The Washingtons

by Flora Fraser

  Washington listed to Mrs. Powel, on March 26, “Rooms to Paint—Paper—Whitewash &ca &ca—But although these things are troublesome, & disagreeable as they will involve us in a good deal of litter & dirt, yet they will serve to give exercise both to the mind & body.” Three months later Martha confessed to David Humphreys that they were still “more beginners than old established residents.” They had, she wrote, found “everything in a deranged [condition] and all the buildings in a decaying state.” Among other defects in the mansion house, the Washingtons found the fireplace in the parlor all but out of its moorings and the house steps worn down. Problems continued to present themselves. A chance discovery that a girder underpinning the floor of the New Room was “much decayed” averted disaster. Washington told Bartholomew Dandridge in December that had action not been taken to make it good, “a company only moderately large would have sunk altogether into the Cellar.”

  Rooms, once painted, were readied to receive furniture sent by water from Philadelphia. Lear supervised the loading aboard the sloop Salem in March of “ninety seven boxes; fourteen trunks; forty three Casks; thirteen packages; three hampers,” besides seven bandboxes, bedsteads, a bidet, “one Tin shower bath,” kitchen equipment and much else. In due course this freight was unpacked and installed or stored at Mount Vernon. Places were found for the Sèvres, and the Cincinnati china was put away, as well as a new service known as the “States china.” Each piece was inscribed with the names of the American states and featured Martha’s initials. A Dutch merchant had commissioned the service in Canton and recently presented the set to Martha.

  The Washingtons entertained continually, despite the inconvenience of having workmen in the house. Unfortunately a man hired in Philadelphia to perform the duties of steward proved more hindrance than help. Martha wrote, in May, to Mrs. Powel: “he knows nothing of cooking, arranging a table, or servants, nor will he assume any authority over them.” Efforts by Mrs. Powel to secure a better candidate were not successful; nor were those of friends and relations nearer to hand. In August, Martha told her sister Betsy Aylett Henley, she was still being obliged to be her own housekeeper, “which takes up the greatest part of my time.”

  Nelly Parke Custis wrote to Miss Bordley in Philadelphia, immediately after their arrival home in March, that she was “deputy housekeeper, in which employment I expect to improve much, as I am very partial to it.” However, Nelly did not take her duties too seriously. Once her harpsichord arrived, she told her friend in Philadelphia, she meant to practice a great deal and make “my Sister”—Eliza Law and Ann Stuart both had trained voices—“sing your parts of our Duetts.” Only in December did the advent of a satisfactory employee, Mrs. Eleanor Forbes, release Martha from what her husband had earlier termed “the drudgery of ordering & seeing the Table properly covered—& things œconomically used.”

  The Washingtons were as much at a loss for a cook as a housekeeper. “Altogether,” Martha, usually resilient, told her sister, “I am sadly plagued.” While they were still on their journey home from Philadelphia in March, Hercules, who had been left at Mount Vernon the previous December, had run away. Both George and Martha strongly suspected he was living among the free black community in Philadelphia, and over subsequent months they made efforts to recover him, to no avail. Washington feared that to supply a cook, he would have to break his resolve “never to become the master of another Slave by purchase.” He told his nephew George Lewis in November, “I have endeavoured to hire, black or white, but am not yet supplied.” In the meantime, Nathan and other house slaves performed cooking duties.

  Now that she was returned home for good, Martha took stock of the neighborhood. She told Humphreys in June: “Our circle of friends is of course contracted without any disposition on our part to enter into new friendships, though we have an abundance of acquaintances and a variety of visitors.” A year later she was to hunger after old friends, writing to Sally Fairfax in England: “ ‘It is amongst my greatest regrets now that I am again fixed (I hope for life) at this place, at not having you for as a neighbour and companion.” She had not felt this loss so acutely, she added, employing a homely metaphor, “while I was a kind of perambulator [traveler].” Now many of their friends from before the war were dead. Lund Washington had left his wife a widow at Hayfield the previous year. Martha added, “our visitors on the Maryland side are gone, and going likewise.”

