If you want to dive into the details concerning inoculation vs. vaccination, the Wikipedia pages are kind of fascinating.
[Transcript]
Hello, and welcome to America’s First Ladies. I’m your host, Risa Weaver-Enion.
Episode 1.6: 1776
When we left off last week, Martha, Jack, and Nelly had arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where George and the Continental Army had set up their winter quarters. I know I titled this episode 1776, but we’re still in the last months of 1775 as we pick up the story again.
Army Headquarters and George’s residence in Cambridge were one and the same, and that’s also where Martha, Jack, and Nelly settled when they arrived. The house they were in had belonged to British sympathizers who had fled to Nova Scotia and was known as the Vassal House. George’s aides-de-camp stayed in the house as well, so it was a cramped situation.
Once Martha arrived in camp, it was a signal to other officers to invite their wives to join them too. The Vassal House became the social hub of winter camp, with George and Martha hosting frequent dinners. There were also a number of visitors from other states who wanted to see General Washington, Lady Washington, and the Continental Army. Martha was probably entertaining in Cambridge as much as she had done at Mount Vernon, but in smaller quarters, with fewer provisions, and with less assistance from the house slaves.
The enlisted men of the army were living in decidedly less comfortable circumstances, despite how crowded Vassal House was. They were set up in everything from tents to lean-tos constructed from boards and sailcloth. Conditions were bad but they had been even worse when George arrived in July.
In The General and Mrs. Washington, Bruce Chadwick describes the scene that greeted George: “Disorder was everywhere. No troops were being drilled. Men drank all day. Gambling was rampant. Men who had never fired a musket shot themselves while trying to do so. Soldiers relieved themselves on the streets. Tents and huts were flimsy and shabbily built. Garbage piled up outside the tents and no one collected it. Officers feuded with each other. Men from city militias did not want to be housed next to men from country militias. Ethnic groups fought with each other. The Virginians did not like the men of Massachusetts and the men from Massachusetts did not like the Virginians; nobody liked the Pennsylvanians.”
One observer called the army the “most wretchedly clothed, and as dirty a set of mortals as ever disgraced the name of a soldier.” There were no women in the camp, and therefore no one to do laundry. Men were letting their shirts literally rot on their bodies because God forbid they do their own laundry! Some men will do literally anything to avoid housework.
George’s first order of business had been to bring some semblance of order to the chaos. Rules of behavior were implemented and enforced. Drills were held and the men learned how to maintain and fire muskets. The men built barracks, repaired wagons, and took turns cooking for their companies. They also dug latrines and fortifications. By the time Martha arrived in December, things were much better, but still not great.
One unexpected benefit of Martha being in camp was her diplomatic abilities. George was overwhelmed with trying to manage an army of amateurs, with barely any supplies, and even less experience. As Helen Bryan explains in Martha Washington: First Lady of Liberty,
“With the constant struggle to obtain supplies from the Congress, and so much to do to set up a military chain of command, whip the camp into order, and enforce discipline and authority between the ranks, George had had little time for the finer points of military etiquette. Relations between his staff and other officers were riven with petty jealousies, as the officers jockeyed for position around their commander. Under impossible pressures, George admitted to Martha his own harassed manner often led to unintentional offences that at best undermined morale and at worst could lead to the formation of dangerous cabals that would jeopardize the fragile structure of military authority. It was a possibility that added immeasurably to George’s difficulties. Martha, at home in social situations since childhood, began smoothing ruffled feathers. She made friends with the other officers’ wives, among them Lucy Knox, the large, bossy, and rather loud wife of General Henry Knox, and Kitty Greene, the pretty but scatterbrained young wife of Quaker general Nathanael Greene…With her knack of getting on smoothly with people, Martha unobtrusively managed to take the social lead without upsetting other women. Had she had a more abrasive personality, it would have elicited a different response from the other wives and simply exacerbated the existing tensions in camp.”
There was a lot of competition among the officers for who got to spend time socially with George, so Martha set up a rotating schedule so that each officer, and his wife if she were in camp, dined at headquarters on a regular basis.
