by Flora Fraser
Caroline, at first light, alerted Lear, who sent for Dr. Craik. After Martha dressed, she remained with her husband in the bedchamber. Numerous remedies were attempted in the early hours, while they waited for professional assistance. Washington almost suffocated when attempting to swallow a drink intended to ease his throat. An overseer came in, “soon after sunrise,” to try bleeding him. Martha, “not knowing whether bleeding was proper or not in the general’s situation, begged that much might not be taken from him, lest it should be injurious.” The general insisted the procedure continue. “Mrs Washington,” recorded Lear, “being still very uneasy lest too much blood should be taken, it was stop’d after taking about half a pint.”
No relief was to be had. Even when his throat was bathed externally, Washington said, “ ’Tis very sore.” Martha told Lear to send for Dr. Brown of Port Tobacco, “whom Dr Craik had recommended to be called, if any case should ever occur that was seriously alarming.” Even so the general insisted on being dressed. He was helped to a chair by the fire, where he was sitting when Craik arrived at about eight o’clock in the morning.
After a couple of hours Washington could sit no longer and returned to lie down on the bed. Christopher, Washington’s body servant, stood at its head. Martha took up a seat at the foot. She watched while Craik applied a blister to her husband’s throat and tried to make him gargle. Again Washington nearly suffocated. Moll, Caroline, and Charlotte, and housekeeper Mrs. Forbes, came and went, tending to the fire, bringing hot water and other supplies. More doctors arrived midafternoon—Dr. Dick from Alexandria and Dr. Brown. They counseled more bleeding: “the blood came very slow, was thick, and did not produce any symptoms of fainting.”
Washington, calling Martha to his bedside about half-past four, had her go down into his study below and bring him the two wills in his desk there. On his instructions, she then burned the “useless” one and preserved the other in her closet. It was an orderly passing, despite the agonizing pain. He told Lear: “arrange & record all my late military letters and papers—arrange my accounts and settle my books.” Soon after six the general dismissed Dick and Brown from the room: “I pray you to take no more trouble about me, let me go off quietly; I cannot last long.” To Craik, who remained, he had already said, “I die hard; but I am not afraid to go.” He motioned Christopher, who had been standing all day, to be seated.
Craik stole some moments in the course of the long evening that succeeded to leave his patient and sit by the fire, “absorbed in grief.” Martha remained seated “near the foot of the bed.” Some time after ten, Lear called Craik to the bedside. Together doctor and secretary witnessed the general’s demise. Martha asked, “with a firm & collected Voice, ‘Is he gone?’ ” Lear responded with a gesture. “ ’Tis well,” said she, in the same voice. “All is now over, I shall soon follow him! I have no more trials to pass through.”
Dry-eyed she had been all day, and apparently dry-eyed and focused Martha, widowed, remained. She told Christopher to take “the General’s keys and things” out of his deceased master’s coat pockets and give them to Lear for safekeeping. Near midnight, the general’s heavy corpse was taken down through the house and laid out on the dining room table in the New Room. Early the following morning, on Martha’s instructions, Lear sent to Alexandria for a mahogany coffin. It was to accommodate a body six feet three and a half inches long, one foot nine inches “Across the Shoulders,” and two feet “Across the Elbows.”
It had been determined not to delay burial until Wash Custis, Lawrence Lewis, and other family members far off should arrive. Instead, the funeral was held on Wednesday, the fourth day after Washington’s death. The vault in the grounds, where Patsy Parke Custis had been laid a quarter of a century earlier and which would receive the new coffin, was unbricked. Martha gave orders, however, that a wooden door should take the place of bricks, when it came to close the vault once more. It would not be long before she joined her husband, she averred, displaying a “pious fortitude” that unnerved Lear and others. She had retreated to a small bedchamber on the attic story and apparently did not again enter the room that she and her husband had shared for forty years and where he had died. “The world now appears to be no longer desirable to her,” Lear wrote to his mother on December 16, “and yet she yields not to that grief which would be softened by tears.” Throughout, Thomas Law wrote to his brother in England, she “displayed a solemn composure that was more distressing than floods of tears.”
