by Flora Fraser
In Virginia itself opposition to the act was intense. In September, while George Mercer was still crossing the Atlantic, Richard Henry Lee, John Augustine Washington’s wealthy neighbor, orchestrated a procession that marched on the Westmoreland County courthouse. It was made up largely of Lee’s slaves with some additional white “tag rag and bobtail,” John Mercer was later to write indignantly. They carried effigies of George Grenville, the minister who had originally introduced the Stamp Act, and of George Mercer himself. The slaves, acting as “sheriffs, constables, Bailiffs and hangman,” hanged the dummies at the public gallows and then burned them. Lee afterward published the supposed “dying words” of Mercer, all confession and contrition.
George Mercer had been previously esteemed in the colony for his services as an officer. But the public mood was ugly when he disembarked at Williamsburg on October 30, leaving his odious cargo of stamps on board. A great many “gentlemen of property…some of them at the head of the respective Counties” and “merchants of the country, whether English, Scotch or Virginian,” were in town when Mercer arrived, as Governor Fauquier subsequently reported to the London Board of Trade. They waylaid Mercer and demanded that the distributor resign his office. He volunteered to give an answer two days later and proceeded on to meet the governor, who was, with the speaker and council, at Mrs. Campbell’s coffeehouse in the Exchange. But the planters and merchants were not satisfied.
They passed messages, requiring an earlier answer. The distributor stood firm. Frustration mounted. As dusk was gathering, a cry went up, “Let us rush in,” and some of the malcontents stormed the coffeehouse. Though they were repulsed, Mercer agreed to give his answer instead the following afternoon. Through the “thickest of the people,” he then proceeded, walking side by side with Fauquier, so that he would not be “insulted,” to the governor’s palace. There he spent the night.
Humiliation followed for the government. Mercer appeased his detractors with his decision, the following afternoon, to resign. The day after, he appeared in the General Court to say that he had no stamped paper to distribute. It was the signal for the stagnation of business in the colony. Without the stamps, the General Court could not function, and it adjourned. Without the stamps, the shiploads of tobacco that sailed every spring for England could not be certified. Planters and merchants were jubilant, despite the economic hardship entailed. The following February Richard Henry Lee instigated what became known as the Westmoreland Association. He had the support of two of Washington’s brothers, Samuel and Charles. More than a hundred members of other leading families of the area also became “Associators.” They swore to “exert every faculty to prevent the Execution of the said Stamp Act in any Instance whatsoever.” In particular, they threatened “every abandoned Wretch…so lost to Virtue and public Good” as to use stamped paper. One Archibald Ritchie had rashly announced at Richmond his intention to clear with the reviled paper from some unknown source a cargo bound for the West Indies. He had since privately recanted. But Lee would not be balked of his theater. A “Committee of Safety,” on February 28, 1766, forced Ritchie out of his Hobbs Hole house to swear fealty in public to the Association. The Associators and a crowd of onlookers—three or four hundred men, some armed, according to newspaper reports—witnessed the merchant express his remorse for having formed “so execrable a design.”
As unrest in the colony grew, Fauquier continued to prorogue the House of Burgesses, which was to meet for the first time in November 1766. Washington left Mount Vernon only on estate business. His response to the vicissitudes of the Stamp Act was not to rail against government or to resort to violence like his brothers. In September 1765 he, echoing Benjamin Franklin, had written regarding the revenue act shortly to be imposed on the colonies: “the Eyes of our People—already beginning to open—will perceive, that many Luxuries which we lavish our substance to Great Britain for, can well be dispensed with whilst the necessaries of Life are (mostly) to be had within ourselves—This consequently will introduce frugality, and be a necessary stimulation to Industry.”
