If you want to read more about sugar loaves, here's a link to the Wikipedia page. And if you're wondering what "spoon bread" is, well, it's a Southern side dish sort of like cornbread, but with a more pudding-like consistency so it can be eaten with a spoon. So it's aptly named, lol. I found this recipe on the Spruce Eats if you want to give it a try.
[Transcript]
Hello, and welcome to America’s First Ladies. I’m your host, Risa Weaver-Enion.
Episode 1.4: Mrs. Washington
When we left off last week, the Widow Custis had married Colonel George Washington, thus becoming Mrs. Washington.
The wedding festivities probably lasted several days, maybe even a week. When all the guests were finally gone, the newlyweds remained at White House. Construction was on-going at Mount Vernon, and it was not yet ready for its new inhabitants, namely, a young woman and her young children.
The House of Burgesses was scheduled to convene on February 22 (George’s birthday), so he and Martha moved to Williamsburg with Jacky and Patsy. I will now start referring to Martha as Martha instead of Patsy. For one, it’s too confusing to refer to both mother and daughter as Patsy. And also, Martha did start going by Martha some time after she and George were married. George and her family continued to call her Patsy, but we’re sticking with Martha from here on out.
Part of the Custis estate included a home in Williamsburg called Six Chimneys House, and that’s where the family stayed from February until April, 1759. They were able to enjoy the social scene of Williamsburg and most likely attended many dinners and balls.
George wanted to get to Mount Vernon in time for the spring planting season. Mount Vernon was about 50 miles from Williamsburg, which at that time was about a 5-day carriage ride. They left Williamsburg on April 2 and arrived at Mount Vernon on April 6.
Martha and the children rode in the Custis carriage, George was on horseback, and the household goods and slaves traveled in wagons. Martha brought mostly furniture and housewares with her from White House to Mount Vernon. She left behind all of her clothes, as well as the children’s clothes, purchasing new items after arriving at Mount Vernon. She also purchased new toys for the children, a variety of new housewares, and even new horses.
In her book Martha Washington: An American Life, Patricia Brady provides an inventory of the items Martha did take with her:
“stone pots of raisins, two Cheshire cheeses, a barrel and twenty-two loaves of sugar, ten dozen bottles of wine, one tierce (a giant cask holding about forty-two gallons) of rum, brandy, cider, nutmegs both plain and candied, a half pound each of cloves and mace, three pounds of comfits, six pounds of white sugar candy, eight pounds of almonds, two bags of salt. From the Custis houses, she took a mahogany desk, a table and cabinet, two chests, three looking glasses, and six beds with their ‘furniture,’ that is, counterpanes and bed curtains. The amount of linen Martha considered necessary for her new home included twenty-four pairs of sheets, fifty-four tablecloths, ninety-nine napkins and towels, twenty-five pillowcases. For the dining room, she took two cases of knives and forks, a tea chest, at least sixty glasses, and uncountable numbers of dishes—two sets of china, a tea set, a crate of earthenware, and much more.”
Can we just pause for a minute here to consider why someone would need 54 tablecloths. And what’s up with having 99 napkins and towels? Why not an even 100? And in case you’re wondering what on earth a loaf of sugar is, I Googled it for us, because I was also wondering.
It turns out that until the mid-1800s when granulated sugar and sugar cubes became available, sugar was sold in loaves. They didn’t look like a loaf of bread though. They were tall conical shapes with a rounded top. I’ll put a photo on the website, along with a link to the Wikipedia entry. It’s fascinating. People would snip off pieces of sugar as they needed it with a tool called sugar-nips—like special scissors. The loaves weighed from about 5 pounds to more than 30 pounds, but the smaller loaves were higher quality sugar. And that’s our fun fact for today, friends!
During the journey to Mount Vernon, George sent a messenger ahead to the plantation manager to prepare the house for their arrival. He wanted the house cleaned and aired out, beds prepared, fires built, and some eggs and chickens procured. He also specifically instructed that the staircase be polished to make it look its best. Mind you, he only gave the plantation manager one day’s notice to complete all of this!
And despite the fact that they had spent the winter in Williamsburg, construction on Mount Vernon still wasn’t finished. The main point of the project was adding a second story to the house, where the bedrooms were going to be. But since they weren’t finished, the beds had to be set up in the downstairs hall.
Mount Vernon had (and still has) beautiful wide lawns and lovely views of the Potomac River, so the approach probably made a good impression on Martha and the children. The river created the boundary between the colonies of Virginia and Maryland, and the Maryland side was heavily forested, so the views were picturesque.
