The following review posted on H-SAWH (Southern Association of Women
Historians) may prove of interest to readers of VA-Hist. 


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Sara B. Bearss
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Senior Editor, Dictionary of Virginia Biography
The Library of Virginia
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Richmond, VA 23221-8000
 
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H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (April 2008)

Patricia Brady. _Martha Washington: An American Life_. New York: Viking,
2005. iii + 272 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95
(cloth), ISBN 0-6700-3430-4; $15.00 (paper), ISBN 0-1430-3713-7.

Reviewed for H-SAWH by Martha J. King, Papers of Thomas Jefferson,
Princeton University

A Second Look at a First Lady

The cover illustration and subsequent pages of the latest biography of
Martha Washington challenge our stereotyped image, frozen in time, of
America's first "first lady" as an elderly, timid matron. Historian
Patricia Brady invites us to take a closer look at a significant, though
sparsely documented, figure in American history. Brady's approach to the
biography is not unlike the technique the book's cover artist, Michael
Deas, uses to portray a very feminine and graceful Martha Custis based
on a forensic imaging and age regression of a Charles Wilson Peale
miniature. Brady's own fresh portrait of the Virginia gentlewoman uses
the limited direct documentary source material that exists to situate
her in a contextualized historical narrative that challenges some of our
static preconceptions. Brady fleshes out the facts recorded in the brief
sketch of Washington's life written by Ellen McCallister Clark (_Martha
Washington: A Brief Biography_ [2002]) and provides some details of the
times and relationships in which the first lady was immersed, especially
her marriage to George Washington.
 
With a paucity of only five known extant documents exchanged between
George and Martha Washington, including one at the Virginia Historical
Society that the author identified, Brady and other biographers must
grapple with the lacunae of source material. Martha Washington
supposedly burned her correspondence with her famous second husband
before her death, to keep their relationship private. The lack of
documentary evidence makes it difficult to interpret their almost
forty-one-year partnership. Yet, Brady makes extensive use of George
Washington's correspondence and letters written by others that mention
his wife.  

"Based almost entirely on published manuscripts," Brady's book is
indebted to the modern documentary editions of _The Papers of George
Washington_, edited by W. W. Abbott and others, and published in
multiple series at the University of Virginia since 1976, and the
single-volume collection _"Worthy Partner": The Papers of Martha
Washington_ (1994), compiled and published by Joseph E. Fields (p. 255).
Following the lead of such historians as Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who
have teased out life details from women who left more of a trace in pins
and needles than pens and papers, Brady also makes good use of material
culture to interpret the life of Martha Washington.[1] An author who has
previously written on southern women and domestic life, Brady describes
the modest bathing attire her subject wore, the blue cloth-lined chair
in which she rode, the stockings she knit for her husband, and the
handkerchiefs she stitched for grandchildren, as well as the domestic
purchases made and recorded in her account books as a new wife and
plantation mistress. Brady masterfully draws a great deal from her
limited sources, but, just as a painter often takes artistic license to
interpret a subject, she sometimes tries to read Martha Washington's
intent and feelings without more than a hunch or a modern sensibility to
inform her conjectures.  

Martha Washington emerges as a woman of her time and place, the eldest
daughter of eight children in a long-rooted Virginia lineage. Brady
rightly acknowledges that to understand her we need to understand the
customs of eighteenth-century Virginia and of southern women in
particular. As women's historians have long realized, the nodal points
in women's lives are often different from those of the men whose lives
they shared. This account of Martha Washington bears witness to that
insight. The fateful battle of Yorktown with its heralding of the
British surrender and end of the American Revolution pale in
significance for the commanding general's wife with another key event of
1781, the death of her beloved son John Parke (Jacky) Custis. The famous
farewell address of her husband in 1796 merits only a passing paragraph
and is noted not for its form and content but to indicate her delight
that her husband would soon return to private life.

Family was of primary concern to Martha Washington, and her
understanding of family was both expansive and changing across her
lifespan. As a woman who experienced great and frequent loss, she
outlived her parents, siblings, first husband, children, some of her
great grandchildren, and her famous second spouse. Brady's biography is
rooted in role analysis, and her family charts are helpful in untangling
some of the "genealogical snarls" that plague Virginia families (p. 20).


 

Brady assigns more determination to Martha Dandridge than heretofore
appreciated, especially in standing up to, and winning the approval of,
her future father-in-law John Custis.  She also reexamines the initial
meeting of George Washington and the young widow Martha Custis,
dismissing the notion that the young colonel married her only for her
money and diminishing the love-at-first-sight romantic myth made popular
by nineteenth-century family descendants. While her first marriage to
Daniel Parke Custis had made her wealthy and George Washington stood to
gain social and financial prominence as a result of marrying her, she
also considered other suitors. Brady makes the case that the older
widower-with-children Charles Carter was a serious marriage prospect, as
was the eight-month younger and unencumbered bachelor who ultimately won
her hand.

Brady credits Martha Washington with much agency in deciding to please
herself in her second marriage. Likewise, she contends that George
Washington was an attractive man who suffered from an unrequited love
with Sally Fairfax yet ultimately realized that his friend's wife was
off limits to him. The Washingtons, Brady argues, were able to enjoy a
deeply companionate marriage as well as an unstrained mutual friendship
with the Fairfax couple for the remainder of their lives. Brady credits
Washington with being secure in her own worth by rising above any petty
jealousies of her husband's female friends. She downplays and does not
directly mention a letter from George Washington to Fairfax written
later in life.[2] 

Martha Washington was a woman of her time, albeit a very wealthy woman.
Whereas her husband's passion was building, her passion was how many
relatives she could welcome to fill their home. Brady describes a woman
who always enjoyed the company of young people and even adopted
grandchildren and took numerous nieces and nephews under her wing. The
rhythm of Washington's days included managing a growing domestic
household and seeing to the education of children and grandchildren, as
well as sewing, reading, dancing, theater-going, and other socially
proscribed behavior for a woman of her station. She had an almost
obsessive worry about family, travel by water, and smallpox inoculation,
but overcame her fears for the sake of her family.

Brady reminds us that Martha Washington's marriage to George Washington
quite literally expanded her horizons, taking her much farther north
than she had ever been before; indeed, at the time of her marriage, she
had never been more than twenty miles from the house where she was born.
Brady also attempts to explore Martha Washington's spiritual and
intellectual horizons. Yet, without reflections on her reading or
concrete evidence to prove or disprove inner devotion and beliefs, Brady
recounts the titles of her library and also surmises that she likely
read her Bible and prayer book as well as popular inspirational books by
Anglican clerics. 

Lady Washington achieved public fame from her loyal, annual visits to
her husband's winter encampments during the American Revolution. These
visits required extensive preparation and caused anguished separation
from family at Mount Vernon, but they allowed her to be supportive of
the partner in whose company she longed to dwell. Her brave, hospitable
presence with her husband for nearly five of the eight and a half years
he commanded the army was essential, even indispensable, to George
Washington's emotional well being, Brady argues, enabling him to
accomplish much and giving him a haven where he could let down his
guard. Martha Washington's devotion to her husband during wartime made
her "the secret weapon of the American Revolution," but that weapon was
a double-edged sword for her because it tore her from the home that she
much preferred and kept her in the public eye (p. 145).  

Her husband's presidency was perhaps even more of a sacrifice for her
and was akin to state imprisonment for the very same reasons, yet Brady
places Martha Washington on a pedestal in filling the role of the
nation's first lady with wit, charm, and gracious conversation,
endearing herself to many at her popular Friday evening receptions. If
George Washington was conscious of the precedent he set in the execution
of his roles as commander-in-chief and first president, one wonders if
his wife was equally aware of her own precedent and the effect of her
actions. Brady's chronological life account is slim on George
Washington's second term, perhaps because the modern documentary edition
of his papers has not yet completed these years. But Brady interprets
the time in the federal city of Philadelphia as hell for Martha
Washington, who suffered twice as much as her husband did from the
slings and arrows of the brutal partisan attacks against him in the
1790s.

While her depiction of Lady Washington is more nuanced than those of
earlier biographies, Brady perpetuates some stereotypes of other
contemporaries, notably her subject's mother-in-law, Mary Washington,
whom Brady derides as stern, acquisitive, and self-centered, and Thomas
Jefferson, whom Brady portrays as a boorish and insensitive colleague
who had wounded George Washington "so cruelly for political ends" (p.
227). A widower who empathetically reached out to others in their grief
over the loss of children or spouse, Jefferson paid a visit to Mount
Vernon in January 1801 to call on the widow Washington. Yet, this
gesture, even if politically motivated, goes unmentioned by Brady.
 
Slavery is the ever-present canvas on which the picture of any Virginia
plantation family is painted, but especially one as prominent as the
occupants of Mount Vernon with its large number of household and
plantation slaves. Several of these slaves traveled with the Washingtons
to their places of residence in New York City and Philadelphia. Brady
notes that Martha Washington had great affection for some particular
servants and treated them well, but she did not share her husband's
enlightened views and repugnance of the fundamental immorality of
slavery. She never could grasp why her maid Ona Judge would run to
freedom, and Brady gives short shrift to her story as well as to that of
Martha Washington's runaway cook Hercules.

Because so much of Martha Washington's dower estate contained slaves (at
least 153 of the 317 slaves at Mount Vernon upon George Washington's
retirement were "dower" slaves who had interbred with Washington's own
slaves), it was difficult for her husband to manumit them, and he only
pledged them their freedom upon the death of his wife. Brady claims that
Martha Washington could not sell or liberate these slaves during her
lifetime even if she wanted to do so, because they were legally
entangled in part of the family estate that would pass on to her
grandchildren. Ironically, her Custis dower, the land and slaves that
brought her wealth, were not hers to dispose of had she been so
inclined. Martha Washington did free all 123 of Washington's slaves on
New Year's Day 1801, on the advice of Bushrod Washington and not from a
conviction of the evils of slavery.

Only in a bibliographical note does Brady mention recent modern
interpretations of Martha Washington's views on slavery and the
interracial world in which she lived, although she did not leave written
documentation about these views. Unlike Helen Bryan, who has made much
of Martha Washington's mulatto half-brother-in-law Jack Custis in the
dispersal of the Custis estate in her _Martha Washington: First Lady of
Liberty_ (2002), Brady merely refers to the mixed-race Jack Custis as
his father's "favourite boy" (pp. 31, 43). In his interpretation of
incest and miscegenation in the case of Martha Washington's alleged
half-sister of mixed race, Ann Dandridge, Henry Wiencek has suggested,
in _An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of
America_ (2003), that Martha Washington was indifferent to slaves'
feelings and intransigent about slavery. But Brady, in her note on the
sources, dismisses the debate as lacking documentary evidence and
patently deems the controversy false, claiming that it "simply isn't
true" (p. 256).  

As a popular biography, _Martha Washington _ is an accessible,
informative read that could work well as an introduction to themes in
American women's history. The frustratingly brief citation style and the
sometimes jarring transitions to new topics should not keep a reader
from picking up this nuanced work by a historian well versed in the
period and cleverly skilled at drawing loose threads and diverse family
histories into a richer tapestry. Although the "search for the real
Martha Washington" may always prove futile because of the dearth of
documentation, Brady offers plausible insights into a woman's life that
will always remain somewhat shrouded (p. 230).

Notes

[1]. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, "Of Pens and Needles: Sources in Early
American Women's History," _Journal of American History_ 77 (1990):
200-207.

[2]. George Washington to Sarah Cary Fairfax, May 16, 1798, in _The
Papers of George Washington, Retirement Series_, ed. W. W. Abbot, _et
al._ (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 2:272-275.
Other historians have made much of this letter to the widow Fairfax that
Washington wrote late in life, fondly recalling that he had enjoyed the
happiest moments of his life in her company. Yet, both George and Martha
Washington made copies of the letter, and Martha added local as well as
family news to her husband's draft of it.



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