Martha Washington
Martha Washington was the wife of George Washington, the first President of the United States. Although the title was not coined until after her death, Martha Washington served as the inaugural First Lady of the United States. During her lifetime she was often referred to as "Lady Washington".
She had first married Daniel Parke Custis, with whom she had four children, and was widowed by the age of 25. Two of her children by Custis survived to young adulthood. She brought her vast wealth to her marriage to Washington, which enabled him to buy land to add to his personal estate. She also brought nearly 1000 dower slaves for her use during her lifetime. They and their descendants reverted to her first husband's estate at her death and were inherited by his heirs. She and Washington did not have children together but they did rear her two surviving children by her first husband, including son John "Jacky" Parke Custis. They also helped both of their extended families.
Family and background
Martha Dandridge was born on June 13, 1731 on her parents' plantation Chestnut Grove in the British colony, Province of Virginia. She was the oldest daughter of John Dandridge, a Virginia planter and immigrant from England, by his wife Frances Jones, who was of American birth and English, Welsh, and French descent. Martha had three brothers and four sisters: John, William, Bartholomew, Anna Maria "Fanny" Bassett, Frances Dandridge, Elizabeth Aylett Henley and Mary Dandridge.Martha may have had an illegitimate half-sister, Ann Dandridge Costin, who was born into slavery. Costin's enslaved mother was of African and Cherokee descent, and her father was believed to be John Dandridge. Martha's father may also have fathered an out-of-wedlock half-brother to Martha named Ralph Dandridge, who was probably white.
First marriage
On May 15, 1750, at age 18, Martha married Daniel Parke Custis, a rich planter two decades her senior, and moved to his residence, White House Plantation, located on the south shore of the Pamunkey River, a few miles upriver from Chestnut Grove. They had four children together: Daniel, Frances, John, and Martha. Daniel and Frances died in childhood. The other two children, John Parke Custis and Martha Parke Custis, survived to young adulthood. Her husband's death in 1757 left Martha a rich young widow at age 25, with independent control over a dower inheritance for her lifetime, and trustee control over the inheritance of her minor children. In all, she was left in custody of some 17,500 acres of land and 300 slaves, apart from other investments and cash. According to her biographer, "she capably ran the five plantations left to her when her first husband died, bargaining with London merchants for the best tobacco prices."Second marriage
Martha Custis, age 27, and George Washington, age 26, married on January 6, 1759, at the White House plantation. As a man who lived and owned property in the area, Washington likely knew both Martha and Daniel Parke Custis for some time before Daniel's death. During March 1758 he visited her twice at the White House; the second time he came away with either an engagement of marriage or at least her promise to think about his proposal. At the time, she was also being courted by the planter Charles Carter, who was even wealthier than Washington.The wedding was grand. Washington's suit was of blue and silver cloth with red trimming and gold knee buckles. The bride wore purple silk shoes with spangled buckles, which are displayed at Mount Vernon. The couple honeymooned at the Custis' family's White House plantation for several weeks before setting up house at Washington's Mount Vernon estate. They appeared to have had a solid marriage.
Martha and George Washington had no children together, but they raised Martha's two surviving children. In 1773 her daughter Patsy died when she was 16 during an epileptic seizure. John Parke "Jacky" Custis left King's College that fall and married Eleanor Calvert in February 1774.
John was serving as a civilian aide to George Washington during the siege of Yorktown in 1781 during the American Revolutionary War when he died of "camp fever". After his death, the Washingtons raised the youngest two of John's four children, Eleanor Parke Custis, and George Washington Parke Custis. The two older girls remained with their mother. The Washingtons also provided personal and financial support to nieces, nephews and other family members in both the Dandridge and Washington families.
Content to live a private life at Mount Vernon and her homes from the Custis estate, Martha Washington followed Washington to his winter encampments for each of eight years. She helped keep up morale among the officers.
