“I shall yearly ship a considerable part of the tobacco I make to you.”
PETITE, AT FIVE FEET, with brown hair and hazel eyes, Martha Dandridge Custis was twenty-six in March 1758—she would turn twenty-seven on June 13—and was described about this time as an “agreeable widow.” The lawyers and tobacco agents who had had to reckon with her brisk correspondence since her husband Daniel Parke Custis’s death might have tempered this praise. Agreeable for certain, in Washington’s eyes, were a town house in Williamsburg, the White House on the Pamunkey River, and the Parke Custis acreage that Martha and her children had inherited on Daniel’s death. The whole comprised one of the larger fortunes in Virginia. There was one fly in the ointment—the so-called Dunbar suit. This lawsuit of forty years’ standing, in which plaintiffs in Antigua threatened the Parke Custis estate, had come to trial in the General Court in Williamsburg in April 1754 and been dismissed. It had then gone to the London Privy Council, which heard appeals from the colonies. In the summer of his death, Daniel had been waiting to hear the outcome of the plaintiffs’ appeal. In December 1757, Martha had learned that the dismissal had been overturned on appeal. The plaintiffs could seek a retrial in Virginia.
This lawsuit had its origins in ambiguous wording regarding the payment of debts in the will of Daniel Parke. This Virginian—Daniel Parke Custis’s maternal grandfather—had been rewarded for services to the Crown at the battle of Blenheim in 1704. Made governor of the Leeward Islands in the West Indies, he had proved corrupt and debauched in the post. Islanders in revolt against his arrogant rule had murdered him in Antigua in 1710. In his will of the previous year, he had left to his daughter Frances Parke Custis, wife of John Custis IV of Arlington, Virginia, and to her heirs, his considerable wealth and acreage in England and Virginia. The condition was that they bear the name of Parke, in which he took pride. Frances Custis’s young children, Daniel—Martha’s future husband—and his sister, adopted the name. Parke bequeathed a thousand pounds to his other daughter, Lucy Parke Byrd, wife of William Byrd II, again on the condition that her children—two daughters—adopt his name. But the governor’s will contained a surprise. Should Lucy Chester, an infant in Antigua, take the name of Parke, he willed her property in the Leeward Islands valued at £30,000. The child was popularly assumed to be her benefactor’s daughter, and her mother, Katherine Chester, his mistress. In Virginia the Custises were scandalized but were advised that a challenge to the will would be fruitless.
Time passed. Frances Parke Custis and her sister, Lucy Parke Byrd, died young, as did wealthy Miss Chester in Antigua, soon after she had married a fellow islander, Thomas Dunbar. He accommodatingly altered his name to Dunbar Parke. But the governor’s will took on new life, though the orginal legatees were dead, in the early 1720s. Dunbar Parke claimed, as plaintiff, that Daniel Parke had wished to leave his insular property free of all encumbrance. It was therefore, he argued, for the Virginia heirs to meet some £6,000 of debts in Antigua that he had settled. John Custis IV hotly contested the claim. The wording of the will being ambiguous, for over twenty years both Antiguan plaintiffs and Virginian defendants enriched lawyers who disputed the point. Though Dunbar Parke himself died in 1734, his brother Charles adopted the name of Parke, and he and his children pursued the claim and brought it before the General Court in 1754.
When Daniel Parke Custis chose her as a bride in 1749, Martha—then Miss Dandridge of Chestnut Grove of New Kent County and aged about eighteen—had known little of Chancery suits. Described then as “beautiful and sweet tempered,” she had had much to endure. Daniel’s father, John Custis IV, while a shrewd man of business and a botanist with a celebrated garden at his town house in Williamsburg, was also eccentric and quarrelsome. Having first seemed to favor the match, he then objected to Martha as a wife for his son. But Martha showed herself a confident young woman and one capable of dealing with an irresolute suitor and a volatile head of the family.
