The Washingtons

by Flora Fraser

  John Adams wrote of such jibes at the president to his wife, Abigail: “I have held the office, of Libellee General long enough: The Burthen of it ought to be participated and equalized according to modern republican Principles.” For his part, in conversation with Jefferson in February, the president “expressed the extreme wretchedness of his existence while in office, and went lengthily into the late attacks on him for levees &c.” He explained, noted the secretary of state, “how he had been led into them [the levées] by the persons he consulted at New York, and that if he could but know what the sense of the public was, he would most cheerfully conform to it.”

  Washington did not, however, alter by a jot the stately gatherings over which he and Martha presided; nor did he call a halt to the national celebrations of his birth night. He might not be a friend to monarchy, but as chief magistrate of the United States, he must receive the envoys of foreign monarchs as well as those of foreign republics. He would do it in a style that he believed upheld the dignity of the country.

  Washington was at Mount Vernon in April 1793, when Lear wrote from Philadelphia, enclosing newspapers of a February date from London: France had declared war on Britain and on Holland. The secretary, who was well placed to seek many opinions, wrote a digest of views: “it becomes a question with every one—what will be the event to the United States? And the universal hope is that they may not be drawn into it.”

  At all costs, to Washington’s mind, commerce with Britain must be put on a sure footing. Hamilton at the Treasury and Thomas Pinckney, minister plenipotentiary in London, must redouble their efforts to resolve issues including British withdrawal from frontier forts and bad American debts still outstanding ten years after the war. The American government cried off the war debt owed France on the ground that it had been owed to the French Crown. In retaliation, French ships pillaged American merchant ships in the Atlantic.

  Thornton, who studied the president closely, had detected in him a year earlier “a certain degree of indecision…a want of vigour and energy…in some of his actions…the obvious result of too refined caution.” At that time, in the spring of 1792, Washington himself, now sixty, had told Jefferson that he “really felt himself growing old, his bodily health less firm, his memory, always bad, becoming worse.” Now the president did not falter. He signed on April 22, 1793, the Neutrality Proclamation: “the duty and interest of the United States require that they should with sincerity and good faith adopt and pursue a conduct friendly and impartial toward the belligerent powers.” Legal proceedings were threatened against any American who aided any of the belligerents. In March the young French republic made declarations of war on the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal. Washington accepted Jefferson’s resignation later in the year. It was inevitable, given the secretary of state’s passionate advocacy of republican France. To other protests, Washington turned a deaf ear, as he was to be impervious when still greater dissension flared two years thence.

  A pressing local issue diverted the attention of all in Philadelphia, including the president, from international politics. A drought had succeeded heavy spring rains. Pockets of standing water abounded where flies and mosquitoes thrived. An epidemic of yellow fever developed in the city in July and August. The role of the female mosquito and her bite in transmitting the virus was not then understood. Some said the disease had been brought by immigrant planters, who had hurriedly left the French West Indies, following the abolition of slavery there. Despite the best efforts of doctors, thousands were to die.

  In mid-September Dr. Benjamin Rush came down with the fever. The sweats he endured, he noted, were “so offensive as to oblige me to draw the bedclothes close to my neck, to defend myself from their smell.” Bloodletting and purging cured him. Alexander and Betsy Hamilton too recovered. Countless others did not survive. Carts loaded with coffins crowded the streets. Henry Knox wrote mid-September: “the great seat of it at present seems to be from 2d to 3d street, and thence to Walnut Street. Water Street however continues sickly. But the alarm is inexpressible. Every body who could, has removed into the Country.”

  Many decamped for Germantown, high across the river, which remained free of contagion. Others from out of state sought safety at home. The Washingtons themselves left the plague town on September 9 after some argument between them. Washington had wanted earlier to dispatch Martha and the children to Mount Vernon, “The house in which we lived being, in a manner blockaded by the disorder which was becoming every day more & more fatal.” When he spoke of remaining longer himself, Martha was adamant she would not leave without him. They offered to take Mrs. Powel with them to Virginia, but she remained. Her husband, speaker of the Pennsylvania senate, she reported, was not “impressed with the degree of Apprehension that generally pervades the Minds of our Friends.”

