WHILE GEORGE WASHINGTON TRIED GALLANTLY to hold his army together that winter, Martha was displaying her own brand of valor. Starting in June 1775, both Washingtons were borne on a powerful tide that would whirl them along for the rest of their lives. Unlike her husband, Martha wasn’t naturally courageous, but she was a determined woman who could will herself to rise to the occasion. To aid her husband, she conquered whatever fears or anxieties might have kept her from his side. For more than eight years of war, she would exhibit the fierce loyalty of a Spartan wife, a trial that she endured from a combination of wifely duty and outright patriotism.

Despite fears that Lord Dunmore might abduct her from Mount Vernon, Martha had refused to move to the small town house that the Washingtons owned in Alexandria. Washington dwelled on this possibility in so many letters that it got Martha’s attention, and she escaped to visit Jacky and Nelly in Maryland or stayed with her sister Anna Maria in New Kent County. Washington worried incessantly about her. “I could wish that my friends would endeavor to make the heavy and lonesome hours of my wife pass of[f] as smoothly as possible, for her situation gives me many a painful moment,” he confessed to brother Samuel that fall.⁵⁷ Although he wrote weekly letters to Martha, many were opened en route by “scoundrel postmasters,” as he styled them, and others never arrived at all. ⁵⁸ Such postal lapses, besides isolating Martha, would have made Washington more guarded in communicating his thoughts.

In mid-October Washington concluded that he wouldn’t be able to return to Mount Vernon that winter and invited Martha to join him in Cambridge. He knew that the biting chill of a New England fall would make the trip perilous and extremely uncomfortable, telling brother Jack, “I have laid a state of the difficulties . . . which must attend the journey before her and left it to her own choice.”⁵⁹ With her nerves stretched taut, Martha kept postponing the trip, even though delay only increased the likelihood of heavy snow. If not born for heroics, Martha always heeded the summons of duty when her husband called.

At last, on November 16, 1775, the diminutive Martha Washington piled into her carriage and left Mount Vernon, accompanied by Jacky and Nelly, nephew George W. Lewis, and Elizabeth Gates, wife of General Horatio Gates. She traveled luxuriously, her clothing packed in elegant leather trunks studded with brass nails. She brought along five household slaves tricked out in the livery of Mount Vernon. On this arduous northward journey, Martha discovered her sudden elevation in the world and that she had left obscurity behind forever; henceforth fame would be her constant companion. When she reached Philadelphia, she was greeted by a military escort and was mystified by the fuss made over her. She had passed through the city, she observed in amazement, “in as great pomp as if I had been a very great somebody.”⁶⁰ The church bells pealed when she reached Newark, and at Elizabethtown a light horse cavalry trotted beside her, providing an honorary escort. Nevertheless, for a woman who dreaded water, the constant ferry crossings must have been an ordeal, and to bump along six hundred miles of rutted roads in frigid weather must have tested even the faithful Martha. She expressed her stoic credo thus: “I am still determined to be cheerful and to be happy in whatever situation I may be.” ⁶¹

Historians often note that Martha Washington spent each winter of the war with her husband, leaving before fighting resumed in the spring, but this bland statement doesn’t quite capture the scope of her sacrifice. Mount Vernon curator Mary Thompson has computed that Martha spent between 52 and 54 months with her husband in a war that would drag on for 103 months; in other words, she spent about half the war with the Continental Army.⁶² At a minimum she stayed two or three months each winter, but some stays lengthened to seven, eight, or even nine months, until she jokingly referred to herself as “the great perambulator.”⁶³ Because Washington couldn’t afford to abandon his army, Martha’s willingness to join him was of inestimable value. Due to his delicate position in the war, he had to keep his emotions bottled up. He couldn’t afford to show weakness or indecision and needed a wife to whom he could reveal his frustrations.

The secretive Washington also had an acute need for male confidants to whom he could unbosom himself completely. He had enjoyed “unbounded confidence” in his closest aide, Joseph Reed, before the latter went off to Philadelphia in late October to attend his law practice and didn’t return to Cambridge.⁶⁴ Distraught, Washington deemed Reed’s services “too important to be lost” and tried to coax him into returning.⁶⁵ Chained to his desk with correspondence, Washington saw himself turning willy-nilly into a bureaucrat. He needed a surrogate who was not only a good scribe but could intuit the responses he himself would write. “At present my time is so much taken up at my desk that I am obliged to neglect many other essential parts of my duty,” he pleaded to Reed. “It is absolutely necessary therefore for me to have persons that can think for me as well as execute orders.”⁶⁶ Not until the advent of Alexander Hamilton and other proficient aides was Washington finally liberated from his clerical labors.

On December 11, 1775, Martha Washington arrived in Cambridge, not having seen her husband since May. To bedraggled soldiers in the wintry camp, her appearance in the glamorous coach with a slave retinue must have seemed unreal and resplendent. Lady Washington, as she was known in an incongruously aristocratic touch, was still comparatively young at forty-four. Yet when Charles Willson Peale painted her the following year, he noted something matronly in the face, plus a seriousness in her direct, unaffected gaze. When she joined her husband at the imposing Vassall mansion, she was thrust into a busy, working atmosphere. Here Washington mapped strategy, held war councils, and conducted his voluminous correspondence with Congress. Washington’s aides also slept in the house, with several crammed into a single room, while the general commandeered one drawing room as his office. He soon pressed Jacky Custis into service as a messenger. A dozen servants, several of them slaves, waited on officers, and the staff even included a tailor and a French cook. Among the household staff was a free black woman, Margaret Thomas, who worked as a seamstress and entered into a love affair with Billy Lee. Possibly because of this, Thomas seemed to irritate Washington, who wished that he would “see her no more,” but he retained her on the payroll, possibly for Billy, who came to consider himself married to her.⁶⁷

In this crowded house, George and Martha Washington would have found privacy hard to come by. Washington made a bid for conjugal privacy by ordering a curtained four-poster bed before his wife’s arrival. Despite these concessions to gentility, nothing could mask the stark reality of a military camp. By the end of December, as the British continued firing shells from Boston, Martha had trouble coping with the tension. If the men were inured to these intrusions, they were awful new realities to her. “I confess I shudder every time I hear the sound of a gun,” she wrote to her friend Elizabeth Ramsay. “. . . To me that never see anything of war, the preparations are very terrible indeed. But I endeavor to keep my fears to myself as well as I can.”⁶⁸ Since Washington had segregated his military from his home life, this was Martha’s first exposure to war, and she showed real gumption in facing down her fears. The image of her as a small, grandmotherly woman overlooks the fortitude that made her a natural mate for Washington.