A new lieutenant governor took office in November 1751, ushering in a fresh social and political era in Virginia. Robert Dinwiddie was an experienced colonial administrator, a stout middle-aged Scot who wore the plainest of white bobbed wigs; his family came with him—a much younger wife, Rebecca, and two little girls. Daniel waited nearly a month after his son’s birth to ride into the capital and pay his formal respects.
The public celebration of coronations, battle victories, peace treaties, and royal births and birthdays was an essential element of imperial policy; British colonies around the world joined the motherland in reiterating their common heritage and loyalty through these grand events. Dinwiddie followed that policy with verve. At Williamsburg there were fireworks and general illuminations, militia parades with drums rat-a-tatting and fifes shrilling, cannons booming and volleys of muskets cracking, crowds of ordinary folk in the Market Square gathered around a great bonfire and drinking bumbo (rum punch) from the large barrels provided for them, and fashionable assemblies and balls for the gentry at the Governor’s Palace.
Dinwiddie unveiled the new ballroom wing at the palace with the celebration of the king’s birthday in November 1752. This elegant addition at the rear of the palace included a grand rectangular ballroom and an adjoining supper room. Tables for cards, dice, and backgammon were set up in the other rooms of the palace. The new formal gardens adjoining the ballroom—eight diamond-shaped boxwood parterres planted with periwinkles and English ivy, towering topiary cylinders of clipped holly, trained beech arbors, and a maze—brought an English country estate to mind. Even though she was five months pregnant with their second baby, Patsy and Daniel probably joined the other revelers at that celebration; no fashionable planter could bear to miss it.
Along with the governor’s ballroom, the rebuilding of the Capitol was completed the following year, providing another large assembly room. Theater too was a major source of entertainment. Williamsburg had been a theater town on and off for more than thirty years, but the new playhouse, completed in 1752 on Eastern Street behind the Capitol, housed two successive companies of professional English actors, who played to packed houses. These troupes arrived with copies of the most popular plays of the London stage (scripts were often hard to come by in America), chests full of costumes, and brightly painted sets. Colonial audiences adored spectacle, and theater managers obliged them by “improving” the old standards with processions, dances, songs, crowd scenes, and duels with naked swords. So realistic were the sword fights that the empress of the Cherokees, in town for the inauguration of the governor’s ballroom, almost sent her guards onstage to prevent a killing during a performance of Othello.
An evening at the theater—seven shillings, five pence for a box seat—was well worth the cost. To open, the troupe’s lead actor delivered a poetical prologue filled with local references. Then the actors performed a well-known crowd-pleaser. During the times that Patsy and Daniel were in Williamsburg, such dramas as Richard III and the broadly comical Lying Valet were presented. This would be followed by an interval with instrumental music and songs, a jig or other solo dance, and perhaps a comic turn. The evening ended with an afterpiece, usually a short, raucous farce.
Back at White House in April 1753, Patsy gave birth to Frances Parke Custis, named for both her grandmothers. The middle name Parke was given to all the Custis children as a condition of inheritance under Daniel Parke’s will. Ten months later, little Daniel fell ill with a fever. The warm, muggy air, sluggish streams, and swamps of the Tidewater bred swarms of mosquitoes, giving rise to numerous fevers. Everyone contracted malaria, but most people survived, suffering recurrent episodes of chills, sweating, and fever, known as the ague, throughout their lives. Daniel, however, died shortly after his second birthday.
Death was a sadly commonplace family affair, and the little boy probably died in his mother’s arms. Patsy herself may have laid out the body of her son, washing and dressing him in a white linen shroud. Since corpses were not embalmed, the carpenter would have worked through the night to make the small hexagonal coffin, the common shape at the time. The family burial ground at Queen’s Creek, where the elder Daniel’s mother and sister lay, was a few miles from White House. So the family would have driven over to meet the minister and other mourners, all bundled up against February’s chill. Ropes creaked as slaves lowered the coffin into the cold ground; the parents would have thrown the first handfuls of earth and watched as their eldest child was buried. The next order to London included a “Tomb for my son,” no marble being available in Virginia.