At the 1777–1778 Valley Forge encampment
By tradition, Washington was described as spending her days at the Revolutionary War winter encampments visiting with the common soldiers in their huts. But Nancy Loane, author of Following the Drum: Women at the Valley Forge Encampment, says there is no evidence that Washington visited with the common soldiers, noting that Martha Washington was fashionably dressed, assertive, and a woman of great wealth and independent means. Mrs. Washington joined her husband during the Revolution for all the Continental Army's winter encampments. Before the revolution began, she had kept close to home; during it, she traveled thousands of miles to be with her husband. General Lafayette observed that she loved "her husband madly".The Continental Army settled in Valley Forge, the third of the eight winter encampments of the Revolution, on December 19, 1777. Martha Washington traveled ten days and hundreds of miles to join her husband in Pennsylvania. Primary documents of the Revolutionary period refer to Lady Washington's activities at the site.
, circa 1856, based on a portrait by his father, Charles Willson Peale
Martha Washington took her familiar role as her husband's hostess at camp. On April 6, Elizabeth Drinker and three friends arrived at Valley Forge to plead with General Washington to release their husbands from jail; the men, all Quakers, had refused to swear a loyalty oath to the United States. Because the commander was not available at first, the women visited with Mrs. Washington. Martha Washington was regarded as a matriarch in the camps she visited. Drinker described her later in her diary as "a sociable pretty kind of Woman." Although unable to satisfy the women's demands, General Washington invited them to dine at headquarters that day. Drinker said the dinner with General and Mrs. Washington and fifteen officers was "elegant" but "soon over."
Martha Washington also socialized with the wives of the senior officers at Valley Forge. Years later, Pierre DuPonceau, an aide to Baron von Steuben, recalled that in the evenings the ladies and officers at camp would meet at each other's quarters for conversation. During these social evenings, each lady and gentleman present was "called upon in turn for a song" as they sipped tea or coffee. There was no card-playing during these Valley Forge social gatherings, games of chance having been forbidden by General Washington.
Charles Willson Peale painted a miniature of Washington—for which he charged his usual "56 Dollars"—and presented it to Martha, along with painting other miniatures of Washington. He also painted 50 other officers and their wives that winter.
Lady Washington took part in the camp's May 6 celebration of the formal announcement of the French-American alliance. Soon after the thunderous feu de joie, when thousands of soldiers fired off their muskets, General Washington and his wife received other officers under a large marquee fashioned from dozens of officers' tents. General Washington was said to have worn "a countenance of uncommon delight and complacence."
Five days later, on May 11, 1778, Martha Washington and the commander attended the camp production of Joseph Addison's play Cato, a favorite of the General's. The play was performed by the staff officers for a "very numerous and splendid audience," including many officers and several of their wives. One officer wrote that he found the performance "admirable" and the scenery "in Taste."
First Lady 1789–1797
After the war, Martha wasn't fully supportive of Washington's agreeing to be President of the newly formed United States. Once he assumed office, as the First Lady she hosted many affairs of state at New York City and Philadelphia during their years as temporary capitals. The socializing became known as "the Republican Court".In July 1790, the artist John Trumbull gave a full-length portrait painting of General George Washington to her as a gift. It was displayed in their home at Mount Vernon in the New Room.
Dower slaves, estate, death, and interment
While her father had owned fifteen to twenty slaves, her first husband, Daniel Parke Custis, owned nearly three hundred, making him one of the largest slaveowners and wealthiest men in the Virginia colony. The full Custis estate contained plantations and farms totaling about, and 285 enslaved men, women, and children attached to those holdings.Daniel Parke Custis' death in 1757 without a will meant that, according to law, his and Martha's eldest male child, John Parke Custis, who was at that time a minor, when he became an adult, would inherit two-thirds of the Custis estate, its slaves and the children of those slaves. Martha received a "dower share", the lifetime use of the remaining one-third of the estate and its slaves. After her death, the dower slaves and their progeny were to be distributed among the surviving Custis heirs.
Upon his 1759 marriage to Martha, George Washington became the legal manager of the Custis estate, under court oversight. At the time of her marriage, Martha's dower share included more than 80 slaves. She also would control any children they had, as they would become part of the dower. Estate records indicate that Martha Washington continued to purchase supplies, manage paid staff, and make many other decisions. Although the Washingtons wielded managerial control over the whole estate, they received income only from Martha's "dower" third. The remainder of the income went to a trust held for Jacky Custis until he reached maturity at age 21.
