Martha Washington (4 page)

Mrs. Woodward may have been Martha West, a descendant of Lord Delaware; whether or not she was Martha West, this great-grandmother was almost certainly Virginia born. The Woodwards married sometime in the mid-1600s. Like almost all early planters, even the most successful, they doubtless lived in a modest frame home of two rooms with an attic. Cultivated fields were interspersed with forests teeming with game—squirrels, rabbits, deer, and turkeys, as well as predators like gray wolves. Wolves posed such a menace to settlers' livestock that Virginia's ruling council offered a bounty for killing them, requiring delivery of the ears as proof.

The Woodwards had five children, including a daughter named Martha. Colonial women's birth dates are even more elusive than their names, but Martha Woodward was born sometime between 1657 and 1665. She is the first of Martha Dandridge's female ancestors that we can identify with certainty. About 1680, this Martha married Gideon Macon, a Huguenot planter who had immigrated in 1672. Like thousands of other Protestants who fled persecution in France, he brought welcome capital and skills to Virginia. The Ma-cons built a house called Mount Pleasant on Macon's Island in the Pamunkey River; their plantation incorporated the land that Martha inherited from her parents.

They had six children between 1681 and 1701; their eldest was another Martha. In early 1702, Gideon died. Within a year, the widowed Martha Woodward Macon, now in her late thirties or early forties, married a wealthy bachelor, Captain Nathaniel West of West Point, a neighbor and perhaps her cousin. Their only child was a daughter named Unity, born about 1703, who will figure in our story later. Widowed, remarried to a Scottish merchant, and widowed again, Martha Woodward Macon West Biggers moved back to Mount Pleasant, where she resided until her death in 1723.

In January 1703, her daughter Martha Macon married Orlando Jones. His mother was a native-born Virginian, Anne Lane; his father was an Anglican clergyman, the Reverend Rowland Jones, who had emigrated from England in the 1660s. The elder Jones was one of the founders and the first rector of Bruton Parish.

Orlando studied at the new College of William and Mary, became a planter near Williamsburg on Queen's Creek, a navigable stream (at least at high tide) leading out to the York River, and served as a burgess. As the eighteenth century brought greater prosperity, Orlando and Martha Macon Jones lived in a brick house with five or six rooms, which included nineteen chairs, pictures on the parlor wall, and a few pieces of silver. Plantation labor had changed, too. Indentured Englishmen had become less common in the tobacco fields, replaced by enslaved Africans. By this time, fully a quarter of all colonial Virginians were black, the majority of them toiling on large plantations. Even a small planter like Orlando owned twenty-one slaves.

Not only was Orlando and Martha's house more comfortable and stylish than their parents' had been, they lived right outside the growing new capital, where they could enjoy at least the rudiments of urban life—a few shops, craftsmen, markets, and taverns. In Virginia, a rural colony with a widely spread population, all the other so-called towns amounted at most to a warehouse, a tavern, and a house or two.

Marshy, disease-ridden Jamestown was destroyed once too often by fire; in 1699, it was replaced by Williamsburg as the new capital. On the relatively high neck of land between the James and York rivers, the College of William and Mary, built to keep planters' sons close to home, and the simple brick Bruton Parish Church were incorporated into a handsome plan of wide, sand-covered streets and brick government buildings. Still far from complete,
this
town was built to last.

The Joneses' first surviving child was a son named Lane, born in 1707, followed by a daughter, Frances, in 1710, a break in the line of Marthas. Martha Macon Jones died in 1716, when Fanny was only six. Life in colonial Virginia was uncertain, and the chances of a child growing to adulthood with two living parents were rare indeed; living grandparents were even less common.

Like most colonial widowers (not to speak of widows), Orlando Jones soon remarried; it was simply too difficult to maintain a household and rear children alone. Reflecting this reality, many colonial documents refer to “now husband” and “now wife” to distinguish from earlier spouses. After three childless years, Orlando also died and left the guardianship of his children to his second wife, Mary Elizabeth Williams Jones. His will directed her to sell his “tenement,” or rental house, on Duke of Gloucester Street in Williamsburg. Although he further directed that the family remain on the plantation, the young widow had other ideas. A year after the sale, she married the purchaser, a Huguenot watchmaker named John James Flournoy.

