Martha Washington, 2025

Summary

The History Chicks: Martha Washington (2025)

Podcast: The History Chicks
Episode: Martha Washington
Date: December 10, 2025
Hosts: Becca & Susan
Theme: An in-depth, nuanced exploration of Martha Washington’s life, legacy, marriage(s), and historical context—with humor, honest reflection, and a sharp eye on the realities of her world, especially those often omitted from standard narratives.

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Overview of the Episode

In this comprehensive revisiting of Martha Washington’s life, Becca and Susan examine her journey from privileged colonial daughter to influential First Lady, with a thematic focus on her personal resilience, domestic leadership, and the deeply uncomfortable realities of slavery that framed her entire world. The discussion is enriched by personal anecdotes, pop culture references, and reflections on modern perceptions versus historical context. This episode is tightly connected to recent public interest in the American Revolution, riding the wave of the Ken Burns documentary, and is positioned as a timely, critical exploration for a 21st-century audience.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Setting the Stage: Colonial Virginia & Martha's Early Life

• Historical Context (1759): The hosts “drop her into history,” detailing significant global events and notable figures born or died that year, situating Martha’s marriage to George within a dynamic era.
  (02:16–02:45)
• Family Roots & Complexities: Martha Dandridge was born into a large, landowning family in Virginia. The hosts are frank about the prominence of slavery—including Martha's potential mixed-race half-sister, Ann Dandridge, “a harsh and maybe surprising reality.”
  (02:16–03:11)
• Land, Wealth, and Slavery: Both sides of Martha’s family were slaveholders—her mother brought 10 enslaved people into the marriage, her father already owned 20. The hosts make clear that enslaved people and their labor underlie every chapter of Martha’s life, foregrounding this fact throughout.
  (06:00–07:57/11:47–12:32)
• Childhood & Education: Education was basic and domestic-focused—Martha was “certainly no woman of letters like Abigail Adams,” but was highly skilled in estate management “and the fourth R: Religion.”
  (08:33–09:40)
• Societal Training: Women in this era were trained to be ready for anything—from unannounced guests to running an estate to rigorous social graces—contrasting later images of idle ‘decorative’ women.
  (11:47–13:50)

Martha’s First Marriage: Daniel Parke Custis

• The Custis Family: Daniel was Martha’s elder by 21 years, famous for being dominated by his volatile, wealthy father (Grandpa Custis) who initially opposed the union and caused “high drama.” The hosts tell humorous, humanizing anecdotes, including Grandpa Custis’s will and his caustic marital relationship.
  (17:22–22:30)
• Marriage & Domestic Life: Martha married Daniel Custis at 18; their marriage was unusually affectionate for the time and “a relief” compared to Daniel’s own parents’ misery.
  (23:00–24:25)
• Motherhood & Loss: Martha bore four children, lost two in early childhood, and at 26 became a wealthy, capable widow when Daniel died suddenly. Her management of the vast estate and large enslaved population is portrayed as both necessity and testament to her upbringing.
  (25:00–29:57)
  • "Her sense of duty over personal inclination reared itself, as it so often would during her lifetime." – Susan (28:29)
• Assertiveness: A story is told of Martha confronting an attorney in person, getting her way, and smashing up the family’s unwanted heirlooms—a venting of grief and assertion of strength.
  (29:57–31:45)

Martha Meets George Washington

• Social & Economic Calculus: Selecting a second husband was both personal and pragmatic. George, a rising star in Virginia, brought stature and promise, but also came with family baggage and complicated finances.
  (33:30–37:55)
  • “She knew of him… she also knew that he was an extraordinarily trustworthy man.” – Becca (37:55)
• Practical Partnership: Their match was not initially romantic—George had his heart elsewhere—but based on mutual respect and the merging of fortunes and responsibilities.
  (37:19–39:15)
  • “She was 26 and he was 25.” – Susan (39:15)
• Blending Families: George, Martha, and her two surviving Custis children moved to Mount Vernon, with Martha bringing more enslaved people and running the expanded, diversified estate with discipline and ambition.
  (42:44–46:39)
• Social Leader and Domestic Dynamo: Martha excelled as a hostess and manager, balancing the genteel with the gritty daily realities of a working plantation.
  (47:56–48:55)
  • “There was a level of hard work, a level of intelligence and a level of organization that made you as a woman certainly more than a mere decorative element.” – Susan (13:00)

Revolution & “Mother of the Country”

• Political Unrest: The hosts trace growing tensions from the Sugar Act to the Boston Tea Party, illustrating how Martha’s life was intertwined with the coming revolution. George’s leadership role thrust the family, and especially Martha, into national prominence.
  (51:40–55:00)
• The Reality of War: Martha’s life during the revolution was wracked with personal and collective anxieties—deaths of children (notably Patsy from epilepsy), shifting fortunes, and the precariousness of being a traitor’s wife.
  (59:02–59:59)
  • “She went into a state of absolute shock.” – Becca (59:42)
• Wartime Partnership: Martha’s presence at winter camps like Valley Forge provided solace and organization, inspiring the famed “Mother of the Army” persona.
  (76:14–84:07)
  • “She had this ability to soothe and to direct energies… and really make people fall in love with her.” – Susan (77:11)
• Acting for the Cause: She led women in knitting, sewing, and fundraising, and publicly supported smallpox inoculation—leading by example.
  (79:52–81:06)
  • “She went as an example and had it done.” – Susan (79:52)

After the War: From Private Life to the Presidency

• Brief "Retirement": After the war, Martha and George longed for privacy and “domestic felicity” at Mount Vernon, but were constantly beset by visitors, family responsibilities, and nation-building demands.
  (91:40–98:44)
  • “It was sort of a refined three ring circus… but they actually felt busy and productive and happy.” – Susan (98:44)
• Reluctant "First Lady": George was reluctantly drawn back as President; Martha was “dismayed, mixed with anger and resignation.” Despite her distaste for public life, she set many precedents for First Ladies.
  (101:55–102:17)
  • “I am still determined to be cheerful and to be happy in whatever situation.” – Martha Washington, quoted by Susan (108:15)
• Life in New York & Philadelphia: The complex household included both enslaved and free servants, and Martha's “never ending treadmill” of public duty led her to privately call herself a “state prisoner.”
  (104:53–107:15)
• The Enslaved at the Presidential Mansion: The political and personal implications of rotating enslaved people out of Pennsylvania to bypass anti-slavery laws are discussed critically and in detail, foreshadowing the next episode on Ona Judge.
  (112:34–113:44)
  • “Under the pretext that may deceive both them and the public.” – George Washington, on his scheme to evade the law (112:59)

Later Years & Legacy

• Return to Mount Vernon: The couple’s final years are portrayed as bittersweet—full of family, home improvement, and the lingering impacts of public service and war on their health.
  (123:45–127:19)
• Death of George Washington: His death in 1799 prompts Martha’s profound withdrawal. Her vivid grief and practical instructions for her own burial reveal her exhaustion and fundamental attachment.
  (130:57–132:09)
  • “She was described as catatonic… this had been a bridge too far.” – Susan (132:09)
• Freeing Enslaved People: Martha manumitted George’s enslaved people early, fearing for her safety as her impending death meant their freedom. The cruel ironies of slavery's law-of-the-land status and estate law's forced family separations are outlined.
  (136:14–137:33)
  • “She did release all of George Washington’s servants, and a lot of them stayed…” – Susan (137:33)
• Burning Letters, Shaping Legacy: Martha destroyed almost all their personal correspondence, shaping how history remembers their private lives.
  (137:51–138:36)
  • “The letters, much to the detriment of historians everywhere, were largely burnt.” – Susan (138:36)
• Death & Aftermath: After a short widowhood, Martha died surrounded by her family; her will divided enslaved people among her grandchildren, shattering more families in the process.
  (139:25–140:12)
• Moral Complexity: The hosts engage the question—didn't Martha "know better"? Could she have done otherwise? The answer is complex, but they emphasize personal responsibility for upholding immoral institutions.
  (140:21–141:14)
  • “I don’t actually fully accept that they were just people of their time. You know somewhere, don’t you, that these are people...” – Susan (140:24)
• Cultural Memory: Martha's evolving image—in postage, currency, and popular culture—is discussed, contrasting hagiography with the more complicated, morally ambiguous reality.
  (141:14–142:45)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Enslaved People’s Presence:
  “Whatever happens, there are real people present who... weren’t recorded in enough detail for us to tell you much about them, except for two, which we’ll get to in the latter part of this episode. So we just want to say... there they are.” – Susan (07:57)
• On Martha’s Role:
  “A level of hard work, a level of intelligence and a level of organization that made you as a woman certainly more than a mere decorative element.” – Susan (13:00)
• On Grief & Duty:
  “Her sense of duty over personal inclination reared itself, as it so often would during her lifetime.” – Susan (28:29)
• On Gendered Expectations:
  “She was described as having a general amiability of demeanor.” – Susan (16:52)
• On the Political Calculus of Marriage:
  “A woman’s property becomes her husband’s upon the second of her marriage...” – Susan (37:19)
• On the Revolution’s Gendered Impact:
  “Suddenly all these groups calling themselves the Daughters of Liberty used... their husband’s pocketbooks and boycotted all of those products... Work circles sprang up to produce homespun cloth... a bit of a badge of honor, which I find humorous, that Martha Washington wanted no part of this.” – Susan (54:55)
• On the Camps:
  “She had this ability to soothe and to direct energies in opposite channels and really make things work... and make people fall in love with her.” – Susan (77:11)
• On the Presidency:
  “If Martha Washington thought she was on stage before, she is now the most famous woman in the country. And all eyes were on her all the time.” – Susan (104:56)
• On Legacy:
  “Both were... a pattern to their country. And we are grateful.” – Susan (150:59)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Topic | |-----------|-----------------------------------------| | 01:01 | 30-second ‘not boring’ summary | | 02:16 | Martha’s birth and family origins | | 13:00 | Women’s domestic and social training | | 17:22 | The tumultuous Custis family | | 28:29 | Martha as grieving, resourceful widow | | 33:30 | Martha and George’s courtship | | 39:15 | Second wedding | | 46:39 | Children, domestic life at Mount Vernon | | 59:02 | Patsy's death & Martha’s profound grief | | 72:23 | George’s appointment as Commander | | 76:14 | Martha in the revolutionary winter | | 91:40 | Postwar “retirement” and reality | | 101:55 | Reluctance about public life | | 108:15 | Martha’s affirmation letter | | 112:34 | Rotating enslaved people in PA & slavery| | 130:57 | George’s illness and death | | 137:33 | Manumission of the enslaved | | 140:24 | Did they “know better” about slavery? | | 143:02 | Recommendations (books/media) |

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Books, Media, and Resources Recommended

• Biographies:
  • Martha: An American Life by Patricia Brady
  • Martha Washington: First Lady of Liberty by Helen Bright
  • The Washingtons: George and Martha, Joined by Friendship, Crowned by Love by Flora Fraser
• Primary/Material Culture:
  • Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery (recipe collection)
• On Slavery:
  • Next episode will focus on Ona Judge
• Mount Vernon Museum:
  • Offers tours and YouTube resources, including videos from “Martha’s” POV

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Tone & Style

The hosts blend deep research, warm humor, and personal reflection, never shying away from difficult subjects like slavery or Martha’s contradictions. Their style is conversational but precise, with a modern sensibility and clear attributions for historical facts (and their gaps). Pop culture asides and vivid historical storytelling keep the narrative engaging.

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Takeaway

Martha Washington’s story is illuminated as one of remarkable resilience, leadership, and profound personal loss. Yet her legacy is unavoidably entwined with the shameful institution of slavery and deep ethical tensions at the nation’s founding. This balanced, lively, and critical episode gives a full portrait of Martha “the mother of her country”—her strengths, her flaws, and her enduring impact.

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Next Episode Teaser:
The History Chicks will next focus on Ona Judge and the realities of those whom Martha and George enslaved, offering a vital, overdue perspective on the founding of America.

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Transcript

[Becca]

Welcome to the History Tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

Hello and welcome to the show. Thanks to a medical situation that took a little bit longer than we had expected and then a pretty violent windstorm that knocked out power. We are going to revisit today the story of Martha Washington. We thought that this was a good tie in for the Ken Burns documentary the American Revolution that it's recently played on pbs. And we knew that a lot of you, including us, were watching it. We were in a chat group with some of our friends and they were all watching it each night and talking about it. But Martha Washington ties into that as well as our coverage of Betsy Ambler last month. And we will be back in a couple of weeks with a brand new episode, the one that we were supposed to record this week.

And now on with the show.

[Susan]

And here's your 30 second summary.

Though she had been brought up to competently run a large estate, young Martha never would have guessed how extensive her responsibilities would grow to be. Martha Washington was the template for all future first ladies in the newly formed country of the United States of America. The end. Let's talk about Martha Washington.

[Becca]

But first, let's drop her into history. In 1759, the British Museum, the world's oldest national museum, opened. To quote all studious and curious persons, Voltaire's satire Candide was first published, selling instruments, sheet music and composition supplies. The first music store in America opened in Philadelphia. English potter, abolitionist and businessman Josiah Wedgwood opened his own tableware business. St. James Gate Brewery was first founded in Dublin, Ireland, by Arthur Guinness. Sixty years later, the brew they sold carry the name Guinness. Mary Wollstonecraft and Auld Lang Syne writer Robert Burns were both born. Composer Frederick Handel died, and in 1759, George and Martha became Mr. And Mrs. Washington.

[Susan]

Martha Dandridge was born on June 2, 1731, at home at the Chestnut Grove Plantation in the colony of Virginia, the eldest of the eight surviving children of John Dandridge and Francis Jones Dandridge, though 10 other pregnancies had not ended up with the birth of a living child. Let's take that in a moment. And Papa, also likely Slash, probably was the father of a mixed race, possibly enslaved woman in the household by the name of Ann Dandridge. A what woman? Did you hear that correctly? Yes. We are going to open this story with a harsh and maybe surprising reality that not only was Martha born into a family who owned enslaved African people, she herself and later her husband, George Washington, owned enslaved people. Unapologetically for their entire lives, as we shall see.