This was a radical proposition for a Virginian to make. Washington and Martha positively delighted in luxury and the very latest and best from England. But they had already retrenched, on finding themselves in Cary’s debt. Artisans in America were becoming more sophisticated in their manufacture. In return for furniture, millinery, and saddlery from New York or Philadelphia, as well as the “necessaries of life”—cloth, food, medicines—Washington had wheat to sell in the domestic market. As swiftly as agitation in Virginia had brewed, it subsided. News came of the repeal of the Stamp Act in London in the spring of 1766. Washington had guessed correctly in September: “if a stop be put to our Judicial proceedings I fancy the Merchants of Great Britain trading to the Colonies will not be among the last to wish for a Repeal of it.”
Washington accepted Cary and Co.’s assurances that they had done their utmost to promote annulment of the act, responding dryly that he was a friend to any who had done so. He added, regarding a recent order: “the Wheat Riddles [sieves] are so entirely useless that I shall be under a necessity of sending them back, or keeping them by me as useless lumber.” Sometimes the deficiencies of the consignment trade were glaring, and the stranglehold in which the British agents had the Virginians hard to bear. Three years hence Washington was to write to Mason: “that the Colonies are considerably indebted to Great Britain, is a truth universally acknowledged.” He added, “That many families are reduced, almost, if not quite, to penury & want, from the low ebb of their fortunes, and Estates daily selling for the discharge of Debts, the public papers [newspapers] furnish but too many melancholy proofs of.” Washington, determined never to see Mount Vernon or the Parke Custis lands advertised for sale in the Virginia or Maryland Gazette, continually took measures to reduce his own indebtedness to Cary by whatever means he could discover. In 1767, for the first time, fifteen hundred ells of cloth and linen were woven at the plantation, rather than imported, and Washington, in his accounts, estimated that this was a considerable saving.
A Declaratory Act was passed at the same time that the Stamp Act was repealed. It affirmed the Crown’s right to tax any part of its empire whenever it suited, but no one in Virginia was inclined to dwell upon it. At last in November 1766 Fauquier summoned the House of Burgesses to meet. As though he had never incited violence and unrest, Richard Henry Lee served on a committee that acknowledged the “tender Regard shown to the colonists’ Rights and Liberties” by the king. Unfortunately this “tender regard” was not to last for long. Just a year after repeal of the Stamp Act, Chancellor of the Exchequer Townshend promoted acts imposing a tax on tea, paint, and other items that were customarily exported from England to the colonies. The new minister was reviled in Virginia. But neither an official protest in the House of Burgesses nor less orderly agitation elsewhere had any effect. The government in London had ordained that the colonies should pay toward their own military defense.
As the politics of colony and Crown grew more embattled, Washington was often away, in Williamsburg and inspecting the Parke Custis estates, or pursuing land claims in the west or south. Martha kept up a constant correspondence with her husband when he was absent. Lund Washington wrote to his cousin from Mount Vernon, giving details of the lambing and of a runaway slave, on March 30, 1767. Martha added this misspelled but confident postscript, making it clear that the couple’s relationship was both intimate and easy:
My Dearest
It was with very great pleasure I see in your letter th[at] you got safely down we are all very well at this time but it still [is] rainney and wett I am sorry you will not be at home soon as I expe[ct]ed you I had reather my sister woud not come up so soon, as May woud be much plasenter time than april we wrote to you las[t] post as I have nothing new to tell you I must conclude my self your most Affcetionate [sic]
Martha Washington
This is one of only two missives extant from Martha Washington to her husband. The
other is a postscript to a letter from Jacky to his stepfather. It may serve as representative of many hundreds of letters that we know, from references in other letters, that she wrote him.
Cheerful, practical, and loving, she wrote as, increasingly, she looked. Although only thirty-six in June, while Washington was thirty-five, Martha was filling out with the years. The stays and dresses that came from London were of a larger measure than before. Washington himself had not renounced his soldier’s figure, and the London tailors received no fresh instruction for his suits. But Martha and George had always been of comically different build—she so small, he so tall. That her girth was increasing does not seem to have disturbed him. Though a reserved man, he spoke openly of the happiness it was to be married to his wife and marked, even in a time of privation, their wedding anniversary.