Everyone was surprised by how friendly and charming the General’s wife was. She could converse with people on any topic, from child care to ice skating. After meeting Martha, Mercy Otis Warren wrote to Abigail Adams, “I will tell you I think the complacency of her manners speaks at once of the benevolence of her heart, and her affability, candor, and gentleness qualify her to soften the hours of private life or to sweeten the care of the hero and smooth the rugged paths of war.” Everyone loved Martha, and that made George’s life easier.
Nothing about the war was making George’s life easier. Before Martha had even arrived in camp, George had sent 1,100 men north into Quebec, Canada, to block the British, who intended to sweep down from the north on the Americans. The expedition was led by General Richard Montgomery and General Benedict Arnold (you know, before he became the most famous traitor in American history).
The expedition turned into a disaster. Supply chains had completely broken down, leaving the men without shoes, clothing, or food. The ones who didn’t die of hunger, thirst, or cold came down with smallpox. A large number of men deserted the failed mission. Oh, and General Montgomery was killed and General Arnold was wounded when they decided to attack Quebec on December 31, despite the sorry state of their troops. They tried to besiege the city, but British reinforcements under General Burgoyne were fast approaching. It was the first major offensive attack made by the Continental Army, and it was an epic fail.
In better news, General Henry Knox had successfully taken the British Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York, capturing its valuable store of cannons and artillery. They spent the rest of the winter slowly moving this artillery down to Cambridge.
The British forces trapped in Boston were faring even worse than the Continentals camped in Cambridge. The Americans had set up a successful blockade of the city, so no food or other supplies could get in. The Brits had resorted to tearing apart the wharves to get wood for fires. The soldiers couldn’t afford what little food was left in the city. Although we think of the British Red Coats as a professional army with trained soldiers, the fact is that Britain’s army was spread pretty thin around the world at this point. England had resorted to conscripting felons into the army, just to fill the ranks.
In early March, 1776, the stalemate in Boston finally broke. Under the cover of a general bombardment, George ordered the artillery that Knox had brought down from Fort Ticonderoga to be placed in Dorchester Heights, which overlooked Boston. On March 5, the British army woke up to the sight of enough cannons and mortars to blow them all away. The British contemplated a counterattack, but they did not have good positioning for it, and then a fierce storm blew in. So instead they decided to withdraw from Boston and cede it to the Americans.
Boston was basically in ruins, but at least it wasn’t held by the British any longer. The next target was New York City. George thought it was likely that the British would attack New York because it was a strategic location and had a large population of Tories.
On April 4, the Continental Army began marching from Boston to New York, arriving on April 13. Martha, Jack, and Nelly took a different route and arrived four days later. Jack and Nelly didn’t stay long in New York. Nelly was pregnant again and wanted to get home to Mount Airy well before giving birth. They left around the end of April. Martha remained in New York with George, but not for long.
Smallpox was running rampant through the city. Smallpox was horrible, highly contagious, very deadly, and hard to contain. It’s estimated that nine times as many soldiers died of smallpox as were killed by the enemy. George was immune because he had caught it in Barbados in his 20s. But Martha had never had it, and was definitely not immune. It was possible to inoculate a person against smallpox by infecting them with a small amount of the disease, prompting the immune system to respond, but hopefully not making the person sick enough to be seriously ill or, you know, die.
In early May, Martha left New York and went to Philadelphia to be inoculated. (Side note: if you’re interested in the technical differences between inoculation and vaccination, I’ve put a link to the Wikipedia page on the website for this episode.)
George went with Martha to Philadelphia because he and Congress had some things to discuss with regard to the army. Congress was still debating whether they should officially declare independence from Britain. George felt it was unnecessary. He thought the fact that they were at war with each other was all the declaration they needed.
Martha was inoculated with the smallpox virus around May 23, and on June 4, George wrote a letter to Burwell Bassett that she was handling it well, had gotten through the fever, and had only about a dozen pustules.
After her recovery, Martha left Philadelphia and rejoined George in New York, where he had arrived on June 6. She wasn’t there long though, because on June 29 British General William Howe and fifty British warships arrived on the scene in New York. They set up a camp on Staten Island to await further reinforcements from Britain.
