“she reminded me of the Roman matrons”
WASHINGTON, ON JULY 11, 1780, directed Major “Light Horse Harry” Lee to dance attention on the French admiral and general at Newport, and impress “every kind of refreshment the country affords; cattle, vegetables, etc for the use of our allies.” Five days later the American commander addressed the Comte de Rochambeau directly, in a letter he entrusted to Lafayette. He begged the French general to consider “all the information” this emissary gave and “all the propositions he makes…as coming from me.” His chief wish, as he wrote to Rochambeau, was to “fix our plan of operations, and with as much secrecy as possible.” Washington concluded, “Impatiently waiting for the time when our operations will afford me the pleasure of a personal acquaintance with you, I have the honour, etc.”
British naval superiority frustrated Washington’s scheme for an allied attack on New York in the coming months. A second fleet with a division of French troops, 2,000 strong, with arms and armaments, was expected from Brest. While they awaited this aid, the American and French commanders separately endured numerous alarums and excursions. Clinton, returned from the south, made a move on Rhode Island. Washington countered by marching on New York. The British commander speedily returned to the city.
Constantly on the move so as not to exhaust any one district’s supplies and enrage its inhabitants, Washington wrote to his brother Samuel from “Camp near Fort Lee” on August 31: “The flattering prospect which seemed to be opening to our view in the month of May is vanishing like the morning dew.” There was no sign of the French troops and ships expected from Brest: “I despair of doing anything in this quarter this campaign.…At best the troops we have are only fed hand to mouth and for the last four or five days have been without meat.”
Within days the Alliance frigate brought bad news from France. The British had blockaded Brest. The ships and troops promised to America were penned in. With no prospect of taking New York while the British enjoyed naval supremacy in the Sound, Washington looked to campaigns in the new year to restore the country’s fortunes. Much ceremony and profession of friendship at a meeting with Rochambeau in the latter part of September could not disguise this unpalatable fact. For the moment the allies were powerless to move against the British.
In the south, Lord Cornwallis, whom Clinton had left in command, scored a notable victory over Horatio Gates at the battle of Camden. The British general was moving north and was dangerously near the border of North Carolina with Virginia. If he and Clinton were to succeed in joining forces in the Chesapeake, they could rout the American army of the north. Washington placed little confidence in an act passed in the Virginia Assembly to raise 3,000 men. He told Jacky on August 6: “it is our misfortune to have such kind of laws (though most important) badly executed, and such men as are raised dissipated and lost before they join the army.”
Troubles came daily. General Benedict Arnold, recently appointed to the command of West Point, was unveiled as a traitor. He had been ready to hand the garrison over to the British. Washington rejected the plea of the British major John André, Arnold’s accomplice, that as an officer, he should be executed by firing squad. He had André hanged as a spy on October 2. Arnold himself escaped arrest and led enemy troops south the following month. His former commander was relentless in his pursuit of the turncoat, whom he wished to see court-martialed.
There was general condemnation of Horatio Gates for the inadequate part he had played at Camden, and Washington directed Nathanael Greene to take over the command in the south. It was an admirable appointment. Victories over the British were to follow, culminating in the defeat of Cornwallis at the battle of Guilford Courthouse, North Carolina, the following spring. When the British general began a march northward into Virginia in April 1781, Greene lost the advantage, but he seized the opportunity to take back undefended positions in South Carolina.
Commenting, in early October 1780, on the “inactive campaign” in the north drawing to a close, Washington wrote to General Cadwalader: “I hoped, but I hoped in vain, that a prospect was displaying, which would enable me to fix a period of my military pursuits, and restore me to domestic life.” On the cold, wet, and tedious journey to a new encampment that followed, he informed the president of Congress on October 7 that there was not a drop of rum to be had for the men.
Martha had reached Mount Vernon in mid-July and told her brother-in-law Bassett on the eighteenth: “I got home on Friday, and find myself so much fatigué with my ride that I shall not be able to come down to see you this summer.” Sending her compliments to Eltham neighbors, the rector of the parish church and his wife included, she asked that, instead, he bring her niece Fanny to her, and indeed her nephews too. “As soon as you can,” she urged, already thinking ahead to her return to her husband. “I suffered so much by going late that I have determined to go early in the fall before the frost set in—if Fanny does not come soon, she will have but a short time to stay with me.”