This summer of 1767 Martha and George made a journey to Warm Springs, a mountain spa in western Virginia long known for its medicinal purposes. Mineral springs flowed at a temperature of 72 degrees down from Warm Springs Ridge. Washington had previously accompanied his ailing brother Lawrence here. The focus of this visit, which lasted a month, appears to have been Martha’s health. There was a widely held belief at this time that “taking the waters” could induce fertility in women. The George William Fairfaxes, also childless, went with them. The journey was formidable, the spa was rough and ready, and they had to bring with them all their supplies. Were Washington and Fairfax hopeful that their wives might become pregnant? If so, both were disappointed.
In Williamsburg in early November 1768, Washington joined his fellow planters and the merchants of the town in welcoming Lord Botetourt, the new royal governor of Virginia, who had arrived days before. Botetourt, recently elevated to the peerage and also appointed a lord of the bedchamber, came with instructions from the king in council to converse with “the principal persons of influence.” He was to “endeavour to lead them…to disclaim the erroneous and dangerous principles which they appear to have adopted.” In addition, for fear that any “sudden commotion of the populace” might require troops to be ferried in from Boston, the ship on which he had come, HMS Rippon, remained in the harbor.
The great commotion in Williamsburg upon the royal governor’s arrival was laudatory and even adulatory. The usual complaints about the Townshend Acts were barely audible. It had been eighty years since a royal governor had chosen to live in the colony. Three successive peers had deputed their duties to lieutenant governors, of whom the last was Francis Fauquier, recently deceased. Washington dined out in company with the new governor and, with others, attended receptions at the palace replete with pomp and ceremony. Botetourt, writing home to Lord Hillsborough, secretary of state for the colonies, declared that he liked the style of the Virginians “exceedingly.” Conversations and correspondence between Washington and George Mason on the Potomac the following spring bore radical fruit, which caused him to change his opinion.
Washington wrote to his neighbor on April 5, 1769: “At a time when our lordly Masters in Great Britain [the British government] will be satisfied with nothing less than the deprivation of American freedom, it seems highly necessary that something shou’d be done to avert the stroke and maintain the liberty which we have derived from our Ancestors…no man shou’d scruple, or hesitate a moment to use a—ms [arms] in defence of so valuable a blessing, on which all the good and evil of life depends.” More cautiously he continued: “Yet A—ms [Arms], I wou’d beg leave to add, should be the last resource; the dernier resort.” Addresses to the throne and remonstrances to Parliament had proved futile. He concluded: “starving their Trade & manufactures, remains to be tryed.”
Washington and Mason studied together a nonimportation association that Philadelphia merchants had drawn up for Pennsylvania. The Philadelphia association, modeled on others in Boston and in New York, aimed to force the repeal of the Townshend Acts by proscribing luxury goods from Britain. In Philadelphia, merchants alone had become signatories to the association. Maryland merchants pointed out that, in the southern “tobacco colonies,” individual planters, quite as much as merchants, were responsible for imports. They must therefore also sign any agreement. Washington wrote to Mason that he believed that such an association would furnish Virginia planters “with a pretext to live within bounds” and curb their habit of living to the hilt “till ruin stares them in the face.”
Mason, though suffering from a cold and erysipelas at Gunston Hall, responded the same day and set to work to draft an Association for Virginia. “Our all is at stake,” he wrote, “and the little conveniences and comforts of life, when set in competition with our liberty, ought to be rejected not with reluctance but with pleasure.” He was keen to “retrench all manner of superfluities, finery of all denominations,” and was of Washington’s opinion: “it is amazing how much this (if adopted in all the colonies) would lessen the American imports.” The Association agreement that he now drafted at Gunston Hall banned the import of, among other British goods, “watches, clocks, tables, chairs, looking glasses, carriages, joiners’ and cabinet work of all sorts.” Also proscribed were “upholstery of all sorts, trinkets and jewellery, plate, and gold[smiths’] and silversmiths’ work of all sorts.” In line with Mason’s previous remarks about “finery,” the draft agreement forbade the import of “ribbon and millinery of all sorts, lace of all sorts, India goods of all sorts (except spices), silks of all sorts (except sewing silk), cambrics, lawn, muslin, gauze.” Dearer cottons and linens were proscribed, as well as dearer “woollens, worsted, and mixed stuffs,” and dearer broadcloth and narrow cloth. Even “hats, stockings, shoes and boots” featured, as well as saddles and “all manufactures of leather and skins of all kinds.” Should the Association be embraced, Martha and Patsy must find substitutes at home for their lace and gloves and satin slippers. Jacky’s guns and Washington’s “superfine” coats must come from Philadelphia or New York.