No doubt it was during this afflicting period that Patsy Custis developed her lifelong anxiety about her children, which went hand in hand with her intense love for them. She delighted in their company but was always fearful of illness, accident, or death. Losing her firstborn son—she always favored boys—forever made her an overanxious mama.
At about the time of little Daniel’s funeral, Patsy became pregnant again, and John Parke Custis (called Jacky), named for both his grandfathers, was born in the fall of 1754. In the summer of 1754, while Patsy was pregnant, the colony of Virginia briefly took center stage in world affairs, leading the British Empire into yet another war against France. The rivalry for international power between Great Britain and France had been played out for the past half century in a series of wars that raged throughout Europe and around the world. Their respective colonies were the bargaining chips when peace treaties, usually short-lived, were made. This time, the competition began over the rich Ohio Valley, whose lands were marked out for conquest by both British and French colonists. The region lay to the west of the British colonies of Virginia and Pennsylvania and to the south of French Canada—all bent on expansion. It was a question of who could get there first, seize the area, establish forts, make Indian allies, and bring in their own settlers.
One of Governor Dinwiddie’s instructions was to block the French and encourage British settlement in the Ohio area. To affirm British claims, he sent out two small expeditions led by a little-known young officer named George Washington. These skirmishes against the French included the killing of a French officer who may or may not have been a diplomatic envoy, each nation affirming the opposite version. The incident set off a new war, which quickly spread to Europe and other European colonies. Called the Seven Years’ War in European history, it was known by Americans as the French and Indian War, signaling their developing sense of national priority.
The French were always better at Indian diplomacy than the British, and they soon sent their Indian allies to attack Virginia’s frontier settlements—marauding, sacking, burning, killing, carrying off prisoners. British refugees poured back over the Blue Ridge Mountains with tales of terror. New Kent County was far from the western frontier and danger, but the entire colony was in an uproar, and war became the center of everyone’s attention.
Great Britain responded in 1755 by sending a force of British regulars under the command of General Edward Braddock. In one of the classic tales of American history, Braddock led his army out to meet the French again, only to be ambushed. This costly loss with its heavy casualties, including his own death, led colonists to discount unduly the effectiveness of the British army in American warfare. Braddock’s aide George Washington led the surviving soldiers to safety. All of a sudden, at twenty-three, Lieutenant Colonel Washington was a somebody in Virginia.
The Custises no doubt discussed the colony’s rising military star. If they knew him personally, it was not very well. A younger son of a middling planter near Fredericksburg, he had never had the money or the occasion to spend much time in Williamsburg, where they would have met. They did have an interesting connection through Washington’s half-brother, Lawrence, and Patsy’s uncle William Dandridge, who had served together as officers in the ill-fated British attack on Spanish colonial Cartagena fifteen years earlier. And, of course, there were the gentry intermarriages of acquaintances and cousins of cousins that kept everybody informed
about who was who.
Political clamor and military alarms aside, life in the Tidewater continued to revolve around tobacco growing and family matters. In 1756, Patsy gave birth to another daughter, Martha Parke Custis, who had the Parke family’s dark good looks—large brown eyes and curly black hair. At about the same time, Patsy’s mother, Fanny Dandridge, age forty-six, produced her last child, a change-of-life daughter. That August, proud papa John Dandridge went to Fredericksburg, where he dropped dead of apoplexy, as a stroke was then called. The weather was so scorchingly hot that his body had to be buried immediately in the town cemetery; there was no time to take him home or to summon the family before the body decomposed. His loss was felt deeply by both families along the Pamunkey. Patsy’s oldest surviving brother (John Jr. had died as a teenager), twenty-two-year-old William, took over the management of Chestnut Grove for his mother and younger siblings.