Martha and the other officers’ wives were hustled out of New York and back to Philadelphia. Martha was in Philadelphia on July 2 when Congress voted for independence, on July 4 when the Declaration of Independence was formally adopted, and on July 8 when it was publicly proclaimed. George didn’t find out about it until July 9 when a copy reached him in New York.
George spent the summer of 1776 skirmishing with the British. General William Howe’s troops had been joined by Admiral Lord Richard Howe (his brother) and his fleet. British troops outnumbered American by about two and half to one.
The Americans were defeated at the Battle of Long Island on August 28, and shortly after that, George called for the Continental Army to abandon New York City and retreat. On August 29, a severe storm blew in, bringing with it heavy fog. Throughout the night of August 29-30, small boats slowly ferried 9-10,000 Continental troops across the East River in complete silence. When the fog cleared mid-day on the 30th, the British realized the Americans were gone. A classic Washington retreat that preserved the army to fight another day. Unfortunately, the Americans were then defeated in a series of battles throughout New York state, until they had finally retreated all the way to Pennsylvania.
Martha was no longer in Philadelphia, having finally returned to Mount Vernon in early September. She had stayed in Philadelphia throughout the summer hoping to eventually be able to rejoin George in New York, but the fighting had made that impossible.
With the Continental Army in retreat, and the British in control of New York and New Jersey, Congress abandoned Philadelphia and reconvened in Baltimore, Maryland by early December.
Martha probably stopped at Mount Airy on her way back to Mount Vernon. Nelly had given birth to a daughter on August 21. They named her Elizabeth Parke Custis, and she was called Betsy. As with all of Martha’s children, all of Jack and Nelly’s children would bear the middle name of Parke so they would be eligible to inherit the Parke fortune, which was tied up in the Custis fortune. In Jack’s words, Betsy was “as fine a Healthy, fat Baby as ever was born.” He must have been right, because Betsy survived into adulthood, unlike so many others.
In November 1776, Mount Vernon was in a pretty sad state. George had been away for 18 months, and Martha had been gone nearly a year. Lund Washington was trying to keep the estate going, but Martha had taken many of the house slaves with her, and many of the field slaves had abandoned the estate, lured by the false promise of freedom if they fought for the British.
Martha would have liked to go south to see her relatives, especially her favorite sister Nancy, who was ill, but she was too tired from the long journey to Massachusetts, then New York, then Philadelphia, New York, Philadelphia again, and finally back to Mount Vernon. And there was too much to be done at home.
One of the most concrete things Martha did to help the Continental Army was to make clothes for them. Congress was not sending the army anywhere near enough supplies, including clothes. Mount Vernon was well equipped to produce flax and wool cloth and sew them into clothing. Martha had been outfitting hundreds of slaves for years. She and the house slaves set to work spinning thread, making cloth, knitting stockings, sewing shirts, and making new shirts.
Meanwhile, George and the army had retreated to Princeton, New Jersey, and they were in a bad state. Helen Bryan put it this way, “By December George’s troops were licking their wounds in Princeton, and the seventeen thousand strong army George had had in February 1776 had dwindled to three thousand cold, ragged, hungry, ill-shod, and badly provisioned men, not all of whom were able-bodied enough to fight by the time December arrived. One observer called them animated scarecrows. Desertion was rife. Men who had been absent for over a year wanted or needed to return to their farms. Many had heard the stories of British atrocities and feared for the safety of their women. The troops simply melted away.”
The winter of 1776-77 was bitter cold. Roads were frozen and snowdrifts were piled high. After Princeton, the Continental Army retreated further to Trenton, New Jersey, and then across the Delaware River to the Pennsylvania side of the river. They either took or burned all the boats on the New Jersey side, stranding the British with no way to pursue them until the river froze over enough that they could cross on foot. There were 10,000 British soldiers and Hessian mercenaries on the New Jersey side of the river, with only 3000 American troops on the Pennsylvania side.
Philadelphia had managed to raise a militia of 2000 townsmen, which joined George’s troops in December. George and his men were the only thing standing between the British and Philadelphia. In desperation, George hatched a plan to prepare a sneak attack on the British and Hessians on Christmas Day 1776. The Delaware River was frozen in chunks, but not fully frozen over yet. George assembled 2500 men and artillery on flat-bottomed boats and spent hours ferrying it all across the river. At 4 am they finally had everyone and everything assembled on the New Jersey side.
