Karin Wulf: Even later in her life, people often remarked when
she was first lady that she dressed rather simply, and I
think that's very self conscious. She doesn't want to
look too fancy, because it's a balancing act, trying to be
first lady, but not trying to pretend that you're being the
queen or something. But the fabric of her clothing was
exquisite, always, of the finest quality.
Colleen Shogan: In early May 1789, Martha Washington
finalized the details of a long journey ahead. In a few weeks
time, she would set out from her home in Mount Vernon in Virginia
and head north to New York City. There she would join her
husband, George, the nation's first president, in the first
capital of the United States. Martha wasn't exactly looking
forward to her new life as the first first lady. She longed to
remain at Mount Vernon and live in retirement with her husband
and grandchildren, but George had answered the nation's call,
and she understood his sense of duty more than most. There was
also no precedent for her new role, and as today's guest, Dr.
Karin Wulf writes, Martha knew that the eyes of the nation were
upon her. So what can we learn then from Martha Washington's
leap into the dark. I'm Colleen Shogan, and this is In Pursuit a
podcast that explores lessons from America's past to write the
history of America's future. Episode Two: "Martha
Washington's Frst Steps."
Karin Wulf, Welcome to In Pursuit.
Karin Wulf: Thank you so much, Colleen, it's good to be with
you.
Colleen Shogan: So we're going to be talking about Martha
Washington this morning. Now, she never expected to become the
first lady of a new nation. As a very young and wealthy Virginia
woman, what path did she expect to follow earlier in her life?
Karin Wulf: I love that you started with that question in
part because I think Martha Washington's story and George
Washington's story is such a Virginia story. I'm a native of
Virginia. Virginians tend to think that Virginia is the total
of early American history, but this is really a story rooted in
Virginia and to understand Martha's early life and the path
towards marrying George Washington, and the path they
ultimately followed that led to the presidency, you have to
understand early Virginia and her expectation, not that she
would be the First Lady of the United States, which didn't
exist, but that she would probably be the mistress of a
modest Virginia plantation, or if she had ambitions that she
would run a larger plantation. She came from a family that was
relatively modest by some standards, but very wealthy by
others. She would have managed enslaved people, and she would
have managed household resources, and she would have
expected to raise children not to be the first lady of a new
nation.
Colleen Shogan: So genealogy is very important, as you
mentioned, to early Americans. And in fact, you've written a
new book entitled Lineage on the topic. So tell us about Martha
Washington. How did she view genealogy? Was this important to
her?
Karin Wulf: Genealogy was so important to Martha Washington's
life as it was to all people who lived in British America, in
part because genealogy is about the relationship between
property and family, and Martha Washington's whole life is
structured around precisely that relationship of property and
family. So whether she was thinking about the family that
she was born into, or the first family she was married into, or
the second family she was married into, because George
Washington was her second husband, she was always thinking
about and understanding that her position owed everything to the
people that she was descended from. So let me give you just
one example. Her first husband, Daniel Parke Custis, was a child
of incredible privilege of a much wealthier family than
Martha's. He was much older than she was, and his father had a
child by an enslaved woman, and also his father had probably his
own half brother in the Caribbean. This is a family
through whom property in people as well as property in land,
meant a lot to what you inherited, whether you inherited
your own personal freedom or you inherited property yourself. So
she would have been enormously attuned to and understood the
significance of her family relationships. It structured her
life.
Colleen Shogan: Her first husband, as you mentioned,
Daniel perk Custis. What happens to him actually impacts what
happens to Martha Washington later in her life. He dies in
1757, how does this affect Martha Washington? What does it
mean for her to be a widow at a fairly young age.
Karin Wulf: Her early life is so compact, I think sometimes it's
easy to miss the fact that she gets married, and within six,
seven years, she's had four children, two of whom died, and
her husband's dead. And then she meets George Washington, or she
probably knows him a little bit anyway, and in another year,
she's remarried to him. It's very compressed, I think, from
our perspective. But when her husband dies, she is appointed
the executor of his estate, which means she's in charge of
distributing to his heirs or managing for his heirs, because
they're they're two little kids, all of the property, and it's
extensive. It's like multiple households and many, many
hundreds of acres, many dozens of enslaved people. And it's not
unusual in Virginia for a young widow to actually be the
executor to manage that kind of property after the death of
someone. Not everyone does it, but it would have been a lot.