Daniel’s orders to Britain now included items for the Dandridges, such as silk pumps of a color appropriate “for Second Mourning,” probably either purple or gray, for his mother-in-law. He proudly ordered for the three fine Custis children as well—fashionable hats, leather and silk shoes, a quilted cap, stays, an expensive “Dolly,” necklaces, kid gloves, ten shillings’ worth of toys, ribbons for the girls, and a saddle and bridle for Jacky. Running about in her pretty red shoes, Fanny was old enough to begin learning her letters, so he sent for a slate and pencils. Alas for such plans. In April 1757, Fanny died just before her fourth birthday, joining her brother in the family plot at Queen’s Creek.
Death was too common a visitor in colonial homes to allow grieving parents to withdraw from their daily lives. Patsy and Daniel had to continue about their regular routines, attend to the needs of their surviving children, and receive guests at White House. Within the three months following Fanny’s death, a traveling portraitist, an Englishman named John Wollaston, came to stay with the Custis family. In the eight years since his arrival in America, he had made the rounds of New York, Maryland, and Virginia, painting more than three hundred three-quarter-length portraits of everyone who was anyone in the colonies. Reflecting the tastes of his elite clientele, he bestowed special attention on the “rich fabrics touched with subtle highlights” of their finest outfits.
At White House, Jacky and little Patsy, two and a half and one, posed together in all their adult finery, he with a pet redbird perched on his wrist, she with a rose in her lap, pearls and ribbon in her wispy baby hair, the tip of a red shoe peeking out from beneath her gown. Wollaston painted separate portraits of Daniel and Patsy attired in their best, she in a silver lace and beribboned blue gown with a yellow petticoat and stomacher, her dark hair combed straight back and entwined with pearls, picking a white blossom edged with pink from a flowering bush. The price for all three works was a costly fifty-six pistoles, a Spanish gold coin that circulated in the British colonies; Wollaston’s high prices reflected his popularity among the gentry.
The Custises’ return to normality was brief. Three months after Fanny’s death, both Jacky and the robust Daniel fell ill on July 4. Patsy immediately sent to Williamsburg for medicine, and when there was no improvement the next day, Dr. James Carter, one of the capital’s leading physicians, came out to attend the patients. For three days, he administered a course of medications that suggests some sort of virulent throat infection—scarlet fever, a streptococcal infection, diphtheria, quinsy. Rather than dosing his terribly ill patients with the usual purges and emetics that formed colonial doctors’ stock practice, Carter concocted medicinal pastes with honey to be smeared on their gums and tongues. These pastes were absorbed slowly rather than swallowed straight down. If Daniel and Jacky were suffering from severely ulcerated or swollen throats, they would have been unable to swallow.
Jacky survived, but Daniel died on July 8, after only seven years of married happiness. It was a terrible way to die, slowly suffocating as his throat closed up, and Patsy must have been with her husband and son throughout those awful days. The day of Daniel’s death, she sent to the carpenter to build a black walnut coffin for his speedy interment. Oddly enough, in a time of hovering illness and swift death, many people waited until they were on their deathbeds to make a will and frequently left it too late. Daniel Custis was one of that number, dying intestate and leaving the inheritance of his family to fall under the rules of English common law. He was buried alongside his mother and his two children at Queen’s Creek.
Patsy had little time to express her grief, other than in action. A local seamstress was called in to alter a gown and make mourning dresses for her; a tailor came to make black mourning suits for Jacky and the male house servants. In Daniel’s account book, the date of his last memorandum was 1757, shortly before he died. Turning the page, the reader suddenly sees Patsy Custis’s neat and well-formed handwriting as she took up her husband’s responsibilities two weeks after his death, listing the items the plantations needed from England. She plunged straight in, ordering two seines, or large nets, for shad fishing in the Pamunkey. Her description of the desired nets is carefully detailed—thirty-five fathoms long and twenty feet deep, made of “the best three Thread laid Twine,” well fixed with leads and corks, “the slack Lines made of the best Hemp and full large,” along with spare slack lines. She went on to other mundane items such as starch, cotton for the slaves’ clothing, pins, thread, and castile soap.
