Long before Sally Fairfax’s letters stirred speculations about George Washington’s relationships with women beyond his ostensible devotion to Martha Dandridge Custis, newspapers carried stories that suggested he was a womanizer of epic proportions.
The first of these tales appeared in 1775, soon after Washington reached Cambridge to take command of the impromptu army besieging the British in Boston. He found himself plunged into chaos. The army was closer to a mob, living in crude huts and tents with little or no concern for sanitation. There was a shocking shortage of gunpowder, and the haphazard fortifications erected against a British foray from Boston were next to worthless. Washington was soon bombarding Congress with requests for ammunition and trained engineers and complaining mightily about the undisciplined ways of his New England troops.
One of the general’s correspondents was Congressman Benjamin Harrison of Virginia. Older than Washington, he was known as a jovial man whose conversation was frequently racy. On August 17, 1775, The Massachusetts Gazette; and the Boston Weekly News-Letter, a newspaper published inside the British-occupied city, reported in gleeful terms that a royal navy warship had captured a letter from Harrison that revealed a side of General Washington that might surprise the public.
The letter began with several businesslike paragraphs about the difficulty of finding engineers and Congress’s anxiety to locate ammunition for the army. Then the tone abruptly shifted:
As I was in the pleasing task of writing to you, a little noise occasioned me to turn my head round and who should appear but pretty little Kate the washer-woman’s daughter over the way, clean, trim and rosey as the Morning: I snatch’d the golden glorious opportunity, and but for that accursed antidote to love, Sukey, [probably a house slave] I had fitted her for my general against his return. We were obliged to part but not till we had contrived to meet again; if she keeps the appointment I shall relish a week’s longer stay—I give you some of these adventures to amuse you and unbend your mind from the cares of war.
In a recent book on the sex lives of the presidents, the author gleefully accepted this letter as authentic. He stated that Harrison was Washington’s procurer in Philadelphia. He noted that the letter was soon published in England, as if this guaranteed its authenticity.1
Fortunately for those who prefer their history unflavored by fiction, the story of the letter’s seizure and publication can be explored in depth. We know that Harrison actually wrote it and gave it to a young Massachusetts lawyer named Benjamin Hichborn, who was about to leave Philadelphia for Boston. John Adams added two letters to Hichborn’s pouch—one for his wife, Abigail, the other for his friend James Warren. Hichborn decided the quickest route home was by way of Rhode Island. On a ferry from Newport to the mainland, he was seized by a boarding party from a British warship and was soon a prisoner in a cell aboard the flagship of the admiral commanding the British fleet in Boston harbor. The bloody battle of Bunker Hill had recently been fought, and the British assumed all-out war was now inevitable.
Hichborn had foolishly hesitated to throw his letters overboard. Ashore in Boston, the British high command read them with interest. All three made it clear that the Americans were getting ready to declare their independence and fight a war to defend it. John Adams assailed various people in Congress who hesitated to take this plunge. The British published both his letters, hoping to sow dissension in the rebels’ ranks. But there was nothing noteworthy in Harrison’s letter unless it could somehow be improved.
This turned out to be a fairly simple task. On the admiral’s staff was a fluent writer named Gefferini who was able to compose the authentic-sounding paragraph about Kate the washerwoman’s daughter and put it into the middle of the letter. Why are we sure of this? Because there are copies of the original letter in the Public Record Office in England—without the fraudulent paragraph. General Thomas Gage, commander of the British army, was an old friend of General Washington, and he forwarded the original to his superiors in London without comment or tampering.2
II
When the war shifted to New York, Washington found he was in a very different city and state from Massachusetts, where loyalists were only a handful. A committee of the New York legislature worked full time to detect conspiracies and ferret out spies. In June they discovered a loyalist plot to assassinate and/or kidnap General Washington. A member of his guard, Thomas Hickey, was arrested, convicted of treason, and hanged.
In 1777, the British used this plot to go to work on Washington’s reputation again. From London came a pamphlet, “Minutes of the Trial and Examination of Certain Persons in the Province of New York.” The printer, John Bew, claimed it was based on documents from the files of the New York Assembly committee that was ferreting out loyalist conspiracies. The records had been captured in New York when the Americans retreated from the city in late 1776.