Daniel, aged thirty-eight in 1749, was more than twenty years older than Martha, a bachelor who lived quietly at the White House on the Pamunkey River, tending his tobacco crop. Though handsome in a swarthy way and undeniably rich, he had at least once failed to succeed in a marital venture when his father could not agree on terms with the bride’s family. Unlike his father, who was a member of the Governor’s Council in the capital, Daniel took no part in public life beyond serving as an officer of the local militia and acting as vestryman at his parish church, St. Peter’s, New Kent. Martha’s father, John Dandridge, who was clerk of New Kent Courthouse, was also a member of this vestry. Like many others, he incurred John Custis’s wrath, according to friends of the old man. His crime was to have fathered a daughter so “much inferior…in point of fortune” to Daniel. Chestnut Grove, the modest Dandridge home where Martha grew up a few miles downriver from her suitor’s home, stood in only five hundred acres, and its workforce of slaves numbered fewer than ten.
Not content with rejecting Martha on the ground of fortune, John Custis IV, it seems, also objected to her as a bride because of an animus he bore against the entire Dandridge clan. Martha’s wealthy and well-connected uncle William, though by then dead, had been an adver-
sary of Custis’s on the Governor’s Council for many years. Custis expressed his displeasure by presenting Williamsburg friends Matthew Moody and his wife with gifts of furniture and horses and family plate. To remonstrances, he allegedly replied that he preferred the Moodys to have them “rather…than any Dandridge’s daughter or any Dandridge that ever wore a head…he had not been at work all his life time for Dandridge’s daughter.”
Daniel Parke Custis feared that his father would go further. John Custis extravagantly favored “Black Jack,” a former slave whom he had freed in 1748 and on whom he had settled 250 acres. “Black Jack” was certainly the son of Custis’s slave Alice and very probably his own illegitimate son. Daniel feared that his capricious father would disinherit him in favor of the boy, and he hesitated to marry without his father’s consent. But seventeen-year-old Martha carried the day. The eldest of a large family, she knew what it was to deal with tantrums, and turned away Custis’s wrath with a “prudent speech,” according to Daniel’s friend and attorney James Power. Whereupon the contrary old man declared that he would rather his son married her “than any lady in Virginia.” Following this statement, and before he could recant, Custis fell ill, died, and was buried in the autumn of that year, leaving most of his worldly goods, including the mansion in town, to the son he had tormented. The will made provision for “Black Jack,” directing that he be accommodated with a house furnished with Russian leather chairs, black walnut tables, and feather beds. But the young man was not destined to enjoy such comfort for long. Within two years he had died of a fever. Meanwhile Daniel and Martha had married in May 1750 and set up home together at the White House.
Daniel Parke Custis had already proved a good manager of the acres lying in and about New Kent County. “If everyone would take the same pains with their tobacco and fling away as much [substandard leaf] as I do,” he wrote to London merchant Robert Cary in 1755, “there would not be such complaints of the inspectors [in England] as there are.” He administered competently the enlarged estate that he inherited on his father’s death, and lived quietly with Martha at the White House. In six years they produced four children.
The standard of living Martha now enjoyed was far higher than that at her childhood home. Both plantations were situated on ground close to the slow-moving Pamunkey River and shrouded from the summer heat by oaks, hickories, and maples. Low-lying agricultural fields and freshwater marshes formed part of a distinctive riparian terrain where bald eagles and great blue herons nested and fished. The shallow, winding river was the lifeblood of the locale, and at different points where the course narrowed, ferry crossings connected neighboring families. Many of those families were also connected by blood. It was a pleasant neighborhood and one with which Martha had been intimately familiar from birth.
