The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (2 page)

O
n March 30, 1877, the
New York Herald
, one of the largest newspapers in America, printed a lengthy love letter that had been written on September 12, 1758. Not exactly hot news, you might say. Had the editors lost their collective marbles? The
Herald
’s editors did not think so. Nothing they printed that day created more of a sensation among their readers. The letter was from George Washington. Here is the heart of its text, exactly as it was printed:

In this welter of indirection and hinted meanings was George Washington crying out, “I love you! Do you love me?” The
Herald’
s headline was: “A Washington Romance.” Beneath it was a subtitle: “A Letter from General Washington Acknowledging The Power of Love.” Then came an introduction to the text:

“Irving” refers to Washington Irving, author of an acclaimed five-volume biography of Washington. But the
Herald
reporter dismisses Irving’s assertion by citing an article that was published in
Scribner’s
magazine in June of 1876, in which a Fairfax descendant insisted it was Sally Cary, Mrs. Fairfax, for whom Washington “had a tenderness.” He quotes from the article: “It is fair to say that papers which have never been given to the public set this question beyond a doubt. Mrs. George William Fairfax, the object of George Washington’s early and passionate love, lived to an advanced age in Bath, England…Upon her death at the age of eighty-one, letters, still in possession of the Fairfax family, were found among her effects, showing that Washington had never forgotten the influence of his youthful disappointment.”

Next came a gaffe that underscores why newspapers are often called history’s first draft. The reporter noted that in the sentences preceding the confession that he was “a votary of love,” Washington rebuked Sally Fairfax for suggesting in a letter to him that he was preoccupied with “the animating prospect of possessing Mrs. Custis.” The reporter blithely dismissed this reference to Washington’s future wife: “It is hardly probable that Washington means to express his love for Mrs. Custis, for her hus
band was then living—in fact did not die until twenty years after the date of this letter.” Readers who had access to Washington Irving’s biography swiftly discovered that Daniel Parke Custis had been dead more than a year when Washington wrote this September 12, 1758, letter to Sally Fairfax. Worse, on or about June 5, 1758, he had become engaged to marry Martha Dandridge Custis.
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For Americans who regarded George Washington as a virtual incarnation of divinity—and they were numerous in 1877—the letter created consternation. It was only three months after the fervent yearlong celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of independence, in which Washington had been portrayed as the ultimate hero. Today, the Bangs auction house would have been rubbing its hands with unconcealed glee and kiting the price of the manuscript into the stratosphere. In 1877, no bidding took place. Bangs merely announced that the letter had been sold for $13. Even in 1877, when the dollar was worth perhaps thirty of our depreciated dollars, the price is much too low to be believable. Rumor long maintained that the purchaser was J. P. Morgan, but no evidence has been discovered to support that assertion. Whoever he was, the buyer evidently felt he was performing a patriotic act by removing the letter from sight.

For the next eighty years, the original letter remained unexamined by scholars, which spurred violent arguments about its authenticity and meaning. Some people were eager to dismiss it as a forgery. But the first two collectors of Washington’s papers reluctantly decided to include the newspaper text because the style was so unmistakably authentic, and no one could produce an adequate reason for forging it. Not until the late 1950s did a determined Washington biographer find the original in the files of Harvard’s Houghton Library. That discovery has not prevented people from continuing to disagree over its meaning.
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Some historians have argued it is a good-humored joke, the sort of risqué banter that men and women often exchanged in the eighteenth century. John C. Fitzpatrick, who spent several decades on his monumental edition of Washington’s papers, maintained that the letter was a paean of praise for Martha Custis. He took ferocious issue with those who said that Washington was professing his passion for Mrs. Fairfax in spite of being engaged to Martha. If they were correct, Fitzpatrick wrote, every decent person would be forced to conclude that George Washington was “a worthless scoundrel.”
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II

Sally Cary Fairfax was the daughter of one of the wealthiest planters in Virginia, Wilson Cary, possessor of a splendid estate at Ceelys, on the James River overlooking Hampton Roads, not far from Newport News. The family also enjoyed comfortable town houses in Williamsburg and Hampton. Wilson Cary’s father had been rector of the College of William and Mary; the younger man had studied there and at Trinity College in England. His houses were stocked with the latest English books and magazines, and he took pleasure in teaching Sally and her three younger sisters how to read and write French. He was one of the leaders of the colony’s legislature, the House of Burgesses, which meant that each year the Carys enjoyed the brilliant social season in Williamsburg while the burgesses were in session. It was a world of fancy balls, lavish dinners, and witty conversation that made the pursuit of happiness a fact of life long before it became a phrase in a political declaration.
⁴

An anecdote passed down in the Cary family gives a glimpse of Sally that suggests she was the center of male attention at an early age. She was returning to the family’s Williamsburg house while one of the colonial wars with France was raging and the town was patrolled by sentries. One of these soldiers demanded to hear the password of the night from Sally’s coachman. The man was flummoxed into silence. Sally stamped her foot and cried, “But I am Miss Sally Cary!” The sentry gulped and said, “Pass.” It seems that the officer of the watch was an admirer and had made “Sally Cary” the password as a compliment to the young lady.
⁵

At eighteen Sally married George William Fairfax, son of William Fairfax, the proprietor of Belvoir, on the Potomac River not far from Mount Vernon. The bride enjoyed the dizzying expectation that one day she might become not merely the mistress of this fine mansion but the wife of a bona fide nobleman. George William stood a better than even chance of becoming the next Lord Fairfax. This would not only entitle him to sit in the House of Lords in Parliament and preside over a vast English estate; it would make him owner of five million acres in northern Virginia that King Charles II had given to a maternal ancestor of Lord Fairfax in 1673.