This claim was true up to a point. A comparison of the actual minutes of the committee makes it obvious that Bew had the records on his desk when he wrote the pamphlet. All the witnesses were involved in the trial of Thomas Hickey.
There was no attempt to win sympathy for that unlucky conspirator. The meat of the pamphlet was testimony from two witnesses, who claimed that it would have been far easier to kidnap or assassinate General Washington than was generally believed. Why? The first witness, William Cooper, said that the general was in the habit of visiting a woman named Mary Gibbons, “late at night in disguise.” Mary was a spy who passed along everything Washington told her to a loyalist named John Clayford, who often talked about what he learned while drinking with other loyalists at the Serjeants-Arms Inn. One of the things Washington supposedly told Mary was that “he wished his hands were clear of the dirty New Englanders.”
Witness two was a soldier named William Savage. He testified that while General Washington snored the sleep of a sexually satisfied man, Mary Gibbons went through his pockets and extracted numerous letters and documents that she slipped to John Clayford for quick copying and clandestine return.
The testimony of these witnesses was inserted into the overall minutes with the same skill displayed by the writer who altered the letter from Benjamin Harrison. The Mary Gibbons story, told with great sincerity and seeming plausibility, acquired a life of its own. It has inspired novels and nonfiction books portraying Mary as one of dozens of women with whom Washington enjoyed voracious sex. Its believability sinks to zero if we recall that Martha Washington was in New York at the time of George’s supposedly insatiable visits to Mary. Morever, there is no record of soldiers named William Savage or William Cooper in the American army. Nor has anyone ever heard of John Clayford, outside the pages of Bew’s pamphlet.3
III
The British pursued Washington’s infidelity as a topic in another pamphlet that John Bew published in 1777, titled “Letters from George Washington to Several of his Friends in the year 1776.” These letters were supposedly discovered in a satchel carried by Washington’s slave, Billy Lee, who was reportedly captured at Fort Lee, New Jersey, when that Hudson River bastion surrendered without a fight. Most of the letters concentrated on Washington’s political foibles. He repeatedly insulted New Englanders. He accused them of leaking his military plans to the British. At another point he told a friend that he considered the struggle hopeless, with such despicable allies. He also confessed that he was still loyal to the king and the war was a terrible misunderstanding.
In one letter, the British veered into Washington’s private life. Supposedly writing to Martha, he began it with “My Dearest Life and Love” and closed with “Your Most Grateful and Tender Husband.” Both are phrases that Washington never used in any surviving letter to her. The letter is dated June 24, 1776—the same period in which he was supposedly enjoying his midnight visits to Mary Gibbons. It is addressed to Martha as if she were at Mount Vernon, and urges her to go to Philadelphia, where she can be inoculated against smallpox. After this advice, the general expatiates on how intensely he is hoping for negotiations with the “English commissioners” and an early “pacification.”4
We now know that these letters were probably written by John Randolph, the former attorney general of Virginia, who had remained loyal to the king and retreated to London before the fighting war began. He knew Washington well and was in touch with numerous loyalists who picked up the gossip about Washington’s dislike of New Englanders. The pamphlet was reprinted in New York by the loyalist newspaper editor James Rivington. When Washington read the letters, he was with his army at Valley Forge. He wrote an outraged letter to Congressman Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, condemning the British for being “governed by no principles that ought to actuate honest men.” In 1778, most Americans seemed to agree with this opinion. The letters were also dismissed and generally disbelieved in England, where Washington’s reputation remained high throughout the war.5
IV
In Washington’s second term as president, these 1777 forgeries underwent a rebirth and acquired a following of remarkably virulent proportions. The letters were reprinted in New York and Boston in 1795 and used to argue that Washington had been a secret enemy of numerous patriots during the Revolution, and in many ways had favored the English. This supposedly explained his declaration of neutrality in the war between England and Revolutionary France and his decision to sign a treaty that John Jay had negotiated with the British, which pro-French Americans regarded as a capitulation to London’s hegemony. Soon the letters were collected into a book, Domestic and Confidential Epistles, with a preface that solemnly declared they would be “regarded as a valuable acquisition by a very great majority of the citizens of the United States.”
