Washington [514]
AS PATERFAMILIAS OF THE CLAN, the president loved to shower his young wards with sage advice, especially in affairs of the heart. Despite pressing political concerns, he enjoyed playing the didactic role of the grizzled adviser. George and Martha Washington were thrilled in 1795, when Fanny Washington, widowed by George Augustine’s death, wed Tobias Lear, who had lost his wife, Polly, to yellow fever. To bind them more closely, the Washingtons bestowed upon the young couple a rent-free house and 360 acres at Mount Vernon. Since Fanny had three children from her previous marriage and Tobias Lear a little boy from his, the wedding seemed a fairy-tale solution for the grieving young couple. Then in March 1796 Lear informed the Washingtons that Fanny had fallen gravely ill, and they were stunned when she breathed her last. “Your former letters prepared us for the stroke,” the Washingtons commiserated with Lear, “but it has fallen heavily notwithstanding.”40 For Martha Washington, who had been overjoyed by the marriage, touting Lear as “a worthy man . . . esteemed by everyone,” it extended the dreadful pattern in her life of the untimely death of children, both real and substitute.41
Another young woman who preoccupied Washington’s thoughts was Elizabeth Parke Custis, Nelly’s oldest sister, an attractive brunette raised by her mother and David Stuart. The girl so adored her stepgrandfather that she was once paralyzed by nerves when he descended for a visit. “The General said that, although he thought a young girl looked best when blushing,” she recalled, “yet he was concerned to see me suffer so much.”42 When requesting a portrait from Washington, she professed herself indifferent to love: “It is my first wish to have it in my power to contemplate at all times the features of one who I so highly respect as the Father of his Country and look up to with grateful affection as a parent to myself and family.”43 While Washington obliged her with a miniature by Irish artist Walter Robertson, he teased her gently and inquired whether “emotions of a softer kind” did not move her heart.44
Elizabeth’s desire to join the Washington household in Philadelphia in 1795 must have filled the older couple with misgivings. However devoted she was to them, she had a fiery temper and was cursed with what one aunt called “a violent and romantic disposition.”45 That same aunt regretted that in “her tastes and pastimes, she is more man than woman and regrets that she can’t wear pants.”46 When she first came to Philadelphia, she was sulky and querulous and boycotted church and dances. Martha Washington, a confirmed believer in social duties, could not sympathize with such morbid brooding. Washington, however, enjoyed Elizabeth’s company, and she accompanied him for sittings with Gilbert Stuart. One day, as Stuart painted, Elizabeth abruptly barged into the room and, folding her arms across her chest, cast an appraising look at his work. He was so struck by this self-assured pose that he painted her in exactly this manner, holding a straw hat embellished with a red ribbon. Her sidelong glance in the portrait is proud, spirited, and obstinate, as if she refused to budge from the viewer’s glance. Elizabeth appeared indifferent to her own beauty, as if it were something too trivial to occupy her attention.
In 1796 an Englishman twice her age, Thomas Law, revealed his plans to marry her, a move that took the Washingtons by surprise, Elizabeth having concealed the courtship. After running up a fortune in India, Law had come to America to dabble in real estate and promptly bought five hundred lots in the new federal district. Even before Washington knew he would someday have a familial connection with Law, he had recoiled at the scale of these purchases. “Will it not be asked,” he inquired, “why are speculators to pocket so much money?”47 When Law apprised him of his intention to marry Elizabeth, Washington was quietly livid and must have known that he could not talk the stubborn Elizabeth out of