by Ron Chernow
FOR WASHINGTON, the other troubling family situation of these years involved his perennial attempt to please his mother, who refused to be satisfied. Mary Ball Washington had taken no apparent pride in her son’s service in the French and Indian War, and when he resigned from the Virginia Regiment, she commented that there had been “no end to my trouble while George was in the army, but he has now given it up.”19 If he felt no real affection for his mother, he was first and last a dutiful son and showed integrity in caring for this self-centered woman. Frequently stopping off to see her in Fredericksburg, he made a point of giving her money. He extended many loans to her, even though she always reneged on repayment. In an account book for January 1772, noting that he had been lending his mother money since 1756, Washington offered the acidulous comment, “I suppose she never expected to pay.”20
For decades, Mary Ball Washington had lived frugally at Ferry Farm, the ample spread fronting the Rappahannock that George had inherited from his father and that he had let her use freely all these years. For a long time she had delighted in her independence, riding about in an open chaise and supervising the slaves. Now about sixty-three, she was no longer able to superintend the run-down place, and in 1772 George encouraged her to move into Fredericksburg. To make a final provision for her, he spent 275 pounds for a charming white frame house on a one-acre lot at the corner of Charles and Lewis streets in Fredericksburg. He added a wide, deep porch with a slanting roof that overlooked the garden. The house was ideally situated for Mary: a brick footpath led straight to the imposing mansion of her daughter Betty and Fielding Lewis, who had eleven hundred acres and 125 slaves. Washington’s brothers Charles, a Spotsylvania County justice, and Samuel, a plantation owner, also owned nearby houses. Although Mary Ball Washington spent the last seventeen years of her life in the Charles Street house and never paid a penny in rent, she never acknowledged George’s generosity, as best we know.
Washington personally surveyed Ferry Farm in 1771 in preparation for selling it. He also agreed to take charge of a four-hundred-acre farm, Little Falls, that Mary owned two miles downriver and had inherited from her father. Washington was supposed to profit from Mary’s ten slaves and livestock and pay her thirty pounds rent yearly in exchange, a deal approved by his brother Charles and brother-in-law Fielding Lewis. Because there was no mutual trust between mother and son, when Washington paid Mary the rent, he often did so in the presence of his sister Betty, then recorded in his ledger that the latter had witnessed the transaction.
One small incident from the early years of the Revolutionary War shows just how steely a woman Mary Washington was. She had reclaimed from Mount Vernon a slave woman named Silla. Lund Washington notified George of the heartrending scene that occurred when he informed Silla’s partner, Jack (probably a slave cooper), that Silla was being sent down to Fredericksburg. “He cries and begs, saying he had rather be hang[e]d than separated,” Lund reported. A week later Lund reiterated that “Jack and Silla are much distressed about parting.”21 George Washington respected slave marriages and refused to separate couples. Nevertheless Mary Washington evidently persisted in her demand and broke up the couple for her own convenience.
ON THE EVENING OF MAY 18 , 1772 , Jacky Custis returned to Mount Vernon with an unusual companion in tow, a thirty-one-year-old painter named Charles Willson Peale who lived in Annapolis and toted an introductory letter from the Reverend Jonathan Boucher. The handsome young stranger had relinquished a career as a saddle maker to specialize in portraits of affluent families. Peale was destined to have three wives and sixteen children and emerge as a towering figure in early American life, excelling as a painter, a writer, a soldier, an inventor, a silver-smith, a taxidermist, a dentist, and the founder of a Philadelphia museum. He had studied painting in London under the foremost American expatriate artist, Benjamin West, and the Potomac gentry already prized his pictures. Nudged by Martha, George Washington, age forty, agreed to endure his first portrait. Though he never warmed to artistic scrutiny, he had enough vanity in his psychological makeup to want a picture of himself.
Even though more than thirteen years had passed since Washington resigned his military commission, he still prided himself on a military identity, and people often greeted him as Colonel Washington. The brouhaha over the Stamp Act and the Townshend duties also raised the distant prospect of a recourse to arms. So as the industrious Peale settled in at Mount Vernon, Washington donned a uniform—a blue coat trimmed with scarlet and a scarlet waistcoat—that called forth memories of the French and Indian War.
Never comfortable with self-exposure, Washington was alternately restive and sleepy in posing for Peale, as he described whimsically to Boucher. He seemed to sense what a baffling, enigmatic subject he was. “Inclination having yielded to importunity, I am now, contrary to all expectation, under the hands of Mr Peale, but in so grave, so sullen, a mood—and now and then under the influence of Morpheus, when some critical strokes are making—that I fancy the skill of this gentleman’s pencil will be put to it in describing to the world what manner of man I am.”22
This serene painting has a storybook quality. Instead of presenting Washington as a prosperous planter, it offers a nostalgic backward glimpse to the Washington of the 1750s. With one yellow-gloved hand thrust into his waistcoat, a musket slung behind him, and a golden sash hung diagonally across his chest, Washington gazes poetically into the distance. His face is smooth and innocent, his blue eyes clear, and he might be listening to bird whistles in the tree above him rather than live bullets. His facial features are mobile and animated, not yet etched with the strong character engraved there by the Revolutionary War. The picturesque scene pretends to capture Washington being summoned to battle, with an Order of March protruding from his fob pocket. Washington was so fond of the painting, which captured him in his prime, that it hung in the Mount Vernon parlor for the rest of his life. It seems to foretell his eagerness to resume his military career.