There was no doubt a lot of work for Martha and the household slaves to do to transform a literally dusty bachelor pad into a family home, so it probably took weeks before the house felt put together.
Martha had never been this far away from home before, and all her friends and family were in southern Virginia. The only member of her family who ever made the trip north to visit her was her favorite sister, Anna Maria, with her husband Burwell Bassett. Anna Maria was confusingly nicknamed Nancy, and that’s how she’s referenced in all of Martha’s letters.
In addition to socializing with the nearby Fairfaxes, George and Martha had several other friends reasonably close by. And the new port city of Alexandria was only 10 miles away. It was much smaller than Williamsburg, but it provided a variety of entertainments, such as fish feasts, barbecues, tea parties, horse races, balls, and informal neighborhood dances.
George had to go to Williamsburg regularly, and Martha often accompanied him, taking the opportunity to visit her mother and other family members in southern Virginia. They were happily married, and enjoying their country lifestyle.
In a letter shortly after their marriage, George wrote, “I am now I beleive fixd at this Seat with an agreable Consort for Life and hope to find more happiness in retirement than I ever experienced amidst a wide and bustling World.” [NOTE: for those reading the transcript, this was the actual spelling from the quoted letter.]
Helen Bryan gives us a remarkably detailed look at the typical day that George and Martha had at Mount Vernon. I’m paraphrasing here, rather than directly quoting.
George rose at 4 am, shaved, and dressed quietly, so as not to disturb Martha. He went to his study to handle correspondence and plantation business. Martha rose around dawn, got dressed, and gave housekeeping orders for the day to the household slaves. She would then unlock the food cabinets and dole out what was needed for the day’s meals, and also distribute food rations for the slaves either directly to them or to their overseers.
Martha and George would have breakfast together—at 7 am in the summer and 8 am in the winter, along with any overnight house guests. More on that later. Breakfast was typically meat-heavy, with roasted fowl, ham, venison, and game, along with eggs, a sweet bread, butter, gingerbread, spoon bread, hominy, molasses, biscuits, cream, and copious amounts of tea and coffee. Honestly, with breakfasts like that, it’s not surprising that Martha was always referred to as plump throughout her life.
George limited himself to Indian cakes, which were cornmeal pancakes with butter and honey. He had trouble with his teeth his whole life, and Indian cakes were something he could eat without difficulty. Side note: George Washington never had wooden teeth; that’s just a myth. But he did pay some of his slaves for their teeth which were then wired together into a sort of rudimentary set of dentures. Yikes.
After breakfast, George rode out onto the estate and spent the rest of the day overseeing work, joining in with projects, and checking on things. The plantation totaled 4000 acres over 5 farms. After George went out for his ride, Martha spent an hour reading her Bible and praying, and then went back to work, overseeing everything that took place in the house and surrounding buildings. She also had a never-ending supply of sewing to be done, as well as looking after the children.
George returned home at 2:45 every day. No one mentions how he managed to be so punctual. It’s possible he was just looking at the sun to estimate time, or he might have had a pocket sundial, which was the primary portable means of telling time in colonial America.
Upon returning to the house, George cleaned up, changed clothes for dinner, and powdered his hair. He didn’t wear a wig, but kept his hair fashionably long and wore it in a little ponytail they called a queue. Dinner was the main meal of the day and was served at 3 pm. It often included guests, some who were invited and some who just dropped by.
Dinner was a multi-course situation. Quoting from Bruce Chadwick’s book The General and Mrs. Washington,
“A simple dinner might include a ham, goose, pickled pork, boiled turnips, apple dumplings, cinnamon, sugars, beef, mutton, fowl, lamb, turkey, tongue, turtle, pigeon sausage, eggs, vegetables, and mince pie. The Washingtons often ate fish, usually herring and shad, caught by the fishermen that operated George’s schooners on the Chesapeake. Desserts at a single dinner seating might include jellies, custards, cakes, and pies. The entire meal might be topped off with several bowls of fresh fruit and the nuts that George loved.”
Helen Bryan quotes from a letter written by a guest at Mount Vernon, “The dinner was very good, a small roasted pigg, baked leg of lamb, roasted fowles, beef, peas, lettuce, cucumbers, artichokes, etc. puddings, tarts, et. etc. We were desired to call for what drink we chose.” [Again, for those reading the transcript, this is an exact quote, spelling errors and all.]
When dinner finished, the ladies would retire to another room to sew and talk. The men stayed at the table and drank. After the candles were lit in the evening, everyone would gather in the parlor where they would talk, read, write letters, dance, sing, or play cards. Around 8 pm a light evening meal of tea and toast was served. Bedtime was at 9 pm.