And one of the things we see in Martha Washington's papers, what
little survives actually, is how intense that management of
Daniel Parke Custis estate was. She's writing to London. She's
writing to people in Virginia. Merchants in Williamsburg are
writing to her and reminding her that her husband owes the money,
and they're really hoping that she's going to be able to settle
the estate and pay out. It's a really complex financial and
organizational undertaking for her, and she seems to do it
pretty well.
Colleen Shogan: How does that affect our conception of gender?
In the 1750s that a woman is able to be entrusted with this
responsibility? Essentially, she's running a small business.
Karin Wulf: Yeah, absolutely.There's so many ways
in which I think we misconceive what it meant for women who were
part of this particular wealthy Virginia elite, what was
expected of them, what they did on a day to day basis, even the
fact that we often don't think about women as Enslavers, that
they managed property in people, and she did, and part of that
large business was enslaving people and keeping them working
on these plantations in slavery, but it also meant managing
incredibly sophisticated financial instruments, because
this is an economy of debt and credit, in which people are
always operating on the basis of how much debt they can
accumulate and how much debt They can extend to others. It is
a very much a fluid reputation based debt and credit economy,
and she had to understand all of those different pieces of that
in order to be able to function, both when she was married and
then also after her husband died, when she was the executor
of his estate. So she had to be attuned, as I said before, to
the important relationship between family and property, but
also to the complexity of the financial situation in which
they lived.
Colleen Shogan: Martha Washington meets George
Washington. She is one of the wealthiest young widows in early
America. Why did they get together? Why did they get
married? Do we know from a history, did they marry because
of a union of wealth? Did they marry because they fell in love?
Was it both? What do we know?
Karin Wulf: We don't know for sure, but it seems like the
answer is yes, that they married for love, and they absolutely
married for money, because you wouldn't otherwise, it was very
awkward for people not to marry within people of their own
status. In fact, in her first marriage, her first husband's
father tried to resist their marriage, saying that she didn't
bring enough money, frankly, to the Union for George Washington,
she would have been a great catch because of that property.
But you know, there's a long tradition in early Virginia, of
men doing well by marrying wealthy women. And in fact, if
we look at all of the Virginia like senior politicians and
those planters who become very wealthy, they all do well, and
that includes Washington's ancestors. They do well by
marrying wealthy women. Wealthy women are a great source of
power for men. So yes, of course, they married because
this was a union of assets, as it were. But there's plenty to
suggest that George Washington was kind of dishy, quite
handsome and quite a strange
Colleen Shogan: thing, like the George Clooney of the 1750s I
don't know. I don't know. I'm not sure what to compare him to.
Karin Wulf: I know, right? Like very striking, very handsome,
and a real kind of, you know, people talk about Washington,
when he was the general, that he had such an air of command, but
he had an air about him, even as a courting suitor. He's very
tall, he's very handsome, and at that point, he still had his
teeth too. So that seems important, but she's also very
attractive. We don't have a lot of portraits of her. And, you
know, people are always describing women, right? It's so
annoying, but they do, and they tell us, and we also know this
from material evidence, like some of her surviving clothing.
She was very petite. She had dark brown hair. She was very
smiley, I guess we might say now, she was curvy. Later,
people said very kind of uncharitably that she was a
little plump. But she was curvy and lively and just by all
accounts, quite attractive, and they seemed to enjoy one another
a lot. So sure affection growing into love, or maybe even a spark
right from the start. But I think it had to meet that
threshold first. You know, was this a responsible union of
people of similar or kind of simpatico financial situation.
Colleen Shogan: We know that Martha Washington, she
eventually burns almost all of her correspondence with George
Washington. So how do we know actually what Martha Washington
was like? I mean, how do we have a sense of what she was like as
a person, if we don't have much of her surviving evidence with
her relationship with George Washington.