  Washington left Knox in charge of a skeleton government in Philadelphia. Samuel Fraunces, steward, and Mrs. Emerson, housekeeper, remained in charge of the house on Market Street. The president consulted from Mount Vernon with cabinet members by letter. The epidemic continued into October, in one week claiming over a hundred victims. The Wigton family alone, which had supplied Nelly with a tutor, lost five members in as many weeks. Samuel Powel, sanguine though he had been, died after visiting a stricken employee. The French consul died, and others in government perished: “six Clerks of the Treasury Department, seven persons employed by the Collector of the Customs—a number of Clerks in the different Banks and three persons in the Post Office.” Nor did the Washingtons’ household in Market Street escape the scourge. Will Osborne, Washington’s valet of recent years, died in the hospital. In the course of the summer and autumn, more than 4,000 lost their lives.

  At Mount Vernon the death in June of Anthony Whitting, farm manager, had been a serious blow. Cotton factory manager William Pearce was to take Whitting’s place only in December. The Washingtons enjoyed no respite from duty. Both of them were exasperated by countless vices that they discovered obtained among servants, indoors and outdoors, overseers and field slaves. The president would ask Pearce to address the following when he arrived:

  The Gardener has too great a propensity to drink, and behaves improperly when in liquor; admonish him against it as much as you can, as he behaves well when sober—understands his business—and I believe is not naturally idle—but only so when occasioned by drink.…Do not suffer the Quarter Negro Children [house servants’ children] to be in the Kitchen, or in the yards unless brought there on business—As besides the bad habit—they too frequently are breaking limbs, or twigs from, or doing other injury to my shrubs—some of which at a considerable expense, have been propagated.

  Washington left Mount Vernon for rented lodgings in Germantown at the end of October. Following Will’s death, Christopher Sheels, one of the Mount Vernon house slaves, now acted as the president’s valet. It was anticipated that the town would serve as emergency quarters for Congress, if Philadelphia was still contagious at the opening of the new session in December. Steward Fraunces, however, was optimistic on the twenty-third: “The House is clean and ready for your return and every thing in proper order—I long to see you home where I think you will be as safe as any where—as our Neibourhood is entirely clear of any infection.”

  The city was declared safe, the session of Congress took place in its accustomed meeting place, and Martha and the children joined the president in the city in mid-December. She was to write, however, the following January: “almost every family has lost some of their friends—and black seems to be the general dress of the city.” Neither theater nor assemblies were permitted. She noted a month later, in February 1794: “A great number of people in this town are very much at a loss how to spend their time agreeably.”

  Within the president’s house, there were changes to accommodate. Polly Lear, who had been Martha’s willing companion out shopping or visiting friends, had died unexpectedly in the summer of 1793, before the outbreak of yellow fever took hold of the city. For lack of other femin
ine company in the house, Martha’s relationship with her granddaughter Nelly, now fifteen, became almost too close. Lear himself, intelligent, efficient, and industrious, left the president’s employ at the end of 1793. He meant to establish himself in Georgetown as a shipping agent. Washington could not depend, as he had on Lear, on Martha’s nephew, Bartholomew Dandridge, who became principal secretary. His own nephew, Howell Lewis, became second secretary.

  In February 1794 Martha’s two eldest granddaughters, Betsy and Patty, paid a visit of some weeks to Philadelphia. Accompanying them was Mrs. Robert Peter. Her husband, a merchant and mayor of Georgetown in 1790, had profitably sold land in that town to the Federal City commissioners. Their son, Thomas Peter, who was courting Patty, was among those now investing in the new city. Though some, like David Stuart and Pierre L’Enfant, were no longer involved, the wharves on the Potomac were crowded with cargo ships laden with building materials. Washington himself, in the autumn of 1792, had laid the foundation stone of the President’s House, on a site adjacent to Georgetown. William Thornton had won a competition the following spring to build, at the far end of the new city, a home for the legislature, to be called, by Jefferson’s wish, the Capitol. Lodging houses and hotels were full, and speculators and contractors made daily applications to the commissioners’ office in Georgetown for permission to build. Lots in the squares laid out on either side of a grand boulevard, Pennsylvania Avenue, that connected these two edifices and on sites close to them sold briskly.