[Becca]

Mama Francis's family had come from England. Her grandfather had settled the land that they were living on in New Kent County. New maps will put that between Richmond, Virginia, and the Chesapeake Bay, right on the York River. So it was great farmland. But he had bought 2,100 acres. Mama Francis's grandfather had bought the property from the queen of the Pamunkey tribe in the area. She had made a deal to have him help translate for her tribe, where which he did. He learned their language. He befriended them. He was the go between between the government that had invaded and set up house on the land and the Pamunkey people. As we would expect, every generation did a little bit better than the generation before them. So by the time mama was born, they had elevated themselves in society a bit. But it's still basic living. You know, there's not a whole lot. There's no mansions. And you know what we think of as colonial? Well off. We're not quite there yet. Mama was one of two children who were orphaned at a very young age and moved into what was essentially their stepmother in her new husband's house. And the stepmother fought to keep them there because they both had land and they both had enslaved people, and they both had inherited money from their parents. The stepmom was trying to keep her hands on that. But both Francis and her brother Lane emancipated themselves at about the age of 16. So she's just bouncing at that point from one relative's house to another from the age of 16.

[Susan]

Martha's papa was himself an immigrant from England, having come to the colony of Virginia as a teenager with an older brother to make his way in the world. His own father had given him seed money. By the time he was 21, he. He'd bought 500 acres and built a respectable house, if not what we think of as a plantation house. I know our views on the plantation house is all colored by Tara and gone with the wind. I know. But actually, the house is very similar to the house of wood that I'm currently sitting in. A center entry, very symmetrical. Four bedrooms upstairs, Two big rooms downstairs with an entry hall. Now, that house didn't have a kitchen at the time. You'd be a giant fool to have a kitchen in your house. Most of the time. It would just burn down the house. So they had the kitchen in a separate. Separate building. Seems smart. But the bathrooms were there too. As we know, there's no running water, so other I do in my house have both things A kitchen and running water.

[Becca]

Oh, thank you.

[Susan]

There were no stoves. You know, there were no iron stoves like we think of. Like Benjamin Franklin hadn't, you know, really worked on that yet. So you had to cook over an open fire and with an oven built into the side of your fireplace. So that's what we're working with there.

[Becca]

Did you ever go to Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts?

[Susan]

Mm.

[Becca]

Mm. It's a colonial village living history museum. And they have demonstrations of things like cooking on fires, just like that.

[Susan]

So, okay, so I lived. When I lived in Rhode Island, I lived on the Lippet Hill farm estate. Now, I lived in the Dower house, which was built in 1812, but the house, the big house that was built, I don't know, 1770s, maybe 1760s. Anyway, they preserved their big fireplace. And so I stand corrected, because that house, literally, it really is conn. The kitchen is connected.

[Becca]

Well, that was the 1770s. We're still in the 1730s. So maybe there was something that happened in fire architecture or something. Yeah. Between when Jack and Fanny got married and when your house was built.

[Susan]

Well, anyway, moving on. Her papa was an officer in the local militia. He was an official in the county court. He was sufficiently prosperous at 30 to marry his Francis Jones, the daughter of a comfortably living lawyer slash planter, and more importantly, who had been a member of Virginia's House of Burgesses. So basically, Francis's Poopa was a member of Parliament. You know, that's as close as you can get in the colonies. Francis brought with her to the marriage into the household 10 enslaved people as part of her property. These added to the estimated 20 that were already resident on the premises. That situation is overlaying everything during this whole story. The whole story, whatever happens, there are real people present who, I'm sorry to say, weren't recorded in enough detail for us to tell you much about them, except for two, which we'll get to in the latter part of this episode. So we just want to say that everyone's there. You know, we may not mention them during every scene, but in every scene, there they are.

[Becca]

Right.

[Susan]

You know, and it's something that surprises people, I think, about the Washingtons, but they're from Virginia, so it probably shouldn't surprise us that much.

[Becca]

Well, and even in that era, I mean, there was still enslaved people in New England and New York State. You know, we haven't progressed enough, I guess. Right after the birth of their first child, the eldest R. Martha, Mama Fanny was going to be pregnant for probably the next 25 years either pregnant or nursing a newborn. 25 years. Her last baby she had at about the age of 46.

[Susan]

Onto young Martha's education, she was certainly no woman of letters like her contemporary and former subject, Abigail Adams. Reading her surviving letters today gives you the impression that, like, whoa, what is this illiteracy up in here? Her spelling and grammar were subject to personal whim. Here's the thing, everybody's spelling and grammar were subject to personal whimsical capitalization was as random then as it is today in certain parts of the Internet, you know. But these defects shouldn't be a reflection on her capabilities. You know, the first really widespread effort to standardize spelling was still two decades away with Samuel Johnson's dictionary. So she and her siblings received an elementary education in the basics from home, probably from an indentured servant, someone that would hire their lives out for a number of years in order to book passage to the new world. It was a valuable skill, actually, because everybody needed tutors for their children in this area because there weren't really any schools. They learned the three Rs plus the fourth R, which is religion, of course.

[Becca]

Of course.

[Susan]

And also, and perhaps more importantly, a serious program of domestic and managerial education. Now, men so outnumbered women in Virginia that a girl's future career as a wife and mother was just left in no doubt, like, there's never going to be a problem getting a job, you know, so it was up to the mother and in some cases aunts or grandmothers. It was up to responsible older women to train the young girls and prepare them for their future roles Very, very early in their lives. Daughters of the house were expected to learn their way around a kitchen, a garden, the sewing room, to know how to do the cleaning, the mental load, the back off table for everything was so intense, you know, do you have a sick child? How about this for a verb case? You will have had to have concocted the medicine using your Culpepper's herbal or other reference book, or maybe the handwritten recipe book your mother took the time to make and gave you upon your marriage. But before that, you had to have grown the fennel, you know, before that, you had to have known to save the seed from last year or the bulb or get the material from a neighbor or, you know, every single task was like this, from the making of clothes to managing tasks seasonal, daily, yearly. I mean, the amount of organization you had to be trained to carry was immense.

[Becca]

And in Martha's case, she was the oldest, so she was called upon to Help with her siblings. So she's doing that too. You know, we often think of wealthy people from any era as not getting their hands as dirty as these people had to, but they did. I mean, they did made everything from soap to stockings and threw nothing away because they needed it all. At the same time, they're raising their children to be the next level up in the societal ladder. There's a lot going on in these houses besides just reading, writing and knitting.

[Susan]

Well, not only that, but there was a bit of societal training too. You alluded to it. You. In this time and place, you had to be ready for visitors at all times. Travel was rough, Inns were few. Relatives, neighbors or respectable looking strangers could pop by with no notice and stay for a long time. Colonial hospitality meant you smiled and you integrated the visitor into the household. Period. And then you proceed. I have to say, I admire this friend of mine who's always ready. It's a goal. It's a goal for the summer to be able to just, you know, breezily knock together dinner and drinks for people who stop by without having to go to the store, you know, which is probably more Martha Stewart than Martha Washington.

[Becca]

You never know. I know I can do that because I just can. But I would love to go to your house when you can just knock together something. I would help you, but I'd be dabbled.

[Susan]

Well, honestly, what it's probably going to be, unless Chris Graham is home, is a glorious cheese plate.

[Becca]

Oh, that's my favorite way of eating. Give me some cheese and crackers and some meats and I am happy, happy.

[Susan]

You know, I'm always ready with the drink. Oh, well, yeah, maybe I'm more ready than I think.

[Becca]

Yeah, maybe you are. All right.

[Susan]

And anyway, there was a level, you know, a level of hard work, a level of intelligence and a level of organization that made you as a woman certainly more than a mere decorative element. I don't know, in some periods of time, like a little bit later than this, maybe a hundred years later than this, when there's that domestic goddess movement where ladies are supposed to be at home and not lift a finger and their sleeves are sewn so they can't raise their arms and that kind of thing, like we're not there. We're in an era where the role of women perhaps was. Was different, but it was important and people needed both things to be operating, you know, for a successful partnership. And we were still there. And that also happened in the know, on the frontier. A lot of restrictions on women's behavior suddenly Vaporize like. Well, women got the vote earlier in the west of America, didn't they? Yeah, same reason.

[Becca]

I think, I think what exemplifies what you just said is Martha learned to ride a horse, one leg on each side, until she was of a certain age. And if there was people around, then she had to go sidesaddle. So she could be like riding a horse for doing something with the family in the morning and then flip over and suddenly have to ride sidesaddle and be just as good at sidesaddle as she was old fashioned riding.

[Susan]

Well, yes, social graces and knowing when to put them on was another important lesson that she learned. Now Martha was only 15 when she came out into society, the culmination of a year of clothes making, etiquette lessons, dancing lessons, and perhaps small talk practice. Although I think Martha's pretty good already.

[Becca]

Oh, I think so too.

[Susan]

You had to order ahead, sometimes a year ahead for something that you needed. You had to describe what you wanted in great detail. You couldn't just snap a picture on your phone, maybe draw a picture and send it to the vendor in London, like, oh please. And then you hoped, you hoped. And the unscrupulous vendors in London, sure enough would often offload unfashionable or broken things onto the, quote, colonials. It was genuinely a source of immense frustration, possibly adding fuel to the fire of the revolution. We'll get to that later. But for your house, for your farm, for your clothes, for your books, every single thing, you had to go through this process because the colonials were not allowed to make things in large scale. They couldn't have factories and that kind of thing.

[Becca]

And the way these people have to get this is when they're shipping their, their crops back over to England, they would give the people on the boat, the captain, this list of things that they wanted. And it wasn't just them, it was all their neighbors. That's their Amazon. Dr. Is, you know, ships that are bringing their crops. Then they come back to America with all this stuff. That's a big business if you think about it.

[Susan]

If the boat sinks or if privateers stole your stuff. I mean there, there is insurance, but there's also then a time frame. And then you had to have paid the insurance and they had to have gotten your money. And it, it was, I don't know, it was very rickety. Yeah, it seemed to me it was very rickety. Sorry.

[Becca]

I know we are so spoiled. I could reach my phone right now and I ran out of peppercorns today and I Just ordered some from Amazon.

[Susan]

Well, Papa was generous. The purveyors came through. Ultimately, Ms. Dandridge was a social success. She was delightful to look at. Teeny, tiny, 5ft tall, brunette with hazel.

[Becca]

Eyes and very good teeth. All the sources I read, they kept talking about how wonderful her teeth were. It was a point of beauty on her. And because it wasn't normal to have nice teeth, which she did. But I don't think that was the only. I mean, I think it was her personality. You know, she was cute, so she attracted the attention. And then she opened her mouth and just started to talk. And people were drawn to her.

[Susan]

People described her as having, quote, a general amiability of demeanor. She attracted serious matrimonial attention almost from the outset. But the even more serious matrimonial attention of her neighbor, who was her godfather and incidentally, was 21 years older than she was. A man named Daniel Custis, who, at the time that he began to seriously court her, was 37 years old and she was 16.

[Becca]

He had never been married. And the reason he had never been married is his father, who was a very wealthy curmudgeon, wouldn't allow it. He would just threaten to cut him out of the will if he didn't like the woman that Daniel was attracted to. And Daniel had tried to make some good matches with some very wealthy women. And Papa Custis was like, no, no, no. So, yeah, he was older. He had never been married. And I think that being under the thumb of his dad like that kind of put him on an emotional level closer than it sounds to Martha.

[Susan]

I have to tell you, his whole family was a giant, giant mess. And his parents famously hated each other. In an era where true love wasn't expected in a relationship necessarily. Oh, they famously hated each other to the point where at one point, the dad. Let's just call him Grandpa Custis, one day he was driving his wife along the road and all of a sudden just veered the horses off into the water. He was trying to scare his wife, who was sitting right next to him. When she didn't squawk, she just said, where do you think you're going? And he goes, straight to hell. And she goes, drive on. Anything's better than living with you.

[Becca]

The relationship between Grandpa and Grandma was so bad. They bickered so much that they actually went to the point of getting a legal agreement between the two of them that said they would, quote, not call each other vile names or use ill language. Either one of them. I don't.

[Susan]

You know, when you need an agreement like that. That's a red flag, don't you think? Yeah, yeah, big one. So Grandpapa Custis had abandoned his family for a number of years to sow his oats all over the planet. And when grandma died and her fortune sort of came down to the heirs, her Fortun fortune was the cause of drama and torment for 70 years of lawsuits and counterclaims. Because the, let's see, oats that he left behind in other countries grew up to sue the estate for their own part of the inheritance. I don't know how I could be more clear than that. So this giantly wealthy family that at any minute could have the rug pulled out from under them with these giant lawsuits had a paterfamilias who grew sort of paranoid and antagonistic. His daughter had married against his wishes and he had permanently disinherited her. His son Daniel, age 37, was super concernic as to tell his papa about Martha. He's a 37 year old man who's desperately afraid of his dad, who has proved that he will do what he says he's going to do. You know, if you go against him, he will cut you off. And he has certainly got other relatives, as you well know now in the tropics that he could leave his money to if it came to that. But Grandpa heard it through the grapevine and he proceeded to pop off. He told the whole neighborhood how much he hated fortune hunters like Martha. He besmirched her father's character all over town, gave away a lot of valuable heirlooms to the local innkeeper's wife. And when people are like, why does the innkeeper's wife have all the Custis silver behind the bar? He said, I'd rather throw them in the street than let Mr. Dandridge's daughter look at them.

[Becca]

To say that what happened next is complicated is kind of an understatement. But it involves a mutual friend of Daniel and his father. That someone that Martha knew who was a lawyer, and Martha and Scrooge McGrampa, who. There's a conversation between Grandpa Custis and Martha, and this lawyer is somewhere in there. Different sources have him in different places. But ultimately, because of the conversation she had, suddenly Grandpa did a 180 and now he's like totally, totally team Martha. And so the lawyer says, you two better marry fast before he changes his mind.

[Susan]

Well, but then they didn't. There was a very strange balancing act to keep him in good spirits. It was three times delayed. @ first there was the death of Martha's 16 year old brother John. Her mother became pregnant with her sister Elizabeth, not the youngest child, by the way. And the death of Grandpa Custis himself, which I'm sorry to say was likely a relief, I have to tell you, this is, this is an explanation of Grandpa Castus's character. There was a horrible provision in his will that stated that if his heir did not set this in place, that the will would be null and void and he wouldn't inherit anything. He was required to set a prominent marble gravestone that said something to the effect of, you know, here lies so and so, aged 71 years, but only lived seven. Only those years when he was a bachelor, like. So. He is requesting that his only son put up a gravestone in marble, slagging off his own mother in a public place. So Martha Dandridge finally married Daniel Custis on May 15, 1750, a couple of weeks shy of her 19th birthday. And he was.

[Becca]

39. I love the weddings of this era. It was an event. People came into town, they slept all over the house. You know, three women to a bed. Wherever there was a horizontal surface, family members are sleeping on there. There's the actual wedding and then this party goes on for days afterwards. It's kind of exactly the opposite of what I think the, of these colonial era people who are just trying to scrap by and serious and build this country, you know. But no, they're having six day.