Karin Wulf: You know, it's so tough for women of any kind of
status, we have so little by comparison to what we have with
men. I want to just call out with enormous admiration for the
papers of George Washington Project at the University of
Virginia, which did a "Papers of Martha Washington" volume in
2022. It's fantastic. It's a super scholarly edition, which
might sound like it's dry reading, but it's not. It's
great reading. I highly recommend it to anyone. But it's
essentially hundreds of letters written by her and to her, and
some other materials like receipts and copies of wills and
estate papers. It's a kind of a one stop shop for what we know
from the textual evidence. So that's not the material
evidence, but the textual evidence about Martha
Washington, and it's quite revealing. It shows us quite a
lot about her. It shows us how she expressed herself in
language. It shows us, for example, that she was exchanging
information with these people when she was the executor of her
first husband's estate. It shows us that she's writing about
wanting to make purchases or management of her estate. There
is very little to her husband that is true her husband George
Washington. And it's also true that by comparison to someone
like him, it's very little. This single volume of hundreds of
letters. It's dwarfed by, you know, just in the Founders
Online resource of the documentary editing projects,
this wonderful collaboration of the National Archives and the
documentary editing projects. It's fantastic, online one of
the best resources for early American history. Shows there
are more than 30,000 letters written by George Washington. So
when you say we've got a couple of 100 things written by or two
or about Martha, it seems like very little. But for many other
women, we have 5% of that. We might have one or two or five
things. So I guess what I'm saying is it's a matter of
perspective. There does seem to be quite a lot about her by
comparison to other women, and we can kind of use that
material. We can understand that in conjunction with the
material, evidence of her clothing, material she
collected, things she was interested in. People often
mention that she was a fashionable dresser, and we know
that from what survives, both of the actual material stuff, like,
there's, you know, surviving her beautiful wedding shoes, very,
very fancy she would have absolutely been wearing the
fanciest French shoes.
Colleen Shogan: They were high heels, right? I mean, pretty
unusual.
Karin Wulf: Purple silk embroidered. I mean so, so fancy
and like, can you imagine in 18th century Virginia, saying,
like, dear so and so, this is what I want for my wedding
outfit. I want these fancy heels. So some of that tells us
a little bit about her, too, that she was not the kind of
grandmotherly, you know. Let's just leave her on the margins.
Not much to say about her caricature of later years she
was a woman who knew her own mind.
Colleen Shogan: Yeah, that's interesting, because we have
this picture of Martha Washington in our head, of her
later in life, where she's portrayed very differently than,
like you said, a younger woman who's looking for fancy shoes to
wear at her wedding.
Karin Wulf: Yeah, and but you know, the other thing is that
even later in her life, people often remarked, when she was
first lady, that she dressed rather simply, and I think
that's very self conscious. She doesn't want to look too fancy,
because it's a balancing act, trying to be first lady, but not
trying to pretend that you're being the queen or something.
But the fabric of her clothing was exquisite, always of the
finest quality, and fabric is incredibly expensive at the
time. So she may look like she's simply dressed, but she's
dressed in the best.
Colleen Shogan: You know, she steps into the spotlight,
probably for the first time, when George Washington takes
command of the Continental Army in 1775 and she is now the
spouse, or the wife, of the commander in chief of that army.
What role did she think she had to play in this new foray that
George Washington undertakes that she probably was never
anticipating?
Karin Wulf: Yeah, it's so interesting because one of the
few surviving letters between them is a letter that George
wrote her as he is about to take command, and he says, "I have
been asked to basically, take on this whole big job." And it's a
longish letter, actually, but he's very self conscious about
saying, "I know that this means something, not just for me, but
for you. It's a burden, but it's a responsibility, but it's one I
think we need to shoulder." Interestingly, at the very end
of that letter, he says, PS, "I got the prettiest muslin."
That's gorgeous fabric. I got the prettiest muslin for you,
and I'm sending it. So I think both of them knew that this was
going to change things for them. He'd been a soldier. She knew
that he was an officer for the Virginia militia in the Seven
Years' War. He was fighting for the British because he was a
British colonist. You know, he was a subject of the crown early
in their marriage. But this would change things, and we can
see that she took that seriously in a couple different ways. She
famously always went to visit him at the Winter encampments,
all eight winter encampments, every winter, she tried to be
with him. Armies generally tried to kind of stay put and not
march around and do too much in the winter. So she tried to be
with him. But there are other interesting snippets. Like, for
example, she sometimes just a little bit of evidence on this,
but she would sometimes clearly act as secretary for him, take
notes for him, make copies of letters that he needed, and he
needed a lot. You know, he was managing a big operation. So it
seems to me, what she thought she should do is a version of
what she would have been doing as a plantation mistress,
running an operation. She was thinking about how to serve her
husband and his work, and how to serve the operation that they
were jointly invested in as best she could.
