The Washingtons

by Flora Fraser

  At Eltham in November the Washingtons, mourning Patsy, found common cause with the Bassetts, who had lost two daughters in the one year. Washington dispatched business in Williamsburg. There were also, it seems, going by his journal entries and by a letter he wrote to President Myles Cooper in December, a series of meetings with Jacky’s kith and kin on the subject of Jacky’s wish to leave college and proceed to matrimony. On the Dandridge side, besides Bassett himself, Martha’s brother Bartholomew Dandridge of Pamocra and Benjamin Harrison of Berkeley—brother-in-law to Bassett—may have offered advice. A visit to Westover on the James River may also have elicited counsel from its master, William Byrd III, kin to Jacky on the Parke Custis side.

  If Washington investigated the contents of the books that he had ordered in October for Jacky, when they arrived the following spring, we may be very sure that Jacky did not. Nor did he return to New York and to his studies. In mid-December 1773 Washington wrote to President Cooper from Mount Vernon: “at length I have yielded, contrary to my judgment, & much against my wishes, to his quitting College.” Jacky had disappointed his stepfather’s hopes for him, but Washington was a realist. He cited Jacky’s “own inclination—the desires of his mother—& the acquiescence of almost all his relatives” as being forces against which he did not care to “push” his opposition too far. Allowing that, with Patsy’s death, Jacky truly was “the last of his family,” Washington wrote to Cooper in New York that he had “submitted to a Kind of necessity.” What tussles occurred between Washington and Martha over Jacky’s future this autumn, what pleas were uttered on either side for understanding, we do not know. But the die was cast, and Washington was not a man to repine. The upshot was that Jacky had got his way and was to embark immediately on the marriage to Nelly Calvert that his stepfather had so wished him to postpone. That ceremony concluded, groom and bride could at least begin forthwith to increase the Parke Custis stock. It remained to be seen what kind of plantation owner Jacky would make. In the meantime, Washington would offer advice on the management the Parke Custis estates. Jacky and Nelly, of no fixed abode, would live for the moment between Mount Airy and Mount Vernon.

  The marriage itself was effected easily enough. In January 1774 Washington advanced Jacky £24 to buy “wedding clothes” and a further £37 for other nuptial expenses. With his cousin Lund for company, Washington set out after an early dinner on February 3 to attend the ceremony, which took place that evening at the bride’s home. Still in mourning for her daughter, Martha remained at Mount Vernon. Two days later, after “much other company” had joined in festivities at Mount Airy, Washington was home again “for a late dinner.”

  Jacky was settled, after a fashion. This spring, visits from “Mr and Mrs Custis”—and numerous Calverts—feature in Washington’s journal. But he was to write to Dr. Cooper in New York in April: “the young gentleman”—Jacky—“since his marriage has been a good part of his time in Maryland.” Jacky had recommended to his mother, following Patsy’s death, that she “submit with Patience to the divine will.” Her habit, anyway, was to read devotional works before rising and before settling for the night. The loss of her son to Mount Airy, as well as Patsy’s death, both affected her. George, in his early forties, was as tireless and strong as a man half his age. He hunted and shot with Dr. Rumney and Bryan Fairfax, George William’s younger half-brother. He rode daily the full round—thirty miles—of the estate. Impatient with others’ rate of work, he had a habit, in the fields, of seizing from overseers, hirelings, and slaves their implements in order to show them how best to achieve what he sought.

  News came early in January 1774 of a remarkable recent response to the Tea Act, a new law of the previous May. East India Company–taxed tea, of which there was a surplus, was being offered cheaply in the colonies, so as to undercut other merchants’ and smugglers’ tea. Should colonists purchase it, it was arguable that they implicitly recognized the right of taxation without representation. Protesters—some dressed as Native Americans—boarded a British merchantman in Boston harbor on December 16, 1773, and dumped its consignment of the tainted tea in the water. Washington, far away, was occupied with George Mason and other vestrymen, furnishing a new-built parish church at Pohick. It fell to the master of Mount Vernon to import “a Cushion for the Pulpit…and Cloths for the Desks & Communion Table of Crimson Velvet with Gold Fringe.” While he deplored the Tea Act, Washington had no sympathy for the destruction of property.

