Martha Washington

by Patricia Brady

  On Sundays, they usually went to church, generally down to the small wooden Truro Parish building near George Mason’s Gunston Hall. At times, they also went to the little chapel in Alexandria. Guests and children went with them (Anglicans all), and friends encountered at church were invited for dinner. Martha took communion regularly; George was a member of the Truro vestry. Both churches mounted building campaigns during these years, and by the 1770s, the Washingtons owned square wooden family pews, somewhat like horse boxes with seats on three sides, in both Pohick Church to the south and Christ Church in Alexandria. Both were elegant brick edifices in keeping with the growing prosperity of Virginia.

  George wrote that fall of his newfound happiness with Martha: “I am now I beleive fixd at this Seat with an agreable Consort for Life and hope to find more happiness in retirement than I ever experiencd amidst a wide and bustling World.” No second thoughts in his mind—and certainly not in hers.

  The tenor of their life together was placid with joys and sorrow, gains and losses. George steadily added acreage to Mount Vernon and moved from tobacco to the cultivation of wheat and other crops. Overall, the plantation provided them comfort and luxury, but he sometimes had to borrow from the estates of his wealthy stepchildren to keep afloat in the bad years. They experienced worry, depression, dismay, and unhappiness from time to time. After a trip south, Martha wrote her sister, “I have had a very dark time since I came home. I believe it was owing to the severe weather we have had.” But the happy times far outweighed the sad.

  Measles, whooping cough, malaria, dysentery, assorted fevers, colds, influenza, aches, and strains—like all colonists, they suffered illnesses. Martha dosed the family with the harsh and generally useless remedies of the day—emetics, purges, bark (quinine), mercury. But some of her remedies were herbal, based on everyday observation. Pinworms in children’s intestinal tracts were commonplace, in her opinion the source of most childhood illness. In criticizing a niece’s child-rearing practices, she wrote, “I have not a doubt but worms is the principle cause of her [the child’s] complaints. Children that eat everything as they like and feed as heartely as yours does must be full of worms.”

  Worms were something she could easily deal with. Her sovereign remedy for worms in children was passed down through the Custis family. It called for “1 oz seeds of wormseed / half an oz Rhubarb / 1 tablespoon small cloves of garlic. put the ingredients into a pint bottle. fill it with best wine or whiskey, let it stand a few days, shaking it well, then strain it. for a child of 5 years a small teaspoonful, less for younger children.” The combination of a worm killer, an effective laxative, and the liquor would have purged Jacky’s and Patsy’s youthful guts of the most persistent worms.

  If an illness lingered, the Washingtons sent for a doctor from Alexandria to administer harsher and even more useless treatments, such as bleeding (sometimes a couple of pints were drawn) and blistering. But Martha and George were generally healthy and active, as were Jacky and Patsy. Both of them lost siblings—her teenage sister Fanny while they were courting, his elder half-brother Augustine in 1762, followed by her little sister Mary, the same age as her own Patsy. Nancy Fairfax Lee, George’s former sister-in-law, died in 1761, leaving him the undisputed master of Mount Vernon.

  With her children, Martha was very attentive, even overanxious. On a visit to Hannah and Jack Washington at their plantation, Bushfield, Martha took her “little Patt” with her but left Jacky “at home for a trial to see how well I coud stay without him.” That first two-week separation wasn’t a success. She worried incessantly—every barking dog or strange noise made her think that a messenger had come with bad news. As she wrote to her sister Nancy, “I often fancied he was sick or some accident had happened to him.” She concluded that she couldn’t leave the children again for any length of time until she had someone responsible to care for them.

  In the summer of 1761, Walter Magowan, a well-educated Scot like many colonial tutors (though the accent could be a worry), came to live at Mount Vernon and teach Jacky and Patsy, now seven and five. Martha wrote proudly to her sister that the children were learning their books “very fast.” Jacky would naturally, to the minds of the time, receive a more comprehensive education than his little sister. Magowan requested Greek grammars and texts, histories, a geography, a bookkeeping manual, and a ream of writing paper for Jacky. For seven years, he oversaw the children’s education and formed a congenial part of the Mount Vernon family.