At first Washington attempted to ignore these exhumed attacks, but they circulated so widely that on his last day in office, he decided to write a letter to Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and “disown them in explicit terms.” He considered this act “a justice due to my own character and to posterity.” Along with denying he ever wrote the letters, he pointed out that Billy Lee had never been captured during the Revolutionary War, nor had any part of his (Washington’s) baggage fallen into enemy hands. Pickering thought the letter was so effective that he released it to the newspapers.
One might think this would have ended the matter, but many booksellers simply printed Washington’s letter in the front of the book, apparently convinced that if he took so much trouble to deny the letters, they were probably authentic. As late as 1872 the book was being sold by a rare-book collector, who noted it had the Washington letter in it and commented, “To this day there are writers who from choice or warped moral vision give credit to lies rather than truth.”6
V
In 1871, an oil portrait of Thomas Posey was unveiled in the Indiana statehouse and a hitherto unnoticed chapter in Washington’s early life suddenly became headline news. Thomas Posey was an authentic American hero. He had volunteered for the Continental Army when the Revolution began and had served for the entire war, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He had repeatedly distinguished himself as a battle leader in many bloody clashes. Afterward, he served in the army of the 1790s as a brigadier general and was named territorial governor as Indiana moved toward statehood. Anything written about him was bound to attract attention, at least in the Midwest.
Not long after the portrait was unveiled, the Cincinnati Daily Commercial published an article by an unnamed man from Indianapolis asking, “Was Geo. Washington a father?” The writer declared that “none who are acquainted with the evidence…doubts the assertion that Posey was the son of George Washington.” The accusation was based on a claim that Posey’s parents had been tenants on one of Mount Vernon’s farms. After his father died in 1754, Posey’s mother had a liaison with the then unmarried George Washington and gave birth to Thomas. Thereafter, Washington supervised the boy’s education and saw that he had a decent home life when his mother remarried. General Washington named Colonel Posey to his staff during the Revolution and appointed him a brigadier general in the 1790s and finally territorial governor of Indiana.
Papers all over the Midwest ran the article, never bothering to check its wild divergence from easily ascertainable facts. Posey never spent a day on Washington’s staff during the Revolution, and the president was dead when Posey became territorial governor of Indiana. Instead, the Daily Commercial dispatched a reporter to Indiana. The newsman interviewed numerous unnamed persons who assured him that in “the generation that has passed away,” the tradition that Washington was Thomas Posey’s father was frequently discussed and widely accepted.
The kernel of truth in the story was Thomas Posey’s connection to Mount Vernon. He was the oldest son of Washington’s closest neighbor, Captain John Posey, who lived with his wife and five children at Rover’s Delight, just west of Washington’s plantation. John Posey had served on the frontier with the young Colonel Washington, courageously leading a company of soldiers who specialized in building fortified camps and roads, often under enemy fire. At home, Posey was always ready to join Washington in a fox hunt, followed by a few drinks at Rover’s Delight or Mount Vernon. Unfortunately, Posey’s few drinks frequently multiplied into many later in the evening and often continued multiplying for several days.
Captain Posey had a steady income from a ferry that he ran across the Potomac to Maryland, but he had no head for keeping track of his money. He began by borrowing small sums from Washington and soon owed him 750 pounds—the equivalent of perhaps $75,000 today. Worse, he could not even pay the interest on the debt. He owed more money to people in Virginia and in Maryland. Washington wrote him strenuous letters, but kept loaning him money even when it became obvious that he was never going to get it back. Meanwhile, Posey and his wife and children were always welcome at Mount Vernon. Their oldest daughter, Milly, became Patsy Custis’s favorite companion.
