by Ron Chernow
Many years later, writing to one of Martha’s granddaughters upon her engagement, Washington warned that romantic love cooled in time. This letter may explain Washington’s final preference for Martha Custis over Sally Fairfax.
Do not then, in your contemplation of the marriage state, look for perfect felicity before you consent to wed. Nor conceive, from the fine tales the poets and lovers of old have told us of the transports of mutual love, that heaven has taken its abode on earth. Nor do not deceive yourself in supposing that the only mean[s] by which these are to be obtained is to drink deep of the cup and revel in an ocean of love. Love is a mighty pretty thing, but, like all other delicious things, it is cloying. And when the first transports of the passion begin to subside, which it assuredly will do and yield, oftentimes too late, to more sober reflections, it serves to evince that love is too dainty a food to live upon alone and ought not to be considered farther than as a necessary ingredient for that matrimonial happiness which results from a combination of causes; none of which are of greater importance than that the object on whom it is placed should possess good sense, good dispositions, and the means of supporting you in the way you have been brought up.21
Washington could never have married a poor woman, but neither could he have tolerated a cold and loveless marriage.
Throughout his life Washington was noticeably attracted to women, but his steely willpower and stern discipline likely overmastered any fugitive impulses to stray. Many people observed his gallantry with the ladies. One British officer described how women left his dining room after meals only to be squired right back in by Washington. As he recalled, Washington introduced “a round of ladies as soon as the cloth was removed by saying he had always a very great esteem for the ladies and therefore drank them in preference to anything else.”22 In corresponding with women, Washington frequently slipped into a breezily flirtatious tone. When the widow Annis Boudinot Stockton later sent him an ode in his honor, he encouraged her to produce more poetry: “You see, madam, when once the woman has tempted us and we have tasted the forbidden fruit, there is no such thing as checking our appetites, whatever the consequences may be.”23
In a century of sterling wits, George Washington never stood out for his humor, but he had a bawdy streak and relished hearty, masculine jokes. In the 1920s the puritanical J. P. Morgan, Jr., destroyed some letters by Washington that he owned, claiming they were “smutty.”24 When breeding animals, Washington wrote about their couplings with dry, facetious mirth. In the 1780s, after the Spanish king sent him a male donkey nicknamed Royal Gift, he launched an experiment in breeding mules. Washington noted drolly that the donkey was at first indifferent to “female allurements” and that when he finally responded, he proceeded with “deliberation and majestic solemnity to the work of procreation.”25 At the same time he hoped Royal Gift would catch the democratic spirit in America and “that when he becomes a little better acquainted with republican enjoyments, he will amend his manners and fall into a better and more expeditious mode of doing business.”26
Perhaps the earthiest comment Washington ever made about sex occurred when he learned of the marriage of forty-seven-year-old Colonel Joseph Ward. He seemed to find forty-seven a comically advanced age for matrimony. “I am glad to hear that my old acquaintance Colo. Ward is yet under the influence of vigorous passions,” he told a correspondent. He supposed that Ward, “like a prudent general,” had “reviewed his strength, his arms, and ammunition before he got involved in an action. But if these have been neglected . . . let me advise him to make the first onset upon his fair del Tobosa [Dulcinea del Toboso, the country girl in Don Quixote] with vigor that the impression may be deep, if it cannot be lasting or frequently renewed.”27
The marriage thrived even though Martha and George lacked children. Many theories have been advanced to explain this barren marriage. Martha may have sustained injury during the birth of Patsy, her final child, making additional births impossible. Some scholars have speculated that George’s early bout of smallpox or some other disease left him infertile. We know that George Washington didn’t think he was sterile, because, in writing once to a nephew, he stated that if Martha died and he remarried, he “probably” wouldn’t have children, but only because he would marry a woman suitable to his age—obviously implying that he could have children with a younger woman.28 The historic stress on the childless marriage has obscured the fact that the Washingtons, far from being lonely, were always surrounded by children. In the early years at Mount Vernon, there were Jacky and Patsy Custis and then, in later years, two of Jacky’s children, plus assorted other young relatives, perhaps numbering a dozen orphaned youngsters in all. This childless couple ran a household teeming with high-spirited children, which may have been their way of filling a perceived void.
Later on Washington’s childless state helped him to assume the title of Father of His Country. That he wasn’t a biological father made it easier for him to be the allegorical father of a nation. It also retired any fears, when he was president, that the nation might revert to a monarchy, because he could have no interest in a hereditary crown. In a draft of his first inaugural address, Washington (or his ghost-writer David Humphreys) wrote that “Divine Providence hath not seen fit that my blood should be transmitted or my name perpetuated by the endearing, though sometimes seducing, channel of immediate offspring. I have no child for whom I could wish to make a provision—no family to build in greatness upon my country’s ruins.”29 Many contemporaries professed to discern heavenly influence in Washington’s childless state—God’s tacit way of protecting America. As Gouverneur Morris stated in his eulogy for Washington, “AMERICANS! he had no child BUT YOU and HE WAS ALL YOUR OWN.”30
IN MARRYING MARTHA CUSTIS , George Washington inherited the posh commercial connection that Daniel Parke Custis had formed with the top-drawer London firm of Robert Cary and Company. That spring Washington sent an authenticated copy of his marriage certificate to this London agent and advised that “for the future please to address all your letters which relate to the affairs of the late Dan[ie]l Parke Custis Esqr. to me.”31 Like his previous London representative, Richard Washington, Robert Cary and Company were factors who received tobacco shipments from Virginia plantations, sold them at the best possible price, then used the proceeds to purchase wares from fashionable London purveyors. The firm had also collected dividends for Martha from her former husband’s stock in the Bank of England. Robert Cary was a larger and more prestigious house than Richard Washington, providing further proof of Washington’s swift ascent.