[Susan]

Weddings. Well, and this was definitely an affection match, if not yet a love match. I mean, it was a complete 360 from the way his parents had gone on, which may honestly have been the attraction. The Dandridges were just regular. No, nobody screamed, nobody popped off. Nobody had to have legal agreements not to scream obscenities in each other's faces. I mean, like, it was just everybody seemed to get along and I think the very normalcy of it all was very refreshing to Daniel. And believe it or not, the new couple took up housekeeping at a house called White House. There you go. She got a wedding present of a handwritten cookbook that we will link you to in the show notes. It had gone into publication as having been written by Martha. But that was a bit of a misnomer because it was already her mother's and had probably come from generations past. But anyway, you can page through those recipes. Martha now had the responsibility for the welfare, maintenance, clothing, feeding, directing of over 200 enslaved.

[Becca]

Persons.

[Susan]

Mm. Her new husband owned 15,000 acres and was one of the richest men of Virginia. Martha had been well prepared for her role by her mama and began spinning plates, you know, and checking them off lists, and immediately got right into her new role. It all began very smoothly. There was mutual admiration capability and no.

[Becca]

Drama. Just to read about this relationship. It just must have been such a relief to Daniel to know that people could live this way. And it just, I think, made him love and admire his wife more than most husbands do. You know, that's right. Like, he is, like, buying her, you know, little carriages that she can tool around the neighborhood in. And he doesn't care that she's ordering all this red damask fabric and china and silks and silver sets, you know, he's like, yeah, let's do it. Let's make the house that you want. And Martha was like, yeah, okay, I am.

[Susan]

Ready. Let's go. And they became a very notable couple in society, the society of Williamsburg. They went to dances. They were a beautiful looking couple and also acted very affectionate, which you liked to see amiable together. They were well liked and they were respected. So that's awesome. And also arguably her main item on her main checklist as far as society was concerned. Martha's first son, named Daniel after his papa, was born about a year and a half after the wedding, followed by Francis a year and a half later. And I'm very sorry that right now, young Daniel died at the age of two. John, called Jackie, was born the next year, and Martha Jr. Called Patsy the year after that, during whose birth Martha and Patsy, too, almost died as part of the.

[Becca]

Estate. Was interesting to me that all of these kids had to have Park P A R K E as the middle name so that they would inherit.

[Susan]

Something that went back to. Okay, it's hard to explain. I don't want to get into the lawsuit. We'll probably have to find you a link. But there was a sentence that went wrong. And basically grandmama's estate was therefore required to pay the proceed proceeds of all encumbrances on the dad's estate. So all the money was supposed to go to pay for the half of the estate. That didn't instigate the debt. I. It's hard to explain. So it was like a legal mistake. And then everybody glommed on. Oh, oh, well, then pay mine too. Pay mine too now. You have to pay my legal bill now. And it actually grew to the point where the lawsuits, had they been successful, would be more money than they had left. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. So it like accrued interest and got bigger and more alarming. There was A Charles Dickens book. See, this is where my brain cell is not activated. Talking about a case that has been in Chancery court for, like, 100 years. And it's doing nothing but paying lawyers at this point because everybody in the first lawsuit was dead. So there was not any real common sense reason to keep going. But anyway, it was evidently not that uncommon of a thing. And the people raking it in were the lawyers, I.

[Becca]

Think. Oh.

[Susan]

Yeah. Well, anyway, right after Patsy was born, Martha lost her own father. And then months later, her daughter Frances, who was only four years old. Martha has already lost two of her four children. And then young Jackie fell ill, and so did her husband, Daniel. The terror in the house can.

[Becca]

Only be imagined with Martha's life story. There's not a lot of documentation to it. So her story has to be pieced together by holes in other stories. Or in the case of her first marriage, a lot of the story is put together by those shopping lists that they were sending back to Eng. And sadly, at this point, that shopping list said, one handsome tombstone of the most durable marble to cost about £100, with the following inscription and the arms set on a piece of paper. To wit, here lies the body of Daniel Parke Custis, Esquire, who was born on the 5th day of October, 1711. Departed this life on the 8th day of July, 1757. 45 years. It kind of reminds me of that story that's attributed to Ernest Hemingway. You know, for sale, baby shoes never worn. Yeah. Which quote, investigator says it wasn't Ernest Hemingway, but it's how we have to get. Their story is through things like.

[Susan]

That. So Jackie languished a few more weeks and then finally pulled through, which was a giant relief. And I will tell you, Martha Custis did collapse for a minute. I mean, it's only natural. She is a human woman. But her sense of duty over personal inclination reared itself, as it so often would during her lifetime. And she began sort of gathering the strings of plantation management. That tobacco was about to be ready to harvest, and someone had to be in charge. You know, this is a testament to her education, isn't it? It was tailored to her environment. She had to deal with the factors in England, you know, with all the orders of merchandise and all of the sale of the crops. She had to deal with the overseers in Virginia to run the cruise. That's. I'm not getting into it. She was still responsible for the house. The whole half of the help meet situation that had been hers was still hers. And then she had this Other sphere to jump into. Since her husband had died without a will. The legal split was always one third widow and 2/3 divided among whatever children there were. So there are two surviving children, so one third for each. Inventories had to be made of land, of houses, of furniture, of enslaved persons. This was considered unseemly for a lady to do. Her brother Bartholomew and neighbors took this inventory in hand. She seems to have handled everything to the greatest admiration of the.

[Becca]

Neighborhood. There was a story that I had run across and basically there was a lawsuit that was going on and she didn't think it was being handled properly by the attorney. So she goes down to the attorney's office to face him. You know, none of this note stuff. I'm going to talk to you face to face, eyeball to eyeball. And suddenly it was resolved properly to her satisfaction. So that's the, you know, that's the drive. She's happy being a mom and taking care of the house, but when she has to do it, she does.

[Susan]

It. Now here's a story. This sounds more like a human person's reaction to a lot of things actually. She went on a.

Spree. I don't know, Esprit seems happy. She went on a tear at one of the houses, a house called Six Chimneys, where her father in law had lived, where he had kept all of his precious things that he hadn't given to the innkeeper's wife. Where he had died, more incidentally, that Martha and her husband had chosen not to live in despite its fine environment. She went there and smashed dishes, glasses and tchotchkes down that well, didn't she? She had a little bit of a. You know how you can pay to go smash dishes at those places. That's what she did for a while. The pieces are all still down the well. And held an auction for every other blessed thing in that house. And then rented out the empty house to her younger brother Bartholomew. She is gonna wash that father in law on out of her hair. You don't want a daughter of John Dandridge to have your heirlooms. Fine. Then I'm going to scatter them to the winds and put John Dand his son into your precious house. How about them apples? That is a bit of a revenge. Served cold because he didn't care because he was no longer with.

[Becca]

Us.

[Susan]

Right. But it made her feel better. So that was.

[Becca]

Good. Well, cuz she knew that if he was there, how much it would bother him, you know, it probably put him in the grave.

He wasn't already.

[Susan]

There. It's too bad there wasn't electricity. They could have hooked up a generator, and his spinning in his grave could have run the colony.

Well, Martha is a young, attractive, intelligent widow of considerable property, and she will not want for suitors, will she? And Martha Custis, despite her capable handling of this fear to which she had not been born. You know, widows were more independent than almost any woman on earth, really, at the time. She sort of knew Slash wanted that she'd have to marry again. You know, she kind of wanted to marry again. Her children needed a guardian, for one thing. Their estates had to be kept separate from her estate, managed separately. And it was a lot. It was a lot. And you needed a trusted person to handle these. She had vast properties to manage. She needed somebody that was strong and reliable and experienced and someone that could be her partner. And in this time and in this place, she honestly needed someone that businessmen would be more willing to. To deal with than a woman, you know, and it just was one more layer of mess that she didn't necessarily want to keep. Now, one man in particular, who might have made the cut, based on his general resume, also came with 12 children to raise. So we're gonna turn that page or swipe whatever direction we're not swiping. I don't know. I don't have any of those apps. Whichever direction makes you not match.

[Becca]

Them. She had a good marriage, too. So I think she. That she could have thought, okay, if I'm going to have to get married again, I know what a good marriage looks.

[Susan]

Like. Into her social orbit strode one colonel George Washington, who had begun his career at 16 as a land surveyor on the western frontier of the colonies, which was, at this point, Ohio. Did you ever watch Less of the Mohicans when he says. He keeps saying he's going to go west to Kentucky, you know, and that was the edge of nowhere. That's as far as British people had ever gone, right? Well, anyway, George Washington and friends had been buying up vast tracts of land in Ohio. And I think it was kind of illegal. Like, I think they weren't supposed to go past the Appalachian Mountains. His military service during the French and Indian War had eventually elevated him to this title. And I quote, and just beware for the irony. Colonel of the Virginia regiment and commander in chief of all forces, now raised in the defense of His Majesty's colony. Irony, thy name is George Washington. Several Native American tribes that encountered him said he was impossible to kill. He'd been shot multiple times. He'd lost some horses from Right underneath him and kept ticking. The Iroquois called him Connecticarius, which means town destroyer. That's. That's not good. He was 6 foot 3. He had reddish hair. He was, you know, triangular. You know the drill. You know what I say? He was a presence. But more importantly, he had real stature. He had real experience managing his family lands and estate, both near Mount Vernon, which was his brother's land, and in the wilderness of Ohio. So he had the looks for one part of her heart, he had the other part for her.

[Becca]

Head. On paper, George Washington was a very wealthy man. But in reality, Mount Vernon, who we now associate with him, wasn't even his house. His brother had died, his sister in law owned the house, and she rented it to him. Eventually he would inherit it, but he's living in a house he's rented from his sister in law. There's another property that his mother's living on another plantation, and mom is keeping all the proceeds for.

[Susan]

Herself. He had an irascible mother. And I don't know. I don't know what the deal was, and, and I certainly don't want to blame anybody. I don't know her. Her circumstances. But let's just say her contemporaries viewed her as harsh and, and tough to get along with. And people pitied her children for having to deal with her. George Washington and Martha Custis had met before during her marriage. They ran in the same circles. Even with the speed with which this deal was done is sort of astonishing. There were two serious meetings. So one is an intro. Two people think is the engagement, the proposal and acceptance. The third meeting is literally to just bring her back a ring rq, you know, and then he's going again, and that was it. So they were engaged within a year of Mr. Custis death and genuinely hardly knew each other. And it was definitely not a love match because there was an encumbrance in that.

[Becca]

Area. George had never been married before, but there was a woman that he would have wanted to marry. Her name was Sally Fairfax, and she was the wife of one of his best friends. He knew it wasn't realistic to pine after her, but they had one of those flirtatious relationships that just gave them both, like, chills and excitement. I think we might call it an affair of the heart. And Sally Fairfax didn't want to give this up. She was like badmouthing Martha to his.

[Susan]

Face. So not a love match here at the first, you know, but immensely companionable and very, very practical on both sides. You know, a woman's property becomes her husband's upon the second of her marriage. And so George Washington stood to basically take over a third of Dan Custis's rather expansive holdings by marrying Martha Custis. In return, she got a guardian for her children, someone to manage their fortunes, someone perhaps to have more children with. That was probably in the card. She was a very young woman when they married, only.

[Becca]

26. I think one of the extraordinarily appealing things to her was that she, like you said, she knew of him. They were in the same social circles, but she also knew that he was an extraordinarily trustworthy.

[Susan]

Man. Well, when you have to put your whole fortune, I mean, this is like a giant big decision, you know, because she could have just stayed a widow, it would have been relatively unusual for her to not marry again. But there was no legal requirement for her to do so. The king wasn't going to come over and make her do it. As a matter of fact, as a widow, her father couldn't compel her to marry anyone. She was her own woman. So this was definitely her own personal choice to get married again. So he must have really aced the interview. Well, okay, so he gives her the ring and then they don't see each other again for about half a year, not until right before the wedding. In fact, he had gone out to the west to protect the western frontier of America again, that is where he was. And there's lots of time to let your decision percolate, isn't there? But George Washington resigned, his military commission, came home to Virginia, and he and Martha were married, likely at her White House, but not the non existent White House. On January 6, 1759. She was 26 and he was.

[Becca]

25.

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Welcome to adulthood, son. I also got bison burgers on ciabatta with pesto and turkey bacon. Bison ciabatta match made in heaven. I got creole pulled pork chicken chili and I saved this one for last. I also ordered a few chorizo breakfast sandwiches. Wow. I'm looking forward, I'm not sure I've had anything of their breakfast before. I'm looking forward to that. I ordered them before and they are so good. I thought I'd gotten them before you came home, but maybe your dad and I ate them before you even walked in the door. That wouldn't surprise me. So listeners, take advantage of this exclusive offer for a limited time. Get 4040 get 40% off your first box plus a free item in every box for life. Go to hungryroot.com chicks and use code chicks. That's hungryroot.com chicks. Code chicks to get 40% off your first box and a free item of your choice for life.

Martha and George are married. And that first winter they kind of just, just snuggled down at White House and rode out the winter, which sounds so.

[Susan]

Lovely. Then they went on months of visits including a long stay in Williamsburg where George Washington had been elected to the House of Burgesses. Again, kind of like the Virginia parliament. And I am cracking up at one of the key elements of his platform is providing booze to the voters.

Which we frown on these days but seem to be a reasonable.

[Becca]

Platform. Well, the thing that is making me smile is that at this point when they go to Williamsburg, they're staying at grumpy grandpa's house, you know, his old house that Martha has saged and cleared of all his essence that was in the house. So they get to stay in that house, a beautiful house house right in Williamsburg. And it's just one of many.

[Susan]

Houses that they have now. Speaking of houses, old George Washington, he had a brain on him and he took his new bride for a carefully calculated, timed first look at Mount Vernon. In the very prettiest part of spring, Martha saw her new house at its absolute best. If we ever list our house, it will be in the spring. George Washington is a surprisingly romantic man, but all of the white flowers were blooming, all the pink flowers were.

[Becca]

Blowing. And the house itself is beautiful. I mean, it's on a bluff overlooking the Potomac River. You know, she would walk through the house, out the back door and just see lawn rolling down to the river and Maryland across the way and acres of trees and just beautiful. And so George, super smart going there in the spring. Fall would have probably been beautiful.

[Susan]

Too, but cold though, you never.

[Becca]

Know. Yeah, that's.

[Susan]

True. Well, they began their married life with, with great drive to make Mount Vernon in to their showplace successful and glorious. And George Washington now had the means to execute many of his plans. He would get up at the crack of dawn, sometimes even before, eat sparingly, and run off to manage the work. And we are again, not glossing over the true facts about who was actually doing the work. Work. And also I have to mention, there was a significant lack of concern about overseers and their.

[Becca]

Behavior. Yeah, the enslaved people that Martha came into the marriage with, half of them stayed on the other properties. The ones that had skills, you know, carpenters or seamstresses. People with solid domestic experience are the ones that moved to Mount Vernon. So sadly, families could be split up right here by Martha.

[Susan]

Herself. That was always a risk when someone died or someone got married. Think about that from an enslaved person's perspective. You have a new boss, you have a new owner who you have no idea what their character is. You have no idea what their decisions are going to be. And honestly, a lot of times the first thing someone would do is sell people to raise capital. I can't even imagine the.

[Becca]

Terror. And it wasn't like it was close, you know, it was 120 miles north of where they had been living, Mount Vernon from New Kent. So it's not like they could just sometimes see people. They, they couldn't. They were.

[Susan]

Gone. George Washington also had some skills to deploy. Part of the reason he had been accepted as a husband is he had to carefully manage and document his stepchildren's estates separately. Investments had to be made for each stepchild. And a lot of the time since land was supposed to really pass through to the male line, if you had to divide an estate, a lot of times the movable property, furniture, silver, enslaved people went to the women's side of the family. So that's just what typically happened. And so he was really having to kind of juggle both his stepchildren's estate, his own personal estate, along with all of the life interest in the Custis money that Martha had brought to her.

[Becca]

Marriage. And the children are still very little. Jackie was just under five and Patsy was about three. So that's a big move for them too. You know, there's a lot going on at Mount.

[Susan]

Vernon. Also. Tobacco had eaten up his soil, and he knew it very well. Tobacco's so, so bad for your soil. And he is going to learn on the fly. I wish he'd had the Internet. He decided to change over his farmland to remain profitable. So he turned a lot of his tobacco production to wheat. He packaged and canned herring for sale in the city because there was herring nearby. He started corn mills and started a distillery in which he made whiskey. He decided to.

[Becca]

Diversify. And it's sort of cracking me up because he's considering this his retirement. He's not quite 30 yet, and this is his retirement dream, which it sounds like he was great at it. But he said, I am now, I believe, fixed at this seat with an agreeable consort. That would be Martha. With an agreeable consort for life and hope to find more happiness in retirement than I ever experienced amidst the wide and bustling world. So he's living his dream here in Mount Vernon. And Martha knows her worth. She knows what she's bringing to this marriage. So I think that they were very equally committed and equally busy in making Mount Vernon just this showpiece for.

[Susan]

Themselves. Well, Martha's life was divided between the glamorous public, fancily dressed hostess of an up and comer. In fact, they had house servants in quotes. Servants, we know their real status. The front of house ones anyway, wore red and white Washington livery. There was a new carriage ordered for Martha just to pay calls in. So she's, she's that. But she's also the practical director of behind the scenes operations at a major hotel. Functionally, her husband was fond of fox hunting. We are still British. And so three times a week her house was full of either men in their muddy boots or men who had left those muddy boots outside and are standing on her carpet in their steaming sock feet which. Oh, my God, can I please make you a man cave in one of these barns, y'? All. I could not take it either.

[Becca]

Way. One of their friends said of the Washingtons that they always had, quote, an excellent table and stranger let him Be what country or nation, he will always be met with the most hospitable rece at it. So they were known again, like at the very beginning, we were talking about where Martha was raised, that people just stopped in. Same thing is happening still, you know, she's ready for this.

[Susan]

Though. And it was a matter of pride to get a reputation as a good hostess. I mean, you were, you were a glory to your family, you know. As for family life, George thought Martha spoiled her children, which I think is understandable. They were the last two left. I would also spoil my children. He hired a tutor for the son and dancing and music masters for both of them. The son was very rebellious and kind of a ding dong and not very apt to study. And the daughter was cheerful and obedient and learned what was put before her. And typically, for the time, I'm sorry to say, illness stalked the family and the whole household. I think that's just par for the course for the time. But this family had special difficulties. Young Patsy increasingly suffered from what the family called fits, which of course now we would know as epilepsy. And.

You know how we feel about the medicine of days gone by. They treated her by bleeding her, by giving her valerian root and then a dose of what they called julep, which I hope was not full of alcohol, but so. So they take blood from her and fill her full of alcohol. That is not going to make you feel very good. I'm sorry to say there was no effective, even mitigating treatment for epilepsy until the bromides of the 1850s. Way, way, way, way too late to help Patsy at all. Societally, epilepsy was often attributed to bad blood. I mean, like bad heredity blood. Not bad. The blood that comes out of your arm. Even their neighbors looked askance at this. This is a thread that runs through Martha's whole second marriage, this deep, constant concern for this third beloved child to face an extreme health crisis. She never did have any more children, and historians often point to her difficulties with Patsy's birth, but of course, it's impossible to diagnose from here. Who knows what caused it.

[Becca]

Right? She had four children with her first husband and none with her second. So we can debate it all day. I mean, we don't.

[Susan]

Know. No, but it's typical that it always is the wife's.

[Becca]

Problem. I mean, yeah, yeah, on paper, yep, always the.

[Susan]

Wife. Well, over the course of her life, though, her household would end up including nieces, grandchildren, neighbors and cousins. Plenty. So she did ultimately have a house Full more on that later. But as for biological children, this is it. Her own other child, Jackie, was always a handful and I think it's because he was basically born rich and knew it, if you know what I mean. His step papa tried tutors and boarding school. Please hammer some responsibility into this child. It never did quite take. We'll talk about him in a little bit. But like he was always a headache and of course there's no effective remedy for headache either. That's right. Out in the wider world we have touched on this before, I think in the Abigail Adams podcast. Let me just touch on the timeline. In 1764 there was some legislation that came over from Britain called the Sugar Act. Now they had tried to tax sugar before and the Americans just simply evaded it by producing sugar in the form of molasses and thumbing their nose. But it's technically not sugar la dee. And so the British people were irritated by that and said basically how you have to do with your toddler, like no, you may not push, press allow to fall into, like you really cover all the bases. And that's what they did with this Sugar act. And they also sent some enforcers out. People were very mad about that. And then in 1765, the famous stamp Acts. Well now all legal documents needed a paid for government stamp to be considered valid. And much to their surprise, the colonies popped off. Popped off. There was so much protest they would tar and feather tax collectors. Flags were flown at half mast. Groups calling themselves the Sons of Liberty spoke out against the new rules. George Washington's own House of Burgesses said no Virginian could be taxed by any legislative body to which it had sent no representatives. Now so much pressure was brought to bear, like I think they were just caught on the hop that Parliament rescinded the Stamp Act. Everyone was relieved, but not for very long. Two years later came the Townshend Acts even darker. There were now taxes on paint, lead, glass and tea. Oh, people were so angry. No taxation without representation. There were widespread agreements to not import said taxed goods. Gentlemen's agreement. At first it was shameful to drink tea that had a custom stamp on it. It was cool only to drink black market tea to show that you're not going to let the man tell you to pay your tax on tea. So you had to prove that you had got it from like a black market dealer. Or you could switch to homegrown herbal varieties like raspberry leaf tea or coffee if you could get it. George Washington himself participated in both this unofficial boycott and and the official burgesses legislation forbade the importation of said commodities from England. It was called an.

[Becca]

Embargo. Well, and that's one of the reasons why George was diversifying his crops to grains that he didn't have to ship back to England. He could sell them in the colonies. So it was, you know, it was a food source that they didn't have to import, and there was no tax on.

[Susan]

It. Yet it was women, though, who all over the colonies made the greatest impact. I think it was the most surprising that suddenly all these groups calling themselves the Daughters of Liberty used the power of their husband or father's pocketbooks and boycotted all of those products. And how about this? All English cloth. No more ribbons, no more buttons, no more underwear, no more hats, you know, no.

[Becca]

More.

[Susan]

Right. Work circles sprang up to produce homespun cloth, formerly, of course, only suitable for enslaved workers in the fields or indentured servants. Now, a bit of a badge of honor, which I find humorous, that Martha Washington wanted no part of this. No continued to bedeck her family with the best English fabrics that the factors in London thought to include in.

[Becca]

Her order not only her clothing and the family's clothing. I mean, she's putting brocades all over their bedrooms and their curtains, and, you know, she's decking out Mount Vernon with the most expensive materials that she can get her hands on from outside of the.

[Susan]

Colonies. All of Virginia was kind of too glamorous for this, and it really never penetrated into Virginia. But if you think about the women of New England were steadfast. Well, I just wanted to let you know that the sentiment here began early with women in other parts of the country. So it'll come to Martha eventually. But right now, protests about unfair taxation grew and grew over the next few years. The British sent soldiers to the colonies to deal with the unrest. They're like, that's how they handle things. You know, colonists are being unruly. We're going to send soldiers. And, of course, that caused the tensions to grow, culminating in an event in 1770 called the Boston Massacre. The Boston Massacre. It started out with a guy insulting another guy, and it turned out to be seven soldiers, British soldiers, against a whole crowd of colonists, ending in the death of several colonists plus one Crispus Attucks, a free man of color who is now regarded by history as the very first death of the American Revolution. The year Martha turned 42, which was 1773, is just packed with notable milestones on day one. Traditionally, we don't know 100% when her birthday is. But traditionally an enslaved woman at Mount Vernon gave birth to a little girl called Ona Judd Judge, who will come up again later in our story. Unrelated, I want to be very firm unrelated. Her son Jackie came home from his school and announced that he, age 19, was now engaged to the 15 year old sister of one of his schoolmates. George Washington was very alarmed. In no way did he think Jackie was responsible enough to be the man of any house. He was not even suitable to be in charge of himself, much less have the life of another human in his hands, plus his property and probably children. No way. No way. He bargained with the father of this young lady and got a delay. But Martha actually thought that's what Jackie needs. He needs the steady hand of a well brought up wife, which I say is a lot to put on a 15 year old, you know, to totally change your prospective husband who is basically and has ever been shiftless. The fiance, whose name was Eleanor, everyone soon called her Nellie by the way in the family became a frequent and welcome visitor. So she's going to be a part of the family. She's there quite often with her mother and certain her sisters. But Jackie was convinced to go to college, so.

[Becca]

Hooray. And it was nice that Nellie was around because Patsy had a friend that was about the same age. They knew they were going to be sisters for life, so they or fast friends. When Patsy was about 17, she decided to go into a room to get something and she never came out. She had one of her seizures and without a sound collapsed and died in just a couple.

[Susan]

Minutes. The family had just gotten up from dinner. It was a regular night. Nothing had really happened. There'd been no stress, there'd been no strain. Everyone was just chatting and the worst trauma happened. Martha went into a state of absolute.

[Becca]

Shock. George later described her as being at, quote, the lowest ebb of misery, which I'm sure only begins to describe how she was. This is her third child. This was her Patsy, who she. She was named after her. She was, you know, her buddy and now she's.

[Susan]

Gone. So George Washington was so concerned about her, he did not leave her side for almost three months. He actually took her with him when he went to go look over the fields, talk to the people that are working, that are running things, talk to his business people. He was sort of afraid to leave her alone. And then even when he had to go away, he carefully arranged that people would come and always be with her. He was very, very worried about her and he should have been because she was bereft out in the world. Some turmoil that you have definitely heard of. Cities all up and down the American coast refused to offload tea at any port. And on December 16, against all of the wishes and declared embargoes by the colonists, the British governor of Massachusetts insisted that a cargo of tea was to be unloaded in the morning, come hell, come high water. They are not the boss of him. Well, that night, under cover of darkness, some prepared men dressed as native Americans to conceal their identities boarded the vessel along with many hastily and badly costumed people who'd only just heard of the plan at an earlier rally and just wanted to be a part of it. Mount dumped 35,000 pounds of tea into Boston Harbor. And of course we know this event as the Boston Tea party, although Britain called it a criminal action, which it was.

[Becca]

Really. Well, the king's response was to close Boston harbor until the colonists paid the East India tea company back for all that tea that they had dumped into the harbor. Colonists were not having that well, they.

[Susan]

Said. This was nothing more than a justified reaction to decades of your arrogance, said the colonists. Aren't they beginning to sound spicy? And they were also beginning to openly call themselves not all of them them, but some of them patriots. So Jackie and Nelly did marry, though Martha Washington was still too full of grief to attend. She said that her visage would not lend any joy to the proceedings and stayed home. Her home took on a.

I don't know, semblance of normality as time went on in the country outside, things were churning, churning. Infuriated at the colonists temerity in Boston, Britain began to enact harsher and harsher laws to try to bring them to heel. They had taken away the colonists right to self governance. And the irony of slaveholders tripping over someone being the boss of them was not lost on the members of parliament in London who called them on it. There were careful rumors started that perhaps if worse came to worse, the British would welcome any enslaved people who wished to defy their owners and join the British in the.

[Becca]

Fight.

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It's easy for us at this point to say that all the colonists are looking at revolution, that we need to separate ourselves from the king's rule. But on the flip side, there's people like George Washington who was in the Virginia legislature. And even though the Virginia legislature voted to close down in response to what was happening in Boston for a day of fasting and prayer that night, the governor who is working for the king had a ball and they all went. Because that's their proper people and that's what they do. So it's a very complicated time.

[Susan]

Is all I can think well, and you don't. Yeah, it's just like things are blowing in the wind and it's pretty easy for us to be like and just pick a side. But like think about that. I mean, it percolates so slowly, maybe sometimes that you don't even realize you're boiling in the pot, you know. And George and Martha were trying to walk sort of a middle ground. Like, so there's loyalists that were still for their king, fully for the king. Yay. God save the king. They'd sing the song, they'd stand up when the song was played, blah, blah, blah. And against the growing rebellion, you know, against even the attitude of rebellion, like, how dare they? There were patriots that were literally attacking Tories, which is what they called the loyalists in the street. George Washington and all of Virginia really were kind of socially aspirationally British. Well, with the accent of America. I mean, you know, they ate cornbread for breakfast and everything. The 13 colonies each sent representatives to a meeting called the Continental Congress to try and figure out what to do. Do we beg the king? Do we send a representative there to talk to him? Do we deal with these governors here? Do we just smack everyone in the face and go to war? Like, what do we do? They're trying to think of what to do. And while George Washington was simultaneously arming and training militias, he was working with sympathetic members of parliament in London to try to not have violence happen. And then, Schoolhouse Rock fans, what happened? This is where everybody from the 70s and maybe the 60s has an advantage. In April 1775, during the battles of Lexington and Concord, the shot heard round the world was the start of the revolution. The Minutemen were ready on the move. Take your powder, take your gun, report to General Washington. What?

Wait, what? Now how did that.

[Becca]

Happen? At the second Continental Congress, the first went to took seven weeks. At the second one, John Adams stood up and said, we need a commander to oversee all of these. All of these militias to get them into order and make them military. Hey, George Washington, isn't that exactly what you used to do for the King in the Seven Years War? Isn't that what you used to do in Ohio in the French and Indian War? And George is, like, putting his head down and trying to walk out the back door because he wants no.

[Susan]

Part of this except for, I am gonna call Mal on that scenario, and here's.

[Becca]

Why.

[Susan]

Okay. Boy rolled up in his old uniform. Oh, and he fully knew how good he looked in it, too, and slowly stood.

[Becca]

Up.

I'm guessing, didn't he go, you know, put his finger to the side of his face and.

[Susan]

Go. Nose goes, I don't know, but it reminded me so much. And I told Chris Graham this story because Martha fully knew he packed that out for it. There is a scene in the Incredibles where Frozone goes, woman, where is my super.

[Becca]

Suit?

[Susan]

Right? Because he's going to go back into action. And she's like, I don't know. It's at the cleaners. You don't need it. And he goes, I do, though. Okay. So literally, George Washington had packed his Frozone super suit. So if he pretends.

[Becca]

Reluctance.

Okay, no, you're right, you're right. I just, I don't know, I kind of like the image of him just like, putting his head down and not wanting and being a reluctant participant. Maybe the truth lands somewhere in the middle, you know, that's true. It could have been. I. I don't see him as being like an actor. Like, ah, shucks, you don't want me. I only have five years military experience. You don't want me faking it. I don't know if that's in his.

[Susan]

Nature. During this Continental Congress, as kind of a last ditch effort, there was a document sent to the king called the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms. And part of it reads, we have pursued every temperate, every respectful measure. We have even proceeded to break off our commercial intercourse with our fellow subjects as the last peaceable admonition that our attachment to no nation upon earth should supplant our attachment to liberty. This, we flattered ourselves, was the ultimate step of the controversy. But subsequent events have shown how vain was this hope of finding moderation in our enemies. So they're like, you made us do it. We tried to be moderate, but you made us take this last.

[Becca]

Step. And they're hoping to keep the southern parts of the colonies out of this conflict. At first, George kind of tells Martha that, you know, look, I gotta go. I'm just gonna wrap this thing up by harvest time in a few months and we can get back to our life here at Mount Vernon. And he goes up to Massachusetts to organize those militias trying to keep any fighting up there.

[Susan]

Unsuccessfully. So evidently, after John Adams proposed George Washington, there had been another candidate. And he's also very famous to us. If we've watched Schoolhouse Rock, he is John Hancock, who's the only real name you can read on that document. He signed it real big. I don't know. I don't know why, but he thought, as the richest man in the room, that he was the surefire candidate to lead the entire continental army of what was then called the United Colonies. And it was a little bit shocking to him that he didn't get the nod. I mean, he didn't have any experience at war versus perceived victories, if not real victories in the French and Indian War of George Washington. I mean, all of George Washington's wealth was a house of cards. But nobody really knew that, right? So he looked equally wealthy and people followed him. He inspired confidence. Adams, in fact, said that George Washington had a rare and admirable lack of personal ambition. And that was a good thing to look for in someone that was fighting on behalf of a cause. And so here he is trying to get these 16,000 ragtag dudes who, yes, could shoot guns. In fact, the British. The British, British knew that a lot of them could shoot the buttons right off of a coat. That's how good they were at shooting. But otherwise, we're like ungovernable cats. It was like a nightmare to try to shape this, like, oatmeal into a pottery jug. It wasn't really sticking. I'm.

[Becca]

Like. I'm even just thinking, cookie. You know, make it into a.

[Susan]

Cookie. Like, it's not.

[Becca]

Good. He sets up camp in Boston, and she says, I'll come up there. He says, no, just wait. Just wait. Just stay there at Mount Vernon. Hunker down, and when I'm ready for you, I will let you know, and you can come up here then. And so she waited. And she waited all spring and then all summer. And this letter never came for her to come up. So she goes off on another family round, you know, to go visit some of her family members. And that's when the letter finally comes. Her reply is, you're gonna just have to wait. I'll be home to Mount Vernon shortly, and then I'll pack things up and then go. She wasn't gonna stop her own trip to go up and hang out with her husband in the camp in.

[Susan]

Boston. And I think the frustration from his end must have been great. I don't think that she fully understood the situation she was in. Okay, he was all in. He was openly the head of a force that had taken up arms against their king. What is that called? That's called treason. What's the penalty for.

[Becca]

Treason?

[Susan]

Death. He's put himself out there now, and all of his property could be seized if he were seized. She, being the wife of such a traitor, is now a major candidate for kidnapping to use as leverage against him a target for even assassination. And so here she is delaying, and I imagine it was very stressful. George Washington was now in the great estate danger, and she finally did set out, Even though it was winter by the time she set out and the threat of kidnapping had increased exponentially. With an entourage of enslaved people and bringing with her the carefully crafted image of concerned spouse. She began to have a little mother of the country vibes, I guess. And along the way, a lot of people started to call her Lady.

[Becca]

Washington. The image that I'm getting in my head now, she's Setting out her entourages, also including Jackie and his wife Nellie and one of George's nephews and the wife of one of George's generals. And there is some troops that are escorting their. Their carriage and their convoy up through Philadelphia towards Boston. But it's kind of almost like just another social call in some ways in my head, because she's going into these towns and people are coming out because they know that she's the wife of the guy in charge. That's where they're calling her Lady Washington. They're giving her the respect that she's.

[Susan]

Due. She and young Nelly are now wearing homespun gowns to show faith with the cause. And she put her social skills to bear, like she would roll into a town and people had a conflict. They were so excited to meet her, so excited to be in her presence, etc. As someone very, very famous. But also, like, now, are we going to put our name associated with this guy that's really in the public eye as a traitor? There was a lot of conflict. They, you know, you really do have to pick a side. You have to be brave.

[Becca]

Right? It was. It was that time she's meeting people who were not of her social circle down in Virginia, and she's meeting Quakers and people who have very serious opinions about things when she's in Philadelphia. There was a ball, a ball planned in her honor, and some of these gentlemen came to call on her and they said, we don't think that this is appropriate in this era. This is not appropriate to have a big party. This is not a partying time. And Martha kind of had to sit back and say, you're right. And she sent her regards and the ball was canceled. But I think about Philadelphia, the glow of the fame is starting to wear off and she's starting to appreciate what's going.

[Susan]

On. And then when she gets to camp, the conditions of the camp are appalling to her. Even though George Washington has been there for almost half a year, he's managed to only get things just so far. The supply chain was troublesome. Everyone knew he was in charge. But then who were the second and third? There was jostling for position and there was bad blood among the people in the camp and blah, blah, blah. One of her major contributions to the war effort was her ability to sweep in and make the social. And I don't mean like balls or your pinky up when you're drinking tea or anything like that, but the human relations part of just a bunch of people living together in close Quarters, perhaps people that are afraid. She had this ability to soothe and to direct energies in opposite channels and really make things work and really make people fall in love with.

[Becca]

Her. I think she was a figure of normalcy. Okay, so we live in the Midwest, and in the springtime, there's a lot of tornado sirens that go off. And a lot of times they terrify me. And I'm in my basement by myself, and I'm just getting wrapped up in the anxiety of it. And then a friend will call, not even knowing what's going on here. And just talking to them calms me down. Cause it's like, oh, right, this is a voice of normal. It's okay. Everything's gonna be fine. And I think that's what Martha was doing there. What she also did was open up the opportunity for the wives of other officers to come up. It was kind of like, you know, you wait for the hostess to eat, and then you can eat, too. So she settled in at the commander's quarters, which was a house that they had taken over. And then the other wives came, and they brought their knitting needles, and they got busy supporting the troops the way they could, but together, you know, as a show of.

[Susan]

Normalcy. Abigail Adams friend Mercy Otis Warren did meet Lady Washington at this time and sent a letter back to her friend, Abigail Adams. If you wish to hear more of this lady's character, 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 cares of the hero and smooth the rugged path of.

[Becca]

War. She was a fan. They became really good friends. After one battle that was particularly destructive, the two of them, Martha Washington and Mercy and Otis, went out in a carriage ride to survey the damage. Together. They just went out to see what.

[Susan]

Happened. Well, going forward in the war, we're not going to go to every camp. But though the sword of Damocles is hanging over her head and that of her husband, she bore everything with this outward calm and competence. Just her early training, again, that really inspired love and devotion among almost everyone that she met. One thing that she did, and I don't know that she gets credit for this, really, George Washington and she were disagreeing about the usefulness of having the troops inoculated against smallpox, because earlier in the war, smallpox had decimated a whole regiment of men, and she thought perhaps that would be a good thing to do. And basically, he forbade it, actually. He said it was something. If somebody did that on their own, he was going to send them home away from his company. He wasn't having it. And he said, and also, you're. You're gonna be too afraid to do it. You won't even do it. And so she actually went as an example and to prove that she thought it was a good thing to do and had it.

[Becca]

Done. And she did her three weeks of isolation in John Hancock's house. House in.

[Susan]

Philadelphia. So maybe he got over his peak. Yeah, maybe he realized, oh, yeah, I didn't want that.

[Becca]

Job. Yeah, that. Right.

[Susan]

Right. And, you know, if you want to know more about smallpox inoculation, you should listen to our episode about Lady Mary Wortley Montague for more information. And also, by the way, I highly recommend that series John Adams that was on. What is her name? Laura Linney played Abigail Adams. And there is an emotional series of scenes where Abigail Adams has to decide whether or not to get her own children inoculated against smallpox. So that is really in the air at about this time. People are having to just have faith in this brand new technology that's really scary to them and they don't fully understand.

[Becca]

It.

[Susan]

Yeah. George Washington had been immune because he had picked up smallpox when he was a young man and had gotten over it. So he was not in this game at all. George Washington famously does an about face and changes his mind, mandating that the troops be inoculated. George Washington sees his wife as a valuable member of his team on the battlefront and in.

[Becca]

Life. She's spending her summers down in Mount Vernon and getting to know grandbabies that are being born and just handling things that happen there. And then in the wintertime, she's going to wherever he has set up camp because the camps are moving all over the place. And she arrives at places like Valley Forge, you know, we think of it as bloody and gory, actually. George Washington, too, he wrote to Congress of that time. You might have tracked the army to Valley Forge by the blood of their feet. Martha showed up with supplies and food, and that's kind of illustrates how she.

[Susan]

Was. She inspired women to join her in gathering supplies and sowing. Man. When she showed up at Valley Forge, if the British had only known how bad it was there and decided to push through and hammer people, we would all be drinking tea now in a way, like.

[Becca]

I'm. Like, I have a cup of tea right here. What are you talking.

[Susan]

About? Yeah, they could not. They. They could have taken it easily, I think. I mean, you know, we should really link you to some Revolutionary War history. I think that was an opportunity that they didn't know they had. It was very, very bad. And so when she came, the cry went up. God bless Lady Washington. God bless Lady Washington. Martha didn't do it, certainly by herself. The oneida tribe walked 400 miles to valley Forge to bring more supplies to aid George Washington.

[Becca]

Also. And again, because her presence is there, the wives of other officers are coming. And one of them later wrote of Martha, at the time, she said, I never in my life knew a woman so busy from the early morning until late at night as was Lady Washington, providing comforts for the sick soldiers. She would be seen with a basket in hand and a single attendant going among the huts, seeking the keenest and most needy sufferers and giving all the comforts to them in her.

[Susan]

Power. Once upon a time, she was called upon by some women in a town that had kind of had it with the soldiery. You know, when soldiers pitch up near your town, suddenly your groceries disappear, your pigs get requisitioned. I mean, you know, it's a little bit troublesome. Anyway, she's pretty famous, and the wealthy ladies of the town wanted to call upon her. And I thought this was very telling. We dressed ourselves in our most elegant ruffles and silks and were introduced to her ladyship. And to our surprise, we found her knitting with a speckled apron on. There we were without a stitch of work and sitting in state. State. But George Washington's lady herself, with her own hands, was knitting stockings. We had expected to find the wealthy wife of the great general elegantly dressed, but instead she was neatly attired. We felt rebuked by the plainness of her apparel and her example of persistent industry, while we were extravagantly dressed idlers. Oh, that's a name that's not very creditable in these perilous times. So basically, she was shaming people into buckling.

[Becca]

Down. Yeah, and she did. I mean, she got all these ladies, she got them to.

[Susan]

Work. And oftentimes, by changing the minds of the ladies in the town, she would gradually be able to fire up the enthusiasm of the men in the town for the cause and for George Washington's presence nearby. Spring brought relief from hunger, from privation. Spring brought gain, bought fish, brought foraging. There was the news that the French were ready to join the American Revolution. On the Patriots side, good for us. Ultimately, not so good for the French, as we discussed in our very first episode called Marie Antoinette. Well, Martha Washington during all of the war years, was torn between her love of family, her duty to her home, her duty to her husband. I mean, she now had grandchildren that she would have liked to be with. And it was a constant struggle. But George and Martha sort of worked as a team. He was every man's vision of a larger than life hero. She was every soldier's vision of his mother, of his caring sister, of the mother of the country coming in her homespun dress to give him medicine to relieve his pain. They just became inextricably linked in everyone's mind with the entirety of the war effort. And it was almost like the. The masculine and feminine, you know. Yes, it was super fashionable in France during our revolution to be pro America. Benjamin Franklin was a hot commodity, as he was in France at the time. Oh, did he get doted upon? Marie Antoinette herself sent a present just for Martha Washington as an admirer of her actions during the war. And I'm sorry to tell you that I have no idea what Gloria's present that was because the boat carrying the present was sunk during the war. And I would like to fund that.

[Becca]

Expedition. Yeah, no.

[Susan]

Kidding. But I don't even know what I'm looking.

[Becca]

For.

[Susan]

Right. So we are taught in school that, you know, 1776, we signed a thing, we're done. You know, as late as September 1781, which is significantly later, the situation was very, very dicey. The whole country was messy. Factions were falling apart, people were losing heart. There were deserters from all sides. There were people taking advantage of the vulnerability of people left behind at home. Mount Vernon itself had almost been burnt to the ground. The caretaker had given up supplies to the British. And George Washington was furious when he heard about it because it was not good for his reputation to be conciliatory, you know, like, better. The house should have burnt, I guess, but it likely saved the house for us for future generations. I'm also sorry to say that a lot of British soldiers tricked enslaved people into leaving, and they were likely later sold down to sugar plantations in the Caribbean or. And I can't even believe this is true, this sounds made up, but I read it in multiple places. Purposely infected with smallpox and then sent back.

