The Washingtons

by Flora Fraser

  Unfortunately no more studying was to be done in the backwaters of Maryland than had occurred in bustling Annapolis. By early January 1773, Washington was determined to dispatch his stepson in March to one of the colonial universities. He favored “the Philadelphia College” over King’s College in New York and Princeton in New Jersey. It had equal standing with the others, he believed—“and being nearer,” he told Boucher, “is more agreeable to his Mother.” George had no intention of sending Jacky to William and Mary College in Williamsburg: “the Inattention of the Masters, added to the number of Holidays, is the subject of general complaint.” There was another motive for sending the boy out of the colony. Boucher appears to have warned Washington that Jacky was showing a tendresse for the eldest Miss Calvert. Boucher was direct in his reply of January 19: “It is certainly expedient to remove Mr Custis to some place of public education, and speedily.” He reverted to verbosity when pressing for King’s College, and for New York as a more suitable situation for a young gentleman than Philadelphia. New York, “generally reckoned the most fashionable and polite place on the Continent,” was in addition, he wrote, inhabited by people of rank and fortune, attracted “strangers of distinction,” and was the headquarters of the military.

  Boucher won the day for King’s College, New York. The college president, Dr. Myles Cooper, was a scholar, he wrote, who had “completed his Education by a ten or twelve Years Residence in Oxford.” He brushed aside the city’s great distance from Mount Vernon with a claim that, given Jacky’s record to date, strains credibility: “He may write every week, from one place as well as the other [Philadelphia].” President Cooper wrote more soberly in March with the terms and conditions of enrollment, expressing local prices in terms of the Spanish silver dollar.

  “Our Tuition is only five pounds—one Dollar passing for 8 Shillings—New York Currency,” Cooper observed. The sterling equivalent of a Spanish dollar, given in a New York almanack for 1771, was 4 shillings, 7 pence. “Room-rent four; and Board, including Breakfast, Dinner and Supper, at the Rate of eleven Shillings a week, for the Time each Student is actually in College. These, (saving Firewood, Candles & Washing which must be had every where) are the principal Expenses.” The household at Mount Vernon prepared to send its prodigal son on his way in May, so that he might be in New York in time for commencement in June. And then the prospective undergraduate set all the plans at disarray. Washington wrote to Benedict Calvert on April 3: “I am now set down to write to you on a Subject of Importance, & of no small embarrassment to me. My Son in Law [stepson] & Ward, Mr Custis, has, as I have been informed, paid his Addresses to your Second Daughter, & having made some progress in her Affections, required her in Marriage.”

  It was not, in short, the eldest Miss Calvert to whom Jacky had formed an attachment. He had—furtively—proposed marriage to her younger sister, Eleanor, or “Nelly,” who was only fifteen. How the secret engagement had come to light, whether by his confession or other means, is not clear. His future as well as his honor and the young woman’s virtue now hung in the balance, while his stepfather, his mother, and her father scrambled to find a solution to the vexed affair. For such a practical and orderly pair as George and Martha Washington, the unorthodox circumstances of Jacky’s willful engagement were hard to bear. Washington informed Nelly’s father, Benedict Calvert, in his letter of April 3, 1773, that he would urge Jacky “with the warmth that becomes a man of honour”—though his ward had proved no gentleman to date—“to consider himself as much engaged to your daughter as if the indissoluble knot was tied.” But he was firm that marriage—“an event, on which his own peace, and the happiness of another is to depend”—must follow only on Jacky’s completing his course—“two or three years”—at King’s.

  Other schoolmates and friends of Jacky’s might—and did—marry young. But Washington, as ever, had different ideas for his ward, writing: “I do not conceive that he is capable of bestowing that due attention to the important consequences of a marriage state, which is necessary to be done by those who are inclined to enter into it.” Not the least of the responsibilities he had himself assumed on marriage had been the guardianship of his troublesome ward. He now gave Calvert an outline of Jacky’s wealth. The young man’s estate comprised fifteen thousand acres on the Pamunkey and York, “good part of it adjoining to the City of Wmsburg, & none 40 Miles from it,” and town lots in Williamsburg. He owned, besides, “between two and three hundred Negroes,” and “about 8 or ten thousand pounds,” either upon bond—out at loan—or in the hands of merchants, with Martha’s dower portion to follow upon her death.