Washington used his wife's great wealth to buy land and slaves; he more than tripled the size of Mount Vernon. For more than 40 years, her "dower" slaves farmed the plantation alongside her husband's. By law, neither of the Washingtons could sell Custis lands or slaves, which Martha's dower and the trust owned. After Jacky died during the Revolutionary War, his slaves passed to his son, George Washington Parke Custis, who at the time was a minor. If Jacky's trust or Martha's dower owned a slave's mother, her children were included in that holding. Some slaves owned by the Washingtons and the trust married each other, forming linked families. This created complex inheritance issues.
Seven of the nine slaves whom President Washington brought to Philadelphia to work in the President's House were "dowers". Pennsylvania passed a gradual abolition law in 1780, under which non-residents were allowed to hold slaves in the state for up to six months; after that date, they could claim freedom. Because Washington would have been liable for compensating the Custis estate for any dower slaves freed under this law, he surreptitiously rotated his President's House slaves in and out of the state before the six-month deadline to prevent their establishing residency.
Martha Washington promised her lady's maid Oney Judge, a "dower" slave, to her granddaughter Elizabeth Parke Custis as a wedding gift. To prevent being sent back to Virginia, Judge escaped in 1796 from the Philadelphia household during Washington's second term. According to interviews with Judge in the 1840s, the young woman had enjoyed being in Philadelphia and feared she would never gain freedom if taken to Virginia. She hid with free black friends in the city, who helped arrange her travel by ship to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. There she married and had three children.
Patricia Brady, in her 2005 biography of Martha Washington, writes:
Martha felt a responsibility for the unsophisticated girl under her care, especially since her mother and sister were expecting to see her back at Mount Vernon. What she could never understand was that a simple desire to be free. Ona, as she preferred to call herself, wanted to live where she pleased, do what work she pleased, and learn to read and write... Ona Judge professed a great regard for Martha and the way she had been treated, but she couldn't face a future as a slave for herself and her children.
After Oney's escape, Martha gave her younger enslaved sister Delphy to Elizabeth and her husband as a wedding gift.
Washington's slave Hercules, who had worked as his chief cook at the President's House before being returned to Mount Vernon in 1796, escaped from there on February 22, 1797. He was known to have traveled to Philadelphia, and by December 1801 was living in New York City. His six-year-old daughter, still enslaved at Mount Vernon, told a visitor that she was glad her father was free.
In his July 1790 will, written a year after he became President of the United States in April 1789 and nine years before his death in December 1799, George Washington left directions for the emancipation, after Martha Washington's death, of all the slaves that he owned. Of the 318 slaves at Mount Vernon in 1799, a little less than half, 123 individuals, belonged to George Washington. His will stipulated that his slaves were not to be freed until Martha's death because of his desire to preserve the families of those who had intermarried with Martha's dower slaves.
In accordance with state law, Washington stipulated in his will that elderly slaves or those who were too sick to work were to be supported throughout their lives by his estate. Children without parents, or those whose families were too poor or indifferent to see to their education, were to be bound out to masters and mistresses who would teach them reading, writing, and a useful trade, until they were ultimately freed at the age of twenty-five.
In December 1800, Martha Washington signed a deed of manumission for her deceased husband's slaves, a transaction that was entered into the records of Fairfax County, Virginia. The document was lost during the American Civil War. The slaves received their freedom on January 1, 1801, a little over a year after George's death.
Just a few weeks earlier in December, Abigail Adams, wife of the second President, had visited Mount Vernon and wrote: "Many of those who are liberated have married with what are called the dower Negroes, so that they all quit their connections, yet what could she do?" Mrs. Adams suggested a motive for Martha to have freed Washington's slaves early:
Martha's health, always somewhat precarious, declined after her husband's death. Two and a half years after the death of her husband, Martha died on May 22, 1802 at the age of 70.
Following her death, Martha was interred in George Washington's tomb vault at Mount Vernon. In 1831, the surviving executors of Washington's estate removed the bodies of George and Martha Washington and those of other members of the family from the old vault to a similar structure within the present enclosure at Mount Vernon.
Martha did not emancipate any of her own slaves during her lifetime. Her will bequeathed Elisha, a slave whom she owned outright at the time of her death, to her grandson, George Washington Parke Custis. Upon her death, her dower slaves reverted to the Custis estate and were divided among her four grandchildren. The division split up families, divided husbands from wives and sent children away from their parents.