[Becca]

Home. I believe.

[Susan]

It. After six years of war, the British surrendered at Yorktown. And there was a ceremonial surrender of arms. And George Washington told his troops, do not cheer. History will instead cheer for us. Now, we know now this was probably the decisive battle, but George Washington didn't, and everyone at the time didn't. In fact, there were Almost two years more of.

[Becca]

Conflict. Jackie had been staying down in Virginia, but six years into the war, he finally decided to join his stepfather in the military, and he headed up to the battle stage. Unfortunately, he didn't make it back. Two weeks after what you were just talking about, the British laying down their arms, he died, most likely of typhus. Martha has lost all of her.

[Susan]

Children. And Jackie, in an echo of his mother's life, left his young widow with four small children. And here's the thing. So there's that situation, the worst, worst pain she's ever been in. And here's her husband, who wanted her with him again for PR purposes because they needed to finish out this war. He needed her as his teammate. And it's wrenching. Like, what do we do? All she does is the best that she can for every single person except herself. You know, she can't follow her own inclinations, and there's duty everywhere. It's not a matter of inclination over duty. It's so many duties. What do I do? She did go back saying to soldiers that she had been there for the opening and closing shot of every year's campaign pain, and they loved her for it and called her a gallant little woman finishing out the war years in good spirits, at least outwardly. Before the war was quite over, there was a massive celebratory gala to celebrate the birth of the dauphin in.

[Becca]

France. So they have replaced their celebrations of the king's birthday of King of England, George's birthday, with celebrations of French.

[Susan]

Monarchy.

I guess they saved America's lardon, you.

[Becca]

Know. Oh, true. Oh, I mean, I get it, but it just seems like, you know, out of the frying pan and into the fire almost from here, because we know what happens in France at about.

[Susan]

This time the year after that. At last, the peace treaty with Britain was finally signed. The war at last was over, and the American colonists had.

[Becca]

Won. In the eight years of the war, George Washington really hadn't been back to Mount Vernon for any significant amount of time. You know, Martha had come and gone, but he hadn't. And finally, they're 52 years old, both of them, and the war is over and they're able to retire back to Mount.

[Susan]

Vernon. George Washington publicly resigned his commission. He wanted that to be very apparent because there had been rumors all through the war that afterward, America was going to have a new king, George. King George Washington. Or perhaps a military government with a military tyrant named George Washington at the helm. No, he wanted to say, I am a farmer. I am not a King. I am not a military dictator. All I want to do is eat Doritos and watch Netflix. You know, like he doesn't want.

[Becca]

It. I've had some great ideas on agriculture. I mean, that's his passion is, you know, growing things and harvesting them and finding new ways to grow things.

[Susan]

And. Yeah, yeah, gardens, gardens. And my house, I haven't lived there since 1775 and it's time. So everyone's gonna have to sort that out without me. And he and Martha came home to Mount Vernon on Christmas Eve, Eve 1783, with no view to anything but settling down to a much deserved domestic life with what remained of their.

[Becca]

Families.

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[Susan]

You.

So home again, home again. Jiggity Jig, not just sliding back into a luxurious retreat. Unfortunately for one, the estate was the worst for wear. And both of the Washingtons had to set to almost immediately. George Washington set out on a scheme of vast improvements despite their rocky financial situation. And I get it. The way that he acted with regard to buying stuff reminds me of when I have a hard week and I go ahead and splurge on that antique painting on Etsy. Like I'm like whatever. I'm not even gonna look. I deserve.

[Becca]

This. Like I have that gene too. So there's all kinds of things going on that he can focus his attentions on just to improve Mount Vernon. And in my head, he's just dove right into plantation life to try and separate himself from what had happened.

[Susan]

Before. Both had really exhausted themselves during the war years. George Washington, actually, if I were to look back with my, my diagnostic eyeballs, I would guess he had ptsd. He would often sit bolt upright from a sound sleep thinking he was he needed to do something on the battlefield. You know, it took him a long time to get over his warriors. And that seems normal. And she did too. A series of young relations came to live with them, some more or less permanently, some for extended periods of time. That would baffle us today, but was pretty normal for the time. Their two youngest grandchildren were more or less less adopted, though not officially.

[Becca]

So. Jackie and Nellie had had four children. The two oldest were content living with their mother and her new husband. And then there was the younger children. The two children. Eleanor Park Custis, who was called Nellie, not to be confused with her mother, and George Washington Parke Custis, who was called Wash, not to be confused with his.

[Susan]

Grandfather. Martha's late sister also had a 16 year old daughter named Fanny Bassett, who also made her home here and soon became so important to Martha Washington as a dearest companion and excellent assistant. Not of course to replace her own daughter who had died, but definitely kind of fitting, dovetailing into that same type of situation in Martha's life as a companion and.

[Becca]

Confidant. It wasn't that Fannie was just a companion and living in the house. Martha's invested in her life. She wants the best for Fanny. And so she made sure that Fannie came out in society in the proper.

[Susan]

Way. And here's the biggest reason that they couldn't just enjoy their retirement from public life. It's because it came to them. Mount Vernon became busier than it had ever been. Politicians, neighbors, old soldiers, the press, relatives, artists, fans and travelers made beelines to George Washington's house. Ah. And one of the books I read called it, and I quote, keeping constant open house. Well, the standards of housekeeping and of hospitality meant that Martha Washington was always on stage. Now she, for her part, was very protective of George Washington's work time, took pains to to keep sacred his office hours. In return, I will say he hired a housekeeper to lift some of the mental load from his wife. Now, the physical load, we know, right? We still know who is still doing the physical work. But a housekeeper was hired to take some of the mental.

[Becca]

Load. I'm sure on paper, Martha could look at her open door policy that she'd had her entire life and think, okay, we're gonna still do that here at Mount Vernon. But the problem was, of course, that they had met so many more people and George Washington was this iconic figure. So it wasn't just the open door. It was like a revolving door. And if Martha wanted plates to juggle, she sure had.

[Susan]

Them. It took years of work to get the estate back in order and running smoothly as if on rails. It was a lot, but it was there a lot. You know, it makes a difference. And over the course of the next few years, ultimately, Martha Washington had five nieces and a granddaughter to run through the Lady Life lessons program. And Young Wash, the heir to ideally bring up as a responsible man. She was busy and she was content. And even George Washington called this period one of, quote, domestic felicity. But it was sort of a refined three ring circus, we have to admit. But once they had their systems down and it all calmed down a little bit, they actually felt busy and productive and.

[Becca]

Happy. Well, this felicity lasted for about six years before George Washington's retirement was once again interrupted with a call to.

[Susan]

Duty. And it might have been with some relief that he escaped the chaos of his own personal house. He was called as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and then elected president of that organization. And spent the next four months hammering out the Constitution of the United States and then went home. But then the news came. Guess what? The new Constitution has now been ratified by all of the states. And guess who everyone wants as.

[Becca]

President. It was another position that George went to reluctantly. I think he was content with his role already, but he couldn't turn it down. And Martha knew that he couldn't turn it down. He had to do.

[Susan]

It. Everyone agreed that his name, his reputation. And here's the thing, Susan, honestly, his sheer reluctance made him a most attractive candidate. Because you know what they're afraid of is more kings. That's not what we did this for. And his sheer reluctance to come back actually made people go, aha, this is the right guy. And it reminded me, Harry Potter fans of, at the end of the first book, how the only people that could get the stone out of the mirror are the people who don't want to use it. And the only people that want to use it are the only ones that want to get it out of the mirror. It's kind of like it. Yeah, the worthy people don't want to use the power, you know, and so they deserve it. So on the 14th of April, 1789, he answered the call and wrote the following letter. Having concluded to obey the important and flattering call of my country and having been impressed with the idea of the expediency of my being with Congress at as early a period as possible, I propose to commence my journey on Thursday morning, which will be the day after tomorrow. He turned it around almost immediately upon receiving the.

[Becca]

Call. His vice president was going to be John Adams. And the whole role of the president was not in that document that they created. It was going to have to be created on the fly by George and his advisors. But you talked about them wanting to not create another monarchy. John Adams wanted to call George and Martha Washington his Highness and the.

[Susan]

Presidentress. Okay? And George Washington suggested, brace yourself for this, his high Mightiness.

Others suggested Lord Washington. And finally, the wrangling got to be too much for George Washington, who said, I'll be the president and my wife will be Mrs. Washington. Although people persisted in calling her lady Washington. I mean, it had been their habit during the war, and a lot of times they kept that. But officially she was Mrs.

[Becca]

Washington. And we look at her as the, you know, the first first lady. But they were not using the term first lady yet. But they got the lady.

[Susan]

In. Lady Washington was, let's see how the word might be, dismayed, mixed with anger and resignation. I mean, it's a very interesting cocktail of emotions here, mostly negative. You know, she wrote to a friend, it is much too late for him to go into public life again, but. But it was not to be avoided. Our family will be deranged, and I must follow.

[Becca]

Him. She's right. They're like 58 years old. I mean, to us, that's not that old, but that's old age. Back in this era. Yeah.

They earned this retirement. And their golden years. And their golden years are getting tarnished, I.

[Susan]

Guess. Georgia's route to the Capitol in New York was filled with parades, cheering bands, flowers. I mean, he's almost Embarrassed at all the attention. And Martha didn't make it to his inauguration, but her own trip with Little Nellie and Little Wash and a whole entourage of enslaved people, including their cook, Hercules, which everyone called Uncle Harkness because they pretended they couldn't say Hercules, by the way. And the seamstress lady's maid, who tended to Martha Washington's bonnets in particular, named Ona Jones Judge. Well, the reception with her travel was similarly exuberant. She was stopped often by dinners and teas and to the point where those little kids ate so much dessert they like hurled over the side of the carriage half the way up there. That was not good. George Washington met her in New Jersey. And for the last stretch of the trip, George Washington and Lady Washington were rowed from New Jersey to New York in a barge by 13 sailors dressed all in white. It was a symbolic entrance to their new.

[Becca]

Hometown. Martha Washington never liked to travel at all, but she specifically hated travel on the water. So this is off to a super start. George and Martha set up House at 10 Cherry street in New York City. It was the Samuel Osgood house. Osgood had been a lawyer and a politician. He rented his mansion to Congress for presidential use for $845 a year. I know at least he's making good on it already. At the property when they arrived were 14 hired white servants working in the house. So I don't even know how to address this part. In this house is there enslaved people that they brought with them and then 14 hired white servants. That's just right out of the gate. This house is no longer there. It was demolished. But the DAR did put up a plaque so it's recognized in New York City. If you can find it, we'll.

[Susan]

Provide you a link to its location. It's probably an Atlas.

[Becca]

Obscura. Actually, it's probably in Barry.

[Susan]

Boys. That's true. Well, one thing this house didn't have, besides room for the functions it was required to fulfill, was down time. If Martha Washington thought she was on stage before, she is now the most famous woman in the country. And all eyes were on her all the time. And didn't she have to walk a very careful line to plain in appearance and outlook and speech? And people said she wasn't living up to the new country's status in the world, like she was demoralizing our standing with the kings of Europe. Too fancy. And oh ho, Queen Martha. Didn't we just fight a war about this, you know? So what she decided to do was similar to the way that Later, Queen Victoria would decide to dress. She wore plainly cut clothes in the finest fabrics. That was the compromise she decided.

[Becca]

Upon. Martha's official duties included two formal events that were always on the calendar. She couldn't get out of them. One was a reception and one was a dinner. On Fridays, she would receive callers without an invitation in the drawing room. The only requirement was these people had to be in formal attire. Abigail Adams, as the wife of the vice president, was also required to be at those Friday receptions. Abigail Adams wrote of Martha Washington, she is plain in her dress, but that plainness is the best of every article. Her manners are modest and unassuming, dignified and feminine. My station is always at the right hand of Mrs. W. The night before, dinner parties were arranged by the presidential staff. The guest list was created for political reasons. But she did have to dress up and she did have to be the hostess. You know, Martha had to dive right into this. She arrived in New York on a Wednesday, and then by Friday she's hosting her reception. Like she didn't have any adjustment time at all. It was just right into the fire. After two weeks in New York, she wrote to her niece, Fanny. And she said, I have been so much engaged since I came here. I have not had one half hour to myself since the day of my.

[Susan]

Arrival. As things went on and she realized that she was functionally on a never ending treadmill, she had started to refer to herself in private only among trusted friends, as a state prisoner. There are so many strictures on my time, duties and appearance when I go out into public that I rebel and hardly go outside. She actually started waxing nostalgic for camp life during the war, believe it or not. But she said, well, at the time I was busy, people were grateful, and I was engaged in meaningful work. In order to conceal her true feelings from Abigail Adams, the public, possibly her husband, and definitely her own self, Martha Washington had to come up with a. A. I guess I just call it a positive affirmation. She had to shake herself out of this negativity. There's no changing the circumstances. So she had to change her mental outlook. And she wrote to a friend, I am still determined to be cheerful and to be happy in whatever situation they may be. For I have also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions and not our circumstances. We carry the seeds of the one or the other about with us in our minds wherever we.

[Becca]

Go. And if all of this wasn't enough, there's still people. There's still people who are older in age and not even a month into their time in Washington. George started to complain about a pain in his thigh and he developed a fever. He had a mass growing on his thigh. And without anesthesia, the doctors had to. This is gross. But that's what they did, basically dig it out of his thigh. And he spent the next month and a half recuperating. And Martha was at his side the whole time. Some sources say that she did this. Other sources say that it was his personal secretary, a man named Tobias Lear. But someone went so far as to get hay on the streets around the house so that the horse's hooves didn't disrupt the.

[Susan]

President. During the second year, the Capitol moved to Philadelphia, Though George Washington actively was campaigning to locate a new new Capitol nearer to his home in Mount Vernon. Spoiler alert. Ultimately, his wishes came true, but not during his presidency. So they moved to a bigger house, more suited to their needs than the New York house had been. And at the time, Philadelphia was more cosmopolitan and active and fashionable and just a happening place, you know, than New York was. I know, hard to believe, hard to.

[Becca]

Believe. I think New York was hit harder in the Revolutionary War than Philadelphia was. So it was a city rebuilding, right, you know, in addition to this government building itself. And just think about when you have work done on your street, the chaos that erupts just from that. Now multiply it by a whole.

[Susan]

City. Well, fashion here was more elaborate, and Martha Washington had more personal friends in Philadelphia. It's more like Virginia in its attention to grandeur, you know, know making an impression, but naturally, naturally to be seen to strive. Well, that's just bad manners behind the scenes at the presidential establishment, there was just tension all the time. And a lot of it stemmed from the fact that there two whole different sets of servants had two whole different outlooks on life. The enslaved people that had come from Virginia and then the hired in white servants who often offloaded their work work on the enslaved people, the enslaved people who naturally rebelled against the doubling of their workload. And this was all fomenting in the back of the house. Plus, in Philadelphia, there were a large number of what was called free blacks, people of color who were for one reason or another, free and not subject to the same rigors as these presidential servants were in the presidential meeting manner. And a dilemma for George Washington. Back in 1780, Pennsylvania had passed a law called an act for the gradual abolition of slavery. The main aspect being that children born in Pennsylvania were free regardless of the state of their Mother from then on. And no more enslaved people were to be imported into the state. Now, crucially, visitors were allowed to, quote, import their own out of state enslaved people for six months. And that was put into place because the government met in Pennsylvania. You know, that's where all those constitutional conventions had been. But after that, after that six month period, if those enslaved people were kept in the state, they were liable to be seized from the offender and then been freed. Technically, they had closed that loophole. But George Washington and Martha carefully contrived to concoct ways to get their, quote, servants back to Virginia before the deadline. Each time the six month period was about to come.

[Becca]

Up. George Washington even admitted it in a letter in regards to his scheme to swap his enslaved people out. Before that six month period was up, up, he said, under the pretext that may deceive both them and the public. I don't think it deceived the enslaved people at all. They knew what was going on, but they had no recourse.

[Susan]

Right. They talked to people. And we will go more into all of this in the next episode because we have decided to cover ona judge in the next episode. So we will table this for now. But just to know there was a some chicanery and that a lot of people turned a blind eye because technically it was now, as of an amendment to that law, illegal to do this rotation of servants back home type of thing. But everybody sort of looked the other way. George Washington always maintained, I don't live here, I am a resident of Virginia and my household should be under the laws of Virginia. Also, it was sort of bad PR to have the slavery issue front and center. So he was just going to keep it on the deal gal as far as he was.

[Becca]

Concerned.

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[Susan]

Was. It.

[Becca]

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[Susan]

Chicks.

Now the year 1792 came and it was time to elect a new president. Not a minute too soon, as far as Martha Washington was concerned, like, get me out of here. The country was a little fractured. The country was a little fractious. There are people who want the federal government to be stronger. There are people who want the states to be stronger. There are people concerned about the national debt. There are other people who said, we have higher priorities than this right now. There is now trouble in France. Whose side are we going to take? What are we going to do about that? There were abolitionist sentiments that divided some states even this early. And there were the beginning of what we would recognize as political parties. The main opposition party was led by no other than Thomas Jefferson. Well, there was enormous pressure brought to bear by those in the know in government for George Washington to serve another term. They were just worried that the new country could not survive these arguments. And they needed their glue.

[Becca]

Again. Ultimately, George Washington was unanimously reelected for his second term. So Martha's back on.

[Susan]

Stage. Yeah, they sort of grimly accepted the reality that yet again, duty must win over. In Clinton. They did have a pattern of, well, a loosely adhered to pattern of summers, or at least parts of summers at Mount Vernon and then the rest of the year in Philadelphia. All the work followed him there. There's no logging out at 5pm Type of thing. So the work chased him wherever he went. But at least he could look out on a vista that he loved. Trouble in France got acute. We've covered that in the Marie Antoinette episode. And some of the establishment in France came to beg the United States to come help. But George Washington was surprisingly firm. He told the representatives that came over to ask him to help. This conflict is not the same as ours was. We also don't want to go to war with Britain again. And also we're not even on an even footing here. I just really cannot afford to come and help you. Thomas Jefferson and his party differed widely here, too. They were all on the side of going to help France as France had helped us. This is the Reign of Terror years. This is the Guillotine.

[Becca]

Years. You know, we've mentioned the Marie Antoinette episode a couple times in here as a good place to go for, you know, this another side of the same era. But we don't think you should go back to episode number one. That was our very first time with a mic. We redid her story about five years later. So if you want to hear the other side, go back to that.

[Susan]

One. We even tell you in the intro to that show, like, you can start her if you want to. You start at the other end. All right. So George Washington and Martha Washington really felt like they almost had their hands tied and couldn't help help French friends. Ultimately, although not immediately, they did help the Marquis de Lafayette, who was a French nobleman who had come over and was critical in the American Revolution. His son, his teenage son made it all the way to Washington and they put him up in Boston for a while, but ultimately took him into their own house. His name was George with an S. Washington, Lafayette. So come on.

[Becca]

Now.

So many George Washington's running.

[Susan]

Around. Despite that, during this time, a lot of vitriol was being thrown at George Washington because of this decision. And although the man that wrote this phrase had a personal vendetta and felt personally betrayed by George Washington, who didn't come to his own personal aid, he wrote a poem that sort of made the rounds. And it's called, to the sculptor who should make the statue of Washington. Take from the mine the coldest, hardest stone. It needs no fashion. It is Washington. But if you chisel, let your strokes be rude and on his breast engrave.

[Becca]

Ingratitude. Oh.

[Susan]

Ouch. I know, right? I know. That was troublesome. That is going around. And abolition is also becoming elevated as Another hot button issue. And in a stroke of perfect timing, just as the family was decamping to go back to Mount Vernon for the summer, a personal defection that the Washingtons saw as.

[Becca]

Ingratitude. We will go into more detail on this in the next episode. So I don't want to take any of the voom out of the story, but Ona Judge realized that she was heading back to a life of enslavement in Virginia. So she bolted. She left the house, everyone was having dinner. She went out the back.

[Susan]

Door. Martha Washington was shocked, shocked that a, quote, member of the family that she had treated as if she were one of her own children. Had she. I mean, the delusion. No, the.

[Becca]

Delusion. Ridiculous. One time Ona asked if she could learn to read and Martha basically said, no, you don't need that. Would she do that to her own children? No, of course not. She would teach them to.

[Susan]

Read. So Martha Washington put pressure on her husband to go get Ona back, regardless of expense, whatever. She wanted her back. And she was just convinced that Ona wouldn't have gone of her own accord. She'd been stolen by a Frenchman, most likely, I guess like out of revenge for the stance on France, I don't know. And you know, it was bad pr. George Washington tried to low key get her back. We'll talk about that next episode. But it's a dangerous enough issue to not openly go after her like he might have, you know. Right, well, so there's that. Midway through George Washington's second term, there was a compromise. You know, the northern states wanted the Capitol to be in them and the southern states wanted a geographical representative place. And George Washington wanted somewhere near Mount Vernon. Vernon. Well, they all won, but he basically won and he chose the land specifically that currently houses Washington D.C. maryland and Virginia both had to agree to seed some land that had formerly been theirs to create this new national city. Kind of swampy land, kind of a surprising choice. A lot of work had to be done. And so it began. He also chose the location of the new presidential manor, which was not yet called the White House House. He chose to put it on Pennsylvania Avenue. And later theories are that that was a sop to Pennsylvania for having lost the right to be the capital of the United States. Could be true. Yeah. It's very clean and, you know, full circle. So I like it. He attended the ceremony, the cornerstone placement of the future White House before he left office. But it was not until his successor, John Adams was elected that and a president lived in what we Currently call the White House. And then up comes the third term. Martha Washington was very, very relieved when George Washington decided not to run again. Although the whole time she was deathly afraid that people would get to him and convince him again that it was his duty to serve his country. And I read somewhere that she took to taking shots of creme de noyo.

A cordial of the tropics. And so I have ordered this cordial. It's made from apricot pits and once upon a time was basically full of cyanide because apricot pits are full of cyanide. And you had to be careful to shake it up because the cyanide would rise to the top. And the first guy to take a drink and an unshaken bottle was often for the chop. Dangerous, dangerous foods. But they, you know, they don't let that get sold that way any.

[Becca]

Anymore.

[Susan]

No. Oh. The one that I've got coming has only one kind of sketch ingredient. It is literally Beetlejuice to color it red.

[Becca]

Really? Okay, when you get this, not that long ago you said that you wanted to have a house this summer where people could just drop by and you'd have something.

So when you get that, you better tell me. And I am going to be that person. I'll be your training person. I'm gonna come down, have a drink of. What is it? Creme de.

[Susan]

What? Creme de noyo. N O Y A U X. From a company called Tempest.

[Becca]

Fugitive. All right, when you get it, I'm coming. You better make sure you have some cheese and.

[Susan]

Crackers. I do not know what goes with this flavor at all. I have no idea. Obviously, stress.

So I guess we're set. All right, good deal. Well, so it was Adams, the former vice president, versus Thomas Jefferson, the leader of the opposition. And Adams squeaked it. Squeaked it by three votes in the electoral college. So Adams, it was Hooray. Hooray. It was the end of an era when she thought she was leaving for good. Martha Washington wore an orange dress with a yellow pedicle coat, didn't she? It was like Viacon Diablo. Philadelphia people were pretty upset, kind of afraid as Washington prepared to exit the stage. In fact, during Adams inaugural, I guess a whole bunch of people were not listening to Adams's speech, but instead were crying and looking at George Washington on the stage. That's not a vote of confidence for Adams. And he was already touchy. So I don't know how that what that did to his psyche. It took him a long time to get home because Similar to when he had gone there in the first place all those years ago. People wanted to show their gratitude. So he's constantly being stopped by parades and multiple gun salutes and dinners and arches of flowers and this kind of thing. And they must have known the toll this had taken on him. Even now we notice on tv, I mean, look at a picture of President Obama from his inaugural, and then look at him eight years later, right? He has aged way more than eight years. And George Washington was always kind of dicey of health to begin with, and so he's really had it. And plus, there was war before.

[Becca]

That. I was just gonna say Obama didn't really have those war years. So, yeah, George went in already a little aged because of life, and he was aged. I mean, when he's leaving the second term, he's 66 years old.

[Susan]

Right? So back home, Martha Washington really collapsed for a while. It's kind of like, you know, when you're in a scenario of high stress, like at work or whatever, and then. And then you get sick on vacation, which is the dirtiest trick of all of nature. Or your body's like, oh, now it's safe to fall apart. You're like, no, it's my pto.

Well, it seems to always happen. And that's what happened to Martha Washington when she got home. Quite naturally, George Washington, though, got into.

I guess I'm going to call it demolition. Demolition and reconstruction. And all I can say to Martha Washington is, drink your creme de Noyo before it gets dirty.

So having left office, having gone through this celebratory and, you know, know, grieving public on their way back to Mount Vernon, they went back to the other kind of chaos, the kind they liked, young people, home improvement, all kinds of things. Unfortunately for them, one of the key members of their household had taken the chance to peace out on them as they left Washington, D.C. for the last time. Their cook, Hercules Hercules Posey, took the opportunity, the possible last opportunity he would ever have to leave and left. And Martha Washington felt betrayed. She felt shocked and.

[Becca]

Betrayed. Sometimes I try to put myself in that brain, you know, having been raised in an environment where this was just part of life and not looking at it as something that was cruel and inhumane, but just as a fact of life, is kind of how she's looking at it. Like, how dare they? I did everything for them. Them. We don't look at it that way at all, but we often try to look at the world through the eyes of our subjects. And so I'm trying to do that. I have a really hard time, but I'm.

[Susan]

Trying. Yeah, that was really the major thing that, quote, poisoned Martha's return. They always tried to get cooks and never really succeeded in replacing Hercules. George Washington himself about this time resolved to manumit his own enslaved people in his will. And you'll read a lot of like, oh, he realized the error of his ways. He turned benevolent. It was Hercules departure that made him really realize it was more like they were a financial drain on the estate that he didn't want his descendants to have to deal.

[Becca]

With. Right. Even his rationale for trying to find Hercules and Ona Judd was more of, oh, no, if these two enslaved people totally disappear, my estate owes the Custis estate money. That was the prevailing thought, like, oh, no, this is going to cost me.

[Susan]

Money. Well, Martha and George did not enjoy their final real retirement for very.

[Becca]

Long. They had about two and a half years, and that's two and a half years of more children being born, more family members dying. The federal city is being built. Martha will never go there. But two and a half years into his final retirement, George had gone out for a ride on the plantation doing his plantation owner work. It was snowing and then hailing and then raining. But he soldiered on because that's the kind of guy he was. The next day he goes out again and in the middle of the night he wakes up extremely uncomfortable. And Martha is really concerned. Now, we know now here from 2023, that having wet hair and wet clothes out in the cold isn't going to give you a cold. But if you've been exposed to some type of virus and you don't take care of yourself, being out there will suppress your immune system. They called the doctors who did the modern medicine of the day. It did not.

[Susan]

Work. George Washington died on December 14.

[Becca]

1799. When George Washington died, Martha was by his side, as was his personal secretary. And Martha just asked, is he gone? And the answer was, yes, ma'. Am. And she said, tis well, all is now over. I shall soon follow him. She walked out of the room that they had shared for 40 years, moved into a smaller bedroom on the third floor, and never again slept in the room that they had.

[Susan]

Shared. Shared other than messages to the family about what had just happened. Martha Washington, uncharacteristically, was non busy, non business and duty, despite circumstances. At last, finally, this had been a bridge too far. She was described as catatonic. George Washington's body stood in state in the house for three days. He had in his will specified this as he had a terror of premature burial. But there was one specific order that she roused herself to give. Usually the Washington vault was bricked up after each occupant was placed inside. But she ordered the servants to make a hinged wooden door quote, because I will soon follow him. For ease of.

[Becca]

Access. Martha did not go to the funeral. It was a full military funeral procession, band, military escort, the whole.

[Susan]

Thing. And I thought it was very telling. We often hear the first part of this part of the eulogy, but we don't hear the second sentence. I just want to read it. George Washington was first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen. Here's the second part. He was second to none in the humble and endearing scenes of private life. Who could ask for anything more, really, in an.

[Becca]

Epitaph? Letters started pouring into Mount Vernon from all over the country. Martha and Nelly and Tobias were all hand to try and write back and take care of all this mail. Congress sent a letter themselves and said, look, we're going to give you this privilege called franking. And what it is is there's no postage for anything you mail for the rest of your life. Because she was sending out so many response letters to these people that were contacting.

