“the place shall not be carried without some loss”
WASHINGTON REACHED NEW YORK on April 13, 1776, in company with his new aide William Palfrey, secretary Stephen Moylan, and General Horatio Gates. Martha, traveling more slowly with her pregnant daughter-in-law and Jacky, arrived four days later. Three years earlier young Parke Custis had enjoyed a privileged existence at King’s College, under the supervision of President Myles Cooper. The city was much changed now. A new revolutionary committee of safety was in power, while Royal Governor William Tryon hovered in a British man-of-war in the harbor. All but five regiments of those that Washington had commanded at Cambridge were now stationed in the city. King’s College was closed and served as an army hospital. Dr. Cooper himself, condemned for publishing tracts arguing that opposition to the Crown constituted treason, had taken ship for England, never to return.
The Washingtons established themselves in an elegant house on Richmond Hill, a mile and a half north of the city, belonging to Abraham Mortier, British army paymaster. New Yorker Mary Smith was employed as housekeeper and kept the accounts. Caleb Gibbs, an officer with the Fourteenth Continental Regiment from Marblehead, Massachusetts, captained a company known as “the guard,” formed in March to protect the chief from attack. Yankee Gibbs himself was cheerful and capable, but some of the men under him proved irksome. Though proud of their duty, they were not quick to perform it and consumed rather more than their fair share of food and drink.
Facing the Hudson, the Mortier property offered views of the New Jersey shore opposite, of the city southward, and of farmland northward. The grounds included a large enclosed flower garden, shrubs, and venerable oaks. There was little time for the Washingtons to enjoy these amenities together. The commander, whether at work here or at his official headquarters on Broadway in town, was overseeing the completion of fortifications to the city. Charles Lee, who had begun this work, was now in the south with orders to combat Clinton in the Carolinas. Washington reconnoitered, in addition, Staten Island and Long Island. His aim was to see all the places where Howe and his forces might possibly land. No matter where the British troopships that had earlier left Boston harbor might be currently located, their goal, in the opinion of the American commander, was New York. Wherever he was located, the general was, with his aides, engaged in correspondence. As at Cambridge, he pressed Congress for more arms, more men, and more money.
Washington wrote from New York to President Hancock in Philadelphia on April 23, pleading for an increase in pay for Robert Hanson Harrison, acting secretary, and other aides-de-camp. The letter attests to the burden of business undertaken at headquarters: “nothing but the zeal of those gentlemen who live with me and act in this capacity for the great American cause and personal attachment to me, has induced them to undergo the trouble and confinement they have experienced since they have become members of my family. I give into no kind of amusements myself, consequently those about me can have none, but are confined from morn till eve hearing, and answering the applications and letters of one and another.” This work would, he expected, only increase as the business of the “Northern and Eastern departments” passed through his hands.
“If these gentlemen had the same relaxation from duty as other officers have in their common routine,” he continued, “there would not be so much in it, but to have the mind always upon the stretch—scarce ever unbent—and no hours for recreation, makes a material odds.” By way of recompense, three days later his aides received the rank of lieutenant colonel. If their minds were “always upon the stretch—scarce ever unbent,” how much more so was that of their commander.
Early in May Washington wrote again to Hancock: “The designs of the Enemy are too much behind the Curtain, for me to form any accurate opinion of their Plan of Operations for the Summers Campaign; we are left to wander therefore in the field of conjecture.” It had by now emerged that Howe and his forces were massed at Halifax in Nova Scotia. There was no doubt in Washington’s mind that the British meant to gain control of the Hudson and thus isolate New England. It was anyone’s guess whether they intended, proceeding up the St. Lawrence, to advance down the Hudson on New York. They might instead sail down the coast, attack the city, and advance up the river. He had written to Hancock on April 26: “for anything we know, I think it not improbable they may attempt both…if they have men.”
