Orlando studied at the new College of William and Mary, became a planter near Williamsburg on Queen’s Creek, a navigable stream (at least at high tide) leading out to the York River, and served as a burgess. As the eighteenth century brought greater prosperity, Orlando and Martha Macon Jones lived in a brick house with five or six rooms, which included nineteen chairs, pictures on the parlor wall, and a few pieces of silver. Plantation labor had changed, too. Indentured Englishmen had become less common in the tobacco fields, replaced by enslaved Africans. By this time, fully a quarter of all colonial Virginians were black, the majority of them toiling on large plantations. Even a small planter like Orlando owned twenty-one slaves.
Not only was Orlando and Martha’s house more comfortable and stylish than their parents’ had been, they lived right outside the growing new capital, where they could enjoy at least the rudiments of urban life—a few shops, craftsmen, markets, and taverns. In Virginia, a rural colony with a widely spread population, all the other so-called towns amounted at most to a warehouse, a tavern, and a house or two.
Marshy, disease-ridden Jamestown was destroyed once too often by fire; in 1699, it was replaced by Williamsburg as the new capital. On the relatively high neck of land between the James and York rivers, the College of William and Mary, built to keep planters’ sons close to home, and the simple brick Bruton Parish Church were incorporated into a handsome plan of wide, sand-covered streets and brick government buildings. Still far from complete, this town was built to last.
The Joneses’ first surviving child was a son named Lane, born in 1707, followed by a daughter, Frances, in 1710, a break in the line of Marthas. Martha Macon Jones died in 1716, when Fanny was only six. Life in colonial Virginia was uncertain, and the chances of a child growing to adulthood with two living parents were rare indeed; living grandparents were even less common.
Like most colonial widowers (not to speak of widows), Orlando Jones soon remarried; it was simply too difficult to maintain a household and rear children alone. Reflecting this reality, many colonial documents refer to “now husband” and “now wife” to distinguish from earlier spouses. After three childless years, Orlando also died and left the guardianship of his children to his second wife, Mary Elizabeth Williams Jones. His will directed her to sell his “tenement,” or rental house, on Duke of Gloucester Street in Williamsburg. Although he further directed that the family remain on the plantation, the young widow had other ideas. A year after the sale, she married the purchaser, a Huguenot watchmaker named John James Flournoy.
Despite their many blood relatives, Fanny and Lane Jones found themselves, willy-nilly, living in town with their stepmother and her new husband. Babies arrived in rapid succession, and the white frame house was soon bursting at the seams. Initially, Mary Jones Flournoy was obligated to care for her stepchildren. But by their early teens, Fanny and Lane were clearly anxious to leave the household.
The Flournoys probably kept the Jones children for several years against their wishes because of the money. As guardians, they had a legal right to use the income from the Queen’s Creek plantation and its slaves to maintain the household where Lane and Fanny resided. Orlando’s sister Anna Maria Jones Timson sued twice to gain custody of her niece and nephew, as well as their estate, but she was unsuccessful. When he was eighteen, Lane legally emancipated himself from the Flournoys’ guardianship and moved out to Timson’s Neck with his aunt.
Poor Fanny was forced to remain behind for ten more months. At sixteen, she also sued to emancipate herself. The Flournoys were cleared of any financial wrongdoing when the estate was finally settled, but they sold their house and business and moved west to Henrico County, out of our story. We can surmise that Fanny was left with an abiding suspicion of stepparents and the conviction that good aunts had a duty to help out their orphaned nieces.
No one knows where Fanny Jones went to live in 1726. Because she chose a New Kent County planter as her guardian, it seems likely that she moved out to the Pamunkey River neighborhood. All Fanny’s grandparents were dead, and her aunt Anna Maria’s house was overcrowded. Besides her guardian, there were a number of Macon aunts and uncles in that neighborhood.
The most interesting possibility is that she lived with or paid long visits to a maternal aunt, her deceased mother’s younger half-sister, Unity West Dandridge. A considerable heiress in her own right, Aunt Unity was only a few years older than Fanny. In 1719, she had married William Dandridge, an English immigrant twenty years her senior. By 1726, they had three little children, the eldest a daughter named Martha.
The pool of customary names among English settlers was small and the desire to honor family members great: names were repeated in each generation, and two or three cousins often bore identical names without a middle name to distinguish them. All those Marys, Elizabeths, Marthas, Annes, Franceses, Williams, Georges, Thomases, Roberts, Johns, and Daniels make for endless confusion. As one of the early editors of George Washington’s papers put it: “To name generation after generation the same is an evil habit”—and one the Dandridges indulged in repeatedly.
Unity and William Dandridge lived at Elsing Green, a fine brick house in the new Georgian style on the north bank of the Pamunkey. By this time a successful merchant, military man, and member of the Governor’s Council, William had arrived in Virginia in 1715, bringing his fifteen-year-old brother, John, with him. Like most new colonists, they were the descendants of yeoman farmers and skilled craftsmen in England—people of what were called “the middling sort.” The Dandridge brothers prospered in the colony, and William’s marriage to Unity West gave them social cachet.