And that’s what they did EVERY DAY. Except on Sundays when they went to church.
I can’t even imagine how much money they spent on food, especially because they were feeding themselves, all their slaves, and guests several times a week. Mount Vernon records show that the Washingtons had as many as 677 dinner guests in a single year. 677! In one year! That’s too many guests. It was so common for them to have guests that George thought the lack of guests was noteworthy enough for his daily diary. The entry for June 4, 1771 notes “at home all day without company.”
And in addition to their food expenses, they weren’t exactly living a frugal lifestyle. They had Martha’s share of the Custis fortune, and they spent it. George loved the finer things in life: elegant carriages, finely made clothes, ornately decorated dishware and wine decanters, handsome furniture, and elaborate gardens.
The annual orders to England grew longer and more extravagant. They ordered new wardrobes for themselves and the children, and even the house slaves were outfitted in matching scarlet and white uniforms. George was a flashy dresser who wanted to wear the most fashionable clothes from London, whereas Martha had simple, but elegant, tastes. She did, at least, attempt to be somewhat mindful of spending on clothing for the children, knowing that they would outgrow things quickly. In a letter to a London hatmaker, she asked the woman to look for genteel and proper clothes for Patsy, “provided it is done with frugality, for as she is only nine years old; a superfluity or expense in dress would be altogether unnecessary.”
They ordered perfumed hair powders, stays for corsets, laces for the stays, both fancy and everyday handkerchiefs, silk, linen, and satin shoes, cotton stockings, gloves, bonnets, and ornaments, and ribbons and trimming for dresses. They also ordered sewing supplies such as scissors, binding tape, thread, embroidery silk, sewing pins, and hair pins.
Helen Bryan’s book Martha Washington: First Lady of Liberty includes an example of an order George sent to London in September 1759:
“A light summer suit made of Duroy or by the inclosed measure; 4 pieces best India Nankeen; 2 best Beaver hats; 1 ps Irish Linnen; 1 ps of black E Sattin Ribbon; 1 Salmon-colored Tabby of the enclosed pattern, with Sattin flowers, to be made in a sack and coat; 1 Cap, Handkerchief, and Tucker Ruffles of Brussells lace or Point…to be worn with the above negligee; 1 piece Bag Holland; 2 fine flowered Lawn Aprons…a puckered petticoat of a fashionable color a silver Tabby petticoat…1 black Mask.” And no, I don’t know what half those words mean.
It might not be terribly surprising to learn that by 1763, all the Custis money Martha brought to the marriage had been spent, and the Washingtons were in debt. It wasn’t just the things they ordered from England, but also construction projects at Mount Vernon. George had endless ideas about how to improve Mount Vernon, and he had no qualms about spending his wife’s money to complete them. As far as we know, she had no qualms about him spending the money this way. They seem to have spent many evenings (when they didn’t have guests) talking over ideas and plans for Mount Vernon.
It also didn’t help that George’s tobacco crops never fetched as high a price as the Custis tobacco. Northern Virginia was not as well suited to growing tobacco as the fertile southern lands, and George had had a few bad harvests. He spent a lifetime experimenting with new crops and money-making ideas, even sending extensive letters during the war to the cousin he left in charge of Mount Vernon. Ultimately, George’s plantation never made as much money as Daniel Custis’s had.
You might wonder why they had to order all of this stuff from England in the first place. It was one of the ways that England exerted control over its colonies. The colonies were forbidden from trading with any country except England. So if colonists wanted to order Spanish sherry, the sherry had to be shipped from Spain to England, with the appropriate taxes and duties paid, and then the sherry was sold to American colonists at an inflated price and shipped from England to America, incurring more taxes along the way. This was one of many factors that led the colonists to revolt against England in the first place.
The other problem was that there was no uniform currency in America. Each colony issued its own currency, and no colony would accept another colony’s currency as payment for goods, which made inter-colony trade difficult.
In 1760, there was a change in the British monarch when George II died and his son George III became king. The French and Indian slash Seven Years War was still going on, and England was spending a lot of money to fund the war. George III and his advisers decided that the colonies needed to shoulder more of the financial burden of the war. To this end, the 1760s were a decade of numerous Acts of taxation that were issued and then repealed by Parliament.
Patricia Brady provides a lovely, concise summary for us.
“Colonial leaders resisted each attempt to impose taxes and tighten royal control in a series of increasingly acrimonious disputes beginning in 1763. They sent agents like Benjamin Franklin to represent their interests in London, waged newspaper warfare, established intercolonial ties, wrote countless letters and broadsides, and formed committees to enforce their refusal to buy British goods. Boston took the lead, followed by New York City, both their genteel leaders and their mobs of ordinary citizens profoundly suspicious of British intentions and authority. Virginians watched and waited; radicals like Patrick Henry were ahead of the rest. The Proclamation of 1763, the Sugar Act, the Currency Act, the Stamp Act, the Quartering Act, the Declaratory Act, and the Townshend Acts—through the 1760s, the British Parliament passed and then repealed a string of measures, which seldom added to their revenues, eroded imperial control over the colonies, and drove more and more Americans toward defiance and ultimately revolution.”
While these larger-scale events were taking place, life went on at Mount Vernon. In 1761, Martha and George had hired a live-in tutor, Walter Magowan, to handle Jacky and Patsy’s education.
Magowan left them in 1768, when Jacky was 14 and Patsy was about 11 or 12. Jacky was old enough to be sent away to school, so they arranged for him to attend a boarding school near Fredericksburg. Around the same time, Patsy suffered her first epileptic attack, a condition that would plague her the rest of her life. I should note here that only Patricia Brady refers to this as Patsy’s first epileptic seizure. Bruce Chadwick indicates that her epilepsy began around the age of 2 and worsened during puberty. At any rate, Patsy had epilepsy, and it became severe during her teenage years.
There was no treatment for epilepsy in the 18th century. The seizures were referred to as “fits,” and a wide variety of unhelpful medicines were administered to Patsy over the years. They tried herbal remedies, powders, and pills. They used valerian root, which was mostly harmless, but also mercury, which was poisonous. They purged Patsy’s blood with leeches, and took her to hot springs to try to improve her health.
Martha and George did their best to provide Patsy with some semblance of a normal life, inviting friends to stay with them, and attending dances when possible. It seemed clear to everyone that Patsy was unlikely to ever marry and have children in her condition. All Martha’s hopes were now pinned on Jacky.
By 1769, George’s political career had advanced and he was representing Fairfax County, which was more prestigious than Frederick County. At the spring legislative session, the colonial burgesses presented a document called the Virginia Resolves, opposing taxation without representation and other British infringements on the Americans’ rights. The royal governor dissolved the assembly, which was his right, because the colonial legislatures were basically operating at the pleasure of the sovereign, and the royal governor was the sovereign’s appointed representative in the colony.
The burgesses met instead at a local tavern and started organizing a boycott of British goods until the taxes in question were repealed. As you can probably guess based on the earlier description of all the things the colonists ordered from England, it was no easy task to find local replacements. One way the Washingtons tried to do their part was to increase production of cloth at Mount Vernon. Flax and wool could be woven into linen and woolen fabrics and then clothes could be made from the fabric.
In 1770, Jacky’s school was relocated to Annapolis, which was within easy traveling distance of Mount Vernon. Jacky was never a good student. He had very little discipline, and Martha spoiled him. He liked to gamble, attend horse races, and generally spend a lot of money on dumb things. The school master wrote, “I must confess to you that I never in my Life knew a Youth so exceedingly Indolent or so surprisingly voluptuous; one wd. Suppose Nature had intended him for some Asiatic Prince.”
By 1773, George was considering sending Jacky away to college in New York City. Jacky had other plans, having fallen in love with the sister of one of his friends from school, a girl named Eleanor Calvert, who went by the nickname Nelly. They had become secretly engaged before finally revealing their plans as George became more serious about sending Jacky to New York City.
The Calvert family were highly respectable, being descended from Lord Baltimore, the original grantee of the colony of Maryland.
Jack was only 18, and Nelly was only 15 or 16, so George thought Jack was much too young (and irresponsible) for marriage. He was also furious that Jack had entered into a secret engagement and not consulted his family first. However, Martha was thrilled by the engagement, and George always deferred to Martha when it came to the children because he was only their stepfather.
Nelly’s parents were more than happy to have wealthy Jack Custis as a prospective son-in-law. Nelly was their second eldest daughter, and they had 10 children altogether. They were happy to give the engagement their blessing, but also happy to accede to George’s idea that Jack and Nelly wait two or three years before actually marrying.
In April 1773, Nelly visited Mount Vernon for the first time with her parents and her elder sister, Betsy. It was Martha, George, and Patsy’s first chance to meet Nelly. Pasty and Nelly were practically the same age and became fast and close friends. Martha and George invited a variety of distinguished guests to dinner at what was essentially an engagement party. By the end of the four-day visit, the families were well acquainted.