The difficulties that Washington had faced, overseeing the siege of Boston, were as nothing to the oppressive responsibilities that were now his as commander-in-chief of the Continental army. Word came from Lee in the south sporadically. There were not men enough to defend successfully the approach to the Hudson in the north and to garrison New York as well. Nine regiments had perforce been dispatched to Canada, where Continental troops were battered by disease as much as by the British army. There were those far off in Congress who clamored for more troops to be sent north, advocating that Washington himself take the northern command. But he had made his position clear on the twenty-sixth: “I Could wish indeed that the Army in Canada should be more powerfully reinforced, at the Same time I am Conscious, that the trusting this important post (which is now become the Grand Magazine of America)”—New York—“to the handful of men remaining here is running too great a risque.” Securing the Hudson was also of vital importance: “I cannot at present advise the Sending any more troops from hence.” As ever, Washington declared that he remained the servant of Congress and would do its bidding.
Though he continued to believe that the British would strike at New York, Washington was aware that he courted disaster, were Howe instead to launch all his forces down the St. Lawrence. Martha remained behind at the Mortier house when her son and daughter-in-law left at the end of April for Virginia and Mount Airy, where Nelly would have her accouchement later in the summer. Jacky Parke Custis, for all his faults, was alive to the profound affection that existed between his mother and his stepfather. He wrote from home, in June, that in Martha, George had the one person who could “alleviate the Care and Anxiety which public Transactions may occasion.”
Martha had it in mind to undergo, in Philadelphia, inoculation for smallpox. The city boasted several physicians of repute who specialized in the procedure. “I doubt her resolution,” her husband told his brother John Augustine on April 29. No doubt he recalled Martha’s fears where her son’s inoculation had been concerned. But when he was called to Congress to discuss the military options a month later, Martha went as well. Her motive in seeking inoculation at Philadelphia is clear from the June letter that Jacky wrote to Washington, following the conclusion of the operation: “She can now attend you to any Part of the Continent with pleasure, unsullied by the Apprehensions of that Disorder.…Your happiness when together will be much greater than when you are apart.”
Martha had been bold this April, in going with Mrs. Warren into the ruins of Charlestown, an area where smallpox had festered over previous months. In Virginia too, the disease had broken out in January. Patriots rejoiced at the deaths of more than 300 emancipated slaves and indentured servants, and numerous British officers and sergeants, in Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment. Smallpox proved still more inimical to the Continental forces besieging Quebec. Over half of the 1,900 men there were diseased. The siege was raised in May, and the Continentals retreated south to Ticonderoga, pursued by British regulars. If Martha was determined to follow her husband wherever the vagaries of war should lead him, her inoculation was a very necessary measure.
President Hancock and his wife inhabited a large and airy house on Arch Street in Philadelphia. Hearing of Martha’s resolution to take lodgings, while in that city, on Chestnut Street, Hancock wrote to Washington: “Mrs Hancock will esteem it an Honour to have Mrs Washington inoculated in her House.…I am informed Mr Randolph has not any Lady about his House to take the necessary care of Mrs Washington.” Benjamin Randolph, master craftsman, sold cabinetwork and chair work at the Sign of the Golden Eagle. He rented out rooms at the same establishment. Delegates to Congress—including Washington himself the previous year—were Randolph’s clients of late. Though there was no other “Lady about his House,” Martha had no need of one. As a Virginia lady, she traveled with her own maids—favored house slaves from Mount Vernon. Her husband had at his various headquarters as “body servant” or valet Billy Lee. This slave had, at home, among much else, accompanied his master out hunting. While Washington, lodging elsewhere, embarked on a slew of meetings with Congress, Martha was infected with the pox at Chestnut Street on May 23, the day she arrived in Philadelphia.
Washington was—privately—disappointed by his dealings with Congress. The representatives of whole provinces were still “feeding themselves upon the dainty food of reconciliation,” he wrote on May 31 to his brother John Augustine. Rumors, widespread, that Britain was sending across the Atlantic commissioners bent on peace were acting in the House as “a clog” to preparations for the defense of America. Washington wrote of his belief that “the Idea was only to deceive, and throw us off our ground.” The only “Commissioners” he believed in were the mercenaries from Hesse-Cassel and other German principalities hired by the British government who, according to intelligence, were sailing to America to swell the regulars there.
