Martha Washington

by Patricia Brady

  Not only was Philadelphia much larger than New York (42,520 to 32,305, according to the 1790 census), it boasted many more civic amenities. Its broad paved streets had oil lamps, sturdy posts to prevent carriages from running up on the sidewalks, and convenient public water pumps. It was much cleaner than New York as well, though it did have hogs running loose and rooting in the gutters. But Philadelphians had a logical explanation: the swine were part of the city’s street-cleaning efforts.

  High Street, where the Washingtons lived, was becoming known as Market Street. The two names were used interchangeably for a while until Market finally won out. On three blocks of this very wide street, a couple of blocks from their house, market arcades had been built down the middle of the roadway, with stalls rented between the pillars to meat and produce sellers. Traffic passed on the outsides of the buildings, and the inner aisles became a covered promenade.

  In Philadelphia, there were many old friends and some engaging new ones. Through Morris, Willing, Powel, Allen, Chew, and Shippen family connections, the Washingtons met many other wealthy, well-educated, and sophisticated people, to the voluble disgust of republican critics. Probably the most glamorous of their new friends were William and Anne Willing Bingham. Their three-story brick house with its Palladian windows and fanlights on Third Street, set within carefully designed formal gardens, seemed palatial to Americans—especially those who visited and saw the freestanding marble staircase in the front hall and the mirrored drawing rooms hung with paintings. Equally impressive were Landsdowne, the country estate of John Penn, the last proprietary governor of Pennsylvania, and his wife, Anne Allen Penn, and Judge Richard Peters’s Belmont, with its famous gardens, approached down a grand avenue of hemlocks. Martha and George frequently rode or drove out to visit these estates and enjoy the country air.

  The Washingtons again took up their schedule of official entertainments, but Martha could now call informally on her friends and invite them for tea and conversation. Together, she and George occasionally attended the city’s dancing assemblies and concerts, as well as dinners and balls in private homes. Martha bought yards of black velvet for a ball gown and several fans to flourish at these formal occasions, as well as lottery tickets and other presents for relatives back home.

  Martha and George attended services at the nearby St. Peter’s Church at Third and Pine, only a few blocks down from their house toward the river. The rector there, as well as at Christ Church, was Bishop William White, Mary Morris’s brother. They continued their charitable gifts from small amounts for old soldiers or needy widows to larger sums for church building funds and other civic activities.

  It was Martha’s lifelong habit to spend an hour in the morning over her devotions, praying and reading from the New Testament and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (1662). In late 1789, as the old Church of England in America was reorganized into the Episcopal Church, the prayer book was revised and published in a new American version. Martha bought a copy for herself as well as others she sent home to the women of the family in September.

  Despite Quaker opposition, the stage was thriving in Philadelphia at the South Street Theater. The Old American Company, which the Washingtons had enjoyed in New York, presented a performance of The School for Scandal at the president’s request. Washington bought eleven tickets for the evening. A stage box was reserved for the president, his lady, and their guests, complete with red draperies, cushioned seats, and the United States coat of arms draped over the front of the box. They went often during the season, also sending Nelly and Wash, the Washington boys, and Austin, Hercules, Christopher, and Oney on various occasions.

  The greatest of all “rational amusements” in Philadelphia was Peale’s museum. Charles Willson Peale had achieved considerable success as a portraitist of the American elite; beginning twenty years before, he had painted the Washingtons several times. Settling in Philadelphia and fathering a number of children—Raphaelle, Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Van Dyke, among others—he was struck with the idea of setting up a museum of natural history.

