Martha and George’s marriage is painted in a new light

George & Martha Washington: A Revolutionary Marriage

Flora Fraser

Bloomsbury €35.20 ★★★★★

America’s first First Lady, Martha Washington, has not had a good press. While husband George was a dashing military hero, Martha has come down to us as a plump, frumpy matriarch who mostly stayed home on the family plantation in Virginia. Even worse, while George was leading America’s liberation from Britain’s colonial rule, Martha was busy shoring up her personal wealth using slave labour.

But, says Flora Fraser, we need to delve deeper. In this scrupulously researched book, she argues that while George may indeed have been the making of America, Martha Dandrige was the making of George. She didn’t just provide the money that enabled him to dedicate himself to the revolutionary struggle, she was with him every step of the way. Each winter she left the relative safety of Virginia and joined her husband in his military encampments. Having spent time and money importing harpsichords, necklaces and pickled walnuts from London, she dedicated herself to a raggle-taggle rebel army that lacked boots and food.

Fraser also paints a wonderfully detailed picture of American family life at the end of the pioneering colonial period. George and Martha enjoyed glittering balls and dinner parties and concerts to be sure, but they also worried endlessly about the