  Washington made no mention of the Dunbar suit. It had earlier been expected to come on in the General Court in 1772, but it now hung fire. It was, Washington wrote suavely of Jacky’s estate, “upon the whole, such a one as, you will readily acknowledge, ought to entitle him to a handsome portion [dowry] in a wife.” George did not insist on an heiress for his ward, but he did wish to know what dowry Jacky could expect from his bride. He wrote to Calvert, “as I know you are full able”—Mrs. Calvert had been an heiress—“I should hope…that you would also be willing to do something genteel by your daughter.”

  Nelly’s father, in his reply on April 8, hastened to agree with almost all Washington’s sentiments and proposals. Only at the prospect of doing “something genteel” by his daughter did he rebel. With ten children to provide for, he wrote blithely, he could offer “no very great fortune.” In common with half Virginia, he had hopes for the issue of a claim “depending,” or pending, which might alter this state of affairs. But Calvert’s claim, he made Washington aware, was against the estate of the late Lord Baltimore, of whom he was the illegitimate offspring. It was a claim, as Washington and he both knew, unlikely to succeed.

  The Washingtons would have to be content with Nelly’s beautiful brown eyes and pink cheeks, as seen in a miniature of a later date, in place of a fortune. The stain of Benedict Calvert’s illegitimate birth at least was no great issue. He had long served, in Annapolis, on the Governor’s Council. On Nelly’s mother’s side, the girl’s pedigree was unassailable. Moreover Boucher, writing from Annapolis—also on April 8—offered this sop. He described Jacky’s fiancée as “the most amiable young woman I have almost ever known. I know her well and can truly say,” he added, with Martha in mind, “she is all that the fondest parent can wish for a darling child.”

  Nelly’s youth, and her giddiness in acceding to Jacky’s reckless suit, might have made a thoughtful mother wary. But Martha was blind where Jacky and Jacky’s best interests were concerned. She may even have felt some sympathy with Jacky when he apparently confessed that he had been unable to apply himself “with earnestness” to his studies for a full year, “owing to the impression of this passion.” Washington, too, termed Nelly, in a letter to Burwell Bassett, “a girl of exceeding good Character.”

  If Jacky—and indeed Martha—hoped that his engagement to Miss Calvert might be an obstacle to his residence at King’s, they were disappointed. In late April the Calverts and their two eldest daughters paid a visit of some days to Mount Vernon. In early May Jacky was permitted two nights at Mount Airy. On the eighth, just over a month after news had broken of the illicit engagement, Jacky and Washington headed north, in company with Governor Eden, who had a horse running at the Philadelphia Jockey Club meeting. Fond though Jacky was of his home comforts, the attractions of Mount Vernon and even Mount Airy may have paled besides the splendid entertainments that he and his stepfather enjoyed in Philadelphia and on their way to New York. Alexandria, Annapolis, and even Williamsburg were pygmy towns compared to Philadelphia, where the streets were handsomely built and laid out with great regularity, with broad pavements and good lighting and patrols after dark. Dinners and breakfasts at Governor Richard Penn’s palace, assemblies and balls, evenings at the Jockey Club, and race meetings occupied a week of their time. With visits to acquaintances in New Jersey, it was not till May 24 that Washington and Jacky rea
ched New York, their final destination.

  The city consisted of between two and three thousand houses and occupied an area about a mile by a mile and a half at the southern tip of Manhattan Island. William Tryon occupied the governor’s palace in the Battery, the fort dominating the seaward end of the city. A gilded equestrian statue of King George III adorned Bowling Green, the public place that lay between the fort and a thoroughfare known as the Broadway. General Thomas Gage, commander-in-chief of British forces in North America, directed the British regiments that were charged with quelling political unrest. Washington had served with Gage on Braddock’s expeditionary force in 1754. Now he dined with the British commander and attended an “entertainment” given by merchants at “the sign of the Bunch of Grapes,” a tavern, to mark Gage’s departure for England on leave. He attended “the play” on May 28—Hamlet, in this instance, and a farce. Washington’s principal concern remained his stepson.