[Susan]

Her. Speaking of letters, a disturbing letter came from Congress. They wanted to remove George Washington's body, body from Mount Vernon where it lay in the family vault, and install him in a monument to be determined where and what exactly in Washington, D.C. did they have her permission to do so? Abigail Adams was actually very torn by this. You know, Abigail Adams is intimately acquainted with her husband's work and papers in a way that perhaps Martha wasn't. But Abigail Adams wrote, Martha Washington had the painful task to perform to bring her mind to comply with the request of Congress. The body of her beloved friend and companion is requested, and she does not refuse the national wish. I say the country stole him in life, and now they're going to steal him from her in death, too. So this was really the last instance of her duty versus inclination. Now, happily for her peace of mind, although I don't think she knew, obviously this did not end up happening. Financial arguments happened. Lots of clash of the titans up in Washington, D.C. and the monument was really never built. Well, the monument was built. We. We see it, the Washington Monument, it's an obelisk. But George Washington himself is. Is not there. He is still at Mount Vernon. Hooray. Although a new, nicer tomb was erected in the 1830s. But he got to stay on his estate, as he requested. Also, speaking of visitors who had come to Mount Vernon, Thomas Jefferson stopped by. Now, he, at the time, was running for president, and increasingly in George Washington's last term. He was pretty open with his criticisms of George Washington, and I am familiar with this. So George Washington, business and political rival, took it one way. Might have hated the guy, kept it on side, whatever. But Martha Washington, like a wife who loves her husband. I am familiar with the wife being angrier at the business rival than the husband is. She had a grudge, and she described his visit to Mount Vernon. And I quote her as the second worst thing I have ever had to endure. Which says a lot, given all she'd been through, doesn't.

[Becca]

It? Oh, for.

[Susan]

Sure. And history used to idolize this guy. Perhaps we should have listened to his contemporaries a little more over the.

[Becca]

Years, you know, as I learn more and I hear from other stories from around Thomas Jefferson. He had some great ideas. He was super smart, but, man, he was a jerk in a lot of people's stories, you.

[Susan]

Know? Well, she called his election as president, and I quote again, the greatest misfortune this country had ever experienced. She's not playing.

[Becca]

Around. As we've discussed in George Washington's will, he wanted his enslaved servants to be. Be freed upon Martha's death. Martha knew this, and the enslaved people that lived at Mount Vernon also knew.

[Susan]

This. Martha Washington became convinced that the proto freedmen and women, the incipient freedmen and women, were conspiring in some way to hasten the date of her death, I. E. The date of their freedom. There was a suspicious fire. There was a lot of fear and double checking of door locks and distrust of the servants in the house and. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It became sort of a circus, and she decided to cut her losses and free the ones. There were 123 servants that came under this umbrella. The rest of the servants actually had to pass through her hands to that of her children or grandchildren as a part of the Custis estate. And she actually had no power to free them legally. There was no way, because they actually only belonged to her to use during her lifetime time and were not to be disposed of or sold without payment. So she did release all of George Washington's servants, and a lot of them stayed over the course of this whole time. There's no line between who are the Custis servants and who are the George Washington ones. They intermarried. They had children together. They're all one big conglomeration of families. And so when these particular ones were freed, a lot of them made the choice to stick.

[Becca]

Around. Speaking about clearing her estate at this time, this is when she's having this great fire of all her correspondence with George, anything. She's just burning everything that she can get her hands on so that their privacy remains private for all of.

[Susan]

History. And I keep thinking that was a request of George Washington. Oddly, someone had bought a desk desk from an estate and had found a packet of letters from Martha to George tucked away in a drawer and tied up with ribbon. And very conscientiously wrote him and returned the letters unopened and specified. I haven't looked at them, I'm so sorry. You know, these are obviously love letters tied up with ribbon. And he said the typical romantic nature of the letters from my wife are such that the only way to add heat to the letters might have been to burn the. So I don't think he was expecting too much mushiness, but nevertheless, yes, the letters, much to the detriment of historians everywhere, were largely.

[Becca]

Burnt. Martha, as a widow once again, didn't live very long after her husband had passed away. A little over two years after he had died, she fell ill herself. Honestly, from every account, she was ready to go. She wanted to join her husband. And she knew what was coming. She was ready. Her large family and her large social circle were not quite ready. But for three weeks while she lay ill, they flowed through Mount Vernon to say goodbye. At noon on Saturday, May 22, 1802, just a month shy of her 71st birthday, Martha passed away at home, surrounded by her family. At her funeral, her coffin was placed next to her husband's in the vault. And at Mount Vernon, her will.

[Susan]

Dispersed the remaining enslaved people. I mean, it was required by law that the four grandchildren receive their inheritance. It actually wasn't even up to her. But as far as the enslaved people were, this was a devastating blow. All the four grandchildren lived in different places and families were broken up irrevocably. They had no choice in the matter. They had to go. They were just given away willy nilly as if they were the owl fellow figurines in the china cabinet, with hardly even more thought to their feelings than that. And, and I have to say, Martha Washington never, never believed the institution of slavery was in any way wrong, which is such a contrast to she and her husband's fight for American liberty from Britain. It's a hard pill to.

[Becca]

Swallow. I think you And I, after 12 years of doing this, can handle a little bit easier. That People are not all good or all bad.

[Susan]

Bad.

[Becca]

Right. Yeah. So. And this is definitely a case of.

[Susan]

That. Well, and I don't actually fully accept that they were just people of their time. Like. No, you know, there. There's a fundamental problem with keeping people as servants, and I think sometimes financial considerations and greed might get in the way of your. I mean, you know somewhere, don't you, that these are people you. And you know you're doing bad. And there's any number of justifications you can go through, you know, well.

[Becca]

You knew you were doing bad. Maybe you didn't while you were growing up, but as you went out into your new world and you lived in states where there were abolitionists and there were free black people, it gave you an opportunity to do better. You know, when you know better, you do better. And sometimes that leap isn't as easy as it should.

[Susan]

Be. Well, as to her legacy, during the First World War, there was a troop ship named the USS Martha Washington. She was the first woman to appear on US currency, but pretty late in the game, in 1886, she was also the first woman to be on a US postage stamp in 1902. Weirdly, in the 1840s, there was an upswing in something called the Martha Washington Washington Societies, which were really a temperance society. They decided to fight poverty by attacking alcohol abuse, which was so strange given that her most famous recipe was for cherry bounce. And that's like 50% whiskey. So I'm not 100% sure where the temperance thing came in. I do understand the help to the poor. She was actually this whole time, I don't know if we mentioned it, veterans of the Revolutionary War, finding George Washington busy and occupied, would often turn to Martha Washington, who would provide them food, clothes, leads on jobs, sometimes shelter. So she was kind of their mother figure all along. So I can see the aid to the poor, but I don't know how the temperance situation got mixed in. We've seen how fond she is of creme de noyo sue, too.

[Becca]

So. And I also have to wonder how much of her fables of her life life influenced those temperance women. She's up on this pedestal, so let's look at her from there instead of evaluating the.

[Susan]

Pedestal. Well, and I will say Victorians were a lot primer, a lot primer than their Georgian ancestors. You know, there was a lot going on during the Georgian period that shocked the Victorians, so that drinking was probably some of it. And now it's time for media, and as usual, we will start with.

[Becca]

Books. The biography that I relied on and liked the most was Martha An American Life by Patricia Brady. It was written in 2005. It's very linear, it's fairly in depth. It skipped over some things that I would have liked to have read more on, but I was able to get in other books. And it might have been a little bit heavy on George, but. And this is a conversation that Beckett and I have been having is how much of George's story do we tell to understand Martha's? And I think that in any biography that I read, that was something that the biographers had to balance too.

[Susan]

Well. And they also said it outright that they were hampered by a lot of her papers having been burnt. There actually is a compilation of her papers. I'll just link you to that in the show. Notes won't talk about it because like, whatever. But the remaining papers, a lot of them got compiled into a book and you can read it but like with a large percentage of it just vaporized into the universe, there's, you know, you have to kind of reconstruct from an outline of what was left by reading about George and, you know, her son and Thomas Jefferson and you know, yeah, the Adamses and a lot that's going on around her, but she did it to herself by burning the papers. So there is a book I liked even better than the Brady book called Martha Washington first lady of Liberty by Helen Bright. It is actually significantly fatter than the Martha Washington book that you just mentioned. And I'm looking. Oh, people don't get after me. I turned down corners in this book and now it's super fat. I'm gonna have to go through and turn them all.

[Becca]

Back. Well, with an iron in your hand to flatten them.

[Susan]

Out. Yeah, I loved it. Well, maybe I should just start slipping a 20 into the book at a random place. That would be Pay my for my anyway. And then the. The kind of off the beaten track book that I really liked. And I get obsessed with this kind of thing. Martha Washington's book of Cookery, spelled B O O K E which is actually how my family spells book, which is what they all call me. So it's the book of Kukaree as far as I'm concerned. The subtitle is and Book of Sweetmeats being a family manuscript curiously copied by an unknown hand somet 17th century, which was in her keeping from 1749, the time of her marriage to Daniel Custis, to 1799, at which time, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it goes on and on and on and On. So basically it's a digital version of a handwritten manuscript. And there are some really cool things in here, although the spelling is atrocious. This is how she spells fricassee. F, R, Y, K, A, C, Y.

[Becca]

Interesting. That's how I would spell it if I wasn't thinking working. And then I just wait for Google to correct.

[Susan]

It. Yes. So there is a syllabub recipe. There's actually multiple syllabub recipes. And just like we talked about during the Jane Austen podcast, when we made a version of syllabub, Martha Washington's version tells you to mix most of the ingredients in the house and then walk outside with your glass and milk the cow right into the. Into it. Well, we didn't do that part. We just basically did the wine and we used whipped cream from a carton in our refrigerator. So pasteurized. Yeah. It says raw milk produces ever so much more successful syllabubs than pasteurized milk. That's a modern note. I'm like, okie doke. Well, there you go. Well, and then for the Harry Potter fans, she gives you a recipe for spirit of Bezoar. And if you remember, a bazoir, which is basically a stone formed in a goat's stomach of undigested grass and other materials, which was largely considered a remedy for any poison. So if someone had been poisoned, if you shove a bezoir down their throat, they will recover. Evidently, Martha's family subscribed to that same principle. And there is a recipe for bezoar water, an excellent approved antidote against all contagions of plague, smallpox, or.

[Becca]

Measles. And so how much mercury is in.

[Susan]

That? No mercury. It's mixed with angelica water. Oh, how do you water.

[Becca]

It? All right, I'll look at the recipe myself and figure this one out. The book that I liked the best on the Washingtons together was the Washington's George and Martha Joined by Friendship, Crowned by Love by Flora Frazier. It's basically what the title says. And of course, there are portraits in there, which I always appreciate. You know, there's a lot of George, obviously, but I. That's the one I.

[Susan]

Liked. Now, there is a very cool thing that Mount Vernon Museum runs, and there is a George Washington, Mount Vernon channel on YouTube. And some of the videos are. Are an actress garbed and mannered like Martha Washington in her latter years, answering questions or speaking to things like the breakup of a relationship, that kind of thing. It's pretty cute. There's entertaining ones and educational ones. I highly recommend that for a series of videos. There has not really been a biography of Martha Washington in movie.

[Becca]

Form. No. The only one that I found was a documentary from C Span. It was First Lady's influence in images. And this documentary series was then turned into a book compiled by Susan Swain, who you and I met on C Span. So it's basically the same stories that are in a book that she wrote. But that's the only documentary that I could.

[Susan]

Find. Mount Vernon the Museum Mount Vernon.org does offer an Enslaved People of Mount Vernon tour. So if you are going to see Mount Vernon, I highly recommend that you also also book separate tickets for that tour. I think it would be very good to see the whole.

[Becca]

Picture. So yes, if you're there, go to Mount Vernon, but you can virtually go to Mount Vernon as well. And there is so much information on their website that yeah, it's not the same as going, but you can get a lot out of it about the lives of the the Washingtons and about that particular.

[Susan]

Plantation. Also. I don't think you can see this anywhere and it's frustrating to me. I didn't do a deep dive on YouTube about it, but there is a very recent play called the trial of Ms. Martha Washington and it is Martha mostly a bed and the other main character is Ann Dandridge, her half sister companion, possible enslaved, possible free woman of color who was part of the Washingtons family for a long time and then the involvement of other other enslaved people in the house. And I think it takes place between when George Washington dies and when she manumits the servants right in that tiny little.

[Becca]

Window. There will be more information in our show notes about things that we found relating to Martha Washington. We just don't have time to cover all of it because there is a lot of stuff out there. But definitely go check out our show [e-mail] and that's all I.

[Susan]

Have. And in closing, a paragraph from her obituary in the Alexandria Advertiser and commercial intelligencer. Mrs. Washington terminated her well spent life. She was the worthy partner of the worthiest of men. And those who witnessed their conduct could not determine which excelled in their different characters. Both were so well sustained on every occasion. They lived an honor and a pattern to their country. Country and we are grateful. Thanks for.

[Becca]

Listening.

[Susan]

Bye. If you liked what you heard today, please tell a few of your friends or leave a review for us on Apple podcast. Check out our Pinterest boards, one for each show that are increasingly growing exponentially and full of rabbit holes. For you to follow here's one we didn't mention before. The Bowery Boys has a two part series on the inauguration of George Washington and also New York's early role as the home of the President in the newly formed country. So we will link you to that episode, but their website is boweryboyshistory.com again the address if you want to go to London with us in September is likemindstravel.com you may have noticed that I have picked up a bit of a cold since we started recording. I hope it's just a cold and although I can possibly treat this with any number of cordials behind me on the the bar, I'll probably fall back on modern medicine and just take some nyquil. So I wish everyone the best of health out there. The song in the middle is Sonata in E Major Allegro Moderato by Nicholas Freiherr Von Croft. And the song at the end, let's say it's George Washington happy to see his wife arriving back on the battlefield to join him after a long absence. Bother me by the bell hours. See you next time it's been a while since we've spoken.

Oh our minds have gone so far away.

You.

[Becca]

Find your free time I'm so glad.

[Susan]

You'Re here to bind.

[Becca]

Me.

I don't let the world side.

[Susan]

Where I've gone It's changing so with you I wonder how I love to.

[Becca]

You right now oh by the way would you.

[Susan]

Please.

Some Here is the.

[Becca]

Day.

I'll deliver my love.

[Susan]

With.

There isn't much to say.

Only so few currents to.

[Becca]

Play.

We finally.

[Susan]

Understand.

How simple living.

Sam.

New.

[Becca]

Year.

I'm still only a.

[Susan]

Mil.

Give us some time baby I'm so glad you're here Bother me.

Sa.