Colleen Shogan: What's interesting to me, she doesn't
remain at Mount Vernon, where she would have been certainly
more comfortable and probably safer, but she does make these
trips, which has to show some sort of attachment to George
Washington.
Karin Wulf: Yes, although it wasn't completely unusual. You
know, many women did do this, and their husbands did want them
to be with them. I'm reminded that Nathaniel Greene, the great
Rhode Island general, probably George Washington's best
general. I might be biased as a Rhode Island resident now, but
Nathaniel Greene was so desperate for his young wife to
join him on campaign, he wrote her these very sexy letters,
like saying, you know, like, I I'm desperate without you, you
need to join me. And she was like, Well, I just had a baby.
I'm kind of tired. Actually, she named that baby Martha
Washington. Oh, how about but so it's not completely unusual for
women to join their husbands. And of course, as we know that
many armies marched with lots of women in train, lots of women
working for the army. So it's not completely unusual, but it's
true that no one would have thought otherwise. If she had
said, I'm just going to stay at Mount Vernon and manage things
there, it would have been a lot less stressful for her. It would
probably have been a lot easier in a lot of ways, but she wanted
to be there with him now,
Colleen Shogan: After the Revolutionary War is over and
the Constitution is ratified, of course, George Washington
becomes the President of the United States, and then Martha
Washington becomes the first First Lady of the United States,
even though that title wasn't in existence at that time. But how
does she approach this job? I mean, this is actually really
hard. There's not precedent for what this will look like in a
republic in the United States. How does she approach this new
role and position?
Karin Wulf: I think there are two things. One is just to go
back to the world of Virginia that they came from. They lived
in an extremely hierarchical world. They lived in a world
where, literally, some people were free and some people were
enslaved, where there was a hierarchy of Gender, Women
typically expected to be subordinated to men, where
wealthy people expected to be in power, and political power, like
the world of hierarchy, was not unusual to them. She would have
understood being in an important position, and she would have
understood very plainly her husband being in this kind of
prime, elevated position. So hierarchy was not new. Hierarchy
was entirely obvious to them, and that, I think, probably
helped with this transition. What's different is the idea
that it's not the ultimate hierarchy that they were used
to, political hierarchy that they were used to, which was the
monarchy, and the monarchy with all of the symbols and the
trappings of luxury and wealth and status that comes with it
that it helped to culturally convey political and
governmental authority. So the question is, how do you have
enough authority to do what you need to do and to convey the
power of the government, but also not so much that you're
tripping over or falling into monarchical habits and cultural
trappings. How do you do hierarchy, but within a
democracy? Very, very challenging. So I think both
George and Martha Washington, they had a little time to think
about this. He was the commander of the army, and that's a very
hierarchical institution, and people had made her into not
quite a celebrity. Like we think of now, but people knew her.
People, as I just mentioned, with Nathaniel Greene and his
wife, people were naming their babies after George and Martha
Washington. They were celebrated. So it wasn't like
they went from nothing to all of a sudden, catapulted into the
spotlight, but they had to really navigate this new
position quite carefully. And you can see how she wants to
think through how she would entertain for example, because
at Mount Vernon, you are bringing people into your home.
But when you're in the president's house, the
President's mansion, you're bringing people into this place
that is the president's residence of the United States
of America. That's very different. You're not welcoming
people into your home, you're welcoming people into the
President's home. And she's a little self conscious about
that, and she sets up some kind of structures for how to do
that. She has parties, but she structures them in terms of who
she invites when they come in, how she greets them, as I
mentioned before, she's pretty self conscious about dressing in
this kind of simple but very elegant style. She outfits their
houses, the president's house this way, orders China and other
kinds of things that will be kind of emblems of the
presidential residence. So I think she's quite self
conscious, and I think it is a major transition that takes a
lot of thought and care, but it's not a wholesale revolution
in how to be.
Colleen Shogan: How does the American public view these
choices that she makes as the first woman to be married to the
American President, which would eventually be the first hostess
of the United States? How do people react?