Despite their many blood relatives, Fanny and Lane Jones found themselves, willy-nilly, living in town with their stepmother and her new husband. Babies arrived in rapid succession, and the white frame house was soon bursting at the seams. Initially, Mary Jones Flournoy was obligated to care for her stepchildren. But by their early teens, Fanny and Lane were clearly anxious to leave the household.

The Flournoys probably kept the Jones children for several years against their wishes because of the money. As guardians, they had a legal right to use the income from the Queen's Creek plantation and its slaves to maintain the household where Lane and Fanny resided. Orlando's sister Anna Maria Jones Timson sued twice to gain custody of her niece and nephew, as well as their estate, but she was unsuccessful. When he was eighteen, Lane legally emancipated himself from the Flournoys' guardianship and moved out to Timson's Neck with his aunt.

Poor Fanny was forced to remain behind for ten more months. At sixteen, she also sued to emancipate herself. The Flournoys were cleared of any financial wrongdoing when the estate was finally settled, but they sold their house and business and moved west to Henrico County, out of our story. We can surmise that Fanny was left with an abiding suspicion of stepparents and the conviction that good aunts had a duty to help out their orphaned nieces.

No one knows where Fanny Jones went to live in 1726. Because she chose a New Kent County planter as her guardian, it seems likely that she moved out to the Pamunkey River neighborhood. All Fanny's grandparents were dead, and her aunt Anna Maria's house was overcrowded. Besides her guardian, there were a number of Macon aunts and uncles in that neighborhood.

The most interesting possibility is that she lived with or paid long visits to a maternal aunt, her deceased mother's younger half-sister, Unity West Dandridge. A considerable heiress in her own right, Aunt Unity was only a few years older than Fanny. In 1719, she had married William Dandridge, an English immigrant twenty years her senior. By 1726, they had three little children, the eldest a daughter named Martha.

The pool of customary names among English settlers was small and the desire to honor family members great: names were repeated in each generation, and two or three cousins often bore identical names without a middle name to distinguish them. All those Marys, Elizabeths, Marthas, Annes, Franceses, Williams, Georges, Thomases, Roberts, Johns, and Daniels make for endless confusion. As one of the early editors of George Washington's papers put it: “To name generation after generation the same is an evil habit”—and one the Dandridges indulged in repeatedly.

Unity and William Dandridge lived at Elsing Green, a fine brick house in the new Georgian style on the north bank of the Pamunkey. By this time a successful merchant, military man, and member of the Governor's Council, William had arrived in Virginia in 1715, bringing his fifteen-year-old brother, John, with him. Like most new colonists, they were the descendants of yeoman farmers and skilled craftsmen in England—people of what were called “the middling sort.” The Dandridge brothers prospered in the colony, and William's marriage to Unity West gave them social cachet.

The courtship of Fanny Jones and Jack Dandridge was almost inevitable. She would already have known him as her half-aunt's brother-in-law, and they furthered their acquaintance during the late 1720s after she left Williamsburg. Blood kinship or kinship by marriage was always a plus in colonial matches, both financially and emotionally. Hard for a modern reader to follow, genealogical snarls were easily disentangled by colonial Virginians. In those days of early death and frequent remarriage, most people had several half- and steprelatives and kissing cousins by the score.

Though never as successful as his older brother, Jack Dandridge did well. He was deputy clerk of New Kent County, soon to become clerk; a militia officer who would eventually become colonel; and the owner of five hundred acres on the Pamunkey. While he was courting Fanny, he built a house called Chestnut Grove on his small plantation across the river from Elsing Green.

In the eighteenth century, the word
plantation
defined an agricultural property that was devoted to the cultivation of a single crop for the export market. In Virginia, that crop was tobacco. Plantations encompassed everything from estates with thousands of acres, hundreds of slaves, and grand mansions to little more than jumped-up farms where the owners worked in the fields. Chestnut Grove fell somewhere in the middle of this range but was still considered genteel.