The courtship of Fanny Jones and Jack Dandridge was almost inevitable. She would already have known him as her half-aunt’s brother-in-law, and they furthered their acquaintance during the late 1720s after she left Williamsburg. Blood kinship or kinship by marriage was always a plus in colonial matches, both financially and emotionally. Hard for a modern reader to follow, genealogical snarls were easily disentangled by colonial Virginians. In those days of early death and frequent remarriage, most people had several half- and steprelatives and kissing cousins by the score.
Though never as successful as his older brother, Jack Dandridge did well. He was deputy clerk of New Kent County, soon to become clerk; a militia officer who would eventually become colonel; and the owner of five hundred acres on the Pamunkey. While he was courting Fanny, he built a house called Chestnut Grove on his small plantation across the river from Elsing Green.
In the eighteenth century, the word plantation defined an agricultural property that was devoted to the cultivation of a single crop for the export market. In Virginia, that crop was tobacco. Plantations encompassed everything from estates with thousands of acres, hundreds of slaves, and grand mansions to little more than jumped-up farms where the owners worked in the fields. Chestnut Grove fell somewhere in the middle of this range but was still considered genteel.
Fanny and Jack married in 1730, when she was twenty and he was thirty. She brought a respectable dowry to the upwardly mobile young man—a piece of land in King William County and at least ten slaves left to her by her father. In the custom of the times, the newlyweds would have moved into their new house and set up housekeeping at once. Chestnut Grove was a comfortable two-story frame house with three pine-paneled rooms on each floor, warmed by fireplaces at each end of the house; the kitchen was in a separate small building. Its setting was handsome, on a curve of the lazy Pamunkey, surrounded by chestnuts and an orchard of fruit trees.
Like all good Virginia ladies, Fanny was soon pregnant—“breeding,” as her condition was frankly known. The Dandridges’ first child was a daughter they named Martha for her grandmother and great-grandmother (and possibly great-great-grandmother). She was born between twelve and one o’clock on June 2, 1731, in her parents’ bedroom on the first floor of Chestnut Grove.
A brunette with hazel eyes and fair skin, baby Patsy had little time to enjoy being an only chil
d; her brother John (Jack) was born slightly less than nine months later. William made his appearance in 1734, Bartholomew (Bat) was born in 1737, and the sister who became her best friend, Anna Maria (Nancy), was born two years later. By the time she was eight, Patsy had four younger siblings. Then the live births stretched out, with Frances arriving in 1744, Elizabeth (Betsy) in 1749, and Mary in 1756. What with miscarriages and stillbirths, Fanny Jones Dandridge was either pregnant or nursing almost continuously for a quarter of a century.
Patsy was uncommonly lucky to have both her parents living throughout her girlhood. As the eldest daughter in a household without a retinue of servants, she was surely mama’s little helper with her younger brothers and sisters, all of them born at home. No wonder motherliness was one of her distinguishing attributes as a woman or that she always enjoyed the company of young people.
The New Kent County in which the Dandridges lived was pure country, fields bordered by forests, without a town worthy of the name. As a girl growing up on a small plantation, she had a matter-of-fact knowledge of sexuality, reproduction, and bodily functions. There was an earthiness to country life, with steaming manure heaps by the barn, chamber pots and privies, the fall slaughter of pigs and cows, the breeding of horses with bloodlines much discussed, the sounds of her parents’ lovemaking in the deep silence of the night, the birth of spring livestock—not to speak of the human babies born on the place. Patsy never fell into the chilly, tight-lipped clutches of prudishness. Good-humored and laughing, she enjoyed all the pleasures life offered.
There were perhaps fifteen or twenty slaves at Chestnut Grove, an estimate based on acreage. New Kent is one of Virginia’s “burned counties,” whose courthouse records were long ago destroyed by fire. At a place like the Dandridges’, slaves working in the tobacco fields were the key to family prosperity. Very few of them would have been spared for household duties—at most, a cook and maid/ laundress on a regular basis. While Fanny and her daughters did a good deal of the housekeeping, they had to know how to do everything, even the heavy jobs they delegated to the servants. And there was plenty of work every day for all of them.
Besides the mundane tasks like sweeping and mopping, here are some of the things Patsy learned to do at her mother’s side: kill, pluck, and draw fowls, from the smallest hen to the largest turkey; track down setting hens, gather their eggs, and candle them; make dyes; spin, weave, and dye wool and linen; make clothes, sheets, towels, pillowcases, mattress covers, quilts, curtains, bed curtains, tablecloths, napkins, underwear, menstrual pads, diapers, and nightwear; stuff pillows and mattresses; beat dust from the rugs; turn mattresses and even out the feathers; gather useful herbs, plants, berries, and roots in the woods; concoct home remedies and beauty aids; salt and smoke hams, bacon, beef, and fish; make vinegar, sauces, syrups, and jellies; preserve fruit and vegetables; cook large meals over the fire in an open hearth; bake in a brick oven; make soap from lye and household grease; make furniture and silver polish and use them; wash clothes weekly in a huge boiling kettle without shrinking or discoloring them and spread them to dry; crimp ruffles and press clothes with heavy irons heated in the fireplace; darn, mend, and patch; and knit, knit, knit—woolen stockings wore out fast. The most common verb in this long list is “make,” and that’s what colonial women did. Small planters purchased a few imported luxuries, but not most of the necessities of daily life.
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.
Martha Washington Page 3