  For children of the gentry, music and dancing were as important as the alphabet. George himself couldn’t sing or play an instrument, though he was a tireless dancer, but he found “nothing more agreeable” than music. At the same time that Magowan came to teach the basics, George sent to London for a small harpsichord, known as a spinet, for Patsy’s use; three years later, her big brother would receive a violin and a German flute (a transverse flute, not a recorder). John Stadler, a German immigrant “Musick Professor” and a highly accomplished musician, made a circuit of Virginia plantation houses during this time. Spending three or four days a month at Mount Vernon, he gave singing lessons to Martha and the children. She may have trilled out some of the songs in the Bull-Finch like “On the Marriage Act,” which declared “But Adam and Eve, then they first enter’d Course / E’en took one another, for better, for worse” or the untitled but requisite “God save great George, our King / Long live our noble King / God save the king.” Songbooks contained only lyrics, many of them to be sung to a few familiar tunes; one of a music teacher’s tasks was to help students fit lyrics to music.

  While Martha soon gave up the lessons, Stadler continued teaching Patsy and Jacky singing, adding instrumental music, for several years. The routine for dancing lessons was much the same. A dancing teacher lorded over a group of students at Mount Vernon one month, at George Mason’s Gunston Hall the next. For a few days each month, neighboring children gathered to spend several hours each day learning to dance like little ladies and gentlemen, joined by their parents in the joyous evening romps.

  One shadow on their happy life was their failure to have children of their own. For the first few years, given Martha’s fertility as Mrs. Custis, they must have expected welcome news each month. They probably gave up hope soon after she turned forty. No one knows why she never became pregnant again. George may have been sterile from birth or from disease; he had suffered a mild case of smallpox in Barbados as an adolescent, and smallpox can cause sterility. Martha may have suffered some injury during the birth of Patsy, her fourth child. George himself believed the problem lay with his wife.

  A newcomer arrived to live at Mount Vernon in late 1764—Lund Washington, a distant cousin from the Chotank area of Stafford County and former manager of a neighbor’s large estates. Five years younger than George, Lund was a pleasant bachelor of twenty-seven who was hired to manage the Mount Vernon farms. As George had expanded his acreage and operations, he felt the need to have an experienced assistant, especially when he traveled.

  With a tutor, estate manager, and housekeeper living in the house, Martha now dared to leave the children at home while she accompanied George on occasional trips. In August 1767, they set out for Warm Springs, Virginia (now Berkeley Springs, West Virginia). Their friends Sally and George William Fairfax went with them. There must have been quite a caravan rolling up the dirt roads into the Blue Ridge Mountains—a carriage for the ladies, the men on horseback, and a couple of wagons for servants and supplies. The trip took nearly a week as they climbed higher into cool air and heavy forests.

  The several mountain springs were both genteel resorts and health spas, bringing together wealthy planters from throughout the South, only a few of them really ill. Besides “taking the waters”—drinking glasses of the warm, mineral-flavored water or immersing themselves in the springs—the Washingtons and Fairfaxes rode to nearby beauty spots, strolled, played cards, dined with friends, and generally enjoyed themselves in a place where the rules of dress and behavior were s
omewhat relaxed. Some visitors settled for little makeshift cabins, but their friend George Mercer had built a house where they stayed. They brought their own cook, and he prepared healthy meals from the produce the locals brought in for sale—squash, corn, cucumbers, potatoes, beans, cabbages, greens, watermelons, peaches, and apples. George amused himself by looking at the stock of the ubiquitous horse traders and ended by buying four horses—two grays, a black, and a bay.