Nonetheless, George still insisted that Jack attend college, departing with him on May 10 for the ride to New York City. Jack was enrolled at King’s College, which was renamed Columbia in 1784. While he was away, Nelly was encouraged to visit Martha and Patsy at Mount Vernon, and she spent several weeks there in June 1773.
On June 19, while Nelly was still visiting, Patsy suffered an epileptic seizure and died suddenly. She was 17. The day had otherwise seemed normal, but after dinner, Patsy went into her bedroom to retrieve a letter from Jack and had a sudden seizure. Nelly shouted for help, Martha and George rushed in. Patsy was lifted onto her bed, and she died in George’s arms. George recorded the event in his diary, “She was seized with one of her usual fits and expired in less than two Minutes without uttering a Word, a groan, or scarce a sigh.”
The weather was already very hot, so Patsy had to be buried right away. There was no embalming back then, and bodies would begin to decompose rapidly in hot weather. The same had been true when Martha’s father died and also when Daniel Sr. died. There was no time to transport Patsy’s body to the family burial ground where her father, brother, and sister were buried, so she was buried in the family vault at Mount Vernon.
George was so affected by Patsy’s death that he stopped working on plantation business for three whole weeks. With Patsy now dead, her ⅓ share of the Custis estate was divided evenly between Martha and Jack, so when George began working again, there was administrative record-keeping to attend to, settling the accounts of Patsy’s portion of the estate and then apportioning the remainder to Martha and Jack.
Jack wasn’t able to come home for Patsy’s funeral—again, there was no time. She was buried the day after she died. He didn’t even write to his mother for two weeks because he was so traumatized. He wrote that Patsy might be happier in heaven than she had been on Earth, due to her difficult seizures. Bruce Chadwick quotes from Jack’s letter: “Her case is more to be envied than pitied, for if we mortals can distinguish between those who are deserving of grace and who are not, I am confident she enjoys that bliss prepared only for the good and virtuous.”
Jack did come home from school that fall for what was supposed to be a vacation; in the end, he never went back to school. He didn’t enjoy school, he wasn’t a good student, and he wanted to marry Nelly right away. Martha was never able to say no to Jack about anything, and she certainly couldn’t now that he was her last surviving child. He was also the sole heir to the large Custis fortune, and Martha wanted grandchildren.
I’ve alluded to this a few times, but I suppose now is as good a time as any to discuss George and Martha’s lack of biological children together. Considering that they were both in their mid-twenties when they married, they expected to have children together. Martha certainly wanted more children, and given how kind a stepfather George was, it makes sense that he would have been a great father.
No one knows for sure why George and Martha never had children. As far as the records go, Martha never even became pregnant again after she gave birth to Patsy in 1756. It’s possible that her pregnancy or childbirth with Patsy damaged her reproductive organs to an extent that made future pregnancy impossible.
It’s also possible that George was infertile. George had accompanied his elder brother Lawrence to Barbados in 1751 when he was 20. Lawrence was ill with tuberculosis, and it was thought that traveling to warmer weather would do his health some good. It didn’t, and Lawrence died the following year.
But while in Barbados, George contracted smallpox. It wasn’t a serious case and his life was never in danger. It did leave him with some pockmarks on his face, but also with immunity to smallpox, which would come in super handy during the war when smallpox ran rampant through the military encampments. More on that in a future episode.
But it’s possible that the smallpox infection also left him infertile. However, there is some speculation that George fathered at least one illegitimate child before he met Martha. No one knows for sure, obviously. But George did comment somewhere along the way that he felt their childlessness was due to Martha’s inability to bear more children. On the one hand, men are always reluctant to admit the problem might be with them. But on the other hand, if he had fathered a child after having smallpox, then he would have had reason to believe that he and Martha should have been able to have children, but some health problem on her side prevented it.
At any rate, Jack and Nelly were married on February 3, 1774 at the Calvert family home, Mount Airy. George attended but Martha did not. She was still wearing mourning clothes after Patsy’s death the previous summer, and didn’t want to cast a gloomy pall over the wedding festivities. After their marriage, Jack and Nelly split their time between living at Mount Vernon and living at Mount Airy. The two plantations were about 60 miles apart, so it was a reasonably easy distance to travel, taking several days by carriage. It would be some time before they established a home of their own.
Next week, political tensions are going to come to a head and England and her American colonies will go to war against each other. And George and Martha Washington will be at the center of it all.
Thanks for listening to this episode. It was produced by me. The music is by Matthew Dull. If you’re enjoying Martha’s story, please tell a friend and invite them to listen, thanks!
