Washington [148]
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