• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 26220 0

a girl, Nelly was smart and cultivated, if a trifle too dreamy for her grandparents. The Washingtons never penalized her because she was a girl, and they sent her to a boarding school in New York as a day student. They also made sure she acquired the necessary artistic graces. She studied painting with William Dunlap and turned out beautiful still lifes, often floral arrangements set against a black backdrop. Later on, in Philadelphia, a dancing master named James Robardet taught Nelly and Washy the fashionable steps required for polite society. Because she was so creative, the Washingtons also bought Nelly an English guitar and a harpsichord and gave her lessons with the Austrian composer Alexander Reinagle. In the musical realm, Martha was a martinet, forcing Nelly to practice the harpsichord for hours on end until tears sprang to her eyes. “The poor girl would play and cry, and cry and play, for long hours under the immediate eye of her grandmother, a rigid disciplinarian in all things,” said her brother.34 Nelly also told of how, against her grandmother’s warning, she wandered alone by moonlight in the Mount Vernon woods. When she came home, “the General was walking up and down with his hands behind him, as was his wont,” said Nelly, while Martha, “seated in her great armchair . . . opened a severe reproof.”35 Elsewhere Martha Washington is portrayed as overly indulgent with her grandchildren. After spending a day with the family in October 1789, Abigail Adams wrote that “Mrs. Washington is a most friendly, good lady, always pleasant and easy, dotingly fond of her grandchildren, to whom she is quite the grandmamma.”36 Several years later Nelly wrote to Washington of how she looked up to him “with grateful affection as a parent to myself and family.”37 Part of Nelly’s appeal for Washington was her lightness of being, which relieved the gloom that sometimes cloaked the careworn president.

According to Washy, Nelly observed how Washington’s grave presence inhibited children at play and that even grown-up relatives “feared to speak or laugh before him . . . not from his severity” but from “awe and respect . . . When he entered a room where we were all mirth and in high conversation, all were instantly mute.”38 When this happened, Washington would “retire, quite provoked and disappointed.”39 It is a powerful commentary on the way in which fame estranged Washington from the casual pleasures of everyday life, making it hard for him to get the social solace he needed. Yet here, too, there are contrary views. His nephew Howell Lewis wrote that when Washington was “in a lively mood, so full of pleasantry, so agreeable to all . . . I could hardly realize that he was the same Washington whose dignity awed all who approached him.”40 And in his memoirs, Washy reported how his sister charmed the president, stating that “the grave dignity which he usually wore did not prevent his keen enjoyment of a joke and that no one laughed more heartily than he did when she herself, a gay, laughing girl, gave one of her saucy descriptions of any scene in which she had taken part or any one of the merry pranks she then often played.”41

While Washington doted on Nelly, Martha took special pleasure in spoiling Washy. When he was away from home, Martha grew anxious, as she had with Jacky. On one occasion when Washy was gone and failed to write, Washington reminded him “how apt your grandmama is to suspect that you are sick, or some accident has happened to you, when you omit this.”42 Exasperated with the boy’s laxity, Washington criticized him in the terms he had once reserved for Washy’s father. In New York, Washington hired a private tutor to work with Washy, who made temporary progress in Latin but was hopeless in math and other subjects. In general, he was an indifferent and easily distracted pupil. Washington constantly coached Washy and advised him to mend his ways. The boy would make all the right noises, then completely ignore his advice, leading to tooth-gnashing frustration for Washington.

Like his father, Washy knew that he would inherit