In 1769, as creditors closed in on Posey, Washington advised him to sell his Potomac lands and the ferry contract, pay his debts, and move west. Land was cheap there, and a man could make a fresh start with very little money. Washington frequently rode to Rover’s Delight to repeat this advice, but found it was “no easy matter to find the Captn at home and still more difficult to take him in a trim capable of business.” Drunk most of the time, the distraught Posey ignored Washington’s advice.7
Posey’s tall nineteen-year-old son, Thomas, grimly aware that his father was bankrupt, took Washington’s advice. After a consultation at Mount Vernon, Thomas headed west to Augusta County in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, a region where Colonel Washington’s name still meant a great deal to many people. Washington may have loaned him enough money to make the journey. Thomas also probably obtained letters from his father, introducing him to friends in Staunton, the principal town in the county. The captain had soldiered there during an expedition against the Cherokees in the early 1760s. In 1772, Thomas married the adopted daughter of Staunton’s wealthiest merchant and opened a thriving saddlery shop in a nearby town.8
By that time, John Posey was a ruined man. He showed up at Mount Vernon to borrow small sums, which Washington noted in his account book as “Charity to Capt. Posey.” The ex-colonel remained deeply sympathetic to the plight of Posey’s other sons and paid for the education of two of them. In 1774, with Posey’s wife dead and his family scattered, the captain wrote a last pathetic letter to his Mount Vernon neighbor, describing himself as “advanc’d in years” and “really not able to work.” He thanked Washington for his “many favors” and apologized for being reduced so “very low.” Washington invited him to dinner and gave him twelve pounds. That was the last time Washington had any contact with Captain John Posey. Nothing in this account reveals or even suggests that Washington was a former lover of Posey’s wife.
VI
The Daily Commercial’s story remained dormant for the next fifteen years. In 1886, the St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat suddenly reported that in Shawneetown, in southern Illlinois, where Thomas Posey was buried, virtually every man, woman, and child was convinced that George Washington was Posey’s father. The story was based on statements made by some of Posey’s descendants and also by a strong resemblance to Washington noted in one of Posey’s sons. The reporter dredged up a physical description of Posey, published in 1824, that stressed his six-foot-two-inch height and muscular appearance—supposed proof of Washington’s paternity.
The paper followed this story with an interview with a great-grandson of Thomas Posey, a Missouri banker named George Wilson. He dismissed any and all blood connection to Washington. He analyzed portraits of Posey and Washington, pointing out numerous dissimilarities. Wilson added that Colonel John A. Washington, a grandnephew of the general, had told him there were at least a dozen other people who claimed descent from a Washington-fathered son or daughter. Not one had withstood investigation. Finally, Wilson pointed to a brief autobiographical statement by Posey, in which he wrote that he was born of “respectable parentage.” Would he have written this if he were illegitimate?
The story refused to die. It surfaced in other papers in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Missouri. The St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat returned to the fray in 1898 with a four-part story that drew on seemingly reliable research. The source seems to have been an unpublished article by a director of the Smithsonian Institution that propounded the theory that Thomas Posey had been placed in the Posey family by his real father, George Washington. His mother was from “one of the most distinguished families in Virginia.” She was the reason Thomas Posey’s real identity was never revealed. Backing the argument was another analysis of the supposedly strong physical resemblance between the two men.
Out of nowhere at this point reemerged George Wilson, the chief repudiator of the story, to announce that he was now a believer. He had discovered the name of the woman who had been the partner in Washington’s teenage passion—Elisabeth Lloyd. She died giving birth to Thomas, and Washington had arranged for him to be raised by a widow named Posey, a “woman of culture.” In this version, the name Posey was a coincidence—he had nothing to do with John Posey and his family. Wilson’s story ran in the Indianapolis News. Adding to the confusion, Wilson died not long after the story was published, and no one ever found his research. Nor did he tell anyone where he had heard about Elisabeth Lloyd, who remains a mystery woman to this day. All Wilson left were two paintings, one of Posey, the other of Washington, which purported to prove the strong resemblance between father and illegitimate son.