Karin Wulf: Well, I think there are different kinds of
reactions. There is some controversy around the kind of
style that both George and Martha Washington employ in the
presidential residence. Some people complain about the
parties that they have, finding that, in fact, they look a
little too monarchical, they look a little too aristocratic,
whereas other people find that actually, they're navigating
this quite well. It's interesting that Abigail Adams,
who becomes the second First Lady, says, Look, you are such a
model. I'm never going to be able to do it as well as you
did. Thank goodness you went first, basically. And Abigail
Adams, as we know, was a pretty sharp assessor of people and
their behavior, and probably wouldn't have pulled her
punches.
Colleen Shogan: Karin in the final years of their lives, both
Martha and George Washington worried about a lot of things.
They worried about their families, their legacies, about
the future of Mount Vernon, their home, and, of course, the
future of the United States. What choices did Martha
Washington face in these years near the end of her life, and
how did she confront them?
Karin Wulf: I think there are so many different things that
they're concerned about. Her husband is very concerned about
the future of the United States and the political situation,
particularly the friction between the political parties,
is a subject of great concern. She's very concerned about her
children and grandchildren and her very dear niece, how her
close family will be. Is of enormous concern for her and
tending to those family relationships and those family
situations. I think it takes up an extraordinary amount of her
time. She does think that she will get her husband back to
Mount Vernon, and they will have time together. And of course,
they don't. He dies too soon after the presidency for them to
really have a lot of time together, which is like just
deeply, deeply sad. But I think one thing that's quite telling
to me is that her dear niece, her sister's daughter, Fanny
Bassett, marries twice, once to one of George Washington's dear
nephews, but then the second time she marries, and this is
very close to the end of George Washington's life. So it's in
the mid 1790s she marries George Washington's longtime secretary,
Tobias Lear. And I think for me, that kind of symbolizes how they
think about tending to their family, both the people that
they're related to, but also the people who have become part of
their inner circle, how they want to see them as kind of part
of a coherent whole. I think those are really important to
her. There are also important choices that she makes in terms
of as we know, George Washington decides to free the people that
he has enslaved she does not, in part, she doesn't have a lot of
choice, because the enslaved people who are her property are
actually the property of her children. That is, she just has
the care of that property. But she does have a choice about a
couple of things, including one person who she owns outright,
and she doesn't free that person. So we know that she
doesn't make the same choices that her husband does in regards
to enslaved people. And that's, I think, telling
Colleen Shogan: She does free some of the enslaved people from
George Washington earlier because they were supposed to be
freed upon her death, she frees them early. Earlier. But there's
a reason for that. Correct?
Karin Wulf: That's true. You know, that's a really tricky
one, because some people say and comments that she made
contributed to this, that she worries that when people will
gain their freedom only when she's dead, does her death
become the barrier, essentially, to freedom. So she thinks maybe
I should just go ahead and do this sooner. A more charitable
reading of it is that she wants to enact her husband's wishes
and reflect some of his changing views about slavery.
Colleen Shogan: As we look back into our nation's past, four
relevant lessons today, what can In Pursuit listeners learn from
Martha Washington's life?
Karin Wulf: I think there is no single individual who is purely
heroic and good and positive or who is purely evil? Well,
actually, maybe there are a few people who are but people are
complex, you know, and she had really important things to
contribute to the young nation. And also she's a complicated
figure because she is so implicated in some of the
greatest wrongs of our nation's past, like slavery, but she
really contributed, really importantly, in part because she
was so dedicated to her family. When we think about all the
kinds of commitments that we make to our families, we don't
know what paths that will take us down. She did not know when
she married George Washington that she wasn't just marrying
another guy who would be a planter and pretty wealthy, and
wealthier by virtue of the property he brought to her and a
guy who would be, you know, a politician in the Virginia House
of purchases. She had no idea this guy was going to go on to
be the first president of this unimaginable new thing the
United States of America. She said to someone like, situation
has outrun our imagination. But she went with that. She stayed
committed, not just to her husband, to her family, but to
their mutual commitment to the young United States of America.
Colleen Shogan: Karen Wulf, author of the new book
"Lineage," thank you so much for joining us on In Pursuit.
Karin Wulf: Thank you, Colleen.
Colleen Shogan: Thank you
To read Karen Wolf's essay on Martha Washington and to enjoy
other great in pursuit essays and podcasts. Visit
inpursuit.org. In Pursuit with Colleen Shogan is a podcast by
More Perfect. The series is written and produced by Jim
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