It was freezing cold and snowing hard, but the troops managed to quickly cover the nine miles from the riverbank to the enemy encampment in Trenton. Before dawn on December 26, the Continental Army attacked the sleeping Hessians and took more than 1000 of them prisoner, ferrying them back across the Delaware River to the Pennsylvania side.
With Trenton now back in the hands of the Americans, George and the Continental Army routed the British at Princeton on January 3, 1777. The British had abandoned stores of food and ammunition as they retreated from New Jersey, and the Continentals were more than happy to take ownership of both.
The British retreated back to New York, but the Continental Army was hit with another outbreak of smallpox, preventing them from pursuing. They spent the winter in Morristown, New Jersey, but had no proper camp established. Instead, the soldiers were quartered in various homes, and George set up headquarters inside a tavern.
In February 1777, George was seriously ill, and some of his staff thought he might die, but thankfully, he didn’t. Martha left Mount Vernon in late February, this time traveling without Jack and Nelly. She arrived in Morristown sometime in mid-March. She and George hadn’t seen each other since she had quickly left New York on June 29 the previous summer.
The army’s presence in Morristown was wearing on the residents. In Helen Bryan’s words, “George was losing the battle for the hearts and minds of both his troops and the local residents. The impact of thousands of ill, ragged, starving men quartered on the town had been immense. The Presbyterian and Baptist churches had been turned into makeshift hospitals for the soldiers suffering from smallpox or those recovering from inoculation. The townspeople resented the measures, which quartered three or four men in their homes, particularly as the soldiers brought smallpox and dysentery with them. Before the winter was over, smallpox and dysentery killed a fourth of the inhabitants of Morristown. In the countryside farmers resented the depredations of foraging expeditions, and those soldiers well enough to complain grumbled at the poor conditions and lack of supplies.”
Martha had brought with her a supply of cloth and wool and was soon hard at work sewing shirts and knitting socks for the soldiers. Some of the ladies of Morristown were quite surprised by how down-to-earth the General’s wife was. Upon paying a visit to Martha, one woman commented, “We dressed ourselves in our most elegant ruffles and silks and were introduced to her ladyship. And don’t you think, we found her knitting, and with a specked apron on! There we were without a stitch of work…but General Washington’s lady with her own hands was knitting stockings.”
Another woman on that same visit commented, “She seems very wise in experience, kind hearted and winning in all her ways. She talked much of the suffering of the poor soldiers, especially the sick ones. Her heart seems full of compassion for them.”
As usual, Martha’s presence in winter quarters was a signal to the other officers to invite their wives to join them. In addition to the women, there were two other famous additions to George’s military family at this time. Twenty-year-old Alexander Hamilton was one of George’s aides-de-camp and right hand man. And from France the 19-year-old Marquis de Lafayette had joined the Patriots’ cause. He and George became quite close, with George almost considering him a son.
Martha tried to provide a social outlet for George and the other officers, but it was more challenging than it had been in Cambridge. With so little food available, dinner parties were scaled back, and the balls that were held were usually in cramped, unfestive quarters. And one of the most sociable of the wives wasn’t in camp that winter. Kitty Greene had recently given birth to a daughter that she and Nathanael named Martha Washington Greene. She was one of many babies named after Lady Washington.
George had taken advantage of the winter downtime to have most of the Continental Army inoculated against smallpox. Because the recovery took several weeks, they inoculated soldiers on a rotating schedule so they weren’t all recovering at the same time. But the ranks were greatly depleted throughout the inoculation campaign, and it’s fortunate that the British never got word of the army’s depleted state.
It was inevitable that the British would try again to take Philadelphia once spring arrived. They had gotten within six miles of the capital the previous winter, before George’s surprise attack on Trenton and then victory in Princeton. Back in the fall of 1776, Congress had given George the authority to raise a number of new regiments. By June, the army had increased to 9000 men.
It’s unknown why General Howe hadn’t made a move on Philadelphia earlier in the spring, but his delay allowed the Continental troops to recover fully from their smallpox inoculation and grow their numbers with new recruits. Martha left Morristown in early June and headed back to Mount Vernon.