  Martha had been feeling poorly and out of sorts that summer, and the trip refreshed her greatly. One of her bathing dresses is still preserved at Mount Vernon, although it’s probably from a later period. Loose, light, and ankle-length, with a simple tie at the neck and loose three-quarter-length sleeves, the pale-blue-and-white woven linen gown looks a lot like nightwear. The ease and comfort of such a dress must have been heavenly for a woman who wore stays every waking moment. When she waded into the spring, she didn’t have to worry about watching after the skirt—the hem had little lead weights sewn in to keep it modestly in place.

  Lund knew just how anxious Martha would be about Jacky and Patsy while she was vacationing. At least twice during the month, he wrote long letters to George about crops, building projects, and laborers, but he was always careful to report on the children. He sent the news for Martha that “her Children are as well as I ever saw them & have been during her absence.” In the second letter, he again emphasized their continued good health and sent a message: “They desire their Love to their Mama & you.”

  These golden years, as Martha would later remember them, flowed on seemingly untroubled at the local level. But their counterpoint was escalating economic and political divergence between the American colonies and the mother country. Both she and George were loyal subjects of their king, proud of their English heritage. No one at first imagined that the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 would lead directly to the violent break of the American Revolution. Most Virginians had expected to enjoy a halcyon time of peace and prosperity. Their traditional enemy, France, had been soundly defeated, forced to give up all her North American colonies, and her Indian allies were subdued. The seas were safe for British ships again without fear of capture or destruction, agriculture and trade were booming, and all should have been well. As George wrote to an English acquaintance: “I deal little in politics, and what to advance under the article of news I really know not. This part of the country, as you know, affords few occurrences worthy of remark.”

  But like other loyal colonists, George would soon be forced to deal in politics. George III, who had ascended the throne in 1760, had no intention of leaving these jumped-up colonials in peace. A century of imperial wars had depleted the national exchequer and led to a monstrous, albeit unevenly imposed, tax burden in Great Britain. Working through a series of docile chief ministers and shifting parliamentary support, the young king determined to recoup some wartime outlays by taxing Americans.

  Colonial leaders resisted each attempt to impose taxes and tighten royal control in a series of increasingly acrimonious disputes beginning in 1763. They sent agents like Benjamin Franklin to represent their interests in London, waged newspaper warfare, established intercolonial ties, wrote countless letters and broadsides, and formed committees to enforce their refusal to buy British goods. Boston took the lead, followed by New York City, both their genteel leaders and their mobs of ordinary citizens profoundly suspicious of British intentions and authority. Virginians watched and waited; radicals like Patrick Henry were ahead of the rest. The Proclamation of 1763, the Sugar Act, the Currency Act, the Stamp Act, the Quartering Act, the Declaratory Act, and the Townshend Acts—through the 1760s, the British Parliament passed and then repealed a string of measures, which seldom added to their revenues, eroded imperial control over the colonies, and drove more and more Americans toward defiance and ultimately revolution.

  The end of the 1760s just as surely brought upset and changes in family life at Mount Vernon. In 1768, Walter Magowan went to London to be ordained as an Anglican priest, there being no bishopric in the American colonies. When he returned to Virginia, he became rector of a parish; both the pay and prestige were superior to continued service as a tutor. At fourteen, Jacky was old enough to be sent away to school. Even with a resident tutor, he had constantly taken off from his studies to go riding or shooting. Martha spoiled him, but so did his stepfather. It’s hard to imagine that any coercion could have turned him into a scholar. After all, he didn’t need to study very hard: when he came of age, he would be a very rich man indeed.

  After asking for recommendations from among his acquaintances, George wrote to the Reverend Jonathan Boucher, an English clergyman who kept a boarding school in Caroline County, south of Fredericksburg; Boucher’s sister assisted him in looking after the boys under his care. They determined to send Jacky there in the summer.