The commander followed the progress of his wife’s inoculation with anxious care. Martha showed some bravery in being inoculated—probably by Dr. William Shippen, Jr.—immediately on reaching the city. Most doctors—profitably—had their patients follow a regimen for weeks preceding the administration of the pox, with several weeks of isolation and convalescence to follow. Jacky’s inoculation in Baltimore, on which Boucher had made detailed reports, had followed such a pattern. But Shippen and other physicians were fast moving to a belief that neither preparation nor prolonged convalescence was needed. Washington wrote to Burwell Bassett on June 4 that Martha was “like to have it very favourably, having got through the Fever and not more than about a dozen Pustules appearing (this being the 13th day since the Infection was received).” Five days earlier he had written to his brother John Augustine. Martha had thought it prudent to enclose no letter to her sister-in-law—“notwithstanding,” wrote her husband, “there could be but little danger in conveying the Infection in this Manner.” Martha conformed to convention in abstaining from letter writing while infectious. It was still widely believed that paper as well as clothing and other materials could carry the disease. She kept at least one appointment, when others would have convalesced. She and Washington both acceded to President Hancock’s wish that they sit for three-quarter-length portraits to Charles Willson Peale, and gave the artist a sitting apiece.
In more peaceable times Peale had painted Washington in colonial uniform, as well as Jacky and Patsy, at Mount Vernon. Now, making a name for himself in Philadelphia, the ambitious young artist portrayed Washington in regimental buff and blue and against a background recalling the triumphant siege of the spring. Both portraits in oil—of the commander-in-chief and of his consort—were on show in Peale’s studio on Arch Street through the summer and attracted the attention of delegates and citizens. Mezzotints of the companion images went on sale and were widely disseminated. These went some way to satisfy a new American public that was eager to know more of their chief general and his consort. Though Washington’s portrait in oils survives, that of “Lady Washington” has vanished. The engravings show her with pearls in her hair, standing, with one elbow resting on a monumental table. She wears a loose gown with billowing sleeves. A tail of brown hair is pulled forward over one breast. The overwhelming impression is, if pleasing, also sober. It is implied that this is a woman given to grave reflection. A pilastered wall and classical view glimpsed through the window behind her lends something of the antique to the composition.
In the general confusion that reigned about the part that women might bear in an independent America, it became fashionable in learned circles to look to erudite or patriotic women of the Roman Republic for models. Delegate John Adams was to write to his wife, Abigail, in August: “In reading history, you will generally observe, when you light upon a great character, whether a general, a statesman, or philosopher, some female about him, either in the character of a mother, wife, or sister, who has knowledge and ambition above the ordinary level of women, and that much of his eminence is owing to her precepts, example, or instigation, in some shape or other.”
Despite the nod to the antique in Peale’s portrait of Martha, she hardly fits with Adams’s model. She had no “knowledge and ambition above the ordinary level of women” in the narrow sense. She read devotional literature at the beginning and end of each day. When she was at leisure, the books she liked were novels. Washington’s “eminence” was not owing to her exhortation. And yet she was supremely important to him. Theirs was not, in short, a marriage on the virtuous Roman model that so appealed to Adams and other contemporaries. Something of Martha’s own confident and attractive personality emerges from the mezzotints. She appears sure of herself and at her ease, unrestrained by others’ classical notions.
Martha, who was far more interested than her husband in the art of portraiture, also sat this summer for a miniature, which survives. Four years earlier, when Patsy still lived and before war had come to America, Peale had created a luxurious image for her son. Everything about this new image is sober and realistic. Martha’s hair is powdered but otherwise without ornament, and her dress is dark. At her neck she wears a thin ribbon, and her chin is now doubled, her face more rounded, and her bosom plumper. Though she smiles, her eyes are watchful, and her mouth strained.
The simple gold frame of this miniature is worn and thin. Washington, according to legend, carried his wife’s miniature with him during the war. If such was the case, this was probably the image in question. Martha had a matching miniature by Peale of her husband. His long head and pink cheeks are like those in the artist’s full-scale paintings, where Washington is a general in action. The mood here is pensive. The royal blue sash, mark of office, is a flare of color in an otherwise quiet portrait. This keepsake Martha too is said to have had with her throughout the war.