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1 Following her husband’s early death, Oney Judge Staines struggled to rear their three children, fell on hard times, and ended her days a ward of the New Hampshire county where she lived. She never repented her flight from the presidential home. By it, she was to tell inquirers in the 1840s, she had gained freedom, learned to read, and become a Christian. Technically, as she knew well, she remained a slave till her death in 1848.
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Dissolution, 1799–1802
“we found this excellent Woman grieving incessantly”
MARTHA HAD DONE HER BEST to meet the “express desire” her husband had stated in his will, that his corpse be “Interred in a private manner, without parade, or funeral Oration.” On December 18, 1799, the general’s riderless horse and Alexandria Freemasons formed part of the procession that accompanied the coffin from the New Room to the vault. Guns sounded on a schooner on the river. Dr. Thomas Davis of Alexandria, who had so recently married Nelly and Lewis, officiated at a relatively simple funeral service at the tomb. Martha’s former daughter-in-law Nelly Stuart and Hannah Bushrod Washington, widow of Washington’s brother John Augustine, were chief mourners. Martha herself, with Nelly and baby Parke, remained within the mansion.
Other services held elsewhere on the day and a national parade in Philadelphia on December 26—culminating in a funeral oration delivered by General Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee—were beyond her control. In that oration, which found widespread approval, her husband’s former comrade paid full tribute to Washington’s character as a husband: “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen, he was second to none in humble and endearing scenes of private life.…To his equals he was condescending, to his inferiors kind, and to the dear object of his affections exemplarily tender.…The purity of his private character gave effulgence to his public virtues.…Such was the man for whom our nation mourns.”
Martha was not proof against the wishes of Congress, which President Adams made known to her in a letter, brought to her by his nephew and private secretary William S. Shaw at the end of December. Shaw brought too a letter of condolence from the president’s wife, Abigail. Neither letter was lengthy, but Lear, who delivered the letters, told the waiting Shaw that the widow was “two hours getting through them.” Abigail, on January 7, 1800, informed her sister that only then did Mrs. Washington weep. There was good reason in the contents of Adams’s letter for Martha to cry.
President Adams had made known to her the resolution of both houses: “that a marble monument”—or sarcophagus—“be erected by the United States in the Capitol, at the City of Washington; and that the family of General Washington be requested to permit his body to be deposited under it; and that the monument be so designed as to commemorate the great events of his military and political life.” Martha did not wish her husband’s body to be removed from the vault where it had been so recently placed, behind a door that, she had intended, would be opened thereafter to receive her own remains. It was repugnant to Martha that, though joined in life to her husband, she would be separated from him in death.
She strove, according to Abigail, while Shaw awaited her response, to “get resolution sufficient” to see the president’s secretary but finally excused herself. “She had the painful task to perform, to bring her mind to comply with the request of Congress,” Abigail told her sister. Martha’s response, which Shaw took to Adams at the end of two days, was dutiful: “Taught by the great example which I have so long had b
efore me, never to oppose my private wishes to the public will, I must consent to the request made by Congress, which you have had the goodness to transmit to me.” It was not, however, without bite: “In doing this, I need not, I cannot, say what a sacrifice of individual feeling I make to a sense of public duty.”
Dr. William Thornton, architect of the Capitol, was moved by reports of Martha’s distress. He wrote, early in January 1800, to Secretary of State John Marshall to suggest that, upon Martha’s own demise, her remains join those of her husband under the proposed monument. He argued:
if an intimation could be given that she should partake merely of the same place of deposit, it would restore to her mind a calm and repose that this acquiescence in the national wish has in a high degree affected. You, who know her, are not unacquainted with her high virtues, and know that her love for the departed would be the only reason why such a wish could be entertained. She cannot be more honoured than she has been and, were it possible, the nation would give a still further proof of sensibility on this melancholy occasion, by a resolution in favour of her who possessed the heart of the late Friend of Man.
Thornton suggested a “secret vote of the House,” the result to be made known only after Martha’s death.