At Abingdon, Jacky was filling the house with fine furniture and company, but he still lacked a son. Nelly gave birth this year to twin daughters. They survived long enough to be mourned when they sickened and died. Jacky had now sired six children in all without a male heir living or dead among them. On one occasion, when his eldest daughter, “Bet,” later Eliza, was four or five, he responded carelessly and even cruelly, if her later recollection is to be believed. After a convivial dinner at home, he lifted her onto the dining table. He and Dr. Rumney, who was among the guests, had the child sing “very improper” ballads to amuse the company. When Nelly Calvert Custis came in to remonstrate, Jacky replied that “his little Bet could not be injured by what she did not understand, that he had no Boy, & she must make fun for him, until he had.”
Nelly retired, smiling, according to her daughter’s recollection, who would think no ill of her father. Eliza Parke Custis’s later imagination soared on wings when describing Jacky, her early life at Abingdon, and those events of the war that she was old enough to remember. The lack of an heir undoubtedly kept Jacky from undertaking military duties. He served his country only as a member of the Virginia Assembly.
Eliza later affirmed that, when they were children, the Calvert family at Mount Airy favored her younger sister Patty, who was as fair and peaceable as themselves. Of Martha, her paternal grandmother, she wrote: “she had all that tenderness of manner which my father had, & when with her I was always in her arms.” Distance may have sugared her memory. Eliza recorded, too, times when she had stood by and seen Martha pack her traveling trunk: “my heart was almost broke, when she was obliged to go to the Gen.rl, & I was always talking of her & wishing her return.” To the lid interior of a trunk, she affixed a label recalling the high days when Martha returned with “the many gifts she always brought for her grandchildren.” To this extent Eliza’s colourful testimony is corroborated: during her absences from Mount Vernon in the years of conflict, Martha was always at pains to acquire dolls and toys for the children back home.
Martha had expended much love on Jacky and on Patsy, who had required so much care. In her affections Fanny Bassett probably came before her Parke Custis granddaughters, though the youngest, Eleanor—or Nelly, like her mother—was resident at Mount Vernon. Her daughter-in-law Nelly, since becoming a mother, was less close to Martha, but a bond survived from when the two had earlier been affectionate, following Patsy’s death and during the early years of the Parke Custises’ marriage. Jacky warred with Washington for prime place in her affections. The looked-for birth of an heir to the Parke Custis estates might bring a new contender.
At the beginning of the year, for reasons of security, Thomas Jefferson, governor of the Washingtons’ home state, had transferred all public offices and the state assembly from Williamsburg to Richmond, farther inland. From Mount Vernon, Martha wrote in early August to urge participation in an unusual fund-raising scheme on the governor’s wife, Martha Skelton Jefferson. The campaign, spearheaded by Joseph Reed’s wife, Esther, had been launched while Martha was in Philadelphia in June, on her way home. In the Pennsylvania Gazette, on June 21, “American Women” in that state were urged to contribute funds so that Washington could “procure to the army the objects of subsistence, arms or clothings, which are due to them by the continent.” Monies raised were to be regarded as an “extraordinary bounty, intended to render the condition of the soldier more pleasant.” On July 4 Esther Reed informed the commander-in-chief that “200,580 Doll. & £625.6.8 in Specie” had been donated. This amounted, “in Paper Money”—that is, the depreciated Continental currency—to $300,634. French ladies, as well as “American Women,” had contributed, Madame de La Luzerne chief among them. Lafayette pledged a generous sum on behalf of his wife the marquise in France. Washington, though grateful, resisted suggestions from Mrs. Reed that the sum raised be doled out in cash to the soldiers. Shirts, stockings, and sobriety were called for in the current crisis. He informed her of these needs in courteous language. Shirts and stockings, if not sobriety, he got.
Mrs. Washington informed Mrs. Jefferson that the ladies of Maryland were proving similarly generous. In her turn on August 8 the governor’s wife addressed the wife of James Madison, Sr., a wealthy Virginia planter and militia colonel. Mrs. Jefferson felt justified, she informed Eleanor Madison, by the “sanction of her [Mrs. Washington’s] letter in handing forth the scheme.” Next day the announcement of the campaign in the Virginia Gazette duly bore the name of the governor’s wife.
