Washington: A Life

MARTHA WASHINGTON WASN’T THRILLED at being first lady and, like her husband, talked about the presidency as an indescribable calamity that had befallen her. She professed a lack of interest in politics, having told her niece Fa

Martha Washington never defied her husband openly, but when forced to do anything against her will, she could be quietly willful. She would pout and sulk and drag her feet in silence. In one letter Washington said that he wanted to be “well fixed at New York” before he sent for her, but one suspects that Martha’s delay reflected her disinclination to leave Virginia.68 A few days after his inauguration, Washington wrote with some urgency to George Augustine, asking him to hasten Martha’s departure, “for we are extremely desirous of seeing her here.”69 This suggests that her delay had lasted longer than expected. By that point, Washington knew that she would miss the ceremonial ball pla

On May 14 Washington’s nephew, nineteen-year-old Robert Lewis, arrived at Mount Vernon to escort his aunt to New York and discovered with amazement that “everything appeared to be in confusion.”70 Martha was still supervising the packing in an unusually chaotic scene for this well-organized woman. Finally on May 16, with one wagon heaped with nothing but baggage, she piled into her coach with her two grandchildren, Nelly and Washy, accompanied by a retinue of six slaves. As a crowd of slaves clustered around the departing group, emotions ran high. “The servants of the house and a number of the field Negroes made their appearance to take leave of their mistress,” Robert Lewis recorded in his journal. “Numbers of these poor wretches seemed greatly agitated, much affected. My aunt equally so.”71 The slaves’ tears were surely genuine, but one wonders whether they were shed for the six friends and family members being forcibly relocated to New York; perhaps the remaining slaves feared mistreatment at the hands of overseers in the Washingtons’ absence. Martha decided to take two personal slaves, Molly (or Moll) and a sixteen-year-old mulatto girl named Ona (or Oney) Judge, who had become her favorite. Two other slaves, Austin and Christopher Sheels, would act as waiters in New York, while Giles and Paris, who had accompanied Washington to the Constitutional Convention, would reprise their roles as coachmen.

The Martha Washington who set out for New York was a more matronly woman than the doughty wife who showed up regularly at the Continental Army camp each winter. Like her husband, she now wore spectacles on occasion. Ever dutiful, she did her best to live up to her new station on the national scene. With political instincts to rival her husband’s, she had ordered green and brown wool from Hartford to make riding costumes for herself and was lauded in the press for being “clothed in the manufacture of our country.”72

En route to New York, Martha had no better luck than her husband in escaping the hordes who competed to greet her. Nevertheless, as she got her first taste of being first lady—the term was not adopted until later administrations—she experienced a rising sense of excitement. Upon reaching the outskirts of Philadelphia, she was hailed by the state’s chief executive, and a cavalry honor guard conducted her into town. On May 27 the new president took time out from his duties to receive his wife at Elizabethtown, where she got the same tumultuous reception bestowed on him a month earlier. As Martha wrote appreciatively to Fa

No sooner had she arrived in the capital than Martha learned that she would be a prop in an elaborate piece of political theater. One day after her arrival, she had to host a di

The town was enchanted with Martha Washington, whose conviviality offset her husband’s reserve. She won over the toughest critic: the wife of the vice president, who found her the perfect republican counterpart of her husband. “I took the earliest opportunity . . . to go and pay my respects to Mrs. Washington,” Abigail Adams informed her sister. “She received me with great ease and politeness. She is plain in her dress, but that plai

A pragmatic woman, Martha Washington resigned herself to the duties of a presidential wife, but a distinct touch of discontent lingered. She was quietly rebellious, chafing at her restricted freedom. In late October she unburdened herself to Fa