This potentially glorious future was probably the best explanation for the match. William Fairfax had sent his son to England at the age of six to be educated by his family, describing him as a “poor West India boy.”
George William was the product of a marriage that Fairfax had made in the Bahamas with the obscure widow of a British artillery major. Someone launched the rumor that the woman had Negro blood. For fifteen years, George William endured the unlovely experience of his wealthy English relatives eyeing his skin color and debating whether he was a mulatto.
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The result was a slight, rather timid young man with a dour, down-turned mouth surmounted by a strong hooked nose and shrewd close-set eyes. His letter to an influential Fairfax kinsman in England reporting his engagement to Sally did not exactly seethe with passion. He made it sound like it was something he had worked into his schedule while attending the House of Burgesses. He described Sally as an “amiable person” and reported that he had obtained her and her father’s consent to an early marriage. He closed by noting that “Col. Cary wears the same coat-of-arms as Lord Hunsden.” (The first Lord Hunsden was a cousin of Queen Elizabeth, Henry Carey.) This apparently was as important to George William as Sally’s charms.
⁷

A portrait of Sally painted by a not very talented artist around this time reveals a slim, dark-haired young woman most people would call handsome rather than beautiful. But the narrow face is striking nonetheless: the deep-set dark eyes emanate a subtly mocking intelligence; the nose is strong and the mouth, firm and confident. Her waist is narrow and her bosom ample. It is not hard to imagine her as the leader of some lively revels.

Sally came to Belvoir as a bride in 1748 and soon met sixteen-year-old George Washington. He was a frequent guest at nearby Mount Vernon, where his older half brother, Lawrence, was happily married to Anne Fairfax, George William’s older sister. Lawrence was doing his utmost to rescue George, already six feet tall, from the clutches of his headstrong widowed mother, Mary Ball Washington, who was trying to convert her oldest son into a surrogate husband and father figure for her four younger children.

III

George’s father, Augustine Washington, had died in 1743, when George was eleven; later George mournfully remarked that he had only a blurred recollection of this huge, muscular man, a sort of rural Hercules famous
for his feats of strength. For much of the time, Augustine had been an absentee father, traveling between his scattered farms and an iron works that required a great deal of his attention. Enterprise was in Augustine Washington’s blood. Since the arrival of the first Washington in Virginia in 1657, a refugee from the English civil war, the males had made a habit of marrying well and acquiring land. Augustine Washington had continued this tradition, expanding his holdings from 1,740 acres at the time of his first marriage to almost 11,000 acres at his death.
⁸

Compared with the Carys, the Byrds, the Lees, the Randolphs, and the other first families of Virginia, the Washingtons remained “middling gentry.” Their house on 250-acre Ferry Farm, across the Rappahannock River from Fredericksburg, where George grew up, was an eight-room frame structure, not even faintly comparable to the stately brick mansions such as Robert Carter’s Nomini Hall or William Byrd’s Westover. Augustine Washington owned forty-nine slaves. Robert “King” Carter had over 600 toiling on his 60,000 acres. It is easy to imagine young George Washington’s awe when he visited Belvoir. Elegant English-made couches, chairs, and tables filled the parlor. At Ferry Farm, the parlor contained three beds.
⁹

George’s mother, Mary Ball, was Augustine Washington’s second wife. Her mother was illiterate, and Mary received no education worth mentioning. She was a physically imposing woman, large and vigorous, with an explosive temper. One man described her as “majestic.” One of George’s boyhood playmates said he was “ten times more afraid of her” than he was of his own parents. One day, Mary stood up in her carriage on Fredericksburg’s main street and cursed and lashed a slave because he had mishandled the horse. As her oldest son, George was exposed at an early age to his mother’s tantrums. Worse, he inherited her violent temper.
¹⁰

There are more than a few intimations that George Washington’s home life with this turbulent woman was unhappy before as well as after his father’s death. Second marriages, especially ones in which children of the first wife must be dealt with, are often uneasy. Augustine Washington’s decision to send his two sons by his first marriage, Augustine and Lawrence, to school in England at considerable expense may have been motivated in part by Mary’s sharp tongue and short temper.

In one of his boyhood notebooks, in which George laboriously copied such things as
Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company
, he included in his strong, firm script a poem, “True Happiness.” It was a por
trait of domestic tranquility. The “truly bless’d” enjoy a “good estate” with productive soil, a warm fire in the hearth, a simple diet, “constant friends,” a healthy mind and body—and “a quiet wife, a quiet soul.” Almost certainly, this portrait was the opposite of what George encountered on Ferry Farm. Were it not for the intervention of Lawrence Washington, it is dismaying to think what George Washington might have become.
¹¹

IV

Fourteen years older than George, Lawrence had inherited Mount Vernon from his father. His marriage to Anne Fairfax, William Fairfax’s daughter, had catapulted him from middling gentry into the heady stratosphere of Virginia’s aristocracy. Fairfax was the cousin and land agent for the sixth Lord Fairfax, who owned those five million acres between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. Virginians had done everything in their power to invalidate Charles II’s generosity, but the courts had upheld the royal prerogative, thereby making Fairfax the most influential name in Virginia. In swift succession after his marriage, Lawrence became adjutant of the Virginia militia and a member of the House of Burgesses. Add the polish of his English education and his love of martial glory and it is easy to see how he became a formidable figure on young George’s horizon.
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