Martha Washington (12 page)

Dolls, toys, books, and musical instruments delighted Jacky and Patsy, four and a half and three when they came to Mount Vernon. Summertime or early fall, when the tobacco boats came upriver, must have seemed like Christmas, Easter, and several birthdays combined. When one of Cary's ships anchored out in the Potomac, countless barrels, boxes, and trunks packed tightly with English goods were rowed in by longboat to their wharf. Unpacking their treasures was an annual celebration interspersed with disappointment at broken china, unfashionable or ill-fitting clothing, or liquor barrels whose contents had unaccountably evaporated during the voyage.

In the first year of their marriage, George upgraded the Custis vehicles. Unpaved, rough roads quickly took their toll on coaches, almost literally shaking them to pieces. In April, he purchased a small chariot, perhaps to replace Martha's older chair. In the fall, while he was in Williamsburg, he had the Custis family coach repainted. A few years later, he ordered a new coach from London, painted a fashionable green. Besides the team that pulled the coach, they eventually brought up a dozen Custis horses—sorrels, bays, and roans.

Martha and George soon settled into a pleasant routine. Both of them got up before dawn for a light breakfast. He then set off on an inspection ride around the estate or perhaps a foxhunt with the neighbors while she read the Bible and prayed before beginning the day's housekeeping chores and sewing. Her children were both an entertainment and a responsibility as she played and sang with them and taught them their first letters.

Dinner was served at about three in the afternoon in the small dining room with its elegant crimson wallpaper, marble mantel, inset landscape painting, and mahogany furniture—all brand-new. George rode in from the fields, changed clothes, and powdered his hair (he never wore a wig, even for the most formal event) before coming in to dinner. Guests were common, invited or not, and there was always room and welcome for unexpected arrivals. Neighbors who rode or drove open carriages were sent home in the Washingtons' coach if they were surprised by inclement weather. One admiring guest noted that they kept “an excellent table and a stranger, let him be of what Country or nation, he will always meet with a most hospitable reception at it.”

Everyone visited in the afternoon, walking about the grounds or going for a horseback or carriage ride. In her scarlet riding habit, Martha rode sidesaddle. A simple tea was served in the late afternoon, in fine weather on the broad lawn overlooking the Potomac. After the lamps and candles were lit in the evening, they adjourned to the parlor, where they talked, read, wrote letters, played cards or backgammon, danced, or sang. Martha liked to sing the tunes of the day, and George inscribed her copy of
The Bull-Finch
, a large collection of popular English songs, “Martha Washington. 1759,” the first time he wrote her new name. Sometimes he read aloud from one of the newspapers to which he subscribed, and they discussed the news—what little there was in early 1760s Virginia. After a light supper, they retired to their room on the first floor at about nine o'clock, to begin the same routine the next day.

On Sundays, they usually went to church, generally down to the small wooden Truro Parish building near George Mason's Gunston Hall. At times, they also went to the little chapel in Alexandria. Guests and children went with them (Anglicans all), and friends encountered at church were invited for dinner. Martha took communion regularly; George was a member of the Truro vestry. Both churches mounted building campaigns during these years, and by the 1770s, the Washingtons owned square wooden family pews, somewhat like horse boxes with seats on three sides, in both Pohick Church to the south and Christ Church in Alexandria. Both were elegant brick edifices in keeping with the growing prosperity of Virginia.

George wrote that fall of his newfound happiness with Martha: “I am now I beleive fixd at this Seat with an agreable Consort for Life and hope to find more happiness in retirement than I ever experiencd amidst a wide and bustling World.” No second thoughts in his mind—and certainly not in hers.

The tenor of their life together was placid with joys and sorrow, gains and losses. George steadily added acreage to Mount Vernon and moved from tobacco to the cultivation of wheat and other crops. Overall, the plantation provided them comfort and luxury, but he sometimes had to borrow from the estates of his wealthy stepchildren to keep afloat in the bad years. They experienced worry, depression, dismay, and unhappiness from time to time. After a trip south, Martha wrote her sister, “I have had a very dark time since I came home. I believe it was owing to the severe weather we have had.” But the happy times far outweighed the sad.

Measles, whooping cough, malaria, dysentery, assorted fevers, colds, influenza, aches, and strains—like all colonists, they suffered illnesses. Martha dosed the family with the harsh and generally useless remedies of the day—emetics, purges, bark (quinine), mercury. But some of her remedies were herbal, based on everyday observation. Pinworms in children's intestinal tracts were commonplace, in her opinion the source of most childhood illness. In criticizing a niece's child-rearing practices, she wrote, “I have not a doubt but worms is the principle cause of her [the child's] complaints. Children that eat everything as they like and feed as heartely as yours does must be full of worms.”

Worms were something she could easily deal with. Her sovereign remedy for worms in children was passed down through the Custis family. It called for “1 oz seeds of wormseed / half an oz Rhubarb / 1 tablespoon small cloves of garlic. put the ingredients into a pint bottle. fill it with best wine or whiskey, let it stand a few days, shaking it well, then strain it. for a child of 5 years a small teaspoonful, less for younger children.” The combination of a worm killer, an effective laxative, and the liquor would have purged Jacky's and Patsy's youthful guts of the most persistent worms.

If an illness lingered, the Washingtons sent for a doctor from Alexandria to administer harsher and even more useless treatments, such as bleeding (sometimes a couple of pints were drawn) and blistering. But Martha and George were generally healthy and active, as were Jacky and Patsy. Both of them lost siblings—her teenage sister Fanny while they were courting, his elder half-brother Augustine in 1762, followed by her little sister Mary, the same age as her own Patsy. Nancy Fairfax Lee, George's former sister-in-law, died in 1761, leaving him the undisputed master of Mount Vernon.