Late in April, though he seldom stirred from home, Mason stayed three days at Mount Vernon to work on the draft agreement with Washington. By the twenty-eighth Mason, back home and passing the document in review, sent over some last amendments. Two days later Washington left for Williamsburg, carrying with him the draft Association. He also had commissions from Mason for “a pair of toupee [curling] tongs” and, for the Misses Mason, “two pairs of gold snaps…small rings with a joint in them, to wear in the ears, instead of earrings.” Upon his arrival in town in early May, he lodged as usual at Mrs. Campbell’s, attended the House, dined in company, and played cards.
In mid-May proceedings in the House took an unconventional form. Resentment flared, following a British move to have colonists who were accused of agitation amounting to treason removed to England for trial. Washington was among the burgesses who adopted a series of resolutions reasserting their sole right to lay taxes on their fellow colonists, and asserting their sole right to try their fellow colonists. The burgesses denounced the British government’s move, while beseeching the king’s intercession as “father of all his people” on their behalf. These bold resolutions not unnaturally attracted the attention of Governor Botetourt. He called the burgesses to the council chamber. There he informed them, “I have heard of your resolves, and augur ill of their effect.” He dissolved the House with immediate effect.
Uproar ensued outside, and a good part of the burgesses walked down the street and gathered in the Apollo Room at the Raleigh Tavern. They formed themselves into a makeshift assembly, with Speaker Peyton Randolph elected as moderator. Here, in the Apollo Room on May 17, 1769, in an animated atmosphere that still lacked firm purpose, Washington came to the fore. Appointed to a committee that sat the next day till ten at night, he submitted the draft Association that he and Mason had constructed the previous month. It was approved by the committee. Next day eighty-eight burgesses, including Washington, Patrick Henry, Robert Carter Nicholas, Richard Henry Lee, and Thomas Jefferson—newly elected to the House for Albemarle County—were signatories. They must n
ow personally exhort their fellow citizens at home to sign copies of the Association that would soon circulate, a formidable task. The nonimportation agreement was to come into force on September 1, with all the signatories pledging to “promote and encourage Industry and Frugality, and discourage all Manner of Luxury and Extravagance.”
Washington and his colleagues, satisfied, toasted the king, the queen, and Lord Botetourt to complete their proceedings. In these acts of fealty they saw nothing odd. They also attended the “splendid ball and entertainment at the Palace,” marking the birthday of Queen Charlotte, the queen consort, the following day. Radical Washington and his fellow planters might be in their economic plans. Like most colonists at this time, they held the British government responsible for the ills visited on them and not the king or his representative in Virginia. The next day Washington left Williamsburg for home, bearing with him, as well as news of political success, the “gold snaps” he had procured for the Mason girls.
At home Washington found a large party assembled. The races, an Alexandria barbecue, and attendance at Pohick Church were subsequent diversions. George and Martha stood sponsors, or godparents, to Ferdinando Fairfax, a third son for Bryan Fairfax. Washington’s mind, however, was much occupied with the implementation of the agreement he had promoted and signed. He told his brother-in-law Burwell Bassett in June: “The Association in this and the two neighbouring counties of Prince William and Loudoun is complete, or near it. How it goes on in other places I know not, but hope to hear of the universality of it.” He sent a very modest invoice this year to Cary and Co. in July, writing that he had “very heartily” entered into the Association and was “fully determined to adhere religiously to it.” The question was, would others?