  In April the Bassetts came to stay for two weeks with their eldest son, Billy, and Fanny, aged six. With them the Washingtons went to observe the herring and shad being hauled in down at the fishing grounds, a spring ritual and an extremely productive enterprise. (Washington earned £100 this year from the “fishery.”) Following the Bassetts’ departure, a “boat race and barbecue” at Johnson’s ferry ushered in the early summer. When George and Martha set out for Eltham and Williamsburg, where he was to attend the House of Burgesses in May, there seemed no reason to suppose that the even tenor of life at Mount Vernon would ever alter greatly.

  The first days that the Washingtons were in the south in May 1774 were uneventful. Washington came and went between Eltham and Williamsburg, addressing local issues in the House of Burgesses. He pressed, at the request of prominent Alexandria merchants, John Carlyle among them, for “a more effectual method to prevent the raising of Hogs and suffering them to run at large [through the town], also Goats and Geese.” He dined at the governor’s palace with Lord Dunmore. The previous autumn, when Martha had accompanied him south, both she and her sister Nancy at Eltham had been in mourning for their daughters. This June both Washingtons and both Bassetts—with “Mrs Dandridge,” either Martha and Nancy Bassett’s mother or their brother Bart’s wife—made an excursion “by water” from Eltham. Their destination was Pleasant Hill on the Mattaponi River, once the seat of John Robinson, speaker and treasurer of Virginia. After a long career as speaker and treasurer, his equally long embezzlement of public funds was discovered by Burgess Richard Henry Lee. The house, sold after Robinson’s death 1766, when he was found to be £100,000 in debt to the colony, included a neat brick mansion and terraced gardens descending to the water. It had come on the market again the previous year. There was a silver lining to the death of Patsy—namely, the £16,000 “money on bond,” or in stock in London and Virginia, that comprised her estate. Washington, on Jacky’s behalf, invested his stepson’s half share in the purchase of Pleasant Hill and of another plantation adjoining Parke Custis lands. If Jacky did not choose to repair the White House in New Kent County, which had been disused since Martha and the children left it fifteen years before, this was a fine gentleman’s property—and one close to Williamsburg—in which the young Parke Custises could settle.

  The other £8,000 from Patsy’s estate devolved on Washington as disposable property and formed a sizable addition to the Parke Custis dower portion already in his control. He wrote in November 1773 to Cary and Co. in London, regarding £1,650, the dower share of the cash with them formerly assigned his stepdaughter on her father’s death: “as I would choose to discharge my Debt to you, I would apply her [Patsy’s] money in the Bank to that purpose, provided I can sell out without loss.” He flattered himself that this sum, once realized, would expunge what he owed the agents. He had no need to acquire more land on the Potomac. (He now owned 6,500 acres.) George and Martha could apply the remaining funds to the “mansion” at Mount Vernon, and they embarked on an ambitious program of alterations and extensions. Private quarters with a separate staircase and entrance were soon built to the south. They comprised, above, a large bedchamber, serving Martha also as a boudoir during the day, and below, for Washington’s sole use, a library. A “New Room”—a large reception room, two stories high, planned for an extension to the north—and a piazza, or portico, to the east, affording shade and views, were slow in the making.

  Lund Washington was to complain of Lanphier, the joiner from Alexandria whom his cousin had employed to d
o much of the work: “he mouths & talks in such a way that I do not understand him—I mean as to the dimensions of the Palisades—Sills, rails, Posts, & different Heights.” The Washingtons admired the elaborate ceilings at Millbrook, the home of Washington’s sister Betsy and of her husband Fielding Lewis in Fredericksburg. George was to borrow the “stucco man,” an indentured servant, from his brother-in-law to decorate ceilings and walls at Mount Vernon. He took an inordinate length of time to achieve his effects. That August the first of two sales of contents was held at Belvoir, which George William Fairfax had resolved to rent out during his prolonged absence in England. Washington purchased, possibly for the new bedchamber, a “mahogany chest and drawers” from Sally Fairfax’s bedchamber. He also bought a “mahogany sideboard,” and “12 chairs and 3 window curtains from the dining room.” If he intended these for the “New Room,” as seems likely, it would be long before they could be publicly admired. The work at the northern end was not to be completed for a decade.