Washington’s relationship with Robert Cary formed an integral part of his quest for refinement. A profligate spender, he promptly placed an order with Cary for a new bedroom set, complete with a four-poster bed, window curtains, a bedspread, and four chairs, all upholstered in matching blue and white fabric to give the “uniformly handsome and genteel” effect he desired.32 From this first order, it was plain that the young couple planned to entertain in high style. They ordered a “fashionable set” of dessert glasses, special stands for sweetmeats and jellies, and silver knives and forks with ivory handles. In this first lengthy order, there was also an ominous hint of early dental trouble for Washington, who ordered from an apothecary on Ludgate Hill six bottles of a special brew concocted to cleanse teeth and cure toothaches.
In placing orders for goods from London, Washington often employed two adjectives that nicely sum up his taste: neat and fashionable. In the eighteenth century, the word neat differed subtly from its usage today. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, neat then meant “characterized by elegance of form without unnecessary embellishment; of agreeable but simple appearance; nicely made or proportioned.” In other words, Washington preferred things that were stylish but subdued, denoting his worldly status without showily advertising it. Although he never lived to see England (he told one correspondent in 1760 that he “ardently desired” to go), this young provincial yearned to resemble the better class
of London people. 33 In a typical order to his London agents, he wrote, “I have no doubt but you will choose a fashionable colored cloth as well as a good one and make it in the best taste.”34 The Virginia planter trusted blindly to the sartorial judgment of his London tailors. When he ordered “two pair of work[e]d ruffles at a guinea each pair,” he added that “if work[e]d ruffles should be out of fashion, send such as are not.”35 After years of a rough soldierly life, Washington ordered breeches of black silk and crimson velvet. He was careful, however, to warn against lace or embroidery or anything that might stereotype him as a fop. Many of his clothing orders stressed practicality. When ordering a blue hooded greatcoat, he requested that it be made “of such cloth as will turn [away] a good shower of rain.”36
Because he constantly sent his measurements to faraway artisans, Washington left many precise descriptions of his physique, but his somewhat oddly shaped body made him the bane of his tailors. His wide hips and powerful thighs caused the most trouble. In one of many letters about his ill-fitting clothes, he reproached the tailor in caustic terms: “I desire you to make me a pair of breeches of the same cloth as my former pair, but more accurately fitting. These breeches must be roomy in the seat, the buttons firmly sewn on . . . These breeches must be made exactly to these measurements, not to those to which you imagine that they may stretch after a period of use.”37
Like her husband, Martha Washington went on a buying binge after their marriage and ordered a cornucopia of luxury goods, with George drafting the itemized list to London. She ordered silk stockings, white satin shoes, gold shoe buckles, beaver hats, and later on, purple kid gloves. She must have been proud of her hair, for she dressed it with “2 fine ivory combs” and “2 large tortoiseshell combs” as well as gauze caps and “2 pounds of fine perfumed powder.”38 Indeed, portraits of Martha Washington show that she often ornamented her brown hair with white beads or pearls.
As Colonel Washington evolved from regimental commander to tobacco planter, he felt pangs of envy as he watched a succession of British victories in the French and Indian War. Seventeen fifty-nine was the year, in Horace Walpole’s words, that British bells were “worn threadbare with ringing of victories.”39 For Washington, those bells tolled with a somewhat mournful sound. “The scale of fortune in America is turned greatly in our favor and success is become the boon companion of our fortunate generals,” he told Richard Washington, sounding a bit wistful.40 That Washington still identified with the military life and retained some hope of future battlefield glory is evident in his ordering from Robert Cary six busts of great military figures in history: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charles XII of Sweden, Frederick II of Prussia, Prince Eugene of Savoy, and the Duke of Marlborough. When his London agents couldn’t fill the order, they came up with an alternate proposal to supply busts of writers ranging from Homer to Shakespeare to Milton. For the young planter, these literary heroes didn’t quite measure up to famous generals, and he vetoed the suggestion.
As time passed, a petulant tone crept into Washington’s communications to his London factors, and he began to rant about the shoddy, overpriced goods fobbed off on him. The London factors had North American planters at their mercy and exploited the situation, reminding these consumers that, in the last analysis, they were powerless colonials. Washington wasn’t the only Virginian grandee to feel resentful toward arrogant British merchants. Buying in London was a slow, tedious way to do business, hobbled by endless waits for deliveries. When Washington ordered plows from Robert Cary, for example, he found some essential parts missing and bemoaned that the parts already shipped were “entirely useless and lie upon my hands a dead charge.”41 Sometimes shipments from London wound up at the wrong river or arrived damaged. Even the wealthiest Virginians were simply captive customers.