  Jacky on enrolling in King’s, which occupied a handsome site on lower Broadway, adopted the gown that marked out Dr. Cooper’s scholars, and took possession of two chambers, in one of which his slave servant, Joe, slept. His stepfather wrote to the college president on May 31: “If, contrary to my expectation, you should find him inclined to run into any Act of extravagance, you will be so good by your friendly admonitions to check the progress of it.” Jacky embarked on a program of papering and furnishing his rooms, and wrestled with “Mathematicks, Languages, moral and experimental Philosophy.” For exercise, he rode into the pastoral land on Manhattan that lay north of the Broadway. Washington himself headed south for home and reached Martha and Patsy at Mount Vernon on June 8.

  9

  Death and Adjustment

  “the lowest ebb of Misery”

  ON JUNE 11, SOON AFTER Washington returned from settling his ward in New York, Nelly Calvert arrived after dinner—with an attendant, Miss Read—to pay an extended visit at Mount Vernon. The day had been, as Washington observed in his diary, most unseasonable: “Cloudy & exceeding cold. Wind fresh from the northwest, & snowing.” Cool weather and occasional rain obtained during the first days of Nelly’s stay. It did not prevent the household from attending service two days later at Christ Church, the new brick church in Alexandria funded through the purchase of pews by the Washingtons and other parishioners. A large party rode over to the grist mill on the seventeenth, Washington transacted business with numerous visitors, and by degrees a southerly wind blew in. The weather turned warm, and then “clear, calm and exceedingly hot.” The summer party ebbed, then swelled on the eighteenth when Washington’s brother John Augustine and his wife, Hannah, came to stay. They brought with them their daughter, Jane, and two younger children. Though rain threatened, none fell.

  The following day—June 19—was “very warm, and clear, wind being southerly.” Seventeen-year-old Patsy, rising from the table about four o’clock, was “in better health and spirits than she appeared to have been for some time.” So her stepfather wrote to her uncle Bassett the following day. He continued his narrative: “soon after which, she was seized with one of her usual fits, & expired in it, in less than two minutes without uttering a Word, a groan, or scarce a sigh.” Hannah Washington and “other witnesses” to Patsy’s death scene—possibly Jane Washington, fourteen at this time, and Nelly Calvert—were later to expand Washington’s bald account. They told how swiftly he was at his stepdaughter’s side: “before they could realize the event”—that Patsy was not limp but lifeless—“he [Washington] knelt by her and prayed most fervently, most affectedly, for her recovery.” His entreaties were to no avail. By the following day Washington felt able to reflect that this sudden, silent death had “removed this Sweet Innocent Girl into a more happy, & peaceful abode than any she has met with in the afflicted Path she hitherto has trod.” The fits which had plagued Patsy’s life for five long years and the courses of medicine that had failed to cure them were at an end.1 Following the death of Betsy Bassett, aged fourteen, earlier this year, Washington had counseled her father: “the ways of Providence being inscrutable…resignation, and, as far as the strength of our reason and religion can carry us, a cheerful acquiescence to the d[iv]ine will is what we are to aim at.” Martha was not so philosophical, as her husband recognized, writing now to Bassett: “This Sudden, and unexpected blow, I scarce need add, has almost reduced my poor Wife to the lowest ebb of Misery.”

  The Washingtons’ shock and grief, the need to inform Patsy’s brother in New York of his sibling’s death, the consternation among the house party at Mount Vernon—all were secondary, in the summer heat, to the need for burial. The very next day, with a coffin procured from Alexandria and draped with a black pall, Patsy was laid to rest in the Washington family vault near the house, the Reverend Lee Massey officiating. There seems to have been no thought of translating Patsy’s remains to Queen’s Creek graveyard on Parke Custis land. There her elder siblings Daniel and Fanny, who had died so long before, were buried with their father. Patsy had grown up at Mount Vernon, and her coffin took its place beside that of Washington’s brother Lawrence.