  First advertised in 1786, his museum at Third and Lombard consisted of two skylighted galleries added to his house. A neighboring shed housed live animals; the exhibits varied as these natural curiosities died and were replaced. The museum featured his own paintings of national heroes, the bones of an unidentified gigantic animal from the Ohio frontier, mammoth teeth, mineral specimens, insects and butterflies, a marine room with mounted fish and sharks, and Indian and South Seas artifacts. Most striking were the preserved specimens of birds and beasts, mounted in natural poses with watercolor backgrounds to lend realism. A conspicuous sign in the gallery read: “Do not touch the birds. They are covered with arsnic [sic] poison.” Not that most people paid attention, but the preservative coating wasn’t enough to kill them. Martha was known for her tiny feet; she must have been astonished at the model of a Chinese lady’s bound foot and her four-inch-long shoe. The Washington family visited several times, paying the admission price of twenty-five cents, before the president became a sponsoring member.

  Expeditions to the botanical gardens and nursery on the banks of the Schuylkill River, established by Quaker botanist John Bartram, made a pleasant drive out of town. The gardens and greenhouses displayed familiar and exotic American plants, collected on botanical expeditions as far away as Spanish Florida; Bartram’s sons sold roots, seeds, and even live plants. Among the other entertainments enjoyed by Martha and her family in the metropolis were waxworks, a sea leopard (seal) on display, French musicians who played at the door for tips, and street jugglers. Later there were balloon ascensions, a panorama, and the first elephant ever exhibited in Philadelphia, a sad-eyed beast kept penned in an alley off the market shed and given rum and brandy for the amusement of the spectators.

  The children were settled in school and arrangements made for their music, language, and art lessons. By January 25, 1791, a dancing teacher began coming to the house Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at five p.m. It was desirable to have lots of children at the lessons to form sets for the popular country dances; even Abigail’s six-year-old niece was invited to join them. Doubtless the Washington boys and the children’s friends also danced at the president’s house.

  Washington had just brought George Steptoe and Lawrence Washington, his rapscallion orphaned nephews, to study at the University of Pennsylvania. Fortunately, they had settled down and acquitted themselves well at school. Balanced on the cusp between childhood and adolescence, Nelly wore a dancing dress trimmed with silver thread and spangles but had just gotten a new doll. She had made fast friends with the daughters of Washington’s friends—Maria Morris, Susan Randolph, and Elizabeth Bordley. Elizabeth’s elderly father shared the president’s devotion to experimental agriculture. Wash had so many friends at school that Washington feared there was more playing than studying going on.

  The spring and early summer of 1791 brought changes to the Washington household. Polly gave birth to Benjamin Lincoln Lear on March 11; the boy was named for Tobias’s mentor and patron, a leading general in the Revolution, with Washington as his god-father. Martha and George were always happy to welcome a new child to their home.

  David Humphreys went to Portugal as American minister; his place was taken by Martha’s nephew Bat Dandridge. Between them, the Washingtons never ran out of helpful nephews. She told Fanny that Bat was “as yellow as a mulato”; he was probably suffering a relapse of Virginia’s endemic malaria. Bat also had to be inoculated immediately against smallpox.

  When the current steward proved unsatisfactory, Sam Fraunces was summoned from New York to take over. Then, on April 5, Edmund Randolph called on Martha to warn her that some of his household slaves, brought from Virginia, had claimed their freedom. They had cited the Pennsylvania law that declared adult slaves free after a residence of six months in the state. When she relayed the information to her husband, George was concerned about the financial consequences. If any of the Custis dower slaves beca
me free, he would have to reimburse the estate. Neither George nor Martha seemed disturbed by the moral dilemma of keeping slaves in a free state.

  Only Hercules, Austin, and Molly were of age. They decided to send the two men back to Mount Vernon from time to time on trumped-up excuses to circumvent the six-month residency requirement; Martha had already promised Austin’s wife to send him home for a visit. They apparently didn’t fear Molly’s leaving. Lear was acutely troubled by this trickery and could excuse himself only by thinking of how well these people were treated by the Washingtons; the slaves themselves doubtless saw through the charade.