By nature suspicious of people, Washington experienced a keen sense of injustice. He fretted that Robert Cary was padding his bills and charging exorbitant prices. Of one early shipment, he grumbled that the “woollens, linens, nails etc. are mean in quality but not in price, for in this they excel indeed far above any I have ever had.”42 By the second year of his marriage, his letters to London dripped with barefaced sarcasm, and he didn’t bother to disguise his belief that he was being fleeced, telling Robert Cary that “you may believe me when I tell you that instead of getting things good and fashionable in their several kind, we often have articles sent us that could only have been us[e]d by our forefathers in the days of yore. ’Tis a custom . . . with many shopkeepers and tradesmen in London, when they know goods are bespoke for exportation, to palm sometimes old and sometimes very slight and indifferent goods upon us, taking care at the same time to advance 10, 15, or 20 p[e]rc[en]t upon them.”43 When the London factors blithely advised him to return unsatisfactory goods, Washington scoffed that nobody could go a full year without the required articles. His dealings with Robert Cary opened yet another chapter of disillusionment with the British whom he had once so admired.
One reason that Washington and other planters submitted to their London agents was that they offered easy credit unavailable in the colonies. Like many of his affluent neighbors, Washington was land rich and cash poor and spent a lifetime scrounging for money. Historians have often pondered the paradox of why rich Virginia planters later formed a hotbed of revolutionary ferment, and the explanation partly lies in their long, sullen dependence upon London factors. Of four million pounds borrowed by colonists by the outset of the American Revolution, half was owed by the prodigal farmers of Tidewater Virginia.44 As they gorged on credit, their luxurious lives rested on a precarious foundation of debt. Virginia borrowers regularly blamed their London factors for this indebtedness rather than examining their own extravagant consumption. In piling up excessive debt, they repeated a vice then rampant among the spendthrift British upper class.
Almost immediately Washington stumbled into the same quagmire of debt that ensnared many fellow planters. After two years of marriage, he owed a sizable two thousand pounds sterling to Robert Cary. Eager to play the country squire to the hilt, he ordered goods from London with a free hand. In a letter to one of his former officers in April 1763, Washington complained of being hopelessly indebted to Robert Cary. In his defense, he pleaded the disorganized state of Mount Vernon when he returned from the war, the need to buy more land and slaves, and the expenses of a large family: “I had provisions of all kinds to buy for the first two or three years and my plantations to stock.” Before he knew it, the money he spent on buildings and other things had “swallowed up . . . all the money I got by marriage, nay more.”45
The situation deteriorated sharply the following year. Washington was congenitally prickly about money, and Robert Cary aggravated matters by being too quick to dun him for funds. In August 1764 Washington reacted to a call for more money by blaming “mischances rather than misconduct” for the repeated failures of his tobacco crops. He was outraged that Cary would pester him the second he lagged on his payments. “I did not expect that a correspondent so steady and constant as I have proved . . . would be reminded in the instant it was discovered how necessary it was for him to be expeditious in his payments,” he complained. Unlike some patrician debtors, Washington was uneasy carrying so much debt, reminding his London creditor that “it is but an irksome thing to a free mind to be any ways hampered in debt.”46 In subsequent letters to London, Washington’s fury fairly exploded off the page. When he sent a large shipment of tobacco the following year, he was aghast at the poor prices that Robert Cary fetched for him and accused the firm of securing better deals for other Virginia planters. “That the sales are pitifully low needs no words to demonstrate,” he wrote. “And that they are worse than many of my acquaintance upon this river Potomac have got in the outposts . . . is a truth equally as certain.” Washington blustered that it might be “absolutely necessary for me to change my correspondence unless I experience an alteration for the better.”47
For the rest of his life, Washington was
vehement on the subject of debt and frequently lectured relatives about its dangers. Even though he scapegoated creditors for his own debt, it is clear from later letters that he searched his soul long and hard on the subject. Decades later he admonished one nephew that “there is no practice more dangerous than that of borrowing money . . . for when money can be had in this way, repayment is seldom thought of in time . . . Exertions to raise it by dint of industry ceases. It comes easy and is spent freely and many things indulged in that would never be thought of, if to be purchased by the sweat of the brow. In the mean time, the debt is accumulating like a snowball in rolling.”48 Washington spoke knowingly, as only a reformed sinner can do as he reviews past transgressions.
CHAPTER TEN
A Certain Species of Property
FOR THE FIRST SIX YEARS OF MARRIAGE, as he devoted mounting resources to growing tobacco, George Washington was a hostage to the fortunes of that fickle crop. As noted, he had returned from his military adventures to discover Mount Vernon, under brother Jack’s supervision, in a scandalous state of disrepair. While off in the western hinterlands, he found it impossible to monitor business activities at home, which must have been profoundly distressing for someone of his meticulous work habits. As he worked to remedy matters, restocking the plantation and constructing new buildings, he ended up squandering part of Martha’s fortune.