Before her marriage Martha had, it seems, spent some years “up the country”—possibly in the wealthier atmosphere of Elsing Green, her uncle William’s brick mansion, on the northern banks of the river. Elsing Green contained, among other treasures, one of the few picture galleries in Virginia—a nod, perhaps, to the Dandridge family’s artistic heritage: Martha’s paternal grandfather had been a master painter-stainer in London. Another London relative, recently dead, had been her uncle, Bartholomew Dandridge; a pupil of Sir Godfrey Kneller, he was a celebrated portrait painter, whose image of Frederick, Prince of Wales, was widely reproduced. In future years Martha was to play an important part in disseminating images of her second husband. Even during her first marriage, John Wollaston, an English painter popular in Virginia, obtained the commission, in 1757, to paint portraits of her and of Daniel. He also painted a double portrait of their children then living. A scarlet cardinal bird—emblem of Virginia—perches somewhat improbably on three-year-old Jacky’s fist. Jacky is breeched and in coat and waistcoat, while his sister, Patsy, only a year old, is propped up, doll-like, in a satin dress. Another portrait, The Custis Children, attributed to Matthew Pratt, probably dates from the time of her second marriage.
Not only did Martha have an artistic eye. She also had, like many Virginians, a connoisseur’s approach to material goods. Luxurious apparel and furnishings, china and silver—all imported from England—were badges of rank in this society. At least once a year she ordered from London suppliers fashionable and costly clothes for herself and her children and household articles of quality, as Daniel Parke Custis’s invoice book, noting each year’s commissions, attests. Robert Cary and Co. in London was, historically, the London merchant house that had dealt with the major part of the Parke Custis tobacco. The trade that they entered into with Daniel was mirrored in the transactions between dozens of other houses or firms in British ports and other Virginian families. Each year Daniel shipped to London, together with the hogsheads (barrels containing a thousand pounds of tobacco) from the numerous plantations, an invoice listing the innumerable items required at the White House and elsewhere over the course of the following year. Upon reception of the shipload, Cary and Co. sold the tobacco, for prices that varied dramatically. At the same time they applied to ironmongers, mantua-makers, cobblers, and coachmakers—to name a few of the relevant suppliers—for the items requested on Daniel’s invoice. The credits from the tobacco sales and debits from the inventory purchases were entered. Six months later a ship bringing such goods as had been obtained would appear in the York River, with a load to be transferred to the Pamunkey tributary and ultimately to the Parke Custis estate.1
Invoices for the years following their marriage show the reliance Daniel and Martha placed on their London suppliers. A smart “two wheeled chair” or carriage, painted a “pleasant stone colour” and adorned with “gold shields, arms and crest,” was acquired in 1750. The following year’s invoice listed a “blue and white” tea and coffee service, and a silver sugar dish “with a cover to fit very close.” On this dish, and on a milk pot, on a stand and on twelve salvers, all to be of silver, Daniel instructed that his arms be engraved. On a practical note he added: “2 brushes to clean silver with.” The agent was to procure, in 1752, among many other items, “two pairs of very neat silver shoe buckles for Mrs. Custis’s own wear” and “one piece of fine flowered calico for Mrs. Custis.” At the same time an order was placed for “a fashionable cap and feather for my son, about two years well grown.” Planters had to think far ahead in making out their invoices. Martha had given birth on November 19, 1751, to a son and heir, to be known for his short life as Daniel Parke Custis II. But by the time this consignment from London made its way across the Atlantic and to the Pamunkey, it would be the autumn of 1752 and the child a year old.
Time passed, and the invoice sent to merchant Thomas Godwin the following year includes: “5 pairs of pumps [shoes] for my son, about 2½ years old, of different sizes.” By then Frances Parke Custis, a sister for young Daniel II, born on April 12, 1753, had joined the family. Orders, looking ahead, are placed with Cary and Co. for “2 caps, for a girl about one year” and for three pairs of pumps “for a girl about one year old of different sizes.” Like the earlier order for the tea and coffee service, a commission for twelve silver beakers—“each of them to hold one pint with my arms engraved on them”—suggests that, even in the quiet surrounds of the White House plantation, the Parke Custises as a couple upheld the Virginian tradition of sociability and hospitality. Was this Martha’s influence? How did she deal with a husband so much her elder, so long a reclusive bachelor? She appears to have charmed him into spending a fortune. In 1754, for instance, Daniel ordered Robert Cary to obtain “18 yards of the best pink tabby [watered silk] with a fashionable white satin stripe with binding for the same, and no lining.” In addition, a London merchant, owner of an establishment called The Lock of Hair in Fleet Street, made for Martha an “extraordinary white cut peruke and dress and a set of curls of best natural curled hair and newest fashion.”
