by Flora Fraser
All over the Continental seaboard, conventions and congresses were taking similar measures. In Fredericksburg, Washington’s brother-in-law Fielding Lewis was establishing the first Virginian gun manufactory. Everyone, be they young or old, farmer or merchant, appeared to want to fight. Even Congress president John Hancock had written to Washington in July: “I am Determin’d to Act under you, if it be to take the firelock & Join the Ranks as a Volunteer.” Boston merchant Hancock was to remain Congress president till October 1777, when Henry Laurens, rice planter from South Carolina, succeeded him. Only thereafter did Hancock take up arms, as senior major general in the Massachusetts militia. At Mount Vernon, as Lund Washington was later to inform his cousin, Martha said repeatedly that she would go to her husband in camp if he allowed it.
In Cambridge, Washington was taking advantage of the stalemate between the two armies. He sent some detachments to reinforce Schuyler’s forces in New York and others to supplement expeditionary forces against British garrisons in Quebec and Montreal. Peyton Randolph sent word from Virginia on September 6: “We heard upon the road that Mrs Washington was very well. She was in Maryland to visit Mrs Custis, who has got a girl.” News of family affairs—Martha’s first grandchild did not survive long—and about estate matters was at a premium. Lund swore that he enclosed a letter from Martha with one of his own by the post each week. Washington was as insistent in turn that he wrote home to his wife and cousin every week. The Continental postal service was newly established, and Washington blamed, in a letter to his brother Samuel, “the infernal curiosity of some of the Scoundrel Postmasters” for the delay or loss of his private correspondence. His secretary, Joseph Reed, upbraided Benjamin Franklin, now postmaster general, on the subject in late September. Washington wrote to Samuel on the thirtieth: “I am distressed exceedingly in my business, not being able to get any directions home in respect to matters that are referred to me from thence.”
Despite the efforts of Reed in Cambridge and Franklin in Philadelphia, the correspondence between the husband and wife and agent remained problematic. Some letters reached the recipient six weeks after they had been committed to the post. Others traveled swiftly. Some never arrived. Not only did the management of the Mount Vernon estate suffer in consequence, but Washington minded the lack of connection with his wife, for so long his daily companion. In his letter to Samuel, he imagined Martha’s time as hanging “heavy and lonesome” upon her and begged his brother to visit her: “her Situation gives me many a painful moment.”
A letter of October 5 from Lund Washington to his cousin in Cambridge was not wholly reassuring about the danger Martha faced at Mount Vernon from Lord Dunmore and his marine force. “ ’Tis true many people have made a Stir about Mrs Washingtons Continuing at Mt Vernon,” he admitted. Some in Alexandria had earlier expressed concern, and now others joined in. The “people of Loudoun [County],” he wrote, talked of sending a guard to conduct her up into Berkeley in western Virginia, “with some of their principal men to persuade her to leave this & accept their offer.” Moreover, Washington’s brother John Augustine had written to Martha, “pressing her to leave Mt Vernon.”
Martha stood firm. Lund wrote: “she does not believe herself in danger, nor do I.” He added: “Without [unless] they attempt to take her in the dead of Night they would fail, for 10 minutes’ notice would be Sufficient for her to get out of the way [by road].” It is plain that Lund did not relish the task of having to persuade Martha to leave her home, should it become necessary: “I have never Advise’d her to stay nor, Indeed, to go.” Colonel Bassett, who had been visiting, he wrote, thought her in no danger. Washington responded with the practical suggestion that the merchants and gentlemen of Alexandria block the Potomac with chevaux-de-frise, defensive obstacles, so that Lord Dunmore could not proceed upriver.
Relations between Martha and Lund were sometimes strained, and tempers frayed during the absence of the lord and master of the house, as several of the agent’s letters to his cousin reveal. Martha alone had entry to his study and kept the keys of Washington’s desk. She also alone seems to have handled his account books and papers. Lund applied to her when dealings with estate workmen, tradesmen, local merchants, or those from farther off required it. When one supplicant, Bennet Jenkins, wanted payment for pursuing claims in the west on Washington’s behalf, Martha searched for the chit showing the sum owed him. “Mrs Washington Could not find it—I wanted to put the man off,” wrote Lund to Washington on October 15, “but he murmured & thought it hard not to be paid after coming twice such a distance for it.” Jenkins had already been turned away once by Washington, demanding certification that the man had not been paid by others. “I was obliged to pay,” Lund ended dismally, a common ditty in his accounts of clashes with claimants.