The story nonetheless convinced editors of encyclopedias and historical compendiums such as Revolutionary Soldiers Buried in Illinois to refer to Posey as “reputedly the natural son of George Washington.” By the 1920s, John C. Fitzpatrick, director of the Library of Congress and soon to be editor of George Washington’s papers, felt compelled to attack the story in Scribner’s Magazine, dismissing it as fiction. In his biography of Washington, Fitzpatrick returned to the attack, noting Washington had befriended and supported several of Posey’s sons. Did this mean he was also their father? he asked mockingly. He also noted that Washington financed the education of many other young men. “If every child whose education was assisted by Washington were to be stigmatized,” Fitzpatrick wrote wryly, “the distinction of being The Father of His Country might take on a new meaning.”
Fitzpatrick was particularly hard on those whose arguments were based on “alleged physical resemblance.” He called it “the quintessence of inexcusable credulity.” He also took aim at a letter Washington wrote to Posey during the Revolution, which according to some people began with “My Dear Son.” The letter did not contain another personal reference. It was all military business, ending with the usual “Your most obdt. & humble Servant.” When Fitzpatrick examined the original letter, he saw that the claimants were unfamiliar with “one of Washington’s pen characteristics.” It was sometimes hard to distinguish his “word-ending letters”—understandable because he was often writing in haste. A close look at the letter reveals it began with “My Dear Sir.”9
This is not the end of the story. A recent biographer of Thomas Posey points out that if he was born, as most people agree, in 1750, it is unlikely that John Posey was his father. Posey did not marry Martha Harrison, Thomas’s putative mother, until 1752. This suggests that Thomas may have been born of another woman and taken into the Posey family. How eighteen-year-old George Washington, with very little money and not an iota of fame, could have managed this arrangement remains unexplored. But the secret might explain Washington’s “extraordinary liberality” to Captain Posey and his family. The writer stubbornly ignores Fitzpatrick’s observation that Washington was frequently a generous supporter of the sons of cash-short friends.
Nevertheless, the biographer, a descendant of Thomas Posey, presses on. He cites Washington’s early love letters, in which he moaned about his passion for a “lowland beauty” and for another “agreeable young woman” who added “fuel to the fire.” The author recounts Thomas Posey’s similar physical appearance, his courage under fire, and his undoubted gift for leadership. “Both [Washington and Posey] died at the same age, of similar causes,” he writes. But he is forced to conclude that there is no hard evidence to prove Washington’s paternity. The best he can say is that “those who choose to do so may perhaps be forgiven if they continue to believe that Thomas Posey was really the son of George Washington.”10
VII
After he returned to Mount Vernon in the final days of 1783, Washington devoted most of the next two years to reviving the plantation’s commercial vitality. Almost as absorbing was the stream of visitors who took advantage of his hospitality to have a meal with the man who was now considered the greatest living American. Yet in these same years some people maintain that Washington fathered a boy named West Ford by a slave named Venus, who lived at Bushfield, his brother Jack’s plantation, ninety-five miles away. The child was born sometime in the year 1784 or 1785.
No mention of the boy as George Washington’s son has been found in any letter, diary, memoir, or newspaper before Washington’s death in 1799. West Ford never visited Mount Vernon until 1802, when Martha Washington died and the plantation was inherited by Bushrod Washington, Jack’s son.
Bushrod brought West Ford and a number of slaves from Bushfield. By that time, Ford was a free man. Bushrod’s mother, Hannah, freed him in her will in 1801. From that time until his death in 1863, Ford was a fixture at Mount Vernon, a sort of combination servant and caretaker. In 1850, historian Benson Lossing, who “discovered” the forged letter George supposedly wrote to Martha in 1758, interviewed him. He drew a sketch of Ford, in which some people later found a strong resemblance to George Washington. But Lossing made no claim of paternity in his written account of the interview.