Both Washingtons were in Philadelphia when they learned from John Augustine, a delegate to the Virginia Convention, of dramatic events in that cauldron of revolution Williamsburg. On May 15 the convention had approved a resolution directing its delegates to the Continental Congress to introduce a motion of independence. A further resolution was also carried unanimously. It called for a convention committee to be appointed and prepare a declaration of rights and a “plan of government” or constitution for an independent Virginia. Washington wrote to his brother, on May 31, that he was very glad to hear of “so noble a vote.” In mid-June George Mason, author of the Fairfax County Resolves, was to introduce in Williamsburg the declaration of rights he had composed. The preamble to Mason’s Virginia declaration began: “That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights…namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty…”
With a copy of this document to hand, Thomas Jefferson worked in Philadelphia on a document that would assert independence for all thirteen colonies. At the end of May, Washington’s mind was, instead, on the planned constitution. “To form a new Government,” he wrote to John Augustine, “requires infinite care, & unbounded attention.…My fear is, that you will all get tired and homesick, the consequence of which will be, that you will patch up some kind of Constitution as defective as the present.” This should be avoided, he urged. The framework of the constitution was intended to “render Million’s happy, or Miserable…a matter of such moment cannot be the Work of a day.”
The delegates in Williamsburg were in no mood for long deliberations. The provisional assemblies of other former colonies were eager to be first to declare independence. Following a few fervent weeks of business, Virginia was to be third to declare—on June 29—and to approve a constitution. George and Martha Washington became citizens in an independent state, a commonwealth, and ties between the former Old Dominion and Britain were declared “totally dissolved.”
Washington left Philadelphia in early June. He planned to await Howe and his forces in New York, where he presumed the enemy’s grand efforts would be centered, now that they had control of Canada. Before setting out, he told his brother John Augustine, on the fourth, that he anticipated a “very blood [sic] Summer of it” in the north. But he did not anticipate the enemy’s early arrival. Accordingly Martha, who remained behind in Philadelphia, intended to join her husband soon. She was apparently “in fine spirits” when she dined, a week after Washington’s departure, at President Hancock’s Arch Street home. The times were stirring. Richard Henry Lee had galvanized even the most sluggardly delegates when he proposed this motion on the seventh: “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.” John Adams seconded him. In the debates that followed, some delegates proved more determined than others in the pursuit of liberty from the mother country. The arguments were not yet concluded when Martha set out for New York.
Soon after her arrival there, the Washington household on Richmond Hill was thrown into sudden confusion. A considerable number of Loyalists remained in the city, though others, like their Massachusetts brethren, now avowed their fidelity to the Crown in England or in more peaceable parts under British rule. On the twenty-third the New York authorities arrested Mary Smith, housekeeper at the Mortier house, on suspicion of being involved in a Loyalist plot to take the city. This left the commander of the Continental army, as he told Continental colonel James Clinton in Albany, “entirely destitute, and put to much inconvenience.” Clinton, Washington directed, was to search out a Mrs. Thompson in the Albany area, who was recommended as a fit person to supply Smith’s place. Elizabeth Thompson was located and hired. Though over seventy when she arrived at the Mortier house, she was to act as housekeeper in many different headquarters during the war. Caleb Gibbs took over the keeping of the household accounts.
On June 29—the same day that Virginia became a commonwealth—fifty sail, bearing the first of General William Howe’s troops, arrived in New York waters. The ladies of the Continental command were dispatched, in consequence, out of the city the following day. Only days after she had journeyed from Philadelphia, Martha was bound there once more. By July 1, 130 sail, with an estimated eight or nine thousand troops, were off Sandy Hook. Howe swiftly occupied Staten Island, as Washington, powerless to prevent it, had guessed he would. News that the British had arrived in New York, if nothing else, secured, in Philadelphia, universal approval, on July 2, for Lee’s resolution. Two days later, “The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,” the statement of independence that Jefferson had crafted, was adopted.
