Martha Washington , livre ebook

MARTHA WASHINGTON

First Lady of Liberty
Helen Bryan
Copyright 2002 by Helen Bryan. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley Sons, Inc., New York
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This book is gratefully dedicated To the memory of my father, Bates William Bryan To my mother, Helen Anderson Bryan To my dear husband, Roger Low And to Cassell and Niels Bryan-Low With love always
Contents
Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
1 Twenty-Five Miles as the Crow Flies from Williamsburg
2 John Dandridge s Daughter
3 A Young Matron and Her Family
4 The Widow Custis
5 George Washington, His Family and Friends
6 A Twelfth Night Wedding
7 Halcyon Days
8 Uneasy Times
9 Sudden Changes and Milestones
10 Mrs. Washington, a Warm Loyalist
11 I Doe My Dear Sister Most Religiously Wish Thare Was an End to the Matter
12 General Washington s Lady, an Example of Persistent Industry
13 A Dreary Kind of Place
14 Middlebrook and Morristown
15 We Look Upon the Americans as Already at Our Feet
16 A Long Time Going Home
17 Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree
18 The General Is Gone to New York
19 A State Prisoner
20 Philadelphia
21 Duty and Inclination
22 Transitions
23 Once More, Under Our Own Vine and Fig Tree
24 No More Trials to Pass Through
Epilogue
A Culinary Lagniappe: Recipes from Martha Washington s Books of Cookery and Booke of Sweetmeats
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
1. Frontispiece A Tobacco Plantation. Courtesy of the Arents Collection, New York Public Library.
2. Broadside Announcing the Sale of Slaves 1769. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
3. Chestnut Grove, Birthplace of Martha Dandridge. Courtesy of the Virginia Historical Society.
4. Col. John Custis IV, by an unknown American artist. Courtesy of Washington and Lee University.
5. White House Plantation home of Martha Dandridge Custis and Daniel Parke Custis. Courtesy of the Virginia Historical Society.
6. Martha Dandridge Custis, by Charles Willson Peale 1757. Courtesy of Washington and Lee University.
7. Daniel Parke Custis, by Charles Willson Peale 1757. Courtesy of Washington and Lee University.
8. John Parke Custis (Jacky) and Martha Parke Custis (Patcy), by Charles Willson Peale 1757. Courtesy of Washington and Lee University.
9. Sally Cary Fairfax, by Duncan Smith in 1915, copy of a lost original by an unknown American artist. Courtesy of The Virginia Historical Society.
10. The Bull Finch, a songbook belonging to Martha Washington, with her name inscribed by George Washington in 1759, the year of their marriage. Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association of the Union.
11. Colonel George Washington in his uniform of the Virginia Militia, by Charles Willson Peale 1772. Courtesy of Washington and Lee University.
12. Miniature of Martha Washington, by Charles Willson Peale 1772. Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association of the Union.
13. Miniature of Martha Parke Custis Patcy, by Charles Willson Peale 1772. Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association of the Union.
14. Miniature of John Parke Custis Jacky, by Charles Willson Peale 1772. Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association of the Union.
15. West Front of the Mansion, by Edward Savage 1792. Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association.
16. Eleanor Parke Custis, Nelly, by Robert Edge Pine. Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association.
17. Martha Parke Custis, Patty, by Robert Edge Pine. Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association.
18. George Washington Parke Custis, Wash, by Robert Edge Pine, copy by Adrian Lamb 1981. Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association.
19. Elizabeth Parke Custis, Eliza, by Robert Edge Pine, copy by Adrian Lamb 1981. Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association.
20. Fanny Bassett, by Robert Edge Pine, 1785. Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association
21. The Washington Family by Edward Savage. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
22. Eleanor Parke Custis Lewis by James Sharples, about the time of her marriage to Lawrence Lewis in 1799. Courtesy of Woodlawn Plantation.
23. Martha s great-granddaughter Maria Carter Custis Syphax, daughter of Arlington house slave Arianna Carter and George Washington Parke Custis. Courtesy of the Custis-Lee Mansion, Arlington.
Preface
Like every American child I learned about George Washington at school, but knew nothing about his wife, except that her name was Martha. It was not until many years later that I began to wonder why history had paid so little attention to Martha Washington. In an age when political wives can expect an onslaught of media interest in every aspect of their lives, from their academic records to their hemlines, their professional qualifications to their cookie recipes, their views on child raising to their views on global debt, the wife of the most famous American remains a curiously obscure figure. To the extent she is known at all today, Martha is a bland domestic icon, more a reflection of the Victorian values of a later age than of her own robust colonial era. Then I stumbled across an anecdote that suggested that during her lifetime, Martha was regarded as an extremely important figure in her own right and essential to the success of her better known husband. A story has survived of an aged Revolutionary War veteran who once accosted George Washington, saying, You think people take every grist from you as the pure grain. What would you have been if you hadn t married the Widow Custis?
I decided to find out more about this Widow Custis, and soon desultory curiosity became research for this book as one intriguing piece of information led to another. Martha proved to be a difficult subject to research, because she left little correspondence and no diaries, and because before her death she burned nearly all the letters she and George Washington had written to each other over forty years of married life. The collection of her surviving correspondence in Worthy Partner, the Papers of Martha Washington , edited by the late Joseph E. Fields has, of course, been a vital resource, but even so, some of Martha s surviving correspondence is not what it seems. Many of her later letters included in the collection were not actually written by her but by George Washington or his secretary. Martha rewrote some in her own handwriting, and some she simply signed. Occasionally letters to her friends and political contacts during the war were drafted in the expectation they would be intercepted by the British, who would then be misled by the contents. Some letters written on her behalf during Washington s presidential terms contain high-flown sentiments Martha herself would never have written. Martha was a deeply practical woman whose own letters were written to exchange news and give advice. She was far too busy to philosophise, yet her supposed philosophy, such as saccharine statements like, I care only for what comes from the heart are often quoted as evidence of her personality. What this means, of course, is that the popular perception of Martha, based on such quotes, is probably wrong.
Since part of her surviving correspondence must be read subject to these reservations, this has meant relying on a variety of other sources of information to construct a realistic picture of Martha and her life. There is information about her ancestors, her parents, her siblings, her slaves, her husbands, her children, and her grandchildren, as well as her homes, the lifestyle of women in eighteenth-century Tidewater Virginia, and the economics of tobacco. There are also letters from friends, family memoirs, firsthand accounts by people who visited Mount Vernon or met her in the winter camps during the Revolutionary War, and family tradition. There are family wills with far-reaching consequences that would have intrigued a Wilkie Collins or a Charles Dickens. And, I soon discovered, there are some glaring omissions in the family memoirs, what Sherlock Holmes might have regarded suspiciously as the dog that didn t bark, and what I began to call the veil of silence that descended when the family wanted to conceal something. In several cases this veil of silence descended over the matter of children born to slaves and fathered by men in Martha s family, but it was also used to obscure the malevolence of her first father-in-law, her daughter s epilepsy, the profligacy of her son, and the odd nature of her eldest granddaughter.
Against the background of the circumstances that governed her life, Martha began to emerge as a character. Some aspects of her personality, such as her at