  Washington, in September 1797, refused an invitation to a family wedding party in another part of the state that, in former times, he and Martha might once have accepted. “Wedding assemblies are better calculated for those who are coming in to than to those who are going out of life,” he told his nephew, the bridegroom. “You must accept the good wishes of your Aunt and myself in place of personal attendance, for I think it not likely that either of us will ever be more than 25 miles from Mount Vernon again, while we are inhabitants of this Terrestrial Globe.”

  The Washingtons were generous in their welcome to younger generations of neighbors. But George, in particular, found the demands of this hospitality great and the rewards scanty. His widowed sister Betty Lewis had recently died, and he proposed to her son Lawrence in August that he come to live at Mount Vernon, “to ease me of the trouble of entertaining company; particularly of Nights.” Washington wanted to escape, either to his study or to bed, soon after tea had been drunk and the candles lit. If Lewis would remain host after the master and mistress retired, his uncle wrote, “it would render him a very acceptable Service.”

  Lawrence Lewis accepted the position as one, though without salary, with prospects. He had inherited a farm in Frederick County at his father Fielding’s death in 1781, and could at least usefully learn from his uncle how best to manage it. The fortunes of his family had declined. Soon after his mother Betty’s death, Millbrook, the fine house in Fredericksburg where Washington often stayed, was sold to pay off debts. Lawrence proved a satisfactory secretary to his uncle George and a dutiful surrogate host. Nelly Parke Custis, deputing for her grandmother, brought a vivacity and charm to the task of entertaining visitors that Lewis lacked. She was now, at eighteen, much admired. Benjamin Latrobe, a visiting artist, wrote of her “perfection of form, of expression, of colour, of softness.” He marked, too, her “firmness of mind.”

  A year thence a Polish nobleman, Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, visiting Mount Vernon, was to encounter, besides Lewis, George de Lafayette, whom Nelly termed her “young adopted brother.” But the foreigner’s eyes were all for Nelly: “one of those celestial figures that nature produces only rarely, that the inspiration of painters has sometimes divined and that one cannot see without ecstasy.” He recorded: “she plays the harpsichord, sings, [and] draws better than any woman in America or even in Europe.” Her Philadelphia masters would have been pleased to hear it.

  Nelly turned heads in Alexandria when she visited girlhood friends. While staying with her sister Patty Peter in Georgetown, she partnered a young man, Charles Carroll, for six dances at a ball held at the Union Tavern. But, she told Miss Bordley in Philadelphia, it was the custom at Virginia and Maryland assemblies to have one partner all evening. “When I have anything to impart, I shall rely upon your secrecy.” She wrote again, aggrieved by “meddling reporters” who were “perpettually engaging her to those whom she never had a chance of marrying and never wished to be united to.” She referred to George de Lafayette. Until she met a man she could love “with all my heart—that is, not romantically, but esteem & prefer him before all others,” she would remain “E P Custis.” Should she never meet such a paragon, she was content to stay “spinster for life.” Gossips would soon cease to link her name with Lafayette’s son. Under the terms of the Treaty of Campo Formio, the marquis was released from prison. The young man left America and joined his parents and sisters in Europe.

  When the Listons from Philadelphia visited Mount Vernon in the late autumn of 1797, the minister’s wife pressed Nelly to spend a few weeks with them in Philadelphia, where her
former friends—and beaux—abounded. But Miss Custis declined the opportunity. “I have not spent a winter here for eight years,” she explained. She wrote of “the winter weather, the trees, grass, houses, etc. all covered with ice. The appearance is beautiful and the river looks so wide and desolate—the Maryland shore so bleak and sublimely horrifying that I am quite delighted.” These romantic pleasures aside, she wrote, “I could not leave my Beloved Grandmama so lonesome.” She stayed on at Mount Vernon, apparently happy to read a nightly chapter and psalm to her grandmother rather than enjoy a greater world.

  Washington Custis was, with Lawrence Lewis, newly of the household and supposedly studying at home. Faculty records show that, on September 7, 1797, the young man was suspended from Princeton “for various acts of meanness and irregularity.” In early October he reached Mount Vernon. There was apparently no question of his return to the college. Washington wrote to its president on October 9, regretting his ward’s “conduct and behaviour” and requesting a tally of accounts to pay. The shameful secret was kept from Martha and from Wash’s mother, Nelly.