Not until the closing decade of the twentieth century did many people take seriously the claim that West Ford was George Washington’s son. Linda Allen Bryant and Janet Allen, descendants of Ford, launched a media campaign that won widespread attention in newspapers and on television. Stories ran in USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the New York Times, quoting them and discussing the validity of their claim. The sisters created a website, and in 2001 Bryant published a book, I Cannot Tell A Lie, The True Story of George Washington’s African American Descendants. In her preface, she explained why the book is a historical novel rather than a nonfiction work backed by documents and footnotes: “This format allowed me to relay my heritage in the way it was passed down through the generations by the Ford chroniclers.”11
In the narrative’s first chapter, seventeen-year-old Venus recalls the night at Bushfield that “Master John”—Washington’s brother—told her that Master George “needs comforting and has asked for you.”
Venus replied that she would “go and light the fire and warm some bricks for his bed.”
“Ah, Master George needs warming of another kind,” Jack replied.12
After that first fateful night, Venus supposedly became Master George’s preferred bedmate whenever he visited Bushfield. When she accompanied Hannah Washington, Jack’s wife, to Mount Vernon, Master George enjoyed her there, too, until she became pregnant. Thereafter he “left her alone.” When the child was born, Venus decided not to christen him George. “Master George Washington was too politically important to have scandal attached to his name,” she thought. Also, in her mother’s words, “the responsibilities of commanding an army had made him sterner, almost unapproachable.” So Venus called the baby “West.”13
Later in the book, Mrs. Bryant describes how Washington took a special interest in West. At the age of four, he became Washington’s “personal attendant” when he visited Bushfield. He “would fetch and carry and do all kinds of small errands” for him. He sat beside the general on “wagon rides” around the countryside and even accompanied him to church.
One day, after spending some time with Master George, West asked his mother, “Mamma, is the old General my papa?”
At first Venus was panicky. She wanted to know “who done told you that?” West said Bushfield’s cook and her helpers talked about it all the time. They said he looked like the General. Venus realized “the [whole] slave population at Bushfield and Mount Vernon knew. No news could escape the slave telegraph.”
Venus studied her son’s chestnut-colored hair, put her arms around him, and said, “The Old General be your papa.” But she warned him to tell no one, for the time being. “One day you can tell your children but for now it be our secret.”14
It is a touching story, but facts show it to be fatally flawed. The assumption that Washington paid many visits to Bushfield in the years after he returned from the war is refuted by the detailed information we have for his whereabouts almost every day, thanks to his diary and account books. In fact, there is no documented evidence that he visited Bushfield even once in the years between his return from the war in 1783 and Jack Washington’s death in 1787. Hannah Washington visited Mount Vernon once during this period, and Venus may have accompanied her. But the notion that George would ask for Venus at Mount Vernon, where Martha shared his bedroom and the house was filled with visitors eager to ogle the most famous man in the country, is difficult to accept. Also, the Ford family oral tradition clearly identifies Bushfield as the site of the supposed tryst.15
There would seem to be little doubt that West Ford had Washington blood in his veins. But it was probably inherited from Jack Washington or one of his three sons, Bushrod, Corbin, or William Augustine. The latter died around the time West was conceived. Ford’s emancipation and the consideration with which he was treated by Bushrod Washington, who left him over a hundred acres of land in his will, is not untypical of how many southern planters attempted to provide for their own or their family’s mulatto slave children. Equally familiar is the tendency of a slave mother to tell her mulatto son or daughter that their real father was “old master” or someone even more distinguished, rather than the overseer or a temporary white workman, or some nameless white guest to whom the master had given access to his slaves, in what some considered the great tradition of southern hospitality.16
VIII
The same faux historian who described Congressman Benjamin Harrison as Washington’s procurer claims that the sixty-eight-year-old ex-president caught the cold that led to his death while jumping out a back window with his trousers in his hand after an assignation with an overseer’s wife. This is a story that John C. Fitzpatrick labeled “the most nebulous of all the slanders,” but over the years it “gathered its strength from mere repetition.” It is an extreme example of the things people have believed—and some continue to believe—about George Washington’s imaginary love life.
Ultimately, the George Washington pseudo-scandals are a cautionary tale about the way fame attracts this sort of defamation from those who want to believe the worst about a great man. Their reasons run the gamut from envy to political partisanship to revenge for perceived or imagined wrongs.17