The wife and the life
George & Martha Washington: A Revolutionary Marriage by Flora Fraser
Bloomsbury £25
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I DON’T know whether it should disqualify me from reviewing, or make me the ideal reader, but I have never read a biography of George Washington before. I suppose Flora Fraser’s book is more accurately a portrait of a marriage rather than a conventional biography, but if you’ve got to start somewhere with the ‘American Cincinnatus’, what better place than with the home life of a man who always preferred the farm to the battlefield and his wife of forty years to anyone else?
Although there is a good, solid middle section dealing with the battles and politics of America’s War of Independence, the heart of the book – and the author’s I suspect – lies in the domestic detail of George and Martha’s life together on their Mount Vernon Estate. There are hardly any surviving letters between the couple for Fraser to work with, but in the absence of these – and if George’s usual amatory style is much to go by, we’re probably not missing much – she has a huge archive of extended family letters, account books, journals and official records to build up a vivid and detailed picture of family life on an 18th-century slave-owning Virginian plantation.
Perhaps the most striking thing to emerge from all this is how much the
greater part of people’s lives, even in the most exciting of times, belongs to the private sphere. From the day that the recently widowed Martha Custis married George Washington they were at the heart of great events, but to read this book is to be immersed in a world of music lessons and sore throats, of lightweight stays and muslins; of neighbours, runaways and tobacco prices, of family weddings, accouchements, worries and deaths.
If there is nothing very surprising in this, a rather more unexpected facet of the Washington life is the amount of time that Cincinnatus and his wife appear to have spent shopping. During his years as Commander in Chief, General Washington earned his reputation for austerity, but life at Mount Vernon before the war seems to have been one long shopping spree, with Martha endlessly engaged in a kind of 18th-century version of internet shopping, buying everything through their London agents from luxuries and the latest fashions to the clothes for the two Custis children from her first marriage.
Martha was hardly unusual in her taste for luxuries – attempts to embargo British imports into the colonies in retaliation against the Stamp Tax were a hopeless failure as no one was prepared to give up their London shopping – and there was, anyway, another side to her. In the years before the war she had never really had to imagine a world without her Virginian comforts, but Washington’s long years of hardship, frustrations and defeats revealed in her a resilience, loyalty and selflessness that made her his indispensable partner.
Ordinary, unaffected and kind, she was equally gracious in triumph, and during his reluctant and tricky Presidency nobody said a word against her. Could he have done it without her, John Adams once asked, and Flora Fraser makes a strong case that the answer was no. What she certainly shows in this carefully researched and clearly argued book, is that their home and marriage was the goal that he never lost sight of in all his years as hero and public man. ‘I feel like a child within view of the Holydays,’ he said as his Presidency at last came to an end. ‘I have counted the months, then the weeks, & I now reckon the days previous to my release.’ Cincinnatus was going home and it is right that he should still lie there alongside the wife who shared his life.