The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers Read online

  For the next eighty years, the original letter remained unexamined by scholars, which spurred violent arguments about its authenticity and meaning. Some people were eager to dismiss it as a forgery. But the first two collectors of Washington’s papers reluctantly decided to include the newspaper text because the style was so unmistakably authentic, and no one could produce an adequate reason for forging it. Not until the late 1950s did a determined Washington biographer find the original in the files of Harvard’s Houghton Library. That discovery has not prevented people from continuing to disagree over its meaning.2

  Some historians have argued it is a good-humored joke, the sort of risqué banter that men and women often exchanged in the eighteenth century. John C. Fitzpatrick, who spent several decades on his monumental edition of Washington’s papers, maintained that the letter was a paean of praise for Martha Custis. He took ferocious issue with those who said that Washington was professing his passion for Mrs. Fairfax in spite of being engaged to Martha. If they were correct, Fitzpatrick wrote, every decent person would be forced to conclude that George Washington was “a worthless scoundrel.”3

  II

  Sally Cary Fairfax was the daughter of one of the wealthiest planters in Virginia, Wilson Cary, possessor of a splendid estate at Ceelys, on the James River overlooking Hampton Roads, not far from Newport News. The family also enjoyed comfortable town houses in Williamsburg and Hampton. Wilson Cary’s father had been rector of the College of William and Mary; the younger man had studied there and at Trinity College in England. His houses were stocked with the latest English books and magazines, and he took pleasure in teaching Sally and her three younger sisters how to read and write French. He was one of the leaders of the colony’s legislature, the House of Burgesses, which meant that each year the Carys enjoyed the brilliant social season in Williamsburg while the burgesses were in session. It was a world of fancy balls, lavish dinners, and witty conversation that made the pursuit of happiness a fact of life long before it became a phrase in a political declaration.4

  An anecdote passed down in the Cary family gives a glimpse of Sally that suggests she was the center of male attention at an early age. She was returning to the family’s Williamsburg house while one of the colonial wars with France was raging and the town was patrolled by sentries. One of these soldiers demanded to hear the password of the night from Sally’s coachman. The man was flummoxed into silence. Sally stamped her foot and cried, “But I am Miss Sally Cary!” The sentry gulped and said, “Pass.” It seems that the officer of the watch was an admirer and had made “Sally Cary” the password as a compliment to the young lady.5

  At eighteen Sally married George William Fairfax, son of William Fairfax, the proprietor of Belvoir, on the Potomac River not far from Mount Vernon. The bride enjoyed the dizzying expectation that one day she might become not merely the mistress of this fine mansion but the wife of a bona fide nobleman. George William stood a better than even chance of becoming the next Lord Fairfax. This would not only entitle him to sit in the House of Lords in Parliament and preside over a vast English estate; it would make him owner of five million acres in northern Virginia that King Charles II had given to a maternal ancestor of Lord Fairfax in 1673.

  This potentially glorious future was probably the best explanation for the match. William Fairfax had sent his son to England at the age of six to be educated by his family, describing him as a “poor West India boy.” George William was the product of a marriage that Fairfax had made in the Bahamas with the obscure widow of a British artillery major. Someone launched the rumor that the woman had Negro blood. For fifteen years, George William endured the unlovely experience of his wealthy English relatives eyeing his skin color and debating whether he was a mulatto.6

  The result was a slight, rather timid young man with a dour, down-turned mouth surmounted by a strong hooked nose and shrewd close-set eyes. His letter to an influential Fairfax kinsman in England reporting his engagement to Sally did not exactly seethe with passion. He made it sound like it was something he had worked into his schedule while attending the House of Burgesses. He described Sally as an “amiable person” and reported that he had obtained her and her father’s consent to an early marriage. He closed by noting that “Col. Cary wears the same coat-of-arms as Lord Hunsden.” (The first Lord Hunsden was a cousin of Queen Elizabeth, Henry Carey.) This apparently was as important to George William as Sally’s charms.7

  A portrait of Sally painted by a not very talented artist around this time reveals a slim, dark-haired young woman most people would call handsome rather than beautiful. But the narrow face is striking nonetheless: the deep-set dark eyes emanate a subtly mocking intelligence; the nose is strong and the mouth, firm and confident. Her waist is narrow and her bosom ample. It is not hard to imagine her as the leader of some lively revels.

  Sally came to Belvoir as a bride in 1748 and soon met sixteen-year-old George Washington. He was a frequent guest at nearby Mount Vernon, where his older half brother, Lawrence, was happily married to Anne Fairfax, George William’s older sister. Lawrence was doing his utmost to rescue George, already six feet tall, from the clutches of his headstrong widowed mother, Mary Ball Washington, who was trying to convert her oldest son into a surrogate husband and father figure for her four younger children.

  III

  George’s father, Augustine Washington, had died in 1743, when George was eleven; later George mournfully remarked that he had only a blurred recollection of this huge, muscular man, a sort of rural Hercules famous for his feats of strength. For much of the time, Augustine had been an absentee father, traveling between his scattered farms and an iron works that required a great deal of his attention. Enterprise was in Augustine Washington’s blood. Since the arrival of the first Washington in Virginia in 1657, a refugee from the English civil war, the males had made a habit of marrying well and acquiring land. Augustine Washington had continued this tradition, expanding his holdings from 1,740 acres at the time of his first marriage to almost 11,000 acres at his death.8

  Compared with the Carys, the Byrds, the Lees, the Randolphs, and the other first families of Virginia, the Washingtons remained “middling gentry.” Their house on 250-acre Ferry Farm, across the Rappahannock River from Fredericksburg, where George grew up, was an eight-room frame structure, not even faintly comparable to the stately brick mansions such as Robert Carter’s Nomini Hall or William Byrd’s Westover. Augustine Washington owned forty-nine slaves. Robert “King” Carter had over 600 toiling on his 60,000 acres. It is easy to imagine young George Washington’s awe when he visited Belvoir. Elegant English-made couches, chairs, and tables filled the parlor. At Ferry Farm, the parlor contained three beds.9

  George’s mother, Mary Ball, was Augustine Washington’s second wife. Her mother was illiterate, and Mary received no education worth mentioning. She was a physically imposing woman, large and vigorous, with an explosive temper. One man described her as “majestic.” One of George’s boyhood playmates said he was “ten times more afraid of her” than he was of his own parents. One day, Mary stood up in her carriage on Fredericksburg’s main street and cursed and lashed a slave because he had mishandled the horse. As her oldest son, George was exposed at an early age to his mother’s tantrums. Worse, he inherited her violent temper.10

  There are more than a few intimations that George Washington’s home life with this turbulent woman was unhappy before as well as after his father’s death. Second marriages, especially ones in which children of the first wife must be dealt with, are often uneasy. Augustine Washington’s decision to send his two sons by his first marriage, Augustine and Lawrence, to school in England at considerable expense may have been motivated in part by Mary’s sharp tongue and short temper.

  In one of his boyhood notebooks, in which George laboriously copied such things as Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company, he included in his strong, firm script a poem, “True Happiness.” It was a portrait of domestic tranquility. The “truly bl
ess’d” enjoy a “good estate” with productive soil, a warm fire in the hearth, a simple diet, “constant friends,” a healthy mind and body—and “a quiet wife, a quiet soul.” Almost certainly, this portrait was the opposite of what George encountered on Ferry Farm. Were it not for the intervention of Lawrence Washington, it is dismaying to think what George Washington might have become.11

  IV

  Fourteen years older than George, Lawrence had inherited Mount Vernon from his father. His marriage to Anne Fairfax, William Fairfax’s daughter, had catapulted him from middling gentry into the heady stratosphere of Virginia’s aristocracy. Fairfax was the cousin and land agent for the sixth Lord Fairfax, who owned those five million acres between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. Virginians had done everything in their power to invalidate Charles II’s generosity, but the courts had upheld the royal prerogative, thereby making Fairfax the most influential name in Virginia. In swift succession after his marriage, Lawrence became adjutant of the Virginia militia and a member of the House of Burgesses. Add the polish of his English education and his love of martial glory and it is easy to see how he became a formidable figure on young George’s horizon.12

  Thanks to Lawrence, George became a close friend of George William Fairfax. Seven years older than George, Fairfax accepted the elongated teenager as a companion at fox hunts at Belvoir and on trips to the Shenandoah Valley, where more Fairfax acres were being surveyed for sale. Under his genteel influence, Washington was soon spending the money he earned as a surveyor on stylish clothes and feeling at ease in the elegant atmosphere of Belvoir. To Mary Ball’s mounting exasperation, George spent more and more of his time on the banks of the Potomac.

  Then came tragedy. Lawrence Washington was stricken with tuberculosis and slowly died before George’s grief-stricken eyes. In a desperate attempt to regain his health, Lawrence journeyed to the island of Barbados with George, hoping a winter spent in warm sunshine might restore him. The experiment proved fruitless for Lawrence—and doubly painful for George. He caught a bad case of smallpox, which he barely survived. Lawrence was as generous to his younger brother in death as he had been in life. He named George the heir of the Mount Vernon estate, if Anne Fairfax Washington predeceased him. In the meantime, George leased the house and lands from her for a modest sum. When Anne died in 1761, he became Mount Vernon’s owner.13

  V

  Mount Vernon was young George’s refuge from Mary—and nearby Belvoir was a place where he met some of the most sophisticated young women in Virginia. Sally Cary Fairfax’s sisters and numerous friends were frequent visitors. George soon proved himself more than vulnerable to their charms. One belle, who remains nameless, inspired some of the worst poetry ever committed by an adolescent:

  O, ye Gods, why should my poor resistless heart

  Stand to oppose thy might and power

  At last to surrender to Cupid’s feather’d dart

  And now lays bleeding every hour

  For her that’s pitiless of my grief and woes

  And will not on me pity take.

  This atrocity may have been committed on behalf of “a lowland beauty” who particularly tormented George. He told his friend Robin during a sojourn in the Shenandoah Valley at Lord Fairfax’s hunting lodge that there was “an agreeable young lady” living in the house, but every time he looked at her, he thought of the “lowland beauty,” which was only “adding fuel to the fire.” There seems to be little doubt that George was powerfully attracted to the opposite sex—hardly surprising for a healthy, vigorous teenager.14

  George’s romantic emotions slowly acquired a darker tinge. Sally Fairfax seems to have been a coquette who tantalized, teased, and dominated the men around her. She soon realized that one of her conquests was George Washington—a discovery that did not displease her. The contrast between the tall, muscular Washington and her short, precise courtier husband, whose greatest talent was assiduous flattery of his superiors, could not have been more complete. As they performed together in amateur theatrics, danced minuets in Belvoir’s ballroom, and exchanged gossip about the amorous doings of their contemporaries, George Washington fell violently in love with his close friend’s wife.

  One of their favorite plays was Cato, written by the celebrated essayist and poet Joseph Addison in 1713. It was the most popular drama of the century; more to the point, it had two parts made to order for lovers and would-be lovers. Marcia was Cato’s devoted daughter; Juba was a North African warrior who rallied to Cato’s side when he resisted the rise of Julius Caesar. Marcia confessed her love for Juba, but Cato refused his approval because he was a mere colonial. Juba nevertheless remained devoted to the untouchable beauty.15

  VI

  By the time George realized what was happening to him emotionally, he was on his way to becoming Virginia’s best-known soldier. Grown to his full six feet two and one half inches, he stood, in the words of one eyewitness, “as straight as an Indian.” Thanks to his Fairfax connections, he was appointed a major of the militia at age twenty. The following year he won a skirmish against a French patrol that became the opening shots of the world’s first global conflict, the Seven Years’ War. Next, in spite of strenuous objections from his mother, George become a favorite aide of British general Edward Braddock and miraculously survived the rout of his army of regulars when they marched into western Pennsylvania to oust the French from Fort Duquesne, where Pittsburgh now stands. Ignoring four bullets through his coat and two horses killed under him, Washington was among the few who distinguished himself on that chaotic battlefield.

  He staggered back to Mount Vernon a very tired man. A letter from William Fairfax reveals how closely the residents of Belvoir followed Washington’s military career: “Your safe return gives an uncommon joy to us and will no doubt be sympathized by all lovers of heroick [sic] virtue,” Fairfax wrote. He hoped a Saturday night’s rest would refresh the weary warrior enough to enable him to come to Belvoir in the morning.

  Sally added a saucy note, cosigned by two visiting women friends, accusing the hero of “great unkindness in not visiting us this night. I assure you that nothing but being satisfied that our company would be disagreeable would prevent us from trying if our legs would not carry us to Mount Vernon this night; but if you will not come to us, tomorrow morning, very early, we shall be at Mount Vernon.” This is a letter from a woman who knows she has a certain gentleman virtually at her beck and call.16

  VII

  Washington soon became the colonel of a regiment of Virginia regulars that struggled to defend the 700-mile-long frontier against French and Indian incursions. George William Fairfax wrote him admiring letters, vowing that he would be honored to serve under his leadership. But Fairfax never got around to volunteering, even when his younger brother Bryan joined the seemingly endless and extremely dangerous wilderness war and another brother became an officer in the British regular army.

  Washington’s relationship to Sally Fairfax during these years resembled a roller-coaster ride. He wrote her letters from the frontier, hoping she would honor him with a reply. But when his messages became too emotional, she abruptly ordered him to stop writing to her. At another point, she apparently banished him from Belvoir. He accepted this treatment with remarkable patience.17

  Late in 1757, Washington suffered a physical collapse and staggered home to Mount Vernon, seriously ill with dysentery, a nameless fever—probably malaria—and a cough that reminded him alarmingly of Lawrence’s fatal malady. He took to his bed in Mount Vernon and asked Sally to obtain various medicines a local doctor had recommended. George William Fairfax had sailed for England to deal with his difficult relatives. His father, William, had recently died, giving his British cousins a chance to bring up the ruinous suspicion that George William was a mulatto. Washington’s younger brother, John Augustine (“Jack”), and his wife, who had been staying at Mount Vernon as caretakers, were away. Sally brought Washington his medicines—special wines, jellies, and other delicacies beyond
the ability of Mount Vernon’s kitchen. Was it during these months that some or all of “the thousand tender passages” occurred that Washington struggled to forget in the letter he wrote a year later?18

  We simply do not know. The other letters Washington and Sally exchanged have all been destroyed, except for one or two fragments and a puzzling note that he wrote to her when he first arrived at Mount Vernon in 1757. It is as laconic and impersonal as one can imagine, asking for help with his medicines. In mid-February Washington received a letter from George William, reporting he had survived the perils of the wintry Atlantic. He forwarded it to Sally, adding: “When you are at leisure to favor us with a visit, we shall endeavor to partake as much as possible of the joy you receive on this occasion.” This does not breathe deep passion, to say the least; it also suggests that Sally’s visits had been infrequent.19

  During these months, Washington was a very sick man. He wrote a plaintive letter to the doctor who had treated him on the frontier, James Craik, reporting that he was not getting better. Dr. Craik replied that he was not surprised; his malady had “corrupted the whole mass of blood.” The physician ordered the patient to stay in bed and avoid any and all exertion, saying, “The fate of your friends and country [he meant Virginia] are in a manner dependent on your recovery.” This was flattering stuff, but not the sort of message that inspired a depressed, anxious man to become an impassioned lothario.20