by Flora Fraser
Invoices for the years following their marriage show the reliance Daniel and Martha placed on their London suppliers. A smart “two wheeled chair” or carriage, painted a “pleasant stone colour” and adorned with “gold shields, arms and crest,” was acquired in 1750. The following year’s invoice listed a “blue and white” tea and coffee service, and a silver sugar dish “with a cover to fit very close.” On this dish, and on a milk pot, on a stand and on twelve salvers, all to be of silver, Daniel instructed that his arms be engraved. On a practical note he added: “2 brushes to clean silver with.” The agent was to procure, in 1752, among many other items, “two pairs of very neat silver shoe buckles for Mrs. Custis’s own wear” and “one piece of fine flowered calico for Mrs. Custis.” At the same time an order was placed for “a fashionable cap and feather for my son, about two years well grown.” Planters had to think far ahead in making out their invoices. Martha had given birth on November 19, 1751, to a son and heir, to be known for his short life as Daniel Parke Custis II. But by the time this consignment from London made its way across the Atlantic and to the Pamunkey, it would be the autumn of 1752 and the child a year old.
Time passed, and the invoice sent to merchant Thomas Godwin the following year includes: “5 pairs of pumps [shoes] for my son, about 2½ years old, of different sizes.” By then Frances Parke Custis, a sister for young Daniel II, born on April 12, 1753, had joined the family. Orders, looking ahead, are placed with Cary and Co. for “2 caps, for a girl about one year” and for three pairs of pumps “for a girl about one year old of different sizes.” Like the earlier order for the tea and coffee service, a commission for twelve silver beakers—“each of them to hold one pint with my arms engraved on them”—suggests that, even in the quiet surrounds of the White House plantation, the Parke Custises as a couple upheld the Virginian tradition of sociability and hospitality. Was this Martha’s influence? How did she deal with a husband so much her elder, so long a reclusive bachelor? She appears to have charmed him into spending a fortune. In 1754, for instance, Daniel ordered Robert Cary to obtain “18 yards of the best pink tabby [watered silk] with a fashionable white satin stripe with binding for the same, and no lining.” In addition, a London merchant, owner of an establishment called The Lock of Hair in Fleet Street, made for Martha an “extraordinary white cut peruke and dress and a set of curls of best natural curled hair and newest fashion.”
Although Daniel made so many purchases, both necessary and lavish, for his family and home, in other matters he was cautious, especially once the Dunbar suit was on appeal in London. Just as it was the duty of every Virginian to offer hospitality to anyone who came calling, so it was considered the duty of a gentleman in Virginia to grant loans to family, friends, and neighbors. Daniel became creditor to some but declared, in November 1754, that he “never would meddle with one farthing” he had in England until the lawsuit was over. If it should go against him, he affirmed, “all that I have in the world would scarcely do…[to meet the Antigua plaintiffs’ demands].” Once Martha had control of the estate, she showed herself a true Virginian and ended this rule of prudence that friends and neighbors no doubt viewed as parsimony.
While Martha was in her early twenties and Daniel in his early forties, a somber item appears in the invoice for 1754: “tomb for my son.” The Parke Custises’ son and heir Daniel II died in February that year, aged two or three, and was buried in the old Parke graveyard at Queen’s Creek near Williamsburg. His parents went into mourning for fifteen months, as was prescribed for the death of a child or parent. For an initial six months, deep mourning was observed, and Martha wore unrelieved black. In her jewelry, she abjured colored stones. For a further six months, known as half mourning, touches of white might alleviate the dark palette. During second mourning, the last of the prescribed periods, lavender, mauve, gray, and other muted shades were permitted. Daniel II’s sister, Frances or “Fanny,” lived to wear “3 pr of mittens to fit a girl of 2 years old” as well as the “fine thread,” “worsted,” and “scarlet” stockings that figure on the invoice sent to Robert Cary and Co. in 1754. She lived also to become elder sister to John Parke Custis, to whom Martha gave birth on November 27, of that year and to a younger sister, Martha, born sometime in 1756. Daniel ordered “two pairs of red satin shoes for Fanny, 2 years old” in 1755, as well as, a year later, “2 fashionable necklaces” and “one fashionable hat for my daughter, 3 years old.” But further additions to Fanny’s wardrobe stopped abruptly. In April 1757 the child died, eleven days short of her fourth birthday and, like her brother before her, joined Parke forebears in the Queen’s Creek cemetery. Thus in the space of three years Martha gave birth to her two younger children and lost her two older ones. In addition, her father, John Dandridge, had died unexpectedly while in Fredericksburg in August 1756, and she was still in half mourning for him. Her daughter’s death caused her to resume deep mourning.