In the locale of Mount Vernon, the “American Ladies” vigorously set to their task of rendering the soldier’s life pleasant. Collections were made at the different churches, following “sermons suited to the occasion.” The ladies of Alexandria, “under the lead of ‘Lady Washington,’ ” it was later asserted, contributed $75,800. Martha herself gave $20,000, equivalent to £6,000. It was listed in October, in the account book that Lund kept at Mount Vernon, as “Mrs Washington’s Bounty to the Soldiers.”
Whether at headquarters or at home, Martha, as wife of “His Excellency,” was courted. In September she thanked Arthur Lee, former commissioner at Versailles, for “an elegant piece of china.” Gone was the servitude of the Old Dominion when Martha and George—and before them, Martha and her first husband—sent to the china merchants of London for tea services and dinner plates. In the United States of America all things French were prized, and this gift was no doubt a souvenir of Lee’s time in Paris. Martha placed no less value, at a time when resources of all kinds were scarce, on a “piece of net.” She informed Elizabeth Powel, the Washingtons’ elegant friend in Philadelphia, that she was sending it to her by a Lee emissary—either Arthur himself or another of the tribe: “Mr Lee has promised to be careful of it and to deliver it himself.” Martha, closing, begged her compliments to “Mr Powel.”
Far to the north, at Preakness, her husband worked on with his “family” (Alexander Hamilton, Tench Tilghman) and staff officers (Knox, Wayne, Robert Howe of North Carolina, and Captain of Guard Caleb Gibbs) to secure an end to the war. In December, New Windsor, immediately north of West Point, became their new winter home. Though he had not seen his own home for over five years, Washington could at least now look forward to the arrival of his wife.
Nathanael Greene, while on his journey from New Jersey to assume the command in the south, had stopped briefly at Mount Vernon with Baron von Steuben, engineer Du Ponceau, and other officers. They had found Martha planning to leave for the north “about the middle of this week.” If Martha was preoccupied by arrangements for that imminent and prolonged absence from home, she gave no sign of it. Hospitable and warm, she asked after Caty Greene, her companion in numerous winter headquarters, and promised to write to her. In a letter to Washington, Greene waxed lyrical about the commander’s home: “there is everything that nature and art can afford to render my stay happy and agreeable.…I don’t wonder that you languish so often to return to the pleasures of domestic life.” Du Ponceau years later recalled that at dinner at Mount Vernon the “table was abundantly served, but without profusion.” Afterward, while others viewed the grounds, Du Ponceau sat in the parlor “tête-à-tête” with Mrs. Washington. He recorded: “I shall never forget the affability, and, at the same time, the dignity of her demeanour. Our conversation was on general subjects. I can only remember the impression it left upon my mind.” Before the war Virginian Edmund Pendleton had likened Martha to a Spartan mother when she urged Washington to be bold at the forthcoming First Continental Congress. Du Ponceau rather thought of Martha as a woman from later antiquity: “she reminded me of the Roman matrons of whom I had read so much, and I thought that she well deserved to be the companion and friend of the greatest man of the age.”
While at Philadelphia, resting before her further journey north to New Windsor, Martha stayed with Joseph Reed, president of the Pennsylvania Council. The house was quiet. Reed was in mourning for his wife, Esther, who, following her recent exertions to secure donations from “American Ladies,” had unexpectedly died. Martha did receive de La Luzerne, the French minister, who had at all costs to be propitiated. With him came the Marquis de Chastellux, bearing agreeable news. He had visited Washington in New Jersey in late November, and told of the commander’s good health and apparent good spirits. De Chastellux took away an impression that Martha was “about forty or forty-five, rather plump, but fresh and with an agreeable face.” Martha would in fact be fifty the following June. Her energy as well as her pink and white complexion—and good white teeth, on which many remarked—remained youthful.
The Reed mansion was to be Martha’s last taste of comfort for many months, following her arrival in mid-December in New Windsor. Washington derided this settlement above the Hudson as a “dreary station.” Headquarters were a “plain Dutch house” belonging to one William Ellison, just outside the village. But at New Windsor the commander enjoyed the benefit of good communications by road and river with Congress, Rochambeau in Rhode Island, and Greene in the south. Up a hill at Vail’s Gate, Henry Knox and other key officers occupied a more commodious stone house. Lafayette installed himself, with Washington’s nephew George Augustine among his aides, in quarters across a creek.