  Thereafter the general was driven to distraction by Washington Custis’s unsystematic mode of life, as a series of injunctions he laid down on January 7, 1798, shows. Hours spent studying between breakfast and dinner, “instead of running up & down stairs, & wasted in conversation with any one who will talk with you,” would enable the young man to advance in his studies. Moreover, Wash was to be “in place” at the usual breakfasting, dining, and tea hours. “It is not only disagreeable, but it is also very inconvenient, for servants to be running here, & there, and they know not where, to summon you to them.” A bare two weeks later Washington wrote to inform the boy’s stepfather that another solution must be found. It was in his view, impossible to make him “attend to his books” at home, “without an able Preceptor, always with him.”

  After much consultation between Hope Park and Mount Vernon, Dr. Stuart inscribed his stepson in March in the College of St. John in Annapolis. Washington would have liked to send Wash off to Harvard, but considered in January that Martha would find the distance “too heartrending.” The boy was enjoined to write home once a fortnight. In mid-June Washington rebuked him for failing to do so, “knowing (as you must do) how apt your Grandmamma is to suspect that you are sick, or some accident has happened to you, when you omit this.” A previous letter Wash wrote in April, remarking on Charles Carroll’s pursuit of his sister, earned this rebuke: “Young Mr C came…to dinner, and left us next morning after breakfast. If his object was such as you say has been reported, it was not declared here…the less is said upon the subject, particularly by your sister’s friends, the more prudent it will be.”

  Nelly herself wrote in May to Miss Bordley to deny that Mr. Carroll had ever told her of any attachment “by tongue or pen.” If this was a disappointment, she had much to tell her friend. Of one “charming dance” in Alexandria in February, she wrote: “I danced twenty-four dances, sets, cotillions, reels, etc, sung twelve songs, and at five [in the morning] went to roost; got up at seven.” Visits to “Sister Law” and “Sister Peter” in the city furnished other material for comment. The latter now had a second child, named Columbia Washington—“after the City, and District of Columbia. It is one of my sister’s and my choosing,” Nelly wrote, “and I am to be her godmother.” Old friends in Philadelphia also occupied her. Robert Morris, who had financed the Revolutionary army, had overinvested in the Federal City, was bankrupt, and would soon enter a debtors’ prison. The afflictions of his family perturbed Nelly, as they weighed on her grandmother and the general. “Innate worth is not diminished by loss of wealth,” she wrote.

  New rebuke fell on Wash Custis. Washington wrote to the graceless scholar in June: “we have, with much surprise, been informed of your devoting much time, to paying particular attentions to a certain young lady of that place!” Custis allowed that he had informed a Miss Jennings—daughter of an Annapolis merchant—of his affections and of his prospects. He had begged her to wait till he was of age, in the hope that he could “bring about a union at some future day.” Custis wrote stiffly: “The conditions were not accepted.” He had the good sense, on June 17, to allege his youth as “an obstacle to the consummation of my wishes at the present time (which was farthest from my thoughts).”

  The Washingtons were not entirely reassured. The general was displeased by Custis asking for more funds. He hoped that his ward had not indulged a taste for “fanciful dresses, or misspent time in company—perhaps in taverns.” Custis also inquired whether his education was complete, following a course of Euclid. This question, wrote Washington on July 24, “really astonishes me! For it would seem as if nothing I could say to you made more than a momentary impression.” The boy, in short, was to continue studies at the college.

  Washington had other anxieties besides the conduct of his reprobate ward. Though he paid no visits to Philadelphia, James McHenry, now secretary of war, was one of many who had written to him to outline the growing hostility between the American government and the French republic. The French Directory, now the revolutionary government in power, objected to the Jay Treaty between Britain and America and had refused, in December 1796, to accept the credentials of the new American ambassador in Paris. Anti-French feeling among Federalists in Philadelphia built further when French privateers seized American ships trading with Britain. Adams, in his annual address to Congress in the winter of 1797, spoke of French intransigence and aggression and of the need to place his country “in a suitable posture of defence.” War between the two former allies seemed possible.