  After Congress adjourned in early March, Washington waited for the roads to improve before setting out on March 21 for his southern tour, the other half of his trip the previous year. Rumor suggested that his national policy was unpopular in the South, and he intended to find out. This trip of some two thousand miles completed his intention of visiting all the states of the Union. On his way south, the president spent four days at Georgetown talking sense to the local landowners, whose political animosities and greed were endangering the future of the new capital. Both going and returning, he stopped at Mount Vernon to check on things.

  In his absence, Martha avoided a repetition of the past year’s depression. She had a new miniature painted by Peale and took Nelly and Wash on several jaunts, including a visit with friends at a great estate in New Jersey, capped off with a stop at the Bristol Fair in Bucks County. Tobias Lear’s mother came for a long visit, at Martha’s invitation, to admire her new grandson.

  That summer, everyone was sickly except Nelly. They decided not to make their usual trip to Mount Vernon, uprooting the entire household, but to stay quietly in Philadelphia. George Augustine Washington had spent some time on doctor’s orders at one of the mountain spas in another futile attempt to improve his health, and Fanny had just given birth to a third child, Charles Augustine.

  By August, George Augustine was so much worse that he was unable to sit a horse, much less manage a large plantation. Suddenly, all was action as Martha and George packed up children, servants, and aides and set off for Mount Vernon in September. Bob Lewis took over temporary management of the estate, and Washington asked Bob’s brother Howell to join the presidential household. The whole caravan was back in Philadelphia by the time Congress convened on October 24, 1791.

  The first year of the presidency had seen an encouraging display of cooperation in nation building. The next years were filled with rising controversy over just how the government was to operate. And as the president coped with dissensions among the men he trusted, the sad drama of his favorite nephew played itself out. It wasn’t just the loss of someone he and Martha loved; both of them worried about how Mount Vernon could continue to operate without an experienced farmer in charge.

  A plantation manager was hired at last, and the Washingtons went home annually during congressional recesses while George Augustine died slowly of tuberculosis. Sent away again to the mountains as his health spiraled downward, he was constantly spitting up blood, sometimes floods of it when his lungs hemorrhaged, and was at times unable to speak. In August and September 1792, he was bedridden and unable to walk—“a shadow of what he was.” Finally, he, Fanny, and their three children moved to her family home in New Kent County, hoping the warmer climate might be helpful. It wasn’t. George Augustine died on February 5, 1793. He was buried in the family burial ground at Eltham, joining Martha’s son, Jack, and her sister Nancy Bassett. George took this death especially hard, since George Augustine was his favorite of many nephews and the heir apparent to Mount Vernon.

  It was clear as well that Fanny had contracted tuberculosis from her husband. Martha worried about her niece, urging: “I hope you will now look forward and consider how necessary it is for you to attend to your own health for the sake of your dear little Babes.”

  Whatever the general public might have thought in 1791 and subsequently, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had decided that the nation was in jeopardy from the machinations of Alexander Hamilton. All his financial measures were leading down the gilded road to monarchy and damnation. Washington, in their developing view, was merely his dupe. Jefferson couldn’t imagine that Washington seriously found Hamilton’s plans better than his own for the nation—although at this point, Jefferson had few concrete plans other than opposing Hamilton. Jefferson took an extreme states’ rights position, combating every attempt to strengthen the federal government, while the president was committed to creating a strongly united nation.

  Foreign affairs, too, were a crucial factor in the development of political parties. Hamilton had fought the British bravely in the Revolution, but he still admired and wanted to emulate many British institutions. Jefferson had been in Paris when the Bastille fell in 1789 and was filled with enthusiasm and admiration for the French Revolution. Even as new rulers came and went and the shadow of the guillotine loomed, he stood fast in his love for France and hatred for Great Britain. To Hamilton, all this was violence and anarchy that might engulf the United States.

  Alexander Hamilton was a brilliant man but a terrible politician. Neurotic impulses often ruled his behavior, and he suffered from the fatal delusion that he was a master manipulator, causing needless distrust and dislike. Thomas Jefferson actually was a master manipulator, especially in combination with the detail-oriented James Madison. As Hamilton and Jefferson came to stand for coalescing political parties, they fought over matters of substance, but there was an underlying personal hostility as well. They hated each other, each considering the other a hypocrite with secret plans who was trying to use the president for his own ends. And they were both right.

