as large as their family, and they couldn't provide a substantial dowry.

So essential was money in gentry marriages that the
Virginia Gazette
of Williamsburg frequently included the amount of women's dowries in their wedding announcements; that information must have been provided by the families themselves. One example among dozens says it all: In 1737, the
Gazette
stated baldly that Beverley Randolph's bride Betty Lightfoot was “an agreeable young Lady, with a Fortune of upwards of 5000£.” Agreeable indeed, with such a sum to command.

Nevertheless, people usually managed to find a compatible spouse within their own social circles, and happy marriages were probably as common then as now. Patsy would surely find an attractive and companionable husband from among the neighboring New Kent planters of comparable means or her many Pamunkey River cousins—a Dandridge, Macon, or Woodward.

A New Kent neighbor did come courting, but her parents must have been both shocked and delighted by the identity of Patsy's suitor. Contrary to all probability, Daniel Parke Custis came from the very top tier of colonial society—the descendant of Virginia's most prominent families and the son of one of the richest men in the colony. A bachelor twenty years Patsy's senior, he was an active dark-haired man of average height, standing five feet six inches (although he sometimes claimed an extra inch), somewhat stout, with large dark eyes that radiated kindness.

During the eleven years that he had lived in New Kent County, running one of his father's plantations just a few miles down the Pamunkey from Chestnut Grove, Patsy had come to know him well. His life had crossed her family's at countless points—court days, militia musters, social events, church (he served on St. Peter's vestry with her father), the Public Times at Williamsburg—and he had obviously noticed the little girl growing into a lovely young woman. At thirty-seven, he was only a year younger than her mother, but the age difference between him and Patsy was not an impediment; young girls often married older men.

There was, however, one major obstacle to Patsy and Daniel's marriage—his father, John Custis IV, the master of several plantations and thousands of acres, as well as a house in Williamsburg where he lived. Daniel hadn't chosen voluntarily to remain single at nearly forty, a curiosity in a society that married early and often. Old Colonel Custis's eccentricities were as vast as his wealth, particularly on the subjects of marriage, parental authority, money, and social rank. Daniel had not been allowed to take up planting until several years after his peers. His attempts at matrimony, including a proposed union with the heiress Evelyn Byrd, had been thwarted by his father for monetary reasons. Both marriages of Daniel's older sister Fanny had failed because her father refused to turn over her dowry; perhaps from sheer disappointment, she had recently died.

After a lifetime of paternal domination and dutiful behavior, Daniel was reluctant to inform his father of an engagement he was sure to hate. If a Byrd wouldn't do, how could a Dandridge? Patsy must have been upset and offended as Daniel continued to keep their intended marriage a secret. He enlisted the aid of family friends James Power, an attorney, and John Blair, a leading colonial official, who convinced him that the longer he waited, the worse his father's reaction would be.

It's hard to see how it could have been much worse. John Custis flew into a blind rage and demanded that his son forget Patsy Dandridge. But Daniel was deeply in love and determined, for once, to have what, or rather whom, he wanted. Astonished at his dutiful son's defiance, Custis abused Daniel, Patsy, and her father up and down the town of Williamsburg in the most embarrassing way. As he thundered to friends, he had not spent a lifetime amassing a fortune to have it spent by any daughter of Jack Dandridge. Neither Patsy Dandridge's pedigree nor her wealth matched the Custises', and the old colonel meant to force his disobedient son to break off the engagement.