Washington [320]
The Washingtons agreed to provide guidance or financial support for an amazing assortment of nieces and nephews. As noted earlier, after her sister, Anna Maria Dandridge Bassett, died early in the war, Martha pledged to raise her charming daughter Frances, or “Fanny,” who was now a teenager and had moved permanently to Mount Vernon. In a Robert Edge Pine portrait, Fanny has pretty features, big deep-set eyes, a rosebud mouth, and long wavy hair that falls across her shoulder and slightly exposed bosom. Martha adored Fanny and let her function as an assistant plantation hostess. “She is a child to me,” she later wrote, “and I am very lonesome when she is absent.”15 Washington also delighted in Fanny’s “easy and quiet temper.”16 In fact, the girl with her cheerful, winning personality was universally popular. “There was something so pleasing in her appearance and manner that even a stranger could not see her without being interested in her welfare” was one visitor’s impression.17
The bulging household incorporated other young relatives. George Augustine Washington, the son of Washington’s hard-drinking brother Charles, had been an aide to Lafayette during the war and was already plagued by a lingering bout of tuberculosis that would only worsen with the years. Washington was also saddled temporarily with three children from his late brother Samuel, who had been married five times and died heavily in debt. “In God’s name,” Washington had wondered to brother Jack earlier in the year, “how did my broth[e]r Sam[ue]l contrive to get himself so enormously in debt?”18 Samuel’s three children by his fourth marriage—Harriot, Lawrence Augustine, and George Steptoe Washington—ranged in age from eight to eleven and had been left indigent. All three presented special challenges. Harriot, an awkward, slovenly young girl, found herself trapped in a household of manic perfectionists. Starting in 1784 and for the next eight years, Washington footed the bill to educate her two brothers at a Georgetown academy, but they were wild and uncontrollable and a constant trial to Washington, who was extremely generous with young relatives but quite exacting if they failed to measure up to his high standards.
By war’s end, Martha Washington was round and matronly in face and form, a fact recorded by one visitor: “Mrs. Washington is an elegant figure for a person of her years . . . She is rather fleshy, of good complexion, has a large, portly double chin, and an open and engaging countenance.”19 Although her hair was now gray, she still had smooth, unlined skin, and her eyes were warm and bright. She was fond of wearing sheer fabrics in light pastel colors that comfortably fit her full figure. By her own description, Martha was never either sick or well but hovered somewhere in between. Perhaps because she was short, she believed in a proud, erect posture and bought stiff collars for Nelly to encourage her upright carriage. The travel-weary Martha was slow to admit that her marital life had now changed forever: her husband could surrender his commission but not his fame. Later on, in a wistful mood, she would recollect to Mercy Warren that when her husband returned from the war that Christmas, she had little thought “that any circumstance could possibly happen to call the general into public life again” and that she “anticipated that from that moment they should have grown old together in solitude and tranquillity. This, my dear madam, was the first and fondest wish of my heart.”20 Whatever ambitions she might have harbored for her husband’s career had long since been gratified, and she never