Washington [391]
MARTHA WASHINGTON WASN’T THRILLED at being first lady and, like her husband, talked about the presidency as an indescribable calamity that had befallen her. She professed a lack of interest in politics, having told her niece Fanny the previous year that “we have not a single article of news but politic[s], which I do not concern myself about.”66 Whether she was really so blasé about politics, or merely preferred not to express her opinions, is unclear. The tone of her letters grew wistful as she thought about New York. She and her husband had already sacrificed more than eight years to the war, and after so much hardship Mount Vernon had seemed like their long-deserved sanctuary. Now Washington’s presidency would likely eliminate any chance for a private final phase of their lives. Martha couldn’t have found it easy to be married to a man who was also married to the nation, but she understood his reasoning in becoming president, telling Mercy Otis Warren that she could not blame him “for having acted according to his ideas of duty in obeying the voice of his country.”67
Martha Washington never defied her husband openly, but when forced to do anything against her will, she could be quietly willful. She would pout and sulk and drag her feet in silence. In one letter Washington said that he wanted to be “well fixed at New York” before he sent for her, but one suspects that Martha’s delay reflected her disinclination to leave Virginia.68 A few days after his inauguration, Washington wrote with some urgency to George Augustine, asking him to hasten Martha’s departure, “for we are extremely desirous of seeing her here.”69 This suggests that her delay had lasted longer than expected. By that point, Washington knew that she would miss the ceremonial ball planned for May 7 at the Assembly Rooms on Broadway. Evidently Martha’s presence had been anticipated, for a special elevated sofa had been created that would enable the president and first lady to preside in state over the celebration.
On May 14 Washington’s nephew, nineteen-year-old Robert Lewis, arrived at Mount Vernon to escort his aunt to New York and discovered with amazement that “everything appeared to be in confusion.”70 Martha was still supervising the packing in an unusually chaotic scene for this well-organized woman. Finally on May 16, with one wagon heaped with nothing but baggage, she piled into her coach with her two grandchildren, Nelly and Washy, accompanied by a retinue of six slaves. As a crowd of slaves clustered around the departing group, emotions ran high. “The servants of the house and a number of the field Negroes made their appearance to take leave of their mistress,” Robert Lewis recorded in his journal. “Numbers of these poor wretches seemed greatly agitated, much affected. My aunt equally so.”71 The slaves’ tears were surely genuine, but one wonders whether they were shed for the six friends and family members being forcibly relocated to New York; perhaps the remaining slaves feared mistreatment at the hands of overseers in the Washingtons’ absence. Martha decided to take two personal slaves, Molly (or Moll) and a sixteen-year-old mulatto girl named Ona (or Oney) Judge, who had become her favorite. Two other slaves, Austin and Christopher Sheels, would act as waiters in New York, while Giles and Paris, who had accompanied Washington to the Constitutional Convention, would reprise their roles as coachmen.
The Martha Washington who set out for New York was a more matronly woman than the doughty wife who showed up regularly at the Continental Army camp each winter. Like her husband, she now wore spectacles on occasion. Ever dutiful, she did her best to live up to her new station on the national