The summer and fall of 1777 were bad for the Americans on all fronts. On July 4, as Congress was marking the first anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia with elaborate celebrations, General John Burgoyne had taken back Fort Ticonderoga from the Americans, apparently without a fight on the Americans’ part. George had marched briskly with his troops in an attempt to join the fight at Ticonderoga, only to find out on July 15 that the fort had fallen.
Meanwhile, General Howe’s troops were still on board ships in New York Harbor, and George had no idea if they were going to head for Philadelphia over land or sail up the Hudson and try to meet up with Burgoyne’s troops who were marching south through New York after their victory at Ticonderoga. Burgoyne’s men engaged in multiple skirmishes with Americans on the way south, eventually becoming so bogged down by their extensive baggage train that they ground to halt outside Albany.
At the end of July, George received word from Congress that the British fleet was heading for Philadelphia and he was finally able to take decisive action. He and his 11,000 men headed immediately for Philadelphia. They camped five miles north of the city, between Germantown and Schuylkill Falls.
On September 11, 1777 George’s troops engaged the British in what is known as the Battle of Brandywine. It actually took place in Chadd’s Ford, but it was on the Brandywine Creek (sometimes called a river), so somehow it was named after the creek/river rather than the town. General Howe and Lord Cornwallis used the heavy fog that day to their advantage and outsmarted George by marching their main company further upstream from the points being defended by the Americans. The British were able to cross the Brandywine and flank the Americans.
As George retreated to the northeast, the path to Philadelphia was left clear. British troops entered and occupied Philadelphia on September 25 or 26. Between the Battle of Brandywine and the occupation of Philadelphia, Congress had abandoned the capital, fleeing first to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and then to York.
On October 4, George launched a surprise attack on a British garrison at Germantown, outside Philadelphia. They almost pulled off a victory, but the weather was once again not on their side. In heavy fog, two separate columns of American soldiers were advancing on the British, but each column thought the other one was the enemy, and in the confusion, they both retreated.
Soon after this defeat, the Americans enjoyed a rousing victory, but it was accomplished by the troops under Generals Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold, not George Washington. They defeated Burgoyne’s men at the Battle of Saratoga, and Burgoyne surrendered on October 17. In Helen Bryan’s words, “As [Burgoyne’s] men marched out to lay their arms in front of the Americans, the smartly uniformed British were astonished at the motley appearance of the rebel troops, dressed in stained and torn shirts and some accompanied by pet raccoons and bears. Some were wearing wigs that looked, as one English officer noted, as if a whole sheep was being worn under a hat. Many of the Americans seemed to be men in their fifties and sixties who were new to military life.”
While all of this was unfolding, Martha was back in Virginia. She traveled south to Eltham for the first time since before the war to visit her sister Nancy and her family. She took Nancy’s two sons, ages 13 and 11, with her back to Mount Vernon so they could be inoculated against smallpox, which was successful. She sent the boys back to Eltham in November, expressing a hope that Nancy and her daughter Fanny would also be inoculated at some point in the future.
Nancy never had a chance to be inoculated, as she died in December 1777. The cause was unknown, but she had been ill since at least 1774. It seems that Martha and Nancy had discussed the likelihood of Nancy dying before her daughter Fanny grew up, and Nancy indicated that she wanted Martha to bring the girl to Mount Vernon and raise her to be a proper Virginia lady.
After Nancy’s death, Martha sent a letter to her brother-in-law Burwell, offering to make good on this arrangement. But she was prevented from going to Eltham to retrieve Fanny by two events. First, Nelly gave birth to another daughter on December 31, 1777 at Mount Vernon. They named her Martha Parke Custis, and she was called Patty.
Second, George wrote to Martha in January 1778, asking her to join him in his winter quarters at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Congress had insisted that he make winter camp close to Philadelphia, to protect the region from British attacks.
Next week, we’ll spend an absolutely miserable winter with the American troops in Valley Forge. Sounds fun, right?
Thanks for listening to this episode. It was produced by me. The music is by Matthew Dull. Have you recommended this podcast to a friend yet? Please do, thanks!
