In every respect, Martha turned out to be an immense social asset to his career. She was the perfect hostess, with a ready smile, overflowing goodwill, and a genuine interest in her guests. With company, she was convivial and welcoming, where George tended to be more cordial and correct, and she worked her influence in a self-effacing style. “His lady is of a hospitable disposition, always good-humored and cheerful, and seems to be actuated by the same motives with himself, but she is rather of a more lively disposition,” observed one visitor to Mount Vernon. “They are to all appearances a happy pair.”10
Martha never craved wealth or status, perhaps because she already had it; nor did she feed her husband’s ambitions. She was never dazzled by his later fame and never put on airs. Nevertheless she faithfully supported George’s plans and bowed to the exorbitant demands of his career, if not always with unmixed enthusiasm. Direct, plainspoken, and free of frivolity, she lacked the feminine wiles that had so aroused George with Sally Fairfax. Abigail Adams captured Martha Washington perfectly when she said, “Her manners are modest and unassuming, dignified and feminine, not a tincture of hauteur about her.”11 In fact, she remained a bustling, hardworking housewife, occupied with domestic chores until the end of her life, and was fully equal to the administrative demands of Mount Vernon.
Eight months older than George, Martha Dandridge was born on June 2, 1731, in rural New Kent County, the eldest of eight children, three of whom died young. Her father, John Dandridge—a county clerk, militia colonel, and minor tobacco planter on the Pamunkey River—had married Frances Jones the previous year. Fifteen or twenty slaves worked the tobacco fields on their plantation, Chestnut Grove, which covered five hundred acres. Their agrarian household was fairly spartan, and Martha, or “Patsy,” was raised as a domestic helpmate to her mother. She grew up in a proper though hardly genteel house and was never too superior to perform house-work. The provincial world of Martha’s girlhood didn’t spoil young ladies. “She told me she remembered the time when there was only one single carriage in all of Virginia,” said a later visitor to Mount Vernon. “Ladies invited to entertainment arrived on horseback.”12 As the eldest child, Martha Dandridge was occupied with domestic skills that she later taught to indentured servants and slaves at Mount Vernon. Her industrious nature must have pleased George Washington. Both of them were early risers, used every moment profitably, and stuck to the same daily routines.
Like her future husband, Martha Dandridge grew up in a world where slavery was taken for granted, as were illegitimate children sired by the master. A few historians (though by no means all) believe that she had a young half sister named Ann Dandridge who was the offspring of her father and a slave woman of mixed black and Cherokee Indian blood. The little girl, who was likely much younger than Martha, didn’t know the true story of her identity. If the story is to be believed, Martha, to her credit, kept Ann Dandridge in the Custis family and brought her to Mount Vernon; to her discredit, she never emancipated her half sister, who wasn’t freed until 1802, after Martha’s death.13 Helen Bryan, a Martha Washington biographer, believes that Ann Dandridge was free, although perceived to be a slave, while the historian Henry Wiencek thinks she was treated as a slave, albeit a privileged one.14 George and Martha Washington never dropped hints in their letters about Ann Dandridge, who was all but expunged from their history and never listed in Mount Vernon records.
Martha Washington enjoyed a steady faith from the time of her childhood. Her father was a church vestryman, and she was an observant member of the Church of England until the Revolution. “After breakfast, she retired for an hour to her chamber, which hour was spent in prayer and reading the Holy Scriptures, a practice that she never omitted during half a century of her varied life,” said her grandson. 15 As was palpable later on as she endured many family deaths, she retained a simple but intense belief in the afterlife. Her philosophic and religious outlook tallied well in most respects with George Washington’s. They both believed in a world replete with suffering in which one muddled through with as much dignity and grace as one could muster. Neither George nor Martha ever reacted to grave setbacks in a maudlin, self-pitying manner.
Before she died, likely for privacy reasons and perhaps by prior agreement with her husband, Martha Washington committed to the flames their entire personal correspondence; only a handful of messages survived the bonfire. From two of her surviving letters—one addressed to “My Dearest” and the other to “My Love”—we can tell that she adored her husband, and George wrote in the same vein.16 Martha had little, if any, formal schooling and had a habit of torturing the English language. Her grammar was poor, her spelling eccentric, her punctuation nonexistent. (She seemed to specialize in run-on sentences.) Nonetheless she was an avid newspaper reader and kept up with some of the best literature imported from London in the 1760s, including Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield and Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, as well as gothic romance novels.
That Martha concealed a vein of steel behind her conciliatory manner—that she was much more than the sweet, grandmotherly little woman of popular legend—is manifest in the story of her marriage to Daniel Parke Custis. Daniel’s father, Colonel John Custis IV, was a rich, tyrannical man who had made life sheer misery for his equally difficult wife, Fidelia, née Frances Parke. Their marital spats were the stuff of legend on the eastern shore of Virginia. When the couple rode by the shore one day, John became so enraged at Fidelia that he drove their carriage straight into Chesapeake Bay. When Fidelia asked where he was going, John replied with a sneer, “To hell, Madam.” To which she retorted boldly, “Drive on, sir.”17
The tightfisted Custis, an overbearing father, was appalled when he learned that his bachelor son Daniel, in his late thirties, was secretly engaged to the adolescent Martha Dandridge. He had already vetoed a series of potential brides and dismissed Martha as a social-climbing commoner “much inferior in point of fortune” to his son, vowing that he would rather toss his silverware into the street than allow her to inherit it.18 Adding to this combustible mix was a mulatto son named Jack that John Custis had fathered with a slave called Alice. Once before John had threatened to disown Daniel and leave all his money to “Black Jack.” This seemed a distinct possibility if Daniel didn’t shelve his plans to marry Martha Dandridge. Far from hiding Black Jack, the irascible John Custis doted on him, and when the little boy was five, he submitted a petition to the governor to free the boy “christened John but commonly called Jack, born of the body of his Negro wench young Alice.”19 To celebrate his emancipation, the boy was given four slaves as playmates.20 Obviously John Custis didn’t rate very highly as a child psychologist.
During the impasse over the proposed marriage, Martha made the courageous decision to appeal to John Custis directly at his Williamsburg mansion and beard the lion in his den. Somehow she reached into herself and found hidden reserves of strength. We don’t know what she said to sweet-talk this cantankerous man into agreement, but she won him over completely. Although he now hailed her as “beautiful and sweet-tempered,” he still didn’t consent to the marriage. Nonetheless, soon after Martha’s visit, a family lawyer named James Power gave a horse, bridle, and saddle to Black Jack and informed John Custis that this had been Daniel’s doing. The touching display of brotherly love finally made John Custis submit to his son’s marriage to Martha. As the lawyer told Daniel, “I am empowered by your father to let you know that he heartily and willingly consents to your marriage with Miss Dandridge—that he has so good a character of her, that he had rather you should have her than any lady in Virginia.”21 Power lauded the “prudent speech” that Martha made to her future father-in-law, but several scholars have speculated that Martha arranged the cunning gift to Black Jack, the master stroke of the drama. She had shown extraordinary coolness under fire, foreshadowing her ability to deal with incendiary situations later on. On May 15, 1750, Martha Dandridge, eighteen, at last wed Daniel Parke Custis, thirty-eight. Black Jack resided with the newlyweds at the White House until he died, probably from meningitis, eighteen months later.