Wollaston’s stiff, doe-eyed portraits of 1757 show the reduced family—Daniel and Martha and their surviving children, John or “Jacky” and Martha or “Patsy” Parke Custis. At this date Martha was still only twenty-five, Jacky and Patsy two and a half and about one. Deaths in childhood in this period were common, and there was no reason why more children should not follow. But only three months after the death of his elder daughter, Daniel himself was abruptly taken ill in July. Despite the attentions of a Williamsburg doctor, he died the following day. The flurry of grief, mourning, and burial arrangements included Martha’s sending to Cary and Co. for the shipping of “One handsome tombstone of the best durable marble to cost about £100.” Her husband and two elder children now all lay in the Queen’s Creek plot. Martha, still in black for Fanny, must wear mourning for two more years, the period prescribed following the death of a husband. A year of deep mourning was succeeded by six months of half mourning and six of second mourning. An exception was made only if, after the initial year, she acquired a serious suitor. She might then resume everyday attire.
This catalog of deaths when she was in her early twenties must go some way toward explaining an anomaly in Martha’s character. All her future life she was to be, for one so capable and strong-minded, exceptionally nervous and fearful about the health of her children and, later, of her grandchildren. To the immediate challenges of widowhood and of mothering her fatherless children, she rose confidently. With the children, she had ample help in the shape of the White House house slaves and servants. Lawyers, including her brother Bartholomew Dandridge and Robert Carter Nicholas, supported her in the decision she took then to administer the large Parke Custis estate herself. She did it for the most part with aplomb, although her late husband would have deplored her improvidence in making loans to family and friends. A steward, Joseph Valentine, supervised the work of the plantation overseers and the field slaves and answered to her. Martha herself undertook the necessary correspondence with shipping agents in London concerning the dispatch and insurance of the hogsheads crammed with tobacco leaf, which she sent from the estate for sale across the Atlantic.
“I shall yearly ship a considerable part of the tobacco I make to you,” she wrote in August 1757 to Robert Cary and Co., “which I shall take care to have made as good as possible and hope you will do your endeavour to get me a good price.” She sent that year thirty-six hogsheads in all—that is, some 36,000 pounds of tobacco. “I shall want some goods this year for my family,” she added, “which I have inclosed an invoice of and hope you will take care they are well bought and sent me by your first ship to this river [the James River].”
As Daniel had died before composing the year’s invoice, she filled it out herself. For once, there are no items of adornment for Martha. For her mother, Frances Jones Dandridge, who was now observing second mourning for her husband, Martha’s father, there was only a pair of “very well made silk pumps.” Martha’s daughter Patsy, going on a year and a half, was to receive only such “pumps” or shoes as are most proper for “such a child.” For Jacky, now the s
ole male Parke Custis and a child in whom his mother vested much, Martha commissioned, besides two pairs of calf leather pumps, “1 pair calves’ leather shoes, red heels, well sewed.”
Martha was not long widowed when she heard with concern that the Privy Council in London had overturned the dismissal in Virginia of the Dunbar suit. The Antigua plaintiffs were therefore free to seek a retrial in the General Court in Williamsburg. In December 1757 she wrote to John Hanbury and Co., rival agents to Cary and Co. in London, who received some Parke Custis tobacco, expressing her surprise at this outcome. She had been advised in Virginia, she informed the firm, that “Mr. Custis [her late husband] was very unfortunate in losing so good a cause.” In lieu of further animadversions on the London lawyers’ capabilities, she asked for a “particular”—or detailed—account of “the charges of the lawsuit.” Refusing all accommodation with the plaintiffs, though the case would very likely proceed to retrial in Williamsburg, she wrote, “no doubt the matter will turn out in my favour.” Martha’s attorney was to prevail, late in 1758, on John Robinson, speaker of the House of Burgesses, to act as guardian—in legal matters—to her children. In his father’s place, four-year-old Jacky was now “chief defendant” in this and any other lawsuit that might be brought against the estate. Martha and her daughter were also liable.