Then she turned to “One handsome Tombstone of the best durable Marble to cost about £100 [very expensive]—with the following Inscription and the Arms sent in a Piece of Paper on it, to wit ‘Here Lies the Body of Daniel Parke Custis Esquire who was born the 15th Day of Oct. of 1711 & departed this Life the 8th Day of July 1757. Aged 45 Years.’ ” In her letter to Robert Cary, her English factor, she included two locks of hair for the jeweler, probably in a separate sealed piece of paper. She ordered two gold mourning rings in honor of Daniel and little Fanny, their tresses to be covered by clear crystal.
So, in a mixture of prudence and bravely borne grief, Martha Dandridge Custis marked the end of her first happy marriage. With two children to watch over, she had a future to plan and a long life ahead.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Widow Custis and Colonel Washington
Unlike most widows in colonial Virginia, Patsy Custis was rich and independent, free to make any decision she pleased about her own future. In contrast, slave women were forced to keep working despite their sorrow; poor women might be reduced to beggary, their children taken away and apprenticed; the middling sort often ran their husband’s businesses, taverns, or farms if they had sons old enough to work the fields; planters’ widows had money and social position, but their property was sometimes controlled by male trustees set in place by the wills of distrustful husbands.
Free of such galling conditions, Patsy controlled an immense property. English common law ensured the dower rights of the widows of property-owning men; such women automatically inherited one-third of their husbands’ estates for their own lifetimes, and Patsy had no trustees to interfere with her decisions. By August 1757, she was hard at work ensuring her own and her children’s financial well-being. Ordinarily, an inexperienced young widow might look to her father, brothers, or brothers-in-law for assistance. But her father was a year dead, her husband an only son, and her brothers even less experienced than she.
Her youngest brother, Bat, an attorney of twenty, acted as her go-between in early August, seeking general advice from two of the colony’s leading attorneys. They approved of her intention to administer the estate herself, offering practical advice on maritime insurance for tobacco shipments and the suggestion that she hire a trustworthy steward.
Patsy followed through with the insurance but acted as her own steward, retaining the overseers already at work. Throughout August and September, she settled accounts, arranged for a power of attorney, and informed the Custises’ British factors of Daniel’s death. The tone of her letters is strikingly businesslike. These Londoners, Liverpud
lians, and Glaswegians were businessmen, after all, not friends. She notified them all that she would be managing the Custis estate, requesting an up-to-date account from each of them. Expressing her hope that their association would be “agreeable and lasting to us both,” she made it clear that she expected them to sell her tobacco at a good price. The implication that she would otherwise take her custom elsewhere couldn’t be missed. Patsy understood financial power and didn’t hesitate to use it.
She continued Daniel’s practice of lending money at interest to cash-strapped planters. With more than £1,000 of ready money in the house at his death (a tidy sum, worth about $15,000 to $20,000 today), she did a considerable amount of business, keeping careful records of all her loans. When the accounts of a Williamsburg attorney for a long-standing Custis estate suit failed to satisfy her, she had the horses hitched up and drove into town to confront him face-to-face—to his shrill and voluble indignation.
Luckily, Patsy had plenty of common sense. As the oldest child of a large family and the wife of a wealthy planter, she was accustomed to command in household and domestic matters. But she had no enduring desire to inhabit the rough world of men’s affairs with its wheeling and dealing, anxiety over crops and prices, and management of a large labor force, both enslaved and free.
Besides, in colonial society it was considered wildly eccentric for a widow or widower to remain unmarried, and she could expect to turn over her responsibilities to a second husband sooner rather than later. Her late unmourned father-in-law was a rare exception: two or three marriages in a lifetime were the norm among Virginians at every social level. A decent period of mourning was expected, but the timetable could be startlingly short to modern eyes. A perfectly respectable courtship might begin within a month or two after a spouse’s death and the marriage take place a couple of months later.
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