Martha Washington

Martha Dandridge grew up one of eight children on a Virginia plantation and married a much older, wealthy widower, Daniel Parke Custis, at eighteen. Two decades of Virginia planter society and four pregnancies followed; only two of her children lived past early childhood. Custis died in 1757 without a will, leaving her sole control of an estate that included roughly seventeen thousand acres and close to three hundred enslaved people, worth something like thirty-three thousand dollars in today's money. She was twenty-six, the wealthiest widow in the colony, and free for the first time in her adult life to choose her own second marriage. Eighteen months later she married a Virginia colonel eight years her senior.

Her eight winters at the Continental Army's camps, and how she improvised the entirely unprecedented role of president's wife once the war was won, are BriefHistory's subject in full. What that page leaves out is the ledger underneath the partnership: a household run for four decades on enslaved labor inherited from her first marriage, and a war that cost her a son at Yorktown. That accounting is this page's business instead.

Daniel Parke Custis's estate had carried nearly three hundred enslaved people, and Martha's marriage to George folded them permanently into Mount Vernon's workforce. Virginia law kept those "dower" people legally separate from George's own, which meant even his will could not free them — on Martha's death they passed, still enslaved, to her Custis grandchildren. In 1796 her enslaved maid, Oney Judge, escaped to New Hampshire; Martha wanted her hunted down and returned, and George's household kept pressing the matter for years without success. The war took its own toll closer to home: her son John died of camp fever at the Siege of Yorktown in 1781, and she spent her later years raising his two youngest children as her own.

She burned nearly all of George's letters to her before she died at Mount Vernon in May 1802, leaving historians a partnership reconstructed mostly from other people's accounts. The nineteenth century turned her into a domestic icon: her portrait appeared on an 1886 silver certificate, and in 1902 she became the first American woman featured on a U.S. postage stamp. Modern surveys of First Ladies still rank her comfortably in the upper half. What has shifted is the frame — recent scholarship reads Mount Vernon's economy for what it actually was, a working plantation run on the labor of people the Washingtons owned, a fact the nineteenth-century image left out entirely.

Martha Washington's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Weekly "drawing room" receptions other
  The first regular presidential social event, held in New York and Philadelphia 1789
• Continental Army winter-camp relief circle other
  Organized officers' wives to sew and knit for soldiers at Valley Forge 1777
• Mount Vernon plantation management other
  Ran five working farms during George's decades away on public business 1759

• June 2, 1731 aged 0 Born at Chestnut Grove in New Kent County, Virginia
• May 15, 1750 aged 18 Marries Daniel Parke Custis
• July 1757 aged 26 Widowed at 26, inheriting Custis's estate and enslaved workforce
• January 6, 1759 aged 27 Marries George Washington
• Winter 1775 aged ~44 Joins Washington at the Cambridge encampment, the first of eight wartime winters
• 1781 aged ~50 Her son John dies of camp fever during the Siege of Yorktown She raised his two youngest children afterward as her own.
• April 1789 aged 57 Becomes the first president's wife, moving to New York
• 1796 aged ~65 Her enslaved maid, Oney Judge, escapes to New Hampshire
• May 22, 1802 aged 70 Dies at Mount Vernon, after burning George's letters to her

• George Washington 1732–1799
  First President of the United States and commander of the Continental Army during the American Revolution. married to
• Abigail Adams 1744–1818
  Correspondent and presidential spouse whose letters urged legal consideration for women in the new republic. successor in the role
• Dolley Madison 1768–1849
  First Lady who built the political salon of early Washington and saved the Washington portrait in 1814. successor in the role
• Eleanor Roosevelt 1884–1962
  First Lady and human rights advocate who chaired the UN committee that drafted the Universal Declaration. later transformed the role