  The Washingtons had paused at the Lewises’ at Fredericksburg on their way south in May, so that Washington could give up the title deeds of Home House, the farm there, where he had grown up—and where his mother had lived till lately—to Dr. Hugh Mercer. Mercer had arranged to buy the farm for £2,000 in Virginia currency in five installments. Washington’s mother, Mary, had been persuaded to move into a house that he had bought her on Charles Street in town, close to her daughter Betty, at Millbrook. With the sale of Home House, Washington was freed of a property—his inheritance from his father—whose upkeep had long been an encumbrance and a cause of occasional dissension between him and his mother, who owned the slaves and livestock.

  Another long-standing sore, though, was not fully healed. Following the treaties of Fort Stanwix and of Lochaber in 1768 and 1770, which established a proclamation line farther westward, the acres promised to those who had joined the Virginia Regiment in 1754 had at last, in 1772, been apportioned. This was thanks in large part to the efforts of Washington himself, who had chaired many reunions of the veterans and petitioned the different governors of Virginia in turn. Washington had received 18,500 acres himself and had bought up claims from other officers for a further 5,600.

  An influential group of investors in London, the Pennsylvanian agent Benjamin Franklin among them, had been in discussion for some years with the government to obtain a grant of twenty million acres. They hoped to form a new colony, to be named Vandalia, south of the Ohio. As Washington had pointed out to successive governors of Virginia, Vandalia, should it come into being, would encompass the acres due the Virginia Regiment veterans. It would threaten, in addition, the lands not as yet granted but promised by the 1763 Royal Proclamation to all colonial veterans of the French and Indian War.

  Nothing had been settled when the Washingtons headed south in May. In principle, they were the richer for the death of Patsy and following the apportioning of the bounty lands. In the spring Washington had embarked on his plan of embellishment at Mount Vernon, confident that the inheritance from Patsy would pay off the debt to Cary. But the plantation economy was as always subject to the vagaries of the climate. In May the estate finances suffered an unforeseen setback, as he told Robert Cary on June 1, 1774. A vicious frost, accompanied by snow, had destroyed “the better half of more than one thousand acres” that Washington had “growing in Wheat.” Washington wrote from Williamsburg to inquire if his flour, which was of good quality, would command a good price in London. He offered Cary the opportunity—“if our Commerce with Great Britain is kept open (which seems to be a matter of very great doubt at present)”—to sell, on commission, a hundred or two hundred barrels at a time.

  There was all of a sudden every reason for Washington to express doubt about the continuance of commercial relations between mother country and Virginia—and indeed between Britain and its other American colonies. In the week of May 22 news that a Boston Port Bill had passed into law in March reached Williamsburg. The act decreed that the Massachusetts Bay harbor was to be closed from June 1—the date on which Washington wrote to Cary—until the colonial city had made reparation to the Customs Office and to the East India Company for the destruction of the tea in December. The Virginia capital had been in an uproar ever since. Washington was to write to George William Fairfax, nine days after the closure took place: “the cause of Boston—the despotick Measures in respect to it, I mean—now is and ever will be considered as the cause of America (not that we approve their cond[uc]t in destroying the Tea)…we shall not suffer ourselves to be sacrificed by piecemeal.”

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  1 Even today postmortems offer no explanation of SUDEP—Sudden Unexplained Death in Epilepsy. It is given as the cause of death in 7.5 percent of all deaths from epilepsy and in 15 percent of those with intractable epilepsy. Respiratory, cardiac, and cerebral factors are thought to be involved. Cardiac arrest, as here, without warning or prefatory seizure, is common.