  The projected marriage of Patty Parke Custis, seventeen, and Mrs. Peter’s son Thomas met with Martha’s approval. She wrote to Fanny on the fifteenth: “I am the more anxious that she should marry well as I am sure it will be an advantage to her younger sister [Nelly].” At the beginning of March she was content: “from what I can hear Patty and Mr Peter is to make a match.” Referring to a marriage settlement Patty’s stepfather had proposed, she wrote: “The old gentleman”—Thomas Peter’s father, Robert—“will comply with Dr Stuart’s bargain.” Mrs. Washington characterized her second granddaughter as “a deserving girl.” Apparently Thomas thought so too. In the late summer, with a wedding in the new year and residence in the Federal City to come, Patty conceived herself “near the Pinnacle of Happiness.”

  Washington sent the bride-to-be, at her request, a miniature of himself. This provoked Patty’s elder sister Betsy to demand one for herself. “I hope you will believe me sincere,” she wrote on September 7, “when I assure you, it is my first wish to have it in my power to contemplate, at all times, the features of one, who, I so highly respect as the Father of his Country and look up to with grateful affection as a parent to myself and family.” The Washingtons were at this time at Germantown, where they had taken a house to escape the summer heat of Philadelphia. The president apparently gratified Betsy’s request and—unusually—offered matrimonial advice. Possibly tempestuous Betsy—irked by her younger sister’s forthcoming marriage—had found an unsuitable candidate for herself: “Do not…in your contemplation of the marriage state, look for perfect felicity before you consent to wed,” he advised her on September 14. A partner for life should possess, in his view, “good sense—good dispositions—and the means of supporting you in the way you have been brought up. Such qualifications cannot fail to attract (after marriage) your esteem & regard, into wch or into disgust, sooner or later, love naturally resolves itself; and who at the same time, has a claim to the respect, & esteem of the circle he moves in.” The “esteem and regard” that the president felt for Martha, as well as the “respect and esteem” that others felt for her, cannot have been far from his mind.

  Martha’s love for her niece Fanny, widowed in early 1793, had been recently at times tested. Washington had pointed out the advantages of a home at Mount Vernon. “You can go to no place where you will be more welcome—nor to any where you can live at less expense, or trouble,” he had written. Fanny, though expressing herself eager for advice, resolved instead to occupy, with her three children, one of Washington’s rental houses in Alexandria. Washington’s gentle words in March 1793 went unheeded: “with the best œconomy I conceive it must be expensive to purchase furniture & keep a house.” Fanny became one more dependent, and one who requested, that November, an additional story to be added to the house she was to occupy. The president wrote in January 1794 to Pearce, the new manager at Mount Vernon: “The house in Alexandria must be repaired & in order for Mrs [Fanny] Washington to go into in April, as I have promised this. When it is got in order, & made perfectly clean, I shall send paper from hence for the rooms.”

  Martha urged Fanny on September 15, 1794, to pay attention to her financial affairs: “I wish you to be as independent as your circumstances will admit…a dependence is, I think, a wretched state and you have enough, if you will manage it right.” Widowed Fanny’s response to this call to arms was in its way eloquent. She sought her aunt’s and uncle’s advice about a proposal of marriage from widower Tobias Lear, who was now in business at Georgetown. Martha, while praising the former secretary’s character, would not be drawn in, in her reply of September 29: “You must be governed by your own judgment…it is a matter more interesting to yourself than to any other.” The president, wrote his wife, stood by his determination—“as you have often heard him say”—that he never would “intermeddle in matrimonial concerns.” When Fanny accepted Tobias’s hand, the Washingtons offered them as a home the River Farm, within easy reach of Georgetown. Here the couple were to settle, with Fanny’s children and Lear’s young son, Benjamin.