  Agreeing to block Hamilton in Congress, Jefferson and Madison decided that they needed their own newspaper to combat the pro-government Gazette of the United States. Their friend Philip Freneau, a bad poet but an exceptional polemicist, shared their politics. In August 1791, Jefferson hired him as a translator for the State Department with the understanding that his official workload wouldn’t interfere with the newspaper he agreed to publish.

  In October, Freneau came out with the first issue of the National Gazette; by February, he had launched an unremitting barrage of criticism against Hamilton and all his plans, indirectly disparaging the president as well. Jefferson was aware that Washington “was extremely affected by the attacks . . . I think he feels those things more than any person I ever yet met with.” But although he claimed to be “sincerely sorry” for the injury to the president, such attacks were essential to his political aims. When Washington inquired about the coincidence of a government employee imported to publish a newspaper attacking that government, Jefferson equivocated. Technically, he told the truth while asserting a lie. Such specious defenses didn’t impress Martha; she came to abhor the sly politician who used her husband so badly.

  Hamilton leapt to arms, publishing articles in his own defense in the other paper and skewering Jefferson. To Washington, this “spirit of party” was terribly upsetting. To try to bring the opponents together, he began holding formal cabinet meetings. Surely, talking face-to-face, they could get over their difficulties. He saw the issue as northern vs. southern interests. He didn’t yet realize that political parties had become a reality in the United States, with partisans committed to destroying the careers of their opponents. There would be no going back.

  Washington had had enough of refereeing a progressively nastier game. Early in 1792, he informed Jefferson, Hamilton, Knox, and Madison that he would retire at the end of the term. The government was in working order, and he and his wife wanted to go home to enjoy the remainder of their lives.

  When both Hamilton and Jefferson, as well as most other leaders, begged Washington to accept a second term, his sense of duty overcame his own desire for retirement. Martha was bitterly opposed to this decision and begged him to decline. She genuinely feared that her aging husband would not survive the presidency: his two close encounters with death and the partisa
n savagery among his cabinet members seemed reason enough for his retirement to a sensible woman. She was convinced that long hours, worry, emotional turmoil, and lack of regular country exercise were undermining his health. As far as she was concerned, her sixty-year-old husband had done all that could be expected for his country.

  It was almost unbearably disappointing to Martha when George again bowed to duty. He agreed to accept a second term if the vote was unanimous. After a simple inauguration in the Senate chamber on March 4, 1793, the torments of the second term began, far crueler than anything she could have anticipated.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Torments of the Second Term

  Less than a week after Washington’s second inauguration, dramatic news arrived from France. Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette had been guillotined; Lafayette had barely escaped his country alive, only to be thrown into an Austrian prison. Many of the aristocratic French officers who had fought in the American Revolution, as well as their families, were imprisoned and later executed. Pro-French radicals toasted the death of the king and celebrated in the streets of Philadelphia and other American cities. Naturally, there was a strong conservative reaction against France among other Americans, particularly the wealthy, who tended to favor Great Britain. Washington was deeply skeptical about the future course of the French republic but had no inclination to support the British.

  With Congress in recess, Washington went to Mount Vernon in April because his farm manager was dying—and soon learned that the France of Robespierre and the Jacobins was at war with England, the Netherlands, Prussia, and Russia. He rushed back to Philadelphia. By the terms of the treaty of 1784, the United States was obligated to support her French ally. But the France of Louis XVI had disappeared with his beheading. Was the treaty still binding? Jefferson said yes, Hamilton no. Washington stood firm in his belief that the young nation should avoid foreign entanglements and conflicts. The United States had everything to lose by plunging into war with neither an army nor a navy worth mentioning. At his urging, the Neutrality Proclamation was declared on April 22, 1793.