  In the days that followed, George William and Sally Fairfax, who had known Patsy since she first came north with her mother in 1759, were much with the Washingtons. But soon the Washingtons were to suffer a further real, if lesser, loss. In August the Fairfaxes, so long tied to the Washingtons by propinquity and friendship, vacated Belvoir and sailed for London, where George William meant to pursue a lawsuit in Chancery. They were never to return to Virginia.

  In the wake of Patsy’s death, the John Augustine Washingtons left and Benedict Calvert came with his elder daughter to fetch away Nelly and Miss Read. George and Martha continued to stay close to home. On the day of Patsy’s funeral, Washington, citing bereavement, had written to cancel a tour to prospect for land in western Virginia that he was to have undertaken with Governor Dunmore. Both he and Martha were in deep black. Fifteen months of deep, half, and second mourning lay ahead, as was prescribed for the death of a child. Washington ordered from London a “genteel Suit of Second Mourning, such as is worn by Gentlemen of taste, not those who are for running into the extreme of every fashion,” as well as a “genteel mourning sword, with belt, swivels, etc.” Martha required a “Black Silk Sacque & Coat” with “1 Suit of fashionable Linnen to wear with it (containing 2 Caps)” and “1 handsome Fan proper for Second Mourning.” It would appear, in addition, that the Fairfaxes were deputed, on their arrival in London, to order “mourning rings,” possibly containing Patsy’s hair. These were, no doubt, to be distributed among the girl’s friends and relatives.

  Such material provision against the needs of the year to come was more easily effected than coping with other adjustments to the sudden loss of Patsy. Her costly wardrobe, her spinet, and her songbooks remained at Mount Vernon, sad souvenirs of her short life. The parrot that the invalid acquired shortly before her death would be a familiar sight in the outdoor aviary for decades. Washington, who judged his wife much in need of the “balmy consolation” of her relations, hoped that Martha’s mother would make her home with them. He told his brother-in-law Bassett he wished he was “Master of Arguments powerful enough to prevail upon Mrs Dandridge…she lives a lonesome life (Betsy being married).” (Martha’s sister Betsy, on marrying John Aylett, had moved away.) “Lonesome” though her life might be, Mrs. Dandridge remained at Chestnut Grove, and Martha’s brother William farmed the smallholding. In the autumn the Washingtons themselves, with Jacky their companion, went south to Eltham and Williamsburg. Among other business, Washington now submitted the guardian accounts for the last time. Jacky had turned eighteen and would nominally have control of his fortune. Patsy Parke Custis’s share of her father Daniel’s estate—mostly bank stock in England—was meanwhile divided between her mother and her brother.

  Upon receiving in New York the news of his sister’s death, Jacky wrote to Washington in early July that he had, “like a Woman,” given himself up entirely to melancholy for several da
ys. He wrote on July 5 to condole with his mother and, separately, to offer his stepfather advice on how best to mend his mother’s spirits: “I think the only and most effectual means to remove from her mind the impressions of my poor sister [is] to carry her from home for some considerable time, for everything at Mount Vernon must remind her of her late loss.” He would willingly, he wrote, command lodgings in New York.

  Washington may have hesitated to disturb Jacky’s studies. With the prospect of marriage ahead, it would seem that the young man was exerting himself academically. He told his mother: “I assure you that I have done as much or more in 2 months than in the eight Months before.” His sober program, Martha heard, included early attendance at chapel, “a little Breakfast, to which I sit down very contentedly,” and two periods of study during the day. Besides this, he announced, he dined with the professors—“(a liberty that is not allow’d any but myself)”—and attended prayers at six. The college day being then “broak up,” the model student allowed himself a measure of amusement. Jacky’s tutor, John Vardill, wrote from New York in September, praising his pupil’s industry. Jacky was still committed to his studies when he came home in October for the holiday. Before the party set out south for Williamsburg, Washington ordered from London on his stepson’s account books including James Beattie’s Essay on Truth and Thomas Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind.