Washington [73]
Because he constantly sent his measurements to faraway artisans, Washington left many precise descriptions of his physique, but his somewhat oddly shaped body made him the bane of his tailors. His wide hips and powerful thighs caused the most trouble. In one of many letters about his ill-fitting clothes, he reproached the tailor in caustic terms: “I desire you to make me a pair of breeches of the same cloth as my former pair, but more accurately fitting. These breeches must be roomy in the seat, the buttons firmly sewn on . . . These breeches must be made exactly to these measurements, not to those to which you imagine that they may stretch after a period of use.”37
Like her husband, Martha Washington went on a buying binge after their marriage and ordered a cornucopia of luxury goods, with George drafting the itemized list to London. She ordered silk stockings, white satin shoes, gold shoe buckles, beaver hats, and later on, purple kid gloves. She must have been proud of her hair, for she dressed it with “2 fine ivory combs” and “2 large tortoiseshell combs” as well as gauze caps and “2 pounds of fine perfumed powder.”38 Indeed, portraits of Martha Washington show that she often ornamented her brown hair with white beads or pearls.
As Colonel Washington evolved from regimental commander to tobacco planter, he felt pangs of envy as he watched a succession of British victories in the French and Indian War. Seventeen fifty-nine was the year, in Horace Walpole’s words, that British bells were “worn threadbare with ringing of victories.”39 For Washington, those bells tolled with a somewhat mournful sound. “The scale of fortune in America is turned greatly in our favor and success is become the boon companion of our fortunate generals,” he told Richard Washington, sounding a bit wistful.40 That Washington still identified with the military life and retained some hope of future battlefield glory is evident in his ordering from Robert Cary six busts of great military figures in history: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charles XII of Sweden, Frederick II of Prussia, Prince Eugene of Savoy, and the Duke of Marlborough. When his London agents couldn’t fill the order, they came up with an alternate proposal to supply busts of writers ranging from Homer to Shakespeare to Milton. For the young planter, these literary heroes didn’t quite measure up to famous generals, and he vetoed the suggestion.
As time passed, a petulant tone crept into Washington’s communications to his London factors, and he began to rant about the shoddy, overpriced goods fobbed off on him. The London factors had North American planters at their mercy and exploited the situation, reminding these consumers that, in the last analysis, they were powerless colonials. Washington wasn’t the only Virginian grandee to feel resentful toward arrogant British merchants. Buying in London was a slow, tedious way to do business, hobbled by endless waits for deliveries. When Washington ordered plows from Robert Cary, for example, he found some essential parts missing and bemoaned that the parts already shipped were “entirely useless and lie upon my hands a dead charge.”41 Sometimes shipments from London wound up at the wrong river or arrived damaged. Even the wealthiest Virginians were simply captive customers.
By nature suspicious of people, Washington experienced a keen sense of injustice. He fretted that Robert Cary was padding his bills and charging exorbitant prices. Of one early shipment, he grumbled that the “woollens, linens, nails etc. are mean in quality but not in price, for in this they excel indeed far above any I have ever had.”42 By the second year of his marriage, his letters to London dripped with barefaced sarcasm, and he didn’t bother to disguise his belief that he was being fleeced, telling Robert Cary that “you may believe me when I tell you that instead of getting things good and fashionable in their several kind, we often have articles sent us that could only