The artist spent a week at Mount Vernon and painted miniatures of Martha, Jacky, and Patsy along with the three-quarter-length portrait of George Washington. The picture of Martha was done at Jacky’s request, and one wonders whether he made a point of demonstrating his love for his mother or perhaps implicitly rebuked his stepfather for not having included her in pictures by this visiting artist. It must be said that the picture of Martha Washington, in a mauve dress and pearls, is not especially flattering. Her face is cold and humorless, the tight lips primly disapproving. Nevertheless this was probably the miniature of Martha that her grandson later meant when he said that George Washington always “wore around his neck the miniature portrait of his wife. This he had worn through all the vicissitudes of his eventful career . . . to the last days at Mount Vernon.”23
IN MAY 1773, hoping to put a safe distance between Jacky and his intended bride, Washington accompanied him to New York City and enrolled him in King’s College. This sociable trip exposed Washington to personalities who were to be prominent in the coming conflict. It was almost the last moment when Washington could still mingle easily with people of differing ideologies. In Philadelphia he dined with Governor Richard Penn and in Burlington, New Jersey, with Governor William Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son and soon to be ostracized as a notorious Tory. At Basking Ridge, New Jersey, he stayed at the opulent estate of Lord Stirling, whose extravagant ways had already landed him in debt; before too long, Stirling would emerge as one of Washington’s favorite generals. In New York he met with James DeLancey, shortly to command a Loyalist cavalry, and attended a dinner in honor of an old colleague from the Braddock campaign, Lieutenant General Thomas Gage, now commander of British forces in North America. It is amusing to think of George Washington drinking toasts to this future bugbear of the patriot cause. Washington also attended a performance of Hamlet, staged in a red theater building on John Street.
The president of King’s College, the Reverend Myles Cooper, welcomed Jacky Custis and his personal slave Jo
e to the school. An accomplished scholar and poet, versed in classical tongues, Cooper had strengthened the college by adding new professors and a medical school and expanding the library. He had also turned the school into a hotbed of Tory sentiment as the colonies became polarized by the controversial taxes imposed by London. The school stood on the Hudson River, one block west of the common, where radicals congregated to spout anti-British venom. Myles Cooper, with no patience for such critics, branded the radical Sons of Liberty the “sons of licentiousness, faction, and confusion.”24
There is no suggestion that Washington had any qualms about depositing Jacky in a school known for its Tory views. He must have alerted Cooper candidly to Jacky’s wanton history, because he told the president that, if Jacky spent too freely, he hoped Cooper would “by your friendly admonitions . . . check the progress of it.”25 College life was shot through with class differences, and Jacky basked in his privileged station. Thanks to his wealth, the cosseted boy enjoyed social equality with his professors, who seemed to know his status and cater to it. Instead of socializing with other students, Jacky boasted of dining with President Cooper and his tutors. “I believe I may say without vanity that I am look[e]d upon in a particular light” by the faculty, Jacky told his mother. “There is as much distinction made between me and the other students as can be expected.”26 He also bragged that he and Joe had their own suite of rooms, with a large sitting room and two small bedrooms. At times Jacky wrote about King’s College as if it were a swank resort staffed with servile employees hired to wait upon him, assuring his mother that “there has nothing been omitted by my good friend Doctor Cooper which was necessary to my contentment in this place.”27 After Washington returned to Mount Vernon, Jacky promised that he would prove a credit to his family. The young man’s cozy relationship with the faculty suggested that things wouldn’t turn out exactly as Washington had planned.
The concern over Jacky paled into insignificance, however, beside mounting trepidation over Patsy’s medical condition. Charles Willson Peale remembered the palpable atmosphere of fear at Mount Vernon, writing that “we used to walk together to enjoy the evening breeze” and “danced to give exercise to Miss Custis . . . who did not enjoy good health. She was subject to fits and Mrs. Washington never suffered her to be a minute out of her sight.”28 Washington’s diaries for early 1773 are rife with emergency visits by Dr. Rumney. During one particularly distressing time in late January, the doctor camped out at Mount Vernon for almost a full week. Then on Saturday, June 19, 1773, Patsy Custis died a sudden, painless death, leading her stepfather to make a terse entry in his diary: “At home all day. About five o’clock poor Patcy Custis died suddenly.”