At least in this encounter, Martha and Lund had acted in unison. They were not so amicable in the days before she left to go “down country” with Jacky and Nelly. Lund was no longer sanguine, by the end of October, that Mount Vernon would escape the attention of Lord Dunmore’s troops. He wrote to Washington on the twenty-ninth: “from the accounts I get from you and what we are daily having here, it looks like lost labour to keep on with our Building—for should they [those parts of the mansion being altered] get Burned, it will be provoking—but I shall keep on until I am directed to the contrary by you.” In the circumstances, Martha had consented, Lund wrote to the general, to pack the account books and papers that her husband kept in his study in a trunk. This could be swiftly moved to a place of safety in case of need. The agent then advised her that she “should be carefull to tie the papers in Bundles & put them carefully in.” He supposed she had done so, Lund wrote, but could not say for sure. Martha had chosen to do her packing in privacy. She did graciously consent to leave Lund the key of her husband’s study but did not tell him if there were any “papers of consequence” in the desk there. He was resolved, he wrote stiffly, unless it became absolutely necessary, not to “look into any part of it, or in any other part of the Study, without her being present.”
Lund felt all too keenly the responsibility of managing the estate during his cousin’s absence and in these times of war. The First Continental Congress had forbidden the export of grain as of September 10 this year. Wheat was nowadays the principal crop at Mount Vernon. With a glut on the American market, its price would inevitably fall. Moreover, continuous rain and harsh winds made plowing and sowing this autumn difficult. Work on the house and garden undertaken with the inheritance from Patsy was nowhere near complete. The “stucco man” from Fredericksburg was at work for long weeks, which lengthened into months, ornamenting the dining room ceiling. Lund, conscientious and careworn, urged on artisans, overseers, and slaves, but the lack of a master was apparent to all. Martha was impatient for the “stucco man” to start work on the bedchamber in the new southern addition to the house, so that she could “get into it” that winter. Lund wrote on October 15: “if the sides is done in plain Stucco, it will not take him long.”
While Martha stayed “down country”—first with Fielding and Betty Lewis at their home in Fredericksburg and then with the Bassetts at Eltham—Lund longed for his cousin to return. He had written at the beginning of October: “I hope to have the pleasure of seeing you this Winter, for, Whether Things are made up or not, I suppose you can Leave the Army in Winter.” On Sunday, October 22, he had his answer in the shape of a budget of letters, written on the second, seventh, and ninth of the month, from his cousin in camp. Not only would Washington not be coming home, but he wished his wife to join him in Cambridge. No attempt, given the scarce resources of the Continental forces, could be made at present to attack the British. The siege would continue through the winter with the idea of mounting an attack in the spring. The commander wrote to his brother John Augustine on the thirteenth: “seeing no great prospect of returning to my Family & Friends this Winter, I have sent an Invitation to Mrs Washington to come to me.” He explained that he had laid a “state of
the difficulties”—notably, inclement weather—“which must attend the journey before her, and left it to her own choice.”
Lund Washington, responding to his cousin on October 29, had no doubt that Martha would accept her husband’s invitation: “she has often declared she would go to the Camp if you would permit her.” He expedited George’s letters to her at Eltham. Martha, with Jacky and Nelly, did not leave that place till November 6—a delay Lund thought, a week later, “rather ill judge’d.” She had, however, already settled much by the time she reached Mount Vernon. To travel to Cambridge with her were Jacky and Nelly and Washington’s nephew, George Lewis, eighteen. His father, Fielding Lewis, informed Washington that, at the gun manufactory he had established in Fredericksburg, he hoped to have fifty men producing twelve guns a day by the new year. He begged Washington to find a position with emolument for his son, when once young Lewis reached headquarters: “I am in hopes you will find him diligent in whatever duty is required of him.”