Martha’s arrival lightened Washington’s mood. He wrote to Caty Greene in Rhode Island, enclosing a letter from her husband in the south: “Mrs Washington, who is just arrived at these my Quarters, joins me in most cordial wishes for your every felicity; & regrets the want of your Company—remember us to my namesake—Nat—I suppose can handle a Musket.” The Greenes had named their first two children after George and Martha. The birth of Nathanael, their fourth, had occurred in freezing Morristown this January.
Martha settled with apparent ease into the customary pattern of winter life in camp, though Washington told Lafayette their quarters were “very confined.” Dinner—meat, chicken, and vegetables, with pies and puddings to follow—was the great event of the day at headquarters. Washington, as ever, was much in conference with his staff and occupied, with the “family,” in anxious correspondence. Martha found time, on Boxing Day, to write to Peale in Philadelphia. She asked that a jeweler set, “neat and plain” and in matching bracelets, the miniatures of Jacky and Patsy that the artist had painted while her daughter still lived.
Pay and clothing for the army at New Windsor and in winter cantonments elsewhere were equally lacking that winter. Early in January 1781 Washington dispatched Knox on a mission to the eastern states. He had orders to beg from the governors of each “a sum equal to three months pay at least” for their troops and “a complete suit of clothes…shirts, vests, breeches, and stockings to carry them through the winter.” Knox was still on this thankless errand when Pennsylvania troops mutinied at Morristown. They raided the magazine for arms and set off for Philadelphia, declaring they would “demand a redress of their grievances from Congress.” The mutineers, following negotiation at Princeton, desisted. No mercy was shown to New Jersey troops, who were arrested the following month after they seized arms and marched. On Washington’s orders, their leaders were executed.
News came that 1,600 British and German troops had embarked at New York, their destination almost certainly the south. Still more unwelcome was the information, which Washington conveyed to Greene on January 2: “Arnold commands.” Greene wrote from Virginia to Alexander Hamilton at New Windsor that the commander-in-chief was adulated in his native state. Regrettably this veneration did not translate into a supply of men, clothing, provisions, or arms for Washington’s deputy. Cornwallis and his troops fortified southern positions and laid waste swaths of the Carolinas and of coastal Virginia. Greene could put up little defense. Washington took the decision to send Lafayette south with an auxiliary force consisting of 1,200 troops. At Head of Elk, Maryland, he was to combine forces with 1,200 French soldiers, who would come from Rhode Island by sea. Together they were to proceed to Virginia, to combat Arnold.
Washington’s decision to give this important command to the young French marquis, who was wholly unfamiliar with both the geography and the inhabitants of Virginia, was unpopular with many. Alexander Hamilton was one of several of the “family” who yearned for action and for an end to the daily drudgery of drafting and copying. One day in mid-February high words ensued between Washington and Hamilton, after they had been working at correspondence together till midnight the previous evening. Hamilton kept the commander waiting a few minutes. Washington lost his temper, and Hamilton seized the moment to resign. Though Washington apologized immediately, the insulted aide kept to his resolution. He remained at headquarters until David Humphreys, a new amanuensis, arrived and then secured, as he had long wished, command of a regiment.
So pressing was the need for communication with so many at this time that Martha herself turned secretary on at least one occasion: a February letter emanating from headquarters and bound for a clothier is in her handwriting. She may have been glad to pay a visit in March to Philip Schuyler at his elegant home in Albany. Dr. John Cochran, Schuyler’s brother-in-law and uncle to Betsy Schuyler Hamilton, was her escort.
Washington’s plans for Lafayette and French troops to confront Arnold were doomed to failure. A British naval armament at the entrance to Chesapeake Bay drove the French transports back to their base at Rhode Island. In the wake of this intelligence, the American commander ordered the marquis to head south and combine with Greene in Virginia against Cornwallis. Private as well as public humiliation was the American commander’s lot this spring. Toward the end of April, he and Martha learned that a marauding British warship had threatened Mount Vernon from the Potomac below. Custodian Lund had offered its captain refreshments and provisions in a (successful) bid to preserve the estate. Washington told his cousin on the thirtieth: “it would have been a less painful circumstance to me, to have heard, that in consequence of your non-compliance with their request, they had burnt my Houses, and laid the Plantation in ruins.” Martha too was exacting, writing in the third person to Lund a month later: “Mrs. Washington will be glad to know if the cotton for the counterpanes was wove and whitened. How many yards was there of it? How many counterpanes will it make? She desired Milly Posey”—aide to Lund—“to have the fine piece of linen made white. How is Betty?”—slave, spinning woman—“Has she been spinning all winter? Is [has] Charlotte”—house slave, seamstress—“done the work I left for her to do?”
If Martha was more than usually short with Lund, she had been suffering from what Washington described to Jacky, on May 31, as “a complaint in the Stomach, bilious, and now turned to a kind of Jaundice.” Though she was better than she had been, he wrote, she was “still weak and low.” He added: “As she is very desirous of seeing you, and as it is abt. the period for her returning to Virginia, I should be glad, if it does not interfere with any important engagements, if you could make her a visit.” Jacky excused himself. Nelly had at last given him, on April 30, a son and heir. George Washington Parke Custis, as the infant was named, was febrile in the early weeks of his life. His mother was unwell, as she had been following the birth of her third daughter. Jacky, an anxious husband and father, was reluctant to leave home.
Martha continued ill some weeks at New Windsor. In mid-June, Washington returned to a Loyalist donor restorative gifts including oranges, lemons and limes, pineapples, orgeat syrup, and hyssop tea intended for the invalid. No truck must be had with the enemy, however kind. When Martha left for home at the end of June, her health was still not firmly reestablished. Dr. James Craik, Alexandria physician turned army surgeon, was provided as a suitable escort for the journey to a state that was rapidly becoming a cauldron of war.
Cornwallis and Lafayette and Greene were skirmishing and fighting over much of southern Virginia. The defenses at Richmond, as Jefferson had feared, proved inadequate to resist British attack. Many of Martha’s relatives and friends, including her brother Bartholomew and brother-in-law Burwell Bassett, saw their estates damaged in the course of the fighting. Mount Vernon and the Potomac region did not suffer. Martha resumed control of her own household and, with it, responsibility for her grandson. The child, known as “Wash” or “Washy,” appears to have joined his elder sister Nelly in the Mount Vernon nursery, even before Martha reached home. Her daughter-in-law at Abingdon, it would seem, was once more, following childbirth, too ill not to relinquish care of her infant to others.
On the Hudson, Washington concerted numerous plans with Rochambeau to take New York, all of which failed. In mid-August came intelligence that the Comte de Grasse, admiral of a large French fleet in the West Indies, had responded to a plea from Rochambeau for aid. With 3,000 infantry on board, commanded by the Marquis de Saint-Simon, an experienced general, de Grasse and the fleet were headed for Hampton Roads. The time for a reckoning in the south had come, and Washington and Rochambeau, with their respective armies, headed swiftly south to bolster Lafayette’s forces in Virginia.
The marquis, encamped at Williamsburg, had skillfully backed Lord Cornwallis and the enemy into a defensive position at Yorktown, near the southern entrance to Chesapeake Bay. While heading south from Philadelphia, on September 5, Washington learned that de Grasse’s fleet had arrived off Cape Henry, in Virginia, at the southern extremity of Chesapeake Bay. An opportunity offered to invest Yorktown and force a British surrender.
Washington had resumed writing a journal earlier in the year. “Judging it highly expedient to be with the army in Virginia as soon as possible, to make the necessary arrangements for the Siege, & to get the Materials prepared for it,” he now wrote at Head of Elk, Maryland, “I determined to set out for the Camp of the Marquis de la Fayette without loss of time.” Leaving the northern army to make its way south under the command of Benjamin Lincoln, Washington pressed on. Leaving Baltimore early on the morning of September 9, he was soon in the Commonwealth of Virginia, which had been a British colony when he last left it. An entry in his journal is, though laconic, expressive of his pleasure in being, if briefly, at home: “9th. I reached my own Seat at Mount Vernon (distant 120 Miles from the Hd. of Elk).”
One evening only the Washingtons had for some degree of private pleasure together. On successive days members of the military “family”—Rochambeau, de Chastellux, and others—arrived. Mount Vernon was, until the allied commanders and suites left for Williamsburg on the twelfth, as much the scene of anxious conference as previous lodgings at Morristown or New Windsor. At this impromptu headquarters, Washington dared to hope for victory ahead at Yorktown.