Although Daniel made so many purchases, both necessary and lavish, for his family and home, in other matters he was cautious, especially once the Dunbar suit was on appeal in London. Just as it was the duty of every Virginian to offer hospitality to anyone who came calling, so it was considered the duty of a gentleman in Virginia to grant loans to family, friends, and neighbors. Daniel became creditor to some but declared, in November 1754, that he “never would meddle with one farthing” he had in England until the lawsuit was over. If it should go against him, he affirmed, “all that I have in the world would scarcely do…[to meet the Antigua plaintiffs’ demands].” Once Martha had control of the estate, she showed herself a true Virginian and ended this rule of prudence that friends and neighbors no doubt viewed as parsimony.
While Martha was in her early twenties and Daniel in his early forties, a somber item appears in the invoice for 1754: “tomb for my son.” The Parke Custises’ son and heir Daniel II died in February that year, aged two or three, and was buried in the old Parke graveyard at Queen’s Creek near Williamsburg. His parents went into mourning for fifteen months, as was prescribed for the death of a child or parent. For an initial six months, deep mourning was observed, and Martha wore unrelieved black. In her jewelry, she abjured colored stones. For a further six months, known as half mourning, touches of white might alleviate the dark palette. During second mourning, the last of the prescribed periods, lavender, mauve, gray, and other muted shades were permitted. Daniel II’s sister, Frances or “Fanny,” lived to wear “3 pr of mittens to fit a girl of 2 years old” as well as the “fine thread,” “worsted,” and “scarlet” stockings that figure on the invoice sent to Robert Cary and Co. in 1754. She lived also to become elder sister to John Parke Custis, to whom Martha gave birth on November 27, of that year and to a younger sister, Martha, born sometime in 1756. Daniel ordered “two pairs of red satin shoes for Fanny, 2 years old” in 1755, as well as, a year later, “2 fashionable necklaces” and “one fashionable hat for my daughter, 3 years old.” But further additions to Fanny’s wardrobe stopped abruptly. In April 1757 the child died, eleven days short of her fourth birthday and, like her brother before her, joined Parke forebears in the Queen’s Creek cemetery. Thus in the space of three years Martha gave birth to her two younger children and lost her two older ones. In addition, her father, John Dandridge, had died unexpectedly while in Fredericksburg in August 1756, and she was still in half mourning for him. Her daughter’s death caused her to resume deep mourning.
Wollaston’s stiff, doe-eyed portraits of 1757 show the reduced family—Daniel and Martha and their surviving children, John or “Jacky” and Martha or “Patsy” Parke Custis. At this date Martha was still only twenty-five, Jacky and Patsy two and a half and about one. Deaths in childhood in this period were common, and there was no reason why more children should not follow. But only three months after the death of his elder daughter, Daniel himself was abruptly taken ill in July. Despite the attentions of a Williamsburg doctor, he died the following day. The flurry of grief, mourning, and burial arrangements included Martha’s sending to Cary and Co. for the shipping of “One handsome tombstone of the best durable marble to cost about £100.” Her husband and two elder children now all lay in the Queen’s Creek plot. Martha, still in black for Fanny, must wear mourning for two more years, the period prescribed following the death of a husband. A year of deep mourning was succeeded by six months of half mourning and six of second mourning. An exception was made only if, after the initial year, she acquired a serious suitor. She might then resume everyday attire.
This catalog of deaths when she was in her early twenties must go some way toward explaining an anomaly in Martha’s character. All her future life she was to be, for one so capable and strong-minded, exceptionally nervous and fearful about the health of her children and, later, of her grandchildren. To the immediate challenges of widowhood and of mothering her fatherless children, she rose confidently. With the children, she had ample help in the shape of the White House house slaves and servants. Lawyers, including her brother Bartholomew Dandridge and Robert Carter Nicholas, supported her in the decision she took then to administer the large Parke Custis estate herself. She did it for the most part with aplomb, although her late husband would have deplored her improvidence in making loans to family and friends. A steward, Joseph Valentine, supervised the work of the plantation overseers and the field slaves and answered to her. Martha herself undertook the necessary correspondence with shipping agents in London concerning the dispatch and insurance of the hogsheads crammed with tobacco leaf, which she sent from the estate for sale across the Atlantic.