Washington, writing from New York on July 10, informed President Hancock that he had “caused the declaration to be proclaimed before all the army” under his immediate command—“the expressions and behaviour of both officers and men testifying to their warmest approbation of it.” Some ebullient troops pulled down a statue of George III on Bowling Green, an act that the commander condemned in passing next day. He had matters of greater moment to occupy him. On the twelfth a flagship was sighted. Aboard was Admiral Lord Howe, in command of the British fleet off the American coast, as his brother was of the army amassing on Staten Island. Washington, writing an account of enemy activity to his own brother John Augustine on the twenty-second, observed that more ships were “popping in.” He guessed—correctly—that German mercenaries were on board. The Crown had hired from Hesse-Cassel and other small German principalities regiments to supplement the British forces sent against the American rebels. No attack, Washington surmised, would take place until all reinforcements had arrived. Time alone would show what kind of opposition the Continentals offered. “The men appear to be in good spirits,” he wrote, but he presumed New York would soon be in enemy occupation: “if they [the men] will stand by me the place shall not be carried without some loss.”
Washington labored to put New York and Long Island into a “posture of defence.” Martha, by contrast, was in residence at Germantown, a summer resort above the Schuylkill River popular with Philadelphia society and—of late—delegates to Congress. She lodged with Virginia delegate Thomas Nelson of Yorktown and his wife. Washington told his brother that Martha thought of returning home to Mount Vernon: “there is little or no prospect of her being with me any part of this Summer.” Her grandchild’s coming birth might have lured her home. The marauding “Ethiopians,” commanded by Lord Dunmore, were now greatly reduced in number by smallpox, and the force had ceased to represent any threat in Virginia. She remained at Germantown, where she would have early news of action at New York, through July and August.
Though all were anxious about the outcome in the north, life in the resort was pleasant, and intelligence from Virginia as well as from New York easy to come by. Martha dined at The Hills, the elegant country retreat of Robert Morris, Philadelphia financier. Virginia delegate Benjamin Harrison, whose language so outraged John Adams, was another of her hosts. News came that Lord Dunmore was gone from Virginia waters at last. The piratical earl had sailed, with his few remaining troops, for New York. Jacky wrote from home on August 21 of “everything being quiet (which I think is the best news) since Dunmore left us.” He had heard that the earl was “dead of the flux (I wish it may be true).”
In New York, Washington was waiting, and his spies were watching, for the British and Hessians to launch an attack from Staten Island. As “another revolving Monday” came around on August 19, Washington told Lund at Mount Vernon that he was at a loss to account for the delay: “they are in possession of an Island only, which it never was in our power, or Intention to dispute their Landing on…this is but a small step towards the Conquest of this Continent.” Moreover, he argued, the enemy must be aware that the American forces were being—if slowly—augmented as the weeks passed. Over a week later, when Washington wrote to Martha, stalemate still obtained.
From Pennsylvania, Martha sent her sister Nancy Bassett at Eltham a budget of news the next day: “My dear sister, I am still in this town and no prospects at present of my leaving it. The General is at New York. He is very well and wrote to me yesterday.” In consequence she could inform her sister that Dunmore had joined Howe at New York. Another division of the Hessians was expected “before, they think, the regulars will begin their attack.” She added that “some here begin to think, there will be no battle after all.”
Martha glossed over the failure, on August 16, of Continental row galleys, including Lady Washington, and fireships, to destroy enemy vessels on the Hudson. She wrote to Nancy that one of the Continental fireships had grappled with a British ship of war “ten minutes, but she got clear of her.…Our people burnt one of the tenders.” She continued, “I thank God we won’t want men—the army at New York is very large, and numbers of men are still going. There is at this time in the city [Philadelphia] four thousand on their march to the camp.” For all her martial vigor, Martha longed for the battles to come to be concluded: “I do, my dear sister, most religiously wish there was an end to the matter that we might have the pleasure of meeting again.” The elder sister admonished the younger: “I don’t hear from you as often as I used to do at Cambridge.”
