Martha Dandridge Custis Washington

According to: Martha Washington: An American Life by Patricia Brady  

Some brief explanation:  

When I conceived of this project as a biography on each President and was struggling to finish the Washington biography I had picked out, I made the decision to keep up the project by reading but not writing about what I read. When I gave up on Presidential biographies and switched focus to First Ladies, I still originally thought I would read but not write. When people started asking what I was learning, I changed my mind and figured I might write something.  By then I had nearly completed the bio I had picked for Martha Washington.   

When I finally committed to writing, weeks had passed since I finished that first biography. I finished the biography nearly three weeks ago now, so am going entirely on memory. I am also writing about everything all at once. So this entry is going to be a bit different and longer than future entries. In the future, I am hoping to write shorter entries as I go along, commenting on notable items to think about on the day I read them and offering a general summation of the book once completed, rather than all at once and from memory as you will see here. 

What I knew going in: Little to nothing beyond the painting of an old lady many of us saw in grade school.   

I had read a biography of George Washington just before reading about Martha, so I did know she was wealthy when he married her, and he used her fortune to expand their home, Mount Vernon, to what tourists visit today.   

What stood out/What I learned:  

Martha Washington was quite the beauty in her day. When all you have to go on is your childhood response to a painting of an old lady, it’s hard to imagine that same old lady as a young woman. Add to that an unfamiliarity with beauty standards of the time, and it’s tough to visualize any lady from the 18th century as “beautiful.”  Both of my parents saw the cover of a young Martha, asked who I was reading about, and responded, “That’s not the Martha Washington I remember.”  

 

image credit: http://shops.mountvernon.org

Turns out, Martha Dandridge, called Patsy, was something of an exceptional beauty – lovely according to standards of both physical attractiveness and the social conventions of colonial Virginia. She was so appealing she married above her social status to a man – Daniel Custis – whose father disapproved of and initially tried to prevent the match. According to Brady, Martha maintained her beauty into old age.   

Martha stayed in the camps with George during the winters of the Revolutionary War, even the awful winter of Valley Forge. I was vaguely familiar with the concept of women traveling with men during wartime from an exhibit I worked on about the Civil War – washer women, prostitutes, officer’s wives – but this book helped me better understand how that worked: waiting for the fighting to cease for the season and for George to request for her to join him in camp, packing up necessary belongings (way more than you would think) and making the long journey to wherever the Continental Army was camped, living in conditions that certainly were more comfortable than those of enlisted men but far from the comforts of Mount Vernon. 

Martha did not enjoy being First Lady and did not want George to be President. She felt George had done enough in service to his country and wanted them to live out their lives in the domestic tranquility of Mount Vernon. She took to her role – which mostly involved entertaining – admirably, as she was well-trained in Southern hospitality, but she did not relish it.   

The Washington’s was a marriage of love. As Brady explains, Martha Custis was a wealthy and handsome young widow when she met George Washington. She would have had her pick of suitors for her second marriage and specifically chose Washington even as she was being simultaneously courted by another man. Brady also argues that George loved Martha, sighting that he could have waited to marry someone else, that he was concerned with her comfort and safety, and invited her to join him whenever possible when he was away from Mount Vernon, even during wartime.   

General Summation 

Martha Washington, to protect the privacy and intimacy of her marriage, burned her correspondence with George before her death. Only a few letters between the couple survive.  Much of Martha's life and her relationship with George is lost to history. What we know about Martha today comes from letters between her and other relations and what must have been a tedious search through the writings of other important and relevant figures of the day to find mentions of Martha. It is a testament to Brady's ability as a historian to put together the engaging biography she did with the limited source base she had to work with. 

As such, Martha Washington: An American Life is as much a book about eighteenth century domesticity, everyday life, and the people and events surrounding Martha as it is about the subject herself. At times it can be annoying, such as when we get an extended discussion of President Washington and his struggle with the new government or what seems like merely a litany of names when talking about all the rotating relatives and visiting friends staying at the Washingtons' residence. We learn little about any specific influence Martha had on Washington's shaping of the new government, and keeping track of the Washingtons' extended family can be difficult for modern readers (the family tree in the front matter of the book is a necessity). Yet, such thick description of the time period is enlightening in itself, and readers will learn a good deal about what life was like in the late-colonial era and very early republic. By placing Martha Washington within that thick description, we begin to approach her as another human being who lived, loved, suffered, and survived along with her fellow citizens—someone with whom we can find points of identification rather than simply placing her on a pedestal as the wife of an American icon with whom we cannot find common ground.