With her children, Martha was very attentive, even overanxious. On a visit to Hannah and Jack Washington at their plantation, Bushfield, Martha took her “little Patt” with her but left Jacky “at home for a trial to see how well I coud stay without him.” That first two-week separation wasn't a success. She worried incessantly—every barking dog or strange noise made her think that a messenger had come with bad news. As she wrote to her sister Nancy, “I often fancied he was sick or some accident had happened to him.” She concluded that she couldn't leave the children again for any length of time until she had someone responsible to care for them.

In the summer of 1761, Walter Magowan, a well-educated Scot like many colonial tutors (though the accent could be a worry), came to live at Mount Vernon and teach Jacky and Patsy, now seven and five. Martha wrote proudly to her sister that the children were learning their books “very fast.” Jacky would naturally, to the minds of the time, receive a more comprehensive education than his little sister. Magowan requested Greek grammars and texts, histories, a geography, a bookkeeping manual, and a ream of writing paper for Jacky. For seven years, he oversaw the children's education and formed a congenial part of the Mount Vernon family.

For children of the gentry, music and dancing were as important as the alphabet. George himself couldn't sing or play an instrument, though he was a tireless dancer, but he found “nothing more agreeable” than music. At the same time that Magowan came to teach the basics, George sent to London for a small harpsichord, known as a spinet, for Patsy's use; three years later, her big brother would receive a violin and a German flute (a transverse flute, not a recorder). John Stadler, a German immigrant “Musick Professor” and a highly accomplished musician, made a circuit of Virginia plantation houses during this time. Spending three or four days a month at Mount Vernon, he gave singing lessons to Martha and the children. She may have trilled out some of the songs in the
Bull-Finch
like “On the Marriage Act,” which declared “But Adam and Eve, then they first enter'd Course / E'en took one another, for better, for worse” or the untitled but requisite “God save great George, our King / Long live our noble King / God save the king.” Songbooks contained only lyrics, many of them to be sung to a few familiar tunes; one of a music teacher's tasks was to help students fit lyrics to music.

While Martha soon gave up the lessons, Stadler continued teaching Patsy and Jacky singing, adding instrumental music, for several years. The routine for dancing lessons was much the same. A dancing teacher lorded over a group of students at Mount Vernon one month, at George Mason's Gunston Hall the next. For a few days each month, neighboring children gathered to spend several hours each day learning to dance like little ladies and gentlemen, joined by their parents in the joyous evening romps.

One shadow on their happy life was their failure to have children of their own. For the first few years, given Martha's fertility as Mrs. Custis, they must have expected welcome news each month. They probably gave up hope soon after she turned forty. No one knows why she never became pregnant again. George may have been sterile from birth or from disease; he had suffered a mild case of smallpox in Barbados as an adolescent, and smallpox can cause sterility. Martha may have suffered some injury during the birth of Patsy, her fourth child. George himself believed the problem lay with his wife.

A newcomer arrived to live at Mount Vernon in late 1764—Lund Washington, a distant cousin from the Chotank area of Stafford County and former manager of a neighbor's large estates. Five years younger than George, Lund was a pleasant bachelor of twenty-seven who was hired to manage the Mount Vernon farms. As George had expanded his acreage and operations, he felt the need to have an experienced assistant, especially when he traveled.

With a tutor, estate manager, and housekeeper living in the house, Martha now dared to leave the children at home while she accompanied George on occasional trips. In August 1767, they set out for Warm Springs, Virginia (now Berkeley Springs, West Virginia). Their friends Sally and George William Fairfax went with them. There must have been quite a caravan rolling up the dirt roads into the Blue Ridge Mountains—a carriage for the ladies, the men on horseback, and a couple of wagons for servants and supplies. The trip took nearly a week as they climbed higher into cool air and heavy forests.

The several mountain springs were both genteel resorts and health spas, bringing together wealthy planters from throughout the South, only a few of them really ill. Besides “taking the waters”—drinking glasses of the warm, mineral-flavored water or immersing themselves in the springs—the Washingtons and Fairfaxes rode to nearby beauty spots, strolled, played cards, dined with friends, and generally enjoyed themselves in a place where the rules of dress and behavior were somewhat relaxed. Some visitors settled for little makeshift cabins, but their friend George Mercer had built a house where they stayed. They brought their own cook, and he prepared healthy meals from the produce the locals brought in for sale—squash, corn, cucumbers, potatoes, beans, cabbages, greens, watermelons, peaches, and apples. George amused himself by looking at the stock of the ubiquitous horse traders and ended by buying four horses—two grays, a black, and a bay.

Martha had been feeling poorly and out of sorts that summer, and the trip refreshed her greatly. One of her bathing dresses is still preserved at Mount Vernon, although it's probably from a later period. Loose, light, and ankle-length, with a simple tie at the neck and loose three-quarter-length sleeves, the pale-blue-and-white woven linen gown looks a lot like nightwear. The ease and comfort of such a dress must have been heavenly for a woman who wore stays every waking moment. When she waded into the spring, she didn't have to worry about watching after the skirt—the hem had little lead weights sewn in to keep it modestly in place.

Lund knew just how anxious Martha would be about Jacky and Patsy while she was vacationing. At least twice during the month, he wrote long letters to George about crops, building projects, and laborers, but he was always careful to report on the children. He sent the news for Martha that “her Children are as well as I ever saw them & have been during her absence.” In the second letter, he again emphasized their continued good health and sent a message: “They desire their Love to their Mama & you.”