If Nancy was an infrequent correspondent, Jacky wrote from Mount Airy on August 21 with compliments to Mr. and Mrs. Nelson and very welcome news: “I have the extreme happiness at last to inform you that Nelly was safely delivered this morning about five o’clock of a fine daughter.” He wished his mother had been present to see “the strapping hussy.” The “other little one”—the daughter who had lived briefly the previous year—was “a mere dwarf,” he declared, beside this one. “Her clothes are already too small for her.” Jacky could not pretend to say who the child—to be christened Elizabeth and known during youth as Bet, then as Betsy and later as Eliza—resembled. “It is as much like Doctor Rumney”—the family physician and Washington’s fellow sportsman—“as anybody else,” he wrote. “She has a double chin something like his, in point of fatness.” He went on to write rhapsodically of her “fine black hair and eyes. Upon the whole I think it is as pretty and fine a baba as ever I saw.” If he would never be the sober man of business and learning that his stepfather had hoped for, Jacky assumed the roles of husband and father willingly. “Poor Nelly has had a very indifferent time,” he wrote of his wife, “…the pleasure her daughter gives her compensates for the pain she has suffered.”
In New York, Washington continued to write regularly of estate matters to Lund at Mount Vernon. He wrote on August 26 that he “most ardently” wanted the northern extension to the house covered in and completed, “if you should be obliged to send all over Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania for nails to do it with.” He was eager for the New Room—as the large reception room this extension would furnish was always known—to be constructed. Uncharacteristically, he encouraged Lund to act for himself, if only in the matter of where best to sell flour: “you know I shall not disapprove of anything you do (although it should not turn out well), as I am persuaded you mean to do for the best.” It is unlikely that Lund, a natural lieutenant, was cheered by this expression of—limited—confidence in him. But the general was oppressed, when he wrote, by his duties to “the noble cause we are engaged in.” The British had at last made a move, and “a pretty considerable part of their force” had landed on Long Island. These troops were now encamped within three miles of the Continental lines there that General Nathanael Greene commanded.
Only a wood and some broken ground lay between these opposing forces. In New York, Washington thought the British show of strength on Long Island might yet prove a feint. They had sufficient troops still on Staten Island to attack the city. He hesitated to commit more men to Greene. “A few days more, I should think, will bring matters to an issue one way or another,” he told Lund on the twenty-sixth; “…victory, if unfortunately it should decide in favour of the enemy, will not be purchased at an easy rate.”
The general proved a poor prophet. The very next day the British struck on Long Island. Aided by information that the Continentals had left a strategic eastward pass undefended, they secured an easy victory. In this first engagement between the United States of America and the army of their former overlord, two Continental generals—Lord Stirling and Sullivan—as well as 600 troops were taken prisoner. In driving rain Washington watched from afar on horseback, helpless to affect the disastrous outcome. Only in the retreat from Long Island to Manhattan, which took place under cover of darkness on the night of August 29, did Washington prove effective as a general. The 9,000 troops under his command gained and crossed the East River successfully.
Washington apologized to President Hancock, on the morning of August 31, for a delay in informing him of the retreat. For forty-eight hours he had hardly been off his horse and had never closed his eyes till he reached New York. He was thus, he regretted, “quite unfit to write or dictate” till now. Within days it became clear that further mortification and humiliation were to be his lot. Intelligence came that the British intended to “enclose” the American forces on Manhattan, taking up a position at the northernmost part of the island and securing the harbor to the south with their ships. At a council of war on September 7, the painful decision was taken to evacuate New York. The new aim was to establish “strong posts” on the upper part of the island and on the Jersey shore opposite.
From new headquarters in Harlem Heights, Washington wrote to his cousin Lund on the thirtieth that all comfort and happiness eluded him: “such is my situation that if I were to wish the bitterest curse to an enemy on this side of the grave, I should put him in my stead with my feelings.…I see the impossibility of serving with reputation, or doing any essential service to the cause by continuing in command, and yet I am told that if I quit the command, inevitable ruin will follow from the distraction that will ensue.” He told his cousin, “…I never was in such an unhappy, divided state since I was born.”
Martha could no longer linger in Pennsylvania. All hope of rejoining her husband was extinguished with British occupation of New York. Now they would be eager to overcome Washington’s forces on the Hudson and sweep through New Jersey, with Philadelphia their next goal. She set out southward, bound for home.