Washington: A Life

FOR WASHINGTON, the other troubling family situation of these years involved his pere

For decades, Mary Ball Washington had lived frugally at Ferry Farm, the ample spread fronting the Rappaha

Washington personally surveyed Ferry Farm in 1771 in preparation for selling it. He also agreed to take charge of a four-hundred-acre farm, Little Falls, that Mary owned two miles downriver and had inherited from her father. Washington was supposed to profit from Mary’s ten slaves and livestock and pay her thirty pounds rent yearly in exchange, a deal approved by his brother Charles and brother-in-law Fielding Lewis. Because there was no mutual trust between mother and son, when Washington paid Mary the rent, he often did so in the presence of his sister Betty, then recorded in his ledger that the latter had witnessed the transaction.

One small incident from the early years of the Revolutionary War shows just how steely a woman Mary Washington was. She had reclaimed from Mount Vernon a slave woman named Silla. Lund Washington notified George of the heartrending scene that occurred when he informed Silla’s partner, Jack (probably a slave cooper), that Silla was being sent down to Fredericksburg. “He cries and begs, saying he had rather be hang[e]d than separated,” Lund reported. A week later Lund reiterated that “Jack and Silla are much distressed about parting.”21 George Washington respected slave marriages and refused to separate couples. Nevertheless Mary Washington evidently persisted in her demand and broke up the couple for her own convenience.

ON THE EVENING OF MAY 18 , 1772 , Jacky Custis returned to Mount Vernon with an unusual companion in tow, a thirty-one-year-old painter named Charles Willson Peale who lived in A

Even though more than thirteen years had passed since Washington resigned his military commission, he still prided himself on a military identity, and people often greeted him as Colonel Washington. The brouhaha over the Stamp Act and the Townshend duties also raised the distant prospect of a recourse to arms. So as the industrious Peale settled in at Mount Vernon, Washington do

Never comfortable with self-exposure, Washington was alternately restive and sleepy in posing for Peale, as he described whimsically to Boucher. He seemed to sense what a baffling, enigmatic subject he was. “Inclination having yielded to importunity, I am now, contrary to all expectation, under the hands of Mr Peale, but in so grave, so sullen, a mood—and now and then under the influence of Morpheus, when some critical strokes are making—that I fancy the skill of this gentleman’s pencil will be put to it in describing to the world what ma

This serene painting has a storybook quality. Instead of presenting Washington as a prosperous planter, it offers a nostalgic backward glimpse to the Washington of the 1750s. With one yellow-gloved hand thrust into his waistcoat, a musket slung behind him, and a golden sash hung diagonally across his chest, Washington gazes poetically into the distance. His face is smooth and i

The artist spent a week at Mount Vernon and painted miniatures of Martha, Jacky, and Patsy along with the three-quarter-length portrait of George Washington. The picture of Martha was done at Jacky’s request, and one wonders whether he made a point of demonstrating his love for his mother or perhaps implicitly rebuked his stepfather for not having included her in pictures by this visiting artist. It must be said that the picture of Martha Washington, in a mauve dress and pearls, is not especially flattering. Her face is cold and humorless, the tight lips primly disapproving. Nevertheless this was probably the miniature of Martha that her grandson later meant when he said that George Washington always “wore around his neck the miniature portrait of his wife. This he had worn through all the vicissitudes of his eventful career . . . to the last days at Mount Vernon.”23

IN MAY 1773, hoping to put a safe distance between Jacky and his intended bride, Washington accompanied him to New York City and enrolled him in King’s College. This sociable trip exposed Washington to personalities who were to be prominent in the coming conflict. It was almost the last moment when Washington could still mingle easily with people of differing ideologies. In Philadelphia he dined with Governor Richard Pe