The matter hung fire. For the time being, as the city of Washington would not become the seat of government for a full year, and as the “marble monument” was as yet uncommissioned, Washington’s coffin remained in the vault behind the wooden door in the grounds of Mount Vernon. Should she be so minded, Martha might visit it daily.
Another resolution of Congress, passed on March 28, was more welcome. It decreed that “all letters and packets to Mrs. Martha Washington, relict of the late General George Washington, shall be received and conveyed by post, free from postage, for and during her life.” The residuary heir, Bushrod Washington, now a Supreme Court judge in Richmond, was acting as executor for his uncle’s estate from afar. Lear and Lawrence Lewis took care of Washington’s affairs in Alexandria. In the Federal City, Messrs. Peter and Law consulted with Thornton on the houses nearing completion there that Washington had commissioned him to build on lots he owned. At Mount Vernon, Martha had been inundated with letters of condolence from those she knew and from those she did not. Tobias Lear wrote suitable replies, but the postal costs grew prohibitive. This resolution, in late March 1800, that in future her letters be franked, relieved her of worry in this regard.
Few letters prompted Martha to return a personal answer. She did reply, on April 5, 1800, to the widow of General Montgomery: “my own experience has taught me that griefs like these cannot be removed by the condolence of friends, however sincere.” Martha had been overwhelmed when her daughter, Patsy, and later her son, Jacky, died. The Listons, who visited Mount Vernon in July 1800 while on a Virginia excursion before sailing for Europe, were now bewildered by Martha’s sorrow. “Washington was more a respectful than a tender Husband,” was Mrs. Liston’s opinion, “yet we found this excellent Woman grieving incessantly.” Martha repeatedly told them that “all comfort had fled with her Husband, & that she waited anxiously her dissolution.” Indeed, Mrs. Liston noted, “it was evident that her health was fast declining & her heart breaking.”
In December 1800, Mrs. Adams noticed a degree of neglect about the mansion. The president’s wife visited at a time of upheaval and distress. Martha had, that month on advice—no doubt that of Bushrod Washington—signed a deed of manumission, freeing her late husband’s slaves, 123, all told. Abigail wrote: “In the state in which they were left by the General, to be free at her death, she did not feel as tho her Life was safe in their Hands, many of whom would be told that it was their interest to get rid of her.” When making his will, Washington had failed to take into account this risk, that either household or field slaves, eager to hasten the promised day of freedom, might murder Martha. On the first day of the new century, 1801, Washington’s slaves would begin a life of freedom. “Many of those who are liberated have married with what are called the dower Negroes, so that they all quit their [family] connections, yet what could she do?” Abigail wrote to a sister. The Parke Custis slaves—153, with husbands, wives, and children among those who went free—remained enslaved on the estate.
Family, friends, and pilgrims to Mount Vernon continued to receive a welcome. When the city of Washington became the seat of government, members of the outgoing and incoming administrations, senators, and congressmen paid formal visits to the widow. Naval vessels sailed up the Potomac on their way to the new Navy Dockyard in the District of Columbia. On passing by the Washingtons’ home, they formed the habit of honouring the president’s tomb, visible in the grounds above, with a gun salute. Charles Morris, a young midshipman on board the thirty-six-gun frigate USS Congress, later remembered one such occasion in May 1801. “Everyone was on deck to look upon the dwelling where Washington had made his home. Mrs. Washington and others of the family could be distinguished in the portico which fronts the river.” A mourning salute of thirteen guns was fired, and Morris recalled “the echo and re-echo of that sound from the near and distant hills, as it died away in the distance, the whole ship’s company [with heads] uncovered and motionless.”1 Martha took pride in all honors done the memory of her late husband as she had done in those paid George in his lifetime.
A visit that Thomas Jefferson, newly president, paid her on June 1 that year won him no favors. It had been, Martha was later to tell a group of visitors, including the Reverend Manasseh Cutler, an event only marginally less distressing than the demise of her husband. “We were all federalists, which evidently gave her particular pleasure,” Cutler noted. “Her remarks were frequently pointed and sometimes very sarcastic on the new order of things and the present administration. She spoke of the election of Mr. Jefferson, whom she considered as one of the most detestable of mankind, as the greatest misfortune our country has ever experienced.”