  In Philadelphia, Martha and her husband continued the precept that she had urged on her niece and pored over reports from Pearce at Mount Vernon. No doctor, the president had written in January 1794, was to minister to a field slave, Sam. Claiming an asthmatic condition, he was off sick: “he has had Doctors enough already, of all colours & sexes, and to no effect. Laziness is, I believe, his principal ailment.” (No one could ever have accused George Washington of this vice.) Pearce followed the absent but assiduous president’s instructions to the letter. While he remained at Mount Vernon, Washington’s anxious care about the plantation was much abated. Fanny, however, who was deputed to oversee household affairs at Mount Vernon and act as hostess when visitors came during the proprietors’ absence, was less reliable. Following a discovery the president had made on a visit home, Martha reproached her niece in November: “it never was his intention to give wine or go to any expense to entertain people that came to Mount Vernon out of curiosity…rum may always be had.” Though the Washingtons did not attend either wedding, the marriages of Fanny and of Patty in the autumn of 1794 and winter of 1795 were at least occasions for pleasant sentiments to be expressed in correspondence with the bridal couples.

  When Betsy Parke Custis came to stay again in the spring of 1795, her grandmother was disconcerted to find her, as she wrote to Fanny, “very grave. I was in hope that being in the gay world would have a good effect on her, but she seems to wish to be at home.” While her younger sister Nelly and her grandmother went to the assembly, she stayed at home. Church every Sunday—a very social affair in Philadelphia—“she thinks too fatiguing,” Martha reported to Fanny Washington in Alexandria. She concluded: “the girls have lived so long in solitude that they do not know how to get the better of it.”

  Nelly, more sociable than her elder sister, when on visits to her mother at Hope Park, pined for her “beloved grandmamma” and for her life in Philadelphia. Now that Nelly was sixteen, her education was mostly musical and included lessons from masters on the guitar and pianoforte—she became a proficient performer on both instruments. She and her friend Elizabeth Bordley were, in addition, taught to sing in Italian by impresario Filippo Trisobio. There was good reason for Nelly to dislike dark, secluded Hope Park, overrun with younger half-siblings, and for her elder sisters to wish to find early on husbands and a home elsewhere. Their mother only gave birth to the last of thirteen Stuart children a year after Patty was married. Their stepfath
er had withdrawn from the world in recent years, resigning his post as commissioner to the Federal City. His stepdaughter Betsy was later to dub him a “gloomy mortal.”

  From afar Martha fussed. When Nelly wrote of having toothache, she sent “brushes and tooth powder” and advised: “you should be very careful how you go out in the cold to keep your feet dry and take care of your teeth to clean them every day.” Two weeks later she reminded Nelly, still resident at Hope Park: “it is necessary for you to be careful of your clothes and have them kept together and often look over them.”

  Wash Custis’s visits to his mother at Hope Park proved still less satisfactory. Dr. Stuart complained, in the autumn of 1794, of his stepson’s ignorance. The boy was then thirteen and attending a college on Fourth Street. “He attends as constant as the day comes,” wrote Martha defensively to Fanny in September, “but he does not learn as much as he might, if the master took proper care to make the children attentive to their books.” She wrote of the college: “it is a very indifferent one for big boys; little ones are not attended to at all.”

  Washington had little time to attend to these domestic matters. The British government had aroused the ire of its former subjects when the Royal Navy seized more than two hundred American ships, on the ground that they were trading with the French West Indies. At Washington’s instigation, John Jay, special envoy, successfully negotiated in London in 1794 a treaty to settle these and other disputes outstanding from the war. When Jay returned home with the treaty, however, in the summer of 1795, and when its terms became known, he was reviled by merchants, landowners, municipalities, and anti-Federalists alike. They believed that the Jay Treaty, as it became known, grossly favored British interests. Washington and Hamilton, closely associated with the negotiations, were also abused as the Senate vote on the treaty neared. A steady stream of addresses to the president from protesting bodies required response. To them all he gave an identical reply: “the constitution is the guide, which I never will abandon. It has assigned to the President the power of making treaties, with the advice and consent of the senate.”