Martha Dandridge Custis, while fully and competently engaged in this Atlantic trade and while conducting herself ably in a complicated Chancery suit, had nevertheless inhabited a narrow milieu all her twenty-six years, venturing no further than to other houses on the Pamunkey or before marriage to Williamsburg. In the colonial capital she found many friends. Her mother, Frances Jones Dandridge, was related to half the lawyers and clerics in the capital as well as to numerous burgesses. But Martha had not even found her husband in the capital: she had married a Pamunkey neighbor, and upon marriage had settled in the self same parish in New Kent County where she had grown up. Her encounter with George Washington in March 1758 would introduce her not only to life in northern Virginia but, by degrees, to a wider world than the younger Martha could ever have dreamed of.
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1 Sterling was always in short supply in Virginia. From 1755 some paper currency—technically, bills of credit—was printed in the colony as part of the war effort and, denoted in pounds, shillings, and pence, was known as “current money.” (Because other colonies issued their own paper currency, that printed in Williamsburg was also distinguished as “Virginia currency” or “Virginia money.”) The worth of colonial currencies against each other and against sterling fluctuated. At this time Virginia money was worth about seventeen shillings in the pound sterling. Spanish coins—gold ones known as pistoles, worth nearly a pound sterling, and silver pesos or dollars, worth about five shillings—also circulated in the colonies, as did smaller denominations of Spanish and Portuguese coin or “specie.” The system of credit with London agents on which Virginia planters relied had the advantage that no exchange rate was involved.
3
North and South
“the animating prospect of possessing Mrs Custis”
UPON HIS ARRIVAL in Williamsburg in mid-March 1758, Washington was assured by Dr. John Amson, at a cost of £3 2s 6d, that his life was not in danger and that there was nothing to prevent him rejoining his regiment. Nevertheless, he persisted in resigning his commission. General John Forbes was the British commander of an expeditionary force charged with seizing Fort Duquesne, the fortress that commanded the forks of the Ohio River, from a French garrison. He was sorry to hear of George’s decision, writing in March to the president of the Governor’s Council in Williamsburg: “he has the character of a good and knowing officer in the back countries.”
The young colonel had chosen a critical moment to resign. The Virginia House of Burgesses was on the point of raising a second Virginia Regiment to supplement the first, in which he had served. Both were to join Forbes’s British regulars in the assault on the French. Forbes urged intervention on President John Blair: “If he [Washington]…would serve this campaign, I should be glad that you ordered his regiment to repair to Winchester directly.” Honeyed words from Blair—acting governor of Virginia in a lull between lieutenant governors—resulted in a compromise. Washington would indeed serve in the campaign but, it was understood, would resign at its end. Writing to Forbes the following month, Washington hoped that the general’s good opinion of him would continue: “it is the greatest reward I expect for my services in the ensuing campaign.” With retirement to Mount Vernon to follow, promotion was no longer at issue. But he intended to have a companion in that retirement.
By early April Washington was with his regiment at Winchester, in northwestern Virginia. Until late in the year they were to be employed in maneuvers in the Ohio country directed by Forbes with the aim of clearing a path to Canada. But while he was still in Williamsburg in March, he noted in his ledger two entries that introduce “Mrs. Custis.” On the sixteenth we have: “By Mrs. Custis’s servants 30 shillings.” And an entry for the twenty-fifth of the month shows “Mrs. Custis’s servants” being paid a further thirty shillings.