Mount Vernon became a hive of activity as news spread that the commander-in-chief’s wife was set to join him in the north. “This House has been so Crouded with company since Mrs Washington came home,” Lund wrote to his cousin on November 14, “that I fear many things is left undone that should have been done before she left home.” Martha was unsuccessful in some business she did attempt. “Mrs Washington could not find any list of your Rents,” Lund was to write to his cousin on the twenty-fourth. Leases on Washington and Parke Custis property would be up for renewal in the new year: “I must endeavour to make out a list from the Leases, & will see if any part of them can be Collected.” Even with a rent roll, there was no guarantee all the tenants would pay up. Virginia planters, farmers, and merchants had all suffered, following the recent embargo on exports of tobacco and wheat. Nevertheless, leading merchants in Alexandria, and others who sat on the Fairfax County Committee of Correspondence, were eager to help “the deserving poor of Boston.” Like other such bodies recently formed elsewhere, the committee, twenty-five strong, provided a measure of government for the county and raised local issues in correspondence with Congress. They had already shipped flour and beans to Massachusetts. Now they presented Jacky with £53 13s 3d for Washington to distribute as he saw fit.
The conflict that a few months before had been confined to the siege in Boston Bay and to operations in Canada was spreading. News of George III’s Proclamation for the Suppression of Rebellion and Sedition spurred on both government and patriot forces. In Virginia, Dunmore rallied an unexpected force to the British flag. In a proclamation of his own, on November 14, he declared martial law in Virginia and offered freedom to all slaves and indentured servants of patriots, capable of bearing arms, in return for military service. He termed the regiment he instituted Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, in flowery allusion to the African blood of many of those who answered his call. From Mount Vernon one slave ran away to join up and gain his freedom, and took his wife, a cook, with him. A painter, an indentured servant, also went. Every precaution had always been taken in the colony to prevent armed uprisings by slaves against their masters. Now arms were in the hands of these slaves and being wielded on behalf of the British. Furthermore, the loss of each adult male slave to Dunmore represented, to his owner, a loss of as much as £100 Virginia currency. Sentiment against Dunmore and the British hardened among the Virginia planters accordingly.
Lund and Martha had a final contest of wills before she departed for Cambridge, with Jacky and Nelly, on November 14. Lund gave an account of it to his cousin in the letter that accompanied Martha to camp: “In your Letter you speak of Mrs Barnes”—Washington’s cousin—“staying here in the Absence of Mrs Washington,” wrote Lund to his cousin, “to assist in taking care of the Family.” The “Family” in this instance denoted the household and included those servants and slaves who manned it. “Mrs Washington seems to think it will not answer.” Those few words express much. As a result, “what to me is very disagreeable,” wrote Lund, he must assume, in addition to all his other duties, “that of Housekeeping.” Milly Posey, Patsy Parke Custis’s earlier friend, was, with Martha’s approval, appointed to aid Lund in managing the mansion.
Armed with estate accounts and letters, and with an escort of “good gentlemen” as far as Baltimore, Martha and her companions departed north for Philadelphia. Joseph Reed had ceased acting as Washington’s secretary in order to attend to his legal practice there, muster-master Stephen Moylan taking his place. Washington wrote to his former secretary on November 20, “I expect her Horses will be pretty well fatigued; as they will, by the time she gets to Philadelphia, have performed a journey of at least 450 Miles—my Express finding her among her friends near Williamsburg 150 Miles below my own House.” An “express”—a letter conveyed by a rider rather than in the post—was the most expensive as well as the swiftest method of carriage.
When Martha reached the Pennsylvania capital next day, she soon became aware that she was now a person of public interest. “I don’t doubt but you have seen the figure our arrival made in the Philadelphia paper,” she was to write to a correspondent in Alexandria. John Adams wrote from the city to his friend Mercy Otis Warren in Massachusetts: “you will soon know the person and character of his [Washington’s] lady. I hope she has as much ambition for her husband’s glory as Portia and Marcia”—sobriquets for his wife, Abigail, and for Mercy herself—“have, and then—the Lord have mercy on the souls of Howe and Burgoyne and all the troops in Boston!” He wrote prophetically. Martha Washington was soon to show herself redoubtable in the Continental cause.
