Karin Wulf  00:00

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.

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Colleen Shogan  00:24

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."

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Colleen Shogan  01:42

Karin Wulf, Welcome to In Pursuit.

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Karin Wulf  01:44

 Thank you so much, Colleen, it's good to be with you.

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Colleen Shogan  01:46

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?

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Karin Wulf  02:03

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. 

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Colleen Shogan  03:05

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? 

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Karin Wulf  03:21

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. 

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Colleen Shogan  04:42

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.

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Karin Wulf  05:01

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.

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Colleen Shogan  06:27

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. 

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Karin Wulf  06:37

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. 

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Colleen Shogan  07:49

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? 

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Karin Wulf  08:10

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

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Colleen Shogan  09:13

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.

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Karin Wulf  09:19

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.

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Colleen Shogan  10:25

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.

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Karin Wulf  10:47

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. 

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Colleen Shogan  13:11

They were high heels, right? I mean, pretty unusual.

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Karin Wulf  13:14

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. 

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Colleen Shogan  13:42

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.

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Karin Wulf  13:54

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.

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Colleen Shogan  14:27

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?

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Karin Wulf  14:49

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.

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Colleen Shogan  16:34

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.

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Karin Wulf  16:46

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,

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Colleen Shogan  17:46

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?

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Karin Wulf  18:20

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.

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Colleen Shogan  21:23

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?

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Karin Wulf  21:36

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.

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Colleen Shogan  22:22

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?

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Karin Wulf  22:47

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 

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Colleen Shogan  24:51

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? 

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Karin Wulf  25:02

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. 

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Colleen Shogan  25:28

As we look back into our nation's past, four relevant lessons today, what can In Pursuit listeners learn from Martha Washington's life? 

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Karin Wulf  25:37

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. 

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Colleen Shogan  26:47

Karen Wulf, author of the new book "Lineage," thank you so much for joining us on In Pursuit.

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Karin Wulf  26:52

Thank you, Colleen. 

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Colleen Shogan  26:53

Thank you

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Colleen Shogan  26:55

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 Ambuske. Our theme music is "Kleos" by Charlie Ryan, audio mixing by Curt Dahl of CD Squared, please rate and review the show on your favorite podcast app and tell us which Americans inspire you.

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