There are pretty stories about the Washingtons’ initial meeting, including a chance encounter at this time at the home of one of Martha’s neighbors on the Pamunkey River. Most probably, Williamsburg being a small place with a total population of under four thousand and a “society” far smaller, they had met previously. Robert Stewart, a fellow officer in the Virginia Regiment, implied as much when he wrote from the Winchester garrison, shortly after his fellow officer’s marriage, congratulating Washington on his “happy union with the Lady that all agree has long been the just object of your affections.” When Washington first tipped Martha Dandridge Custis’s servants, her brother-in-law Colonel Burwell Bassett was probably present, as his servants received “4 shillings, fourpence ha’penny.” Bassett and his wife—Martha’s younger sister, Anna Maria or “Nancy”—lived at Eltham, a Pamunkey plantation. Where the two visits indicated by the payments took place, whether town or country, we cannot know. Like the Bassetts, Martha went periodically on business and for pleasure into Williamsburg. The question of who suggested that Washington pursue the “widow Custis” is of more interest. It was not all because of her fine hazel eyes that he came calling.
Among those who had advised young Mrs. Custis upon her husband Daniel’s unexpected death at the age of forty-six the previous year was the lawyer Robert Carter Nicholas. With his wife, Ann, he often visited her sister, Sally Fairfax, at Belvoir. In January 1758 Washington had also consulted the lawyer professionally. Possibly Nicholas, who knew as well as anyone of Washington’s military disappointments, of his loneliness, and of the young widow’s circumstances, advised the young planter to woo Martha.
She was, by any standards, a wealthy widow. Daniel Parke Custis had died intestate. In accordance with English common law, which obtained in the colony, all his personal property, minus his lands and slaves, was divided equally between his widow and his children. This comprised, in England, £10,000 sterling in cash, stocks, and bonds and, in Virginia, personal property—including slaves—valued at £30,000 current money. Two-thirds of his Virginian lands, amounting to 17,779 acres, were vested immediately in his son and heir, as were two-thirds of his slaves—285 in number. Eight thousand acres, the Custis mansion in Williamsburg, and 126 slaves were settled on Martha for life. Should she take a new husband, this dower share, as well as her share of her late husband’s personal property, would come under his control. Supposing this second husband predeceased her, both shares reverted to her. At her own death, land and slaves would revert to the Parke Custis estate. She might bequeath her share of personal property where she liked, including to her second husband, if he survived her. But that was to look ahead.
On the debit side for a young man contemplating matrimony with Mrs. Custis, there was the Dunbar suit. It might be decided against the Parke Custis estate, when and if it came back to the General Court in Williamsb
urg for retrial. But it might never come into the courts. If it did, it might continue to seesaw between those of Virginia and London. Moreover, Virginians in colonial times were gamblers. John Mercer of Marlboro on the Potomac had long been the Parke Custis lawyer in Virginia regarding the Dunbar suit. He was aware that the Parke heirs in Antigua, though successful in London, were not yet in a position to seek a retrial in Williamsburg. Such information was easily forthcoming from him, from his nephew, George Mason, Washington’s neighbor, or from Mercer’s own son in the second Virginia Regiment—another George.
Other suitors for Martha’s hand were circling, as an April 1758 letter to William Byrd III, a connection of her children, makes clear: “C.C. is very gay and says he has attacked the widow Custis.” “C.C.” was probably Charles Carter of Cleve, who was already, aged fifty, twice widowed. He did not succeed with Martha Dandridge Custis. As is apparent from further entries in Washington’s cash book, the colonel now pursued Martha with all the tenacity and deadly purpose he had previously shown in pursuing the French and their Native American allies. But the outcomes of the different engagements were very different. Where Washington and the forces with which he fought failed to make headway against enemy positions, with Martha he swept to victory.
On Washington’s part, this was no relationship with love or lust at its root, such as he had initiated with the Fairfax ladies. Martha was, to employ Stewart’s words, a “just object” of the bachelor’s affections. He could tend his estate at Mount Vernon with the aid of the income from Martha’s dower lands in southern Virginia. With a wife also came the prospect of heirs. Moreover, in the social hierarchy of the colony, he belonged to the second tier of planters. As guardian and stepfather to the rich and well-bred Parke Custis children, he would derive worldly benefit. Washington was to describe Martha, soon after their marriage, as an “agreeable partner.” Five months later, in a letter to the same correspondent, she had become “an agreeable Consort for Life.” With time, as this book will show, Washington would come to look on his wife as infinitely more than “agreeable.” But thirty-five years after his marriage, he warned a young woman eager to wed:
