Washington [559]
If Parson Weems foisted a false image of a stiff, priggish Washington on American schoolchildren, Washington did not fare much better at first with more serious biographers. Bushrod Washington had inherited Washington’s papers and knew they would be the ideal source material for a biography. To write an authorized life, he wooed one of Washington’s foremost admirers, John Marshall, who wrote the book after he became chief justice and joined Bushrod on the Supreme Court. Marshall devoted five volumes to inflating Washington into a figure sculpted from marble. For all his deep knowledge of Washington, however, he could not make his old friend come alive, prompting one disgruntled critic to grumble, “We look in vain . . . for any sketch or anecdote that might fix a distinguishing feature of private character in the memory.”40 Like Weems, Marshall edited out Washington’s more turbulent, unruly emotions. John Adams mocked the biography as “a mausoleum, 100 feet square at the base and 200 feet high.”41 The public didn’t warm to the Marshall biography, which presented Washington as a distant figure, and sales flagged. In the 1820s Jared Sparks, later president of Harvard, prevailed upon Bushrod Washington and John Marshall to let him publish the first edition of Washington’s papers, which ran to twelve volumes. So began the scholarly process of disinterring Washington from the many legends that had already encrusted his life.
MARTHA WASHINGTON HAD SACRIFICED so much privacy during her married life that after her husband died, she evened the score by burning their personal correspondence—to the everlasting chagrin of historians. By the standards of her day, her act was neither unusual nor wanton. After Alexander Hamilton died in a duel in 1804, Elizabeth Hamilton burned all her letters to him, although she did take care to preserve, with loving fidelity, his letters to her.
However much Martha sought to be a brave, cheerful widow, she was inconsolable in her grief. “I listened with tender interest to a sorrow, which she said was truly breaking her heart,”reported a British companion.42 A miniature portrait by Robert Field shows her pale, round face closely framed by a frilly white cap and surrounded by the black ribbon that betokened widowhood. Martha was not so much learning to live with bereavement as marking time until she could rejoin her husband. She refused to enter his study or the bedroom they had shared; she took up residence in a tiny attic chamber on the third floor at Mount Vernon, where she met with her sewing circle of slaves. Since Washington Custis kept a room on the same floor, she enjoyed some distraction by doting anxiously on her grandson. She haunted the narrow footpath that ran down to the family vault and often sounded a despairing note. “I always have one complaint or another,” she told a correspondent. “I never expect to be well as long as I live in this world.”43
Always warmly hospitable to visitors, Martha made no effort to mask her bottomless sadness and distributed locks of her husband’s hair like so many saintly relics. Sally Foster Otis detected the contradiction when Martha spoke “of death as a pleasant journey which is in contemplation,” while at the same time being “cheerful [and] anxious to perform the most minute civility and unerring in every duty.”44 Having buried two husbands, four children, and seven siblings, she saw herself as living on borrowed time. When the Reverend Manasseh Cutler visited, she reminisced about her husband with tremendous affection while “viewing herself as left alone, and her life protracted, until she had become a stranger in the world . . . She longed for the time to follow her departed friend.”45
One insuperable problem that shadowed her was the fate of more than 120 slaves designated for freedom by her husband. Because Washington had not consulted her about his will, some scholars have speculated that she did not share his critical views about slavery. Impatient to claim their promised freedom, some of Washington’s own slaves decided to escape at once: