Martha Washington (3 page)

They invited a large group of friends to take tea and spend the evening with Mrs. Washington. McHenry apologized for “harass [ing] her with company,” but as he frankly admitted, his neighbors “would never have forgiven me” if they had not been invited to meet her. Even at fifty-seven, with much of her youthful beauty faded, this middle-aged woman captivated them all. Now stout and gray-haired, she still drew people to her with her fair open face, lively hazel eyes, and bright smile. Her interest in everyone and everything made her a charming conversationalist.

Enlivened by fireworks before and after supper, the party didn't break up until eleven that night. Martha promptly went to bed, but some choice spirits among the citizenry serenaded the house until two in the morning. After only three hours of sleep, the travelers got up to leave town early, avoiding “any parade that might be intended.” With misplaced civic pride, the
Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser
described the intrusive late night serenade as “an excellent Band of Music, Conducted by Gentlemen of the Town.”

Tailored riding dresses were often worn as traveling attire, and Martha seems to have followed that custom. From New England mills that spring, she had received both bottle green and dark brown wool fabric intended to make riding dresses. That she “was clothed in the manufacture of our country” was praised as a mark of “her native goodness and patriotism.” They stayed two more nights on the road before reaching Philadelphia.

Beset by throngs of applicants for office and conflicting recommendations from his advisers, George missed his wife badly and followed reports of her progress. His friends dispatched information about her whereabouts via mail coaches or horsemen on their way to the capital. He sent her a letter in care of his Philadelphia factor to await her arrival there, suggesting that she might need to send him a letter by the Friday morning stagecoach to New York City.

But she missed that post, not coming near Philadelphia until the late morning of May 20, “without the least accident to distress us,” according to Martha's own account. Rough ferry rides and rambunctious horses were already forgotten by a woman who never dwelled on mishaps. New celebrations lay ahead. Scouts, stationed on the highway to watch for her coach, galloped into the city to alert her escort.

After quickly saddling up, two companies of dragoons and the city's leading citizens and government officials rode out to greet the president's lady—a gesture of respect almost as great as the clouds of dust they raised. At Darby, she was met by her friend and Philadelphia hostess, Mary White Morris, the elegant wife of financier Robert Morris, as well as many other ladies in their coaches. The entire group stopped on the western bank of the Schuylkill River at Gray's pleasure garden, with its trees, flowers, walkways, and “artistic decorations” modeled after London's public gardens. There the Philadelphians—about a hundred men and women—welcomed her with a “cold collation.” By the time they were finished, it was two in the afternoon. Back in the coach, they crossed the river at Gray's Ferry; happily enough for Martha, the ferry had been replaced by a floating pontoon bridge in 1778.

Philadelphia! Grand, scandalous, elegant, dangerous, sinful, learned, commercial, pious, tumultuous, peaceful, rich, riotous, tolerant, rebellious, squalid—almost any adjective could be applied to the Queen City of the United States with some measure of truth. By American standards, Philadelphia was enormous—with 42,500 people, it dwarfed both New York City and Boston. William Penn's vision of a green country town, its elegant grid of streets softened by gardens and orchards, had not yet been completely supplanted. The city's two main streets, High (soon to be renamed Market) and Broad, were an impressive hundred feet wide, while the other streets were a respectable fifty feet in width. Most of the streets in the main part of town were paved with cobblestones or paving blocks and lit by whale-oil lamp fixtures. Red bricks, that mark of wealth and permanence, set the tone of the city from stately public buildings, schools, churches of every persuasion (religious toleration was one of Philadelphia's hallmarks), three public markets, and houses down to the sidewalks and even some street gutters. Foreign imports and the handiwork of the nation's most skilled craftsmen filled the tempting shops.

Streets, windows, and fences were jammed with applauding crowds eager to catch a glimpse of Mrs. Washington. Church bells pealed joyously, while the city's artillery company blasted away with a thirteen-gun salute—the new “federal salute”—in her honor. Down High Street, they clickety-clacked along briskly—horseshoes and metal-clad coach wheels ringing on the pavement, the very rhythm of urban life. They drew up at the Morrises' mansion at No. 190 High Street, near Sixth. Here they would all spend a restful weekend before the final leg of the trip. Expansive, fat, and sociable, the middle-aged Robert Morris had already joined the president in New York to consult on fiscal affairs. He was an immensely rich merchant and speculator, whose financial acuity, organizational expertise, and stalwart use of his personal credit had helped bankroll the Revolution and keep Washington's troops supplied and in the field.

Martha felt at home with Mary Morris, eighteen years younger than she but sharing much the same worldview. Fond of entertaining and being entertained by the elite of the Philadelphia social world, Mary was the sister of the American Episcopal bishop and the mother of five sons and two daughters. Ten-year-old Maria became Nelly's friend, her first ever besides her sisters and cousins in the intimate family world of Virginia plantations. “Dear little Washington,” Nelly's little brother, was “lost in a mase” at all the excitement.

Here in the most cosmopolitan city of North America, shopping was a pleasure and a delight. Martha sent for a stay maker and a shoemaker, ordering custom-made luxuries—corsets and “new fashioned” shoes for Fanny Washington, Nelly Stuart, and her eldest granddaughters, Patty and Betsy, young ladies of twelve and thirteen. Nothing made her happier than buying presents for the family.

When they left Philadelphia on Monday, their caravan was joined by Mary Morris and her daughters in their own family coach. Only two more nights on the road remained until journey's end. Finally, on Wednesday, May 27, they arrived at Elizabethtown Point. There they were met by Robert Morris and the newly inaugurated president himself, who must have leaned down to embrace his sorely missed little wife and the excited children, with perhaps a grateful handshake for the faithful Bob Lewis.