“I shall yearly ship a considerable part of the tobacco I make to you,” she wrote in August 1757 to Robert Cary and Co., “which I shall take care to have made as good as possible and hope you will do your endeavour to get me a good price.” She sent that year thirty-six hogsheads in all—that is, some 36,000 pounds of tobacco. “I shall want some goods this year for my family,” she added, “which I have inclosed an invoice of and hope you will take care they are well bought and sent me by your first ship to this river [the James River].”
As Daniel had died before composing the year’s invoice, she filled it out herself. For once, there are no items of adornment for Martha. For her mother, Frances Jones Dandridge, who was now observing second mourning for her husband, Martha’s father, there was only a pair of “very well made silk pumps.” Martha’s daughter Patsy, going on a year and a half, was to receive only such “pumps” or shoes as are most proper for “such a child.” For Jacky, now the sole male Parke Custis and a child in whom his mother vested much, Martha commissioned, besides two pairs of calf leather pumps, “1 pair calves’ leather shoes, red heels, well sewed.”
Martha was not long widowed when she heard with concern that the Privy Council in London had overturned the dismissal in Virginia of the Dunbar suit. The Antigua plaintiffs were therefore free to seek a retrial in the General Court in Williamsburg. In December 1757 she wrote to John Hanbury and Co., rival agents to Cary and Co. in London, who received some Parke Custis tobacco, expressing her surprise at this outcome. She had been advised in Virginia, she informed the firm, that “Mr. Custis [her late husband] was very unfortunate in losing so good a cause.” In lieu of further animadversions on the London lawyers’ capabilities, she asked for a “particular”—or detailed—account of “the charges of the lawsuit.” Refusing all accommodation with the plaintiffs, though the case would very likely proceed to retrial in Williamsburg, she wrote, “no doubt the matter will turn out in my favour.” Martha’s attorney was to prevail, late in 1758, on John Robinson, speaker of the House of Burgesses, to act as guardian—in legal matters—to her children. In his father’s place, four-year-old Jacky was now “chief defendant” in this and any other lawsuit that might be brought against the estate. Martha and her daughter were also liable.
Martha Dandridge Custis, while fully and competently engaged in this Atlantic trade and while conducting herself ably in a complicated Chancery suit, had nevertheless inhabited a narrow milieu all her twenty-six years, venturing no further than to other houses on the Pamunkey or before marriage to Williamsburg. In the colonial capital she found many friends. Her mother, Frances Jones Dandridge, was related to half the lawyers and clerics in the capital as well as to numerous burgesses. But Martha had not even found her husband in the capital: she had married a Pamunkey neighbor, and upon marriage had settled in the self same parish in New Kent County where she had grown up. Her encounter with George Washington in March 1758 would introduce her not only to life in northern Virginia but, by degrees, to a wider world than the younger Martha could ever have dreamed of.
1 Sterling was always in short supply in Virginia. From 1755 some paper currency—technically, bills of credit—was printed in the colony as part of the war effort and, denoted in pounds, shillings, and pence, was known as “current money.” (Because other colonies issued their own paper currency, that printed in Williamsburg was also distinguished as “Virginia currency” or “Virginia money.”) The worth of colonial currencies against each other and against sterling fluctuated. At this time Virginia money was worth about seventeen shillings in the pound sterling. Spanish coins—gold ones known as pistoles, worth nearly a pound sterling, and silver pesos or dollars, worth about five shillings—also circulated in the colonies, as did smaller denominations of Spanish and Portuguese coin or “specie.” The system of credit with London agents on which Virginia planters relied had the advantage that no exchange rate was involved.