Fanny and Jack married in 1730, when she was twenty and he was thirty. She brought a respectable dowry to the upwardly mobile young man—a piece of land in King William County and at least ten slaves left to her by her father. In the custom of the times, the newlyweds would have moved into their new house and set up housekeeping at once. Chestnut Grove was a comfortable two-story frame house with three pine-paneled rooms on each floor, warmed by fireplaces at each end of the house; the kitchen was in a separate small building. Its setting was handsome, on a curve of the lazy Pamunkey, surrounded by chestnuts and an orchard of fruit trees.

Like all good Virginia ladies, Fanny was soon pregnant—“breeding,” as her condition was frankly known. The Dandridges' first child was a daughter they named Martha for her grandmother and great-grandmother (and possibly great-great-grandmother). She was born between twelve and one o'clock on June 2, 1731, in her parents' bedroom on the first floor of Chestnut Grove.

A brunette with hazel eyes and fair skin, baby Patsy had little time to enjoy being an only child; her brother John (Jack) was born slightly less than nine months later. William made his appearance in 1734, Bartholomew (Bat) was born in 1737, and the sister who became her best friend, Anna Maria (Nancy), was born two years later. By the time she was eight, Patsy had four younger siblings. Then the live births stretched out, with Frances arriving in 1744, Elizabeth (Betsy) in 1749, and Mary in 1756. What with miscarriages and stillbirths, Fanny Jones Dandridge was either pregnant or nursing almost continuously for a quarter of a century.

Patsy was uncommonly lucky to have both her parents living throughout her girlhood. As the eldest daughter in a household without a retinue of servants, she was surely mama's little helper with her younger brothers and sisters, all of them born at home. No wonder motherliness was one of her distinguishing attributes as a woman or that she always enjoyed the company of young people.

The New Kent County in which the Dandridges lived was pure country, fields bordered by forests, without a town worthy of the name. As a girl growing up on a small plantation, she had a matter-of-fact knowledge of sexuality, reproduction, and bodily functions. There was an earthiness to country life, with steaming manure heaps by the barn, chamber pots and privies, the fall slaughter of pigs and cows, the breeding of horses with bloodlines much discussed, the sounds of her parents' lovemaking in the deep silence of the night, the birth of spring livestock—not to speak of the human babies born on the place. Patsy never fell into the chilly, tight-lipped clutches of prudishness. Good-humored and laughing, she enjoyed all the pleasures life offered.

There were perhaps fifteen or twenty slaves at Chestnut Grove, an estimate based on acreage. New Kent is one of Virginia's “burned counties,” whose courthouse records were long ago destroyed by fire. At a place like the Dandridges', slaves working in the tobacco fields were the key to family prosperity. Very few of them would have been spared for household duties—at most, a cook and maid/ laundress on a regular basis. While Fanny and her daughters did a good deal of the housekeeping, they had to know how to do everything, even the heavy jobs they delegated to the servants. And there was plenty of work every day for all of them.

Besides the mundane tasks like sweeping and mopping, here are some of the things Patsy learned to do at her mother's side: kill, pluck, and draw fowls, from the smallest hen to the largest turkey; track down setting hens, gather their eggs, and candle them; make dyes; spin, weave, and dye wool and linen; make clothes, sheets, towels, pillowcases, mattress covers, quilts, curtains, bed curtains, tablecloths, napkins, underwear, menstrual pads, diapers, and nightwear; stuff pillows and mattresses; beat dust from the rugs; turn mattresses and even out the feathers; gather useful herbs, plants, berries, and roots in the woods; concoct home remedies and beauty aids; salt and smoke hams, bacon, beef, and fish; make vinegar, sauces, syrups, and jellies; preserve fruit and vegetables; cook large meals over the fire in an open hearth; bake in a brick oven; make soap from lye and household grease; make furniture and silver polish and use them; wash clothes weekly in a huge boiling kettle without shrinking or discoloring them and spread them to dry; crimp ruffles and press clothes with heavy irons heated in the fireplace; darn, mend, and patch; and knit, knit, knit—woolen stockings wore out fast. The most common verb in this long list is “make,” and that's what colonial women did. Small planters purchased a few imported luxuries, but not most of the necessities of daily life.