The spanking new, brightly painted presidential barge, built for Washington's reception by civic leaders, was forty-seven feet long; in case of rain, the back of the deck was covered by an awning of festooned red curtains. But rain isn't mentioned in any account of this exhilarating day, the culmination of what Martha regarded as a “very agreeable journey.” The smartly dressed New York pilots in their white smocks and black-fringed caps, thirteen in all, shipped their oars and waited for their guests to board the craft for the fifteen-mile trip. The servants, carriages, horses, and baggage would follow by ferryboat.

At the coxswain's command, the oars flashed in unison as they crossed Newark Bay, went up Upper New York Bay, received yet another thirteen-gun salute from the Battery at the tip of Manhattan Island, entered the East River, and docked smartly at Peck's slip after a trip of a little more than an hour. Crowds of cheering New Yorkers awaited them there, along with Governor George Clinton, who couldn't resist delivering a welcoming speech to Martha. He escorted the Washingtons and their friends from the landing to No. 3 Cherry Street just a couple of blocks away, where Congress had rented a house for the presidential family and staff.

Not one to sing her own praises, Martha wrote her niece, “The paper will tell you how I was complimented on my landing.” Thanking God that “the President”—her first written use of George's new title—was very well, she plunged immediately into the capital's social whirl without any time to rest or settle in. The day after her arrival, she was the hostess at an official dinner for leading members of Congress; on Friday evening, the presidential mansion was crowded with New York's social and political elite, both women and men, at her first public reception. So much for her expectation of leading the kind of private, domestic life she had enjoyed during the Revolution.

Much to her surprise, at the end of her long trip from Virginia to New York, Martha Washington discovered that, like George Washington, she belonged to the nation and that she too had become part of American history.

CHAPTER ONE

H
istory's Martha Washington was born Martha Dandridge in rural New Kent County, Virginia. She was called Patsy (often spelled Patcy) by her family and friends as a matter of course. In those days, Patsy, Patty, and Pat were the nicknames for Martha, just as Margaret was commonly shortened to Peggy or Peg and Mary became Polly or Poll.

A true child of the colony, she was at least a fourth-generation Virginian on her mother's side. For more than a hundred years, her maternal ancestors had been respected landowning gentry, but they were not grandees with uncounted acres. They lived in a web of relationships based on marriage, kinship, business, and neighborhood. Without strong community ties, no individual could have survived the rigors of early colonial life. Patsy Dandridge was part and parcel of English Virginia and the world of its tobacco planters.

Starvation, disease, hostile Indians, and years of financial losses—for its first twenty or thirty years, the little colony planted in 1607 at Jamestown teetered on the edge of extinction. Then the vagaries of European fashion turned Virginia's future as golden as the mines of Spain's Latin American colonies. Almost overnight, tobacco became all the rage—whether smoked in pipes or daintily inhaled as snuff—and Virginia lands seemed predestined for its cultivation. To most of the world, tobacco and Virginia became synonymous.

Prime tobacco land meant wealth and prestige. Some colonists came with leather satchels bulging with coins, others as indentured servants who had signed away four to seven years of their own hard labor to repay the costs of their passages; but rich and poor alike aspired to landownership. And not just any land. Immigrants wanted acreage on one of the four great tidal rivers of the Chesapeake Bay—the James, York, Rappahannock, or Potomac—as European settlement moved northward. This was the Tidewater, the land between the coast and the fall line, where the first waterfall on each river prevented ships from sailing any farther upriver.

With the labor of indentured servants, Virginia planters cleared hundreds, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands of acres for tobacco cultivation. By the mid-1600s, fleets of English merchantmen set off across the Atlantic each summer, fetching up in the Chesapeake Bay by early fall. They sailed directly up the hospitable rivers—no need here for port cities—anchoring to take on board tightly packed hogsheads or bundles of dried, golden brown tobacco leaves and to deliver hoes, plows, axes, scythes, and other manufactured goods.

Thirty miles or so from its mouth, the York River splits in two: the southern branch is the Pamunkey River, named for the Powhatan tribe that lived along it. Although the Pamunkeys were forced to accept the authority of the colonial government, they still retained considerable land on the frontier when New Kent County was created there in 1654.

No one knows exactly when or under what circumstances Martha Dandridge's maternal forebears came from England to try their luck in Virginia. In 1664, her great-grandfather William Woodward first appears in the documentary record. That summer, Queen Cocka Coeska, leader of the Pamunkeys, sold him 2,100 acres of river land in New Kent County. In a petition to the Governor's Council, she declared her desire to have him as a neighbor and translator for herself and her people.

Family lore holds that Woodward had moved out to that “howling wilderness” sometime in the 1650s as an Indian trader. To English colonists, the great forests were alien and frightening places, where not only the wind and the wolves howled, but the native inhabitants as well. In their eyes, trees were to be chopped down, wolves to be killed, and Indians civilized, beginning with learning the English language and giving up their own “foule noise.” Woodward must have been an unusual Englishman, for he learned the Pamunkeys' language and gained their confidence. So very unusual was this linguistic skill that he was always identified as “William Woodward, the Indian Interpreter.” Although not a colonial official, he was employed for specific negotiations between the Indians and the governor.

Even the name of Martha Dandridge's great-grandmother, the woman who married William Woodward, is unknown, as are those of so many colonial matriarchs. The seventeenth century was concerned with brute survival and the acquisition and protection of wealth. Men owned land, held office, and fought wars: many of their names survive in a document somewhere. Not so with women. Nearly four hundred years of indifference, fires, floods, and vanished burial plots means that a goodly percentage of Virginia foremothers are unknown.