  Now, in June 1798, Adams wrote to Washington: “In forming an Army, whenever I must come to that Extremity, I am at an immense Loss whether to call out all the old Generals or to appoint a young sett.…I must tap you, Sometimes for Advice. We must have your Name, if you, in any case will permit Us to Use it. There will be more efficacy in it, than in many an Army.” Washington had not served the country in a military capacity for fifteen years and was now sixty-six. He responded, on July 4, “it will not be an easy matter, I conceive, to find among the old set of Generals, men of sufficient activity, energy & health, and of sound politics, to train troops to the quick step, long Marches, & severe conflicts they may have to encounter.” He suggested, rather, looking to younger officers who had proved themselves in the revolutionary conflict.

  Experienced officers of the late war still in government—McHenry, Timothy Pickering, the secretary of state, and others—feared the worst. France and Spain had allied in 1796. With friendly Spanish bases in the southern territories of the American continent to supply its needs, the hostile French republic might successfully send an army north to combat the United States. In this heightened state of alarm, numerous volunteer corps formed. Washington, Dr. Craik, and others in Alexandria established a home guard, composed of citizens over forty-five and so exempt from militia service. It went by the name of the Greyheads, or Silver Greys. Martha later in the year was to present to the regiment its colors, “white silk…on an azure blue ground.” A company of volunteer dragoons was similarly honored by Nelly. Meanwhile, on the Fourth of July a “large company of the civil and military of Fairfax company” dined at Spring Gardens outside Alexandria. The general, wearing “full uniform,” reviewed the different corps as they paraded and maneuvered, before all attended a service in Christchurch, where the Reverend Davis officiated.

  Five days later, in Philadelphia, Congress, having previously rescinded treaties with France on July 6, authorized attacks on French warships. At sea America was at war with its former ally. McHenry sent to Washington, with a few perfunctory lines, a newspaper announcement. By an act of Congress, the general was once more appointed commander-in-chief of the United States army. It stood, since a reorganization two years earlier, at 3,000 men. The very first intimation he had had, Washington later told Knox, “that such a measure was in contemplation, was contained in a News-paper, as a complete Act of the President
& Senate.” He was magnanimous: “if affairs were in the alarming state they are represented to be…it was not a time to complain, or stand upon punctilios.”

  McHenry himself arrived, bearing the general’s commission as commander-in-chief. He had with him also, for Washington’s perusal, a “pending Bill for augmenting the Army of the U. States.” Washington’s immediate response was to urge delay in passing this hasty bill. Nevertheless, on July 16 Congress authorized the establishment of a provisional army, to be called up only in case of need. Twelve new infantry regiments and six troops of light dragoons were provided for. The “American Cincinnatus,” though he accepted the military post thrust upon him, exacted this condition: except for such time as he should spend in Philadelphia making appointments in these regiments, he would remain at home until the opening of hostilities. Martha and he must hope that the French, for want of money, and believing the United States well armed, would not venture an attack.

  Understanding that Congress wished Hamilton—no longer secretary of the Treasury—to serve as inspector general, the commander-in-chief offered the next senior command to Thomas Pinckney, lately minister in London. To his former right-hand man, Henry Knox, he offered the junior command of the three. Washington opined to Hamilton on June 14, “if the French should be so mad as to Invade this Country in expectation of making a serious impression…their operations will commence in the States South of Maryland.” In that event “the services and influence” of southerner Pinckney would be crucial.

  Knox, offended and wounded, protested to his former commanding officer at the end of July. But Washington, as ever, was firm where he saw his duty to the country. Knox declined to serve, but the appointments of Pinckney and Hamilton were confirmed. While the summer tide of visitors and family ebbed and flowed at Mount Vernon, Washington compiled lists of those officers who had served in the late war and might serve again. He sifted the letters of those who recommended sons, relatives, and young men of their acquaintance. He and Martha remained uneasy about her grandson.