Washington [59]
Martha Washington enjoyed a steady faith from the time of her childhood. Her father was a church vestryman, and she was an observant member of the Church of England until the Revolution. “After breakfast, she retired for an hour to her chamber, which hour was spent in prayer and reading the Holy Scriptures, a practice that she never omitted during half a century of her varied life,” said her grandson. 15 As was palpable later on as she endured many family deaths, she retained a simple but intense belief in the afterlife. Her philosophic and religious outlook tallied well in most respects with George Washington’s. They both believed in a world replete with suffering in which one muddled through with as much dignity and grace as one could muster. Neither George nor Martha ever reacted to grave setbacks in a maudlin, self-pitying manner.
Before she died, likely for privacy reasons and perhaps by prior agreement with her husband, Martha Washington committed to the flames their entire personal correspondence; only a handful of messages survived the bonfire. From two of her surviving letters—one addressed to “My Dearest” and the other to “My Love”—we can tell that she adored her husband, and George wrote in the same vein.16 Martha had little, if any, formal schooling and had a habit of torturing the English language. Her grammar was poor, her spelling eccentric, her punctuation nonexistent. (She seemed to specialize in run-on sentences.) Nonetheless she was an avid newspaper reader and kept up with some of the best literature imported from London in the 1760s, including Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield and Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, as well as gothic romance novels.
That Martha concealed a vein of steel behind her conciliatory manner—that she was much more than the sweet, grandmotherly little woman of popular legend—is manifest in the story of her marriage to Daniel Parke Custis. Daniel’s father, Colonel John Custis IV, was a rich, tyrannical man who had made life sheer misery for his equally difficult wife, Fidelia, née Frances Parke. Their marital spats were the stuff of legend on the eastern shore of Virginia. When the couple rode by the shore one day, John became so enraged at Fidelia that he drove their carriage straight into Chesapeake Bay. When Fidelia asked where he was going, John replied with a sneer, “To hell, Madam.” To which she retorted boldly, “Drive on, sir.”17
The tightfisted Custis, an overbearing father, was appalled when he learned that his bachelor son Daniel, in his late thirties, was secretly engaged to the adolescent Martha Dandridge. He had already vetoed a series of potential brides and dismissed Martha as a social-climbing commoner “much inferior in point of fortune” to his son, vowing that he would rather toss his silverware into the street than allow her to inherit it.18 Adding to this combustible mix was a mulatto son named Jack that John Custis had fathered with a slave called Alice. Once before John had threatened to disown Daniel and leave all his money to “Black Jack.” This seemed a distinct possibility if Daniel didn’t shelve his plans to marry Martha Dandridge. Far from hiding Black Jack, the irascible John Custis doted on him, and when the little boy was five, he submitted a petition to the governor to free the boy “christened John but commonly called Jack, born