The Washingtons

...Married to Anne's older brother George William, Sally was only two years older than Washington, and a con- A stant presence in his family circle -vj as he was growing from a k gauche and awkward adoles- tjj cent into a powerful and con- t sequential man...

...Appearances have always mattered in politics, but H never as much as back H then, when Washington's V presence—his character, hisV effect, his presentation of ^m himself and his family—stood ^m for everything the early repub-^m lie was lacking...

...I live a very dull life here," she wrote to a niece in December...

...In 1783, as Brookhiser tells us, he put down a menacing army rebellion by making a surprise entrance into the mutineers' meeting, speaking a beautifully modulated plea for forbearance, and then donning his glasses, saying he had not only grown gray, but "half blind in your service...

...She saw a soldier and hero, respected throughout the colony...

...In the first place, the image of a pristine and untroubled first marriage has always been valued political currency and never more so than in the Victorian era...

...His political talents H were crucial to the outcome,giving the world the first example of stable republican leadership it had seen in two thousand years...

...Still, as Bryan notes, "herpres- ^M ence deflected the undercur- ^M rent of scandal...

...Washington came in time to detest slavery sufficiently that he wrote into his will a provision to free his slaves on the death of his wife...

...ton, once conveniently dead, were resurrected to serve a posthumous political purpose as a model first couple, embodying the values of the new republic amidst the political uncertainties that beset America in the years before the Civil War...

...No false moves were made by our first "Power Couple," first in war, first in peace, first in spin...

...They were both shrewd, forward-looking, resilient, and canny...

...George starred in it—as he would star throughout his life...

...Also not shown was Martha's unhappiness with the social restrictions and the efforts to make her seem non-controversial by her husband's political staff...

...The first kind of spin made them effective, the second made them mysterious—burying much under the cover of virtue, including the fact that they could spin...

...She wore homes' spun and left the hair powder at home...

...The intellectual Abigail Adams grew so H giddy in his presence that it ^^H greatly annoyed her own H husband, John...

...In Martha Washington: First Lady of Liberty Helen Bryan argues, "Both George and Martha WashingNoemie Emery is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...The Washingtons knew that a wrong move could end the American experiment...

...Martha directed their wedding...

...The rumor had enough force that when Lord Fairfax died in 1781, his title went to George William's half-brother, son of their father's indisputably white second wife...

...Visitors to the camp found the wife of the ^m "great general" plainly dressed and constantly knitting: "Her gracious and cheerful manners delighted us all...

...Planned for Twelfth Night, then the great winter feast day, their wedding was by all accounts an impressive occasion, with a large house party, rich clothes, richer food, and fine wine...

...It was after this that Washington's secretary Tobias Lear decided it might be wise to edit her public correspondence or, better still, write it himself...

...This sort of thing makes for dynamite reading...

...All the time, the pressure on them was staggering: one false note, and the enterprise might have fallen to pieces...

...George had entered the charmed Fairfax orbit as a boy in his teens when Lawrence had married Anne Fairfax, cousin of the richest landowner in northern Virginia, and it was to the Fairfaxes that George had owed everything: his surveying work, his militia commission, and, above all, his education in the social graces that allowed him to rise in the world...

...Like all good first couples, George and Martha Washington spun incessantly throughout their lives, and were spun by others after their deaths...

...Still, the creation of the republic is our history's premier accomplishment in public life...

...No one knows when their feelings became more than • fraternal, but by 1757 he was sending her letters making it clear that he loved her, and it is equally clear that she did not mind this being said...

...He secured his appointment as commander in chief 1 in 1775 when he showed up at the Continental Congress in Phil-ift adelphia in a militia uniform he k\ had designed...

...Martha knew how to dress for every contingency, from Valley Forge to a high state occasion, and how to talk to everyone, from illiterate recruits to millionaires and their wives...

...After no more than three meetings they decided to marry, parted (George was off to Ohio), and did not see each other until seven months later, or just before their wedding on January 6, 1759...

...When the Washingtons met, each saw an attractive physical specimen...

...In her name and over the years, Lear and others penned a series of prim little notes brimming with platitudes...

...All first ladies and presidents after them have known that a wrong move could hurt a career or a party's agenda...

...No wonder Martha described herself as a "state prisoner" and called these her "lost days," a term she never applied to the eight winters of stress and privation she lived through in army camps during the war...

...All his life, Washington paid great attention to dress...

...The mutiny ended in tears...

...Many virtuosos played in the orchestra—Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams—but Washington A stands out as the master con-A ductor...

...In this respect, his wife was his equal...

...It was only three months after the death of the second (a daughter named Frances) that Daniel died as well, leaving Martha a rich and attractive widow, overwhelmed with business distractions and nursing an intense grudge against her husband's deceased father...

...In New York as first lady, she wore plain clothes in rich fabrics (the formula later chosen by Jacqueline Kennedy...

...It was her good luck and Washington's that at age sixteen she won the affections of Daniel Parke Custis, a harried bachelor of thirty-seven with a large fortune—and an impossible father who railed at Martha as a fortune hunter, threatened to disinherit the couple, gave away goods so that she should not have them, and delayed the marriage by almost two years...

...These creatures of the robust and realistic colonial era came to be filtered through Victorianism, emerging with a double distortion: not only the Father and Mother of the entire country, but the Albert and Victoria of the American nation...

...But, more important, they also saw the solution to their most obvious needs...

...The British spread the rumor that he had a mistress in New Jersey, a slave mistress in Virginia, and a colonel's wife kept as a mistress in camp...

...Indeed, the race situation for Washington was even more complicated...

...It was the qualities the Washingtons showed in their decision to marry that allowed them to bond as the first couple they later became...

...In the end, it was thought best to free the slaves in her lifetime...

...She saw a strong and responsible figure who could run her estates and help with her children...

...George Washington and Martha Dandridge were born into the lower gentry of the Old Dominion and rose in their culture by marrying well...

...But it does make for terrible spin...

...According to Bryan, Martha had a happy childhood from which she emerged as a happy woman, with a great gift for domestic tranquility...

...When the capital later moved to Philadelphia, Martha blossomed into more ornate gowns to fit the new mood of the opulent city...

...In his youth, H he was rumored to have been V the real father of one Thomas W Posey, born in 1751 to Lawrence Washington's neighbors, whom George later made a ^ general in the revolution, and after * that, a territorial governor...

...Here, spin enters the Washingtons' story, as Martha's grandson, Washington Custis, painted a picture of love at first sight: "The lady was fair to behold, and of fascinating manners, and splendidly endowed with worldly benefits...

...He saw a noted political hostess...

...This is a possible explanation for why Anne Fairfax was allowed to marry down and wed Lawrence Washing-ton—but it is also a possible explanation for Sally Fairfax's relations with young George Washington...

...Those who think Martha a dull little muffin will be delighted to know that she went to her late father-in-law's house in Williams-burg and smashed his cherished collection of hand-blown wine bottles, wine glasses, and delftware bowls...

...The 1790 portrait by Edward Savage shows a picture-perfect family of George, Martha, and Martha's two grandchildren, Nelly and Wash...

...Nor would you read that Daniel Parke Custis had a half-brother called Mulatto Jack, whose preferred legal status under their father's will caused such a headache for Daniel and Martha that Jack's sudden death aroused many suspicions...

...In the second, it would have raised the issue of the material calculations involved in the Washington marriage, which, if commonplace enough in their own day and setting, were perhaps too coldblooded for another age...

...Martha herself died about one year later, on May 22, 1802...

...In the fall of 1758, in the months between his engagement to and marriage to Martha, George was receiving sarcastic letters from Sally about the "animating prospect of possessing" the widow, and he was writing to her of his own great unhappiness...

...The result of this well-meaning gesture was that Martha Washington spent the last years of her life convinced that her slaves were attempting to kill her, a rumor that spread throughout Northern Virginia, and led James Madison, who had made a provision quite similar, to excise this part from his will...

...The worldly H Sally Fairfax had returned H his affection...

...There are certain bounds set for me that I must not depart from,—and as I cannot do what I like, I am obstinate, and stay at home a great deal...

...A rumor persisted that the mother of Anne and George William had been a mulatto, whom their father had married when he was governor of the Bahamas in his youth...

...One would be unlikely to read in the Washington legends that Martha had a black half-sister, Ann Dandridge...

...With Richard Brookhiser, whose documentary film Rediscovering George Washington played on PBS over the Fourth of July holiday, Bryan is doing her intriguing best to reclaim the First Couple, for their age and ours...

...The hero, fresh from his early fields, was redolent of fame, and with a form on which 'every god did seem to set his seal, to give the world assurance of a man.'" The truth is that Martha was mourning her husband and child, and distracted with various management problems...

...Less spinnable would have been her two children, the epileptic Patcy who died in 1767 and the wastrel Jacky who died in 1781...

...Leav-^ 1 ing Virginia in the fall of i 1775 to go to the armed ^.r camp at Cambridge and face t an audience that was unfamiliar and possibly hostile, Martha knew she had to ^ Si prove that the planter and 5? his wife could be genuine democrats...

...The image presented was of a happy, united, and prosperous couple—a great spin that in time became the reality...

...Eight months after her husband died in 1757, she met the young Colonel Washington, when he stopped at the home of her friends...

...that perme- ^k ated much of George's public fl life...

...For most of his life, the fl Father of His Country was a fl lure for women...

...They could make sound decisions under enormous emotional pressure...

...A subject that could be spun only through silence was the race issue...

...George was ending his military career in frustration, sick from a long illness, and hopelessly in love with Sally Fairfax, sister-in-law of his late half-brother Lawrence and wife of his closest friend...

...He knew when ^m to be strong and when to be pli-f ant, and how to seem strong while remaining non-threatening...

...There are at least two good reasons why this story, if it was known to early biographers, was rapidly spun out of Washington's life...

...If Sally had produced a Fairfax heir who looked like George Washington—fair-skinned, blue-eyed, red-haired, and thoroughly Anglo—it might have gone a long way toward reassuring their English relations that her husband should succeed to the Fairfax estate...

...And they shared a keen sense of occasion, image, theatrics, and dress...

...He saw the money to build up Mount Vernon and launch his post-military career...

...Once wed, however, the Custises lived very nicely, Martha running the house well and bearing four children, two of whom died...