  But as they weighed terms and possibilities for Jacky’s schooling, a calamity befell the family. Beautiful little Patsy, just turning twelve, experienced a violent seizure, the first of many to come. It seems clear that she suffered from epilepsy, and puberty is one of the trigger points for the malady’s first manifestation. Beginning in January 1768, her fits grew worse over the years, both in violence and in frequency. Patsy’s care became the center of Martha’s life and ironically made it easier for her to send Jacky away to school.

  Epilepsy was untreatable by any medical knowledge of the day. The Washingtons spent much time and money consulting a variety of doctors (at least eight of them over the years), trying changes in lifestyle, mountains of medicines, and treatment with “simples,” that is, herbal remedies. Dr. William Rumney, an Englishman in practice in Alexandria, treated Patsy regularly for five years, coming down to Mount Vernon every few weeks to examine his patient and bring capsules, powders, pills, and decoctions. Throughout her ordeal, antispasmodics such as valerian and musk were the primary medicines prescribed—to no avail. At one point, poisonous but often used mercury and severe purging were ordered, Martha nursing and watching her daughter throughout. Another time, a blacksmith came and put an iron ring on Patsy’s finger, based on an English folk belief that such rings prevented seizures. Later, they spent a month at Warm Springs, hoping the waters might be beneficial.

  As Patsy grew up, Martha tried to provide as normal an adolescence for her daughter as she could. They visited relatives and neighbors, even though they sometimes were forced to return home if her seizures were too severe. Friends were important to the young girl. Millie Posey, a neighbor girl whose mother had died, practically lived at Mount Vernon during these years, joining in Patsy’s dancing lessons. Sally Carlyle came out from Alexandria and stayed a few days a month, sharing in music lessons. Patsy enjoyed the fashionable clothes and accessories of a great planter’s daughter, attending a dance or two during her good spells, but during the bad times she sometimes had two fits a day. At heart Martha knew that Patsy’s condition was hopeless. As her husband wrote, “The unhappy situation of her daughter has to some degree fixed her eyes upon [Jacky] as her only hope.”

  In July 1768, after about a six-month hiatus in his lessons, Jacky moved to school with a servant and two horses. School didn’t prove too taxing, as he frequently came home on long visits. For all his own English education, Boucher had no training as a schoolmaster and didn’t manage to drill much Latin, Greek, or even arithmetic into his bored student’s head. Most Virginia gentry schools were kept by Anglican rectors, and most of them were similarly lackluster.

  In April 1769, George and Martha went down to Williamsburg for the spring legislative session. Her youngest sister, Betsy Dandridge, was with them; she had been visiting at Mount Vernon, and they were taking her back home. By now George represented Fairfax County, a sign of his rise in the world since his marriage. Although not yet a colonywide leader, he no longer disavowed an interest in politics, closely following the developing crisis with Great Britain. His particular mission at this time was to present the Virginia Resolves, written by his friend a
nd neighbor George Mason, opposing taxation without representation and British infringements on Americans’ rights. After heated discussion, the royal governor dissolved the assembly. Its members promptly reconvened at the Raleigh Tavern and agreed to an organized boycott of British goods until the taxes were repealed. Martha stayed at Eltham with the Bassetts, consulting still another doctor about Patsy, waiting eagerly for a report on the meetings before going back home to put the boycott into effect in their own lives.

  Finding local substitutes for such British-manufactured goods as cloth, thread, pins, needles, hoes, scythes, wallpaper, stoneware chamber pots, hats, paper, windowpanes, and paint wasn’t easy for people who were so accustomed to receiving annual deliveries from England. But Martha and George were committed to this political statement. The workshops at Mount Vernon had always produced quantities of homespun cloth, mostly for slaves’ clothing. During the next years, they expanded their output. Martha trained and oversaw the estate’s spinners, seamstresses, and knitters. Weaving was traditionally men’s work in Britain and the colonies, and George oversaw the hiring of itinerant weavers to convert the spun flax and wool thread into the linen and woolen fabrics used and worn at Mount Vernon.