Martha was still an outspoken hostess. She occupied herself with family business, as she had always done. Nelly and Lewis, as well as Wash Custis, were still resident and a comfort to their grandmother and aunt. But both within and without the mansion, there was now a degree of neglect. Philadelphia merchant Thomas Cope was to observe in May 1802: “in general it may be said of the furniture, chairs, carpets, hangings, &c. that they have seen their best days.”
John Pintard, of New York, who dined at Mount Vernon in late July 1801, found no fault with Martha as a hostess: “She converses without reserve & [with] seeming pleasure on every subject that recalls the memory & virtues of her august consort.” Pintard saw a miniature that Martha had recently commissioned from British artist Robert Field and called it a “striking likeness.” Watercolor on ivory, the miniature shows Martha, in a loose cap with mourning ribbon and long lappets, with a decisive expression to her hazel eyes and set mouth. Martha, who had always understood the uses of imagery in the promotion of her husband’s career, in this commission could indulge her “private wishes.” She told Pintard she had had it drawn “to please her grandchildren, that they may see her…in her every day face.”
The reverse of the miniature is ornamented with sixty-seven pearls, Washington’s age at the time of his death, and an inscription, “Join’d by Friendship, Crown’d by Love.” In a tiny scene Martha’s chopped hair, mingled with that of her husband, forms the ground below a hymeneal altar. Above, a cupid offers a laurel wreath, and two birds fly from each other, bearing in their beaks ribbons that form a lover’s knot.
Martha also commissioned from Field a miniature of her husband, with his hair woven on the reverse and surmounted by his initials in gold. Washington, in this companion piece, is depicted in his prime, in the buff and blue uniform that he wore as commander-in-chief during the Revolutionary War. As Colonel Washington, he came courting Martha Dandridge Custis, and as General Washington she remembered him. If Congress were to remove his remains, she had her memorial. She had no wish for others to read her voluminous correspondence with her husband. �
�Shortly after General Washington’s death,” according to the later testimony of her granddaughter Patty Parke Custis Peter, Martha burned their letters to each other. The fires that Caroline and the other maids laid each morning provided a convenient means of destruction.1
Nelly and Lawrence were now ready to build a home on the acres Washington had willed them. In August 1801 the William Thorntons stayed at Mount Vernon, so that the doctor could inspect the ground and furnish the Lewises with a plan for building. Mrs. Thornton thought Martha “much broke since I saw her last.” She noted that the mistress of Mount Vernon seemed very anxious on account of her grandson Washington Custis, “in whom she seems quite wrapt up,” and who was ill. Nelly was nursing a new daughter, named Martha, a sister for two-year-old Parke.
This autumn, during a severe illness, Martha Washington had a white dress laid aside for a time that was not to be long in coming. During a bout of fever early the following summer, a “chilly fit deprived her, during the paroxysm, of the power of speech.” She promised Dr. Craik she would remove, if she recovered, to a more airy and “commodious” part of the house—she was still living in the “small, inconvenient, uncomfortable apartment” on the attic story to which she had retreated when Washington died. No such recovery took place. Less than a week later, on May 22, at noon, Martha passed away. It is said that the parrot, bought to amuse her daughter Patsy nearly thirty years before and an inhabitant of the aviary at the mansion ever since, flew away the same day. The local newspaper, the Alexandria Advertiser, spoke for many when reporting Martha’s death: “She was the worthy partner of the worthiest of men, and those who witnessed their conduct could not determine which excelled in their different characters, both were so well sustained on every occasion.” Congress had never yet made good on their resolution to remove her husband’s remains to a marble home in the Capitol. Three days after her death Martha was laid to rest in the vault near the mansion at his side. On the day of the funeral, Nelly Parke Custis Lewis, six months pregnant with a third child, was “a Picture of Woe,” according to a cousin, but shed no tears: “Never did I see silent Grief so strongly marked as in her countenance.”