The next day, a shaken Washington wrote a note eloquent in its brevity to his brother-in-law Burwell Bassett:Dear Sir: It is an easier matter to conceive than to describe the distress of this family, especially that of the unhappy parent of our dear Patcy Custis, when I inform you that yesterday remov[e]d the sweet, innocent girl into a more happy and peaceful abode than any she has met with in the afflicted path she hitherto has trod. She rose from dinner about four o’clock in better health and spirits than she appear[e]d to have been in for some time. Soon after which she was seized with one of her usual fits and expir[e]d in it in less than two minutes without uttering a word, a groan, or scarce a sigh. This sudden and unexpected blow, I scarce need add, has almost reduced my poor wife to the lowest ebb of misery, which is increas[e]d by the absence of her son (whom I have just fixed at the College in New York).29
After five years of torment, Patsy had gently slipped away. It was unusual for a person with epilepsy to die so peacefully, suggesting that Patsy may have had a heart problem or some other condition associated with her epilepsy.
A private man who never flaunted his deep emotions, George Washington nonetheless gave way to a tremendous outpouring of grief. One observer remembered him kneeling by Patsy’s bed as he “solemnly recited the prayers for the dying, while tears rolled down his cheeks and his voice was often broken by sobs.”30 In a week of sweltering heat, the heartbroken Washingtons decided it was wise to bury Patsy on the family property the next day. The coffin, draped in black, was buried in the brick vault down the hill from the house on the Potomac side. Martha assumed a black mourning cape for a full year. Her husband knew that, between her daughter’s death and her son’s absence, she was unspeakably bereft, and he canceled a western trip to stay near her.
When Patsy died, Jacky’s fiancée, Nelly Calvert, was staying with the Washingtons, and her presence proved providential, for she stepped into the huge emotional void left by Patsy’s death, becoming like a second daughter. She lingered at Mount Vernon for a week, fostering a lasting intimacy with Martha. Jacky wrote a tender condolence note to his mother, telling her to “remember you are a Christian” and saying of his lost sister that her situation was “more to be envied than pitied, for if we mortals can distinguish between those who are deserving of grace and those who are not, I am confident she enjoys that bliss prepar[e]d only for the good and virtuous.”31
Patsy’s death had a profound impact on the finances of her stepfather, who had been unable to shake his indebtedness to Robert Cary. Through skillful management, Patsy’s estate had appreciated to sixteen thousand pounds, and half this amount went to Jacky and half to Washington by way of his wife. Later in the year Washington instructed Robert Cary to take the inheritance and discharge his large debt. Once again, as with his father and his brother Lawrence, Washington had profited enormously from a death that caused him grievous sorrow.
Beyond their obvious sadness, it is hard to overstate the impact that Patsy’s death would have on George and Martha Washington in the coming years. The sudden financial windfall, by relieving pressure on Washington, allowed him the luxury of participating in the American Revolution without financial worries. In fact, it enabled him to take part on the gentlemanly terms that suited him, as he dispensed with a salary. The effect on Martha was no less consequential. She would spend about half the war in her husband’s company, which would have been impossible if Patsy were alive. The sickly girl could never have managed the long coach journeys, or the continual tensions of a military camp, or being left alone. Patsy Custis’s death, paradoxically, set up George and Martha Washington for their shining moment in history.
The inheritance also allowed Washington to launch the second major transformation of Mount Vernon, and he ordered sixty thousand bricks and nearly fifteen thousand shingles for this ambitious effort. In 1773 the main house was still a plain, nondescript building, small and unadorned and not particularly attractive. Now Washington decided to double the mansion’s size, adding those trademark features—a cupola, the pediment over the west entrance, the spacious piazza on the river side—that we associate with it today. Never a professional architect, Washington admitted that he was “a person who avows his ignorance of architectural principles and who has no other guide but his eye to direct his choice.”32 Because he added rooms and wings as needed, the house lacked the elegance of a preconceived design and was marred by some clumsy touches. The facade wasn’t quite symmetrical, and the pediment sat awkwardly on the window tops—errors the more refined Jefferson would have avoided. Nevertheless the house would gain undeniable grace and beauty, and the large colonnaded porch would stand out as a landmark in southern architecture. The piazza, with its spectacular view of the Potomac and wooded hills beyond, turned into Washington’s favorite haunt, the place that Abigail Adams hailed as Mount Vernon’s “greatest adornment.”33
The renovation reflected the split in Washington’s life between his deep desire for privacy and his growing need to entertain people and assume a grand public role. On the south side of the house, he would add a downstairs library and an upstairs bedroom, sealed off from the rest of the house to fend off intruders. On the north side, he would add an imposing two-story room, later called the Banquet Hall, with a magnificent Palladian window—a space in which Washington co
uld receive luminaries with a dignity befitting his station. The renovation also introduced the curved arcades that gracefully attach the mansion visually to the smaller buildings flanking it. Many of these changes would be completed while Washington was with the Continental Army, but while he remained, he oversaw the work with typically fastidious attention to detail. “I am very much engaged in raising one of the additions of my house, which I think (perhaps it is fancy) goes on better whilst I am present than in my absence from the workmen,” he wrote.34
