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By Root 26005 0

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.

Observers noted the companionable relationship between George and Martha Washington. As Nathanael Greene informed his wife, “Mrs. Washington is excessive fond of the General and he of her . . . They are happy in each other.”69 Mercy Warren saw how Martha’s gentle affability could “soften the hours of private life or . . . sweeten the cares of the hero and smooth the rugged pains of war.”70 Washington seemed more relaxed in Martha’s presence, and they loved to share a humorous moment. One day eighteen-year-old Joseph White went to receive orders from Washington. He had adopted the fictitious rank of an officer, and Washington immediately detected the imposture. “Pray, sir, what officer are you?” he asked. The young man claimed to be an assistant adjutant in the artillery regiment. “Indeed,” responded Washington, “you are very young to do that duty.” “I told him I was young,” White recalled, “but was growing older every day.” He said that Washington had “turned his face to his wife and both smiled.”71

Long a wealthy woman, Martha adapted to the austere camp life and looked askance on lavish consumption. Soon after her arrival, she was invited to a fancy dress ball at a local tavern, which local radicals protested as inappropriate in wartime. Four representatives met with her and requested that she boycott the event. One recalled that Martha reacted with “great politeness” and sent her “best compliments” to the protesters, assuring them “that their sentiments on this occasion were perfectly agreeable unto her own.”72 The ball was canceled on the spot. While Martha Washington could have ducked the issue, saying she would consult her husband, she showed confidence