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  Continental Army

  “the Crisis is arrived when we must assert our Rights”

  SOME OF THE YOUNGER Virginia burgesses were swift to respond to what they judged to be an iniquitous act. While Martha and George were dining in Williamsburg with Attorney General John Randolph on May 23, 1774, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and others met and “cooked up,” to use Jefferson’s words, a resolution. Possibly George Mason, who was for once in the city, was present and encouraged them. At their instigation, Robert Carter Nicholas moved in the House next day that Wednesday, June 1, the date Boston harbor was to close, should be observed in Virginia as a “day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer,” in the pious hope that divine intervention might avert the “heavy calamity which threatens destruction of our civil rights, and the evils of civil war.” When this incendiary resolution was carried without a dissenting voice, a modicum of calm was restored to the city.

  Though fasting and prayer were a peaceful response to what the malcontents termed “despotic measures,” they proved unacceptable to Governor Dunmore. He entered the House on the May 26 and, condemning the resolution, curtly dissolved the assembly. Washington had breakfasted with the governor at the latter’s country house that very morning. “This dissolution was as sudden as unexpected,” he was to write to Fairfax in England the following month. He and other burgesses and their wives were due to attend a ball to be given at the governor’s palace the following day to welcome Lady Dunmore, who had only recently arrived in Virginia. The ball took place as though no quarrel between Dunmore and the burgesses existed. But Washington did not hesitate to join more than eighty others who gathered earlier in the day at the Raleigh Tavern, as they had done once before when dismissed.

  The makeshift assembly agreed to support the Bostonians with an association, a body given greater weight when a circulating letter arrived two days later from that northern city. Its inhabitants begged those of other colonies to join with them in a general nonimportation agreement directed at the East India Company as well as at the British government. It was resolved in Williamsburg that the burgesses should return home for consultation and gather again on August 1 in Williamsburg at a convention, to further discuss the agreement proposed. On June 1, besides writing to Cary and Co., Washington fasted and attended church. George Mason, in advance of the date, had sent word home to Gunston Hall that if Fairfax County supported the call to prayer, his elder children should attend church in mourning.

  Given the previous failure of nonimportation agreements, a cynic might have predicted that the other business proposed at the Raleigh Tavern would not amount to much. This was not to be the case in the summer of 1774. There was a new spirit abroad—a general perception that there was a need for cooperation among the disparate colonies. This was pithily expressed, on July 7, on the masthead of Paul Revere’s Boston newspaper, the Massachusetts Spy. Reviving Benjamin Franklin’s famous print of 1754, Join, or die, he altered the segmented snake of that earlier image to form a conjoined serpent, representing all the col
onies united. A month later Colonel George Washington would present to the August Virginia Convention what became known as the “Fairfax [County] Resolves.” These, too, were an expression of the need for cooperation.

  The Resolves, or resolutions, passed in committee in July in Alexandria, were at once an embryo bill of rights and a clarion call for a congress of delegates from all the colonies. That congress, it was hoped, would consider how better to preserve those rights. George Mason’s was the legal mind that framed the Fairfax Resolves in the Northern Neck, Washington the man of action who took them south. With extraordinary efficiency, it was agreed in August at the Virginia Convention and at similar assemblies in other colonies that such a congress as Washington proposed to the convention should be held in early September in Philadelphia. Washington was among the seven delegates chosen to attend from Virginia. At the end of August, Edmund Pendleton and Patrick Henry, who were also chosen, broke their journey at Mount Vernon, where they spent two nights. George Mason was also of the company. A letter from Pendleton, a moderate and a lawyer, gives an interesting account of Martha, their hostess, alternately gracious and steely:

  I was much pleased with Mrs Washington and her spirit. She seemed ready to make any sacrifice and was cheerful, though I knew she felt anxious.

  She talked like a Spartan mother to her son on going to battle. “I hope you will stand firm—I know George will,” she said. The dear little woman was busy from morning until night with domestic duties, but she gave us much time in conversation and affording us entertainment. When we set off in the morning, she stood in the door and cheered us with the good words, “God be with you gentlemen.”