12
Besieging Boston, 1775–1776
“a number of cannon and shells from Boston and Bunkers Hill”
IN NOVEMBER 1775, Martha and her companions stayed only a few days in Philadelphia, Joseph Reed and his wife, Esther, acting as their hosts, before resuming their journey north to Massachusetts. That stay was bedeviled by a spirited argument that developed between some of the Virginia delegates and a caucus of city fathers and Massachusetts congressional delegates, which included Sam Adams. The former were keen to mark the presence in town of the wife of the commander-in-chief, their fellow Virginian, and planned a ball, to be held on the evening of November 24 at the New Tavern. It was expected that President Hancock’s wife as well as Martha would attend. The malcontents argued, with some justification, that such a meeting would run counter to the Eighth Article of the 1774 Congressional Association.
This Eighth Article discouraged “every species of extravagance and dissipation,” including “exhibitions of shows, plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments.” In Philadelphia, a committee of inspection and observation enforced the Association, and Christopher Marshall, a member of this body, came to hear of the projected ball on the afternoon of the day it was to take place. Hoping to find President Hancock at the State House at the end of the congressional day, he met instead Sam Adams, the influential delegate from Massachusetts with whom he had become friendly. Marshall expressed his objections to the ball as well as “some threats thrown out” of public commotion and of damage to the tavern, should the ball take place. The populace, it would seem, saw no reason why Congress should dissipate when they were deprived of their own habitual assemblies. The committee had recently proscribed both spring and autumn fairs.
Sam Adams agreed to seek out the president and beg him to “wait on Lady Washington to request her not to attend or go this evening.” Hancock accepted the task, and Marshall triumphantly informed the ball managers that the entertainment was not to proceed. “Lady Washington,” as Marshall dubbed her, was having a somewhat weary time of it. She was first visited at the Reed house by John Hancock. Then Marshall and other members of the committee of inspection and observation required audience with her. Before proceeding to inform her of the cancelation of the ball, they expressed at some length the “great regard and affection” in which they held her as well as “the General,” her husband. Martha, according
to Marshall, received the ambassadors “with great politeness,” thanking the committee for their kind care and regard “in giving [her] such timely notice” of the proscription. She assured them that “their sentiments, on this occasion, were perfectly agreeable unto her own.”
Benjamin Harrison of Berkeley, one of the Virginia delegates and a chief correspondent of Washington’s during the early stages of the war, was not so easily satisfied. Furious with Samuel Adams for using his influence to stop the ball, he burst in on Marshall and the Bostonian while they were at dinner that evening. Harrison, probably one of the ball managers, declared the assembly “legal, just and laudable.” A heated argument developed. Harrison remained unconvinced by his opponents’ arguments. Commented Marshall with satisfaction, “as he came out of humour, he so returned.”
Harrison, brother-in-law to Burwell Bassett and a wealthy planter, was unquestionably an ardent patriot, but he littered his conversation with profanities and obscenities and aroused Yankee ire in Congress. John Adams condemned him as “an indolent, luxurious, heavy Gentleman, of no Use in Congress or Committees, but a great Embarrassment to both.” The prosperous Boston merchant John Hancock was more forgiving and appointed the Virginian, a veteran of the French and Indian War, to a range of congressional military committees. Harrison may have been especially keen to honor Martha, given the recent publication in the British press and in America of an intercepted letter he had written to her husband. In the published letter, a spurious paragraph was inserted, referring to “pretty little Kate the Washer-woman’s Daughter over the Way, clean, trim and rosey as the Morning.” The paragraph writer continued with an account of how “Harrison” was deprived of the “golden glorious opportunity” that opened when the girl appeared at his door. Had he not been interrupted by the advent of another female, whom “Harrison” dubbed a “cursed Antidote to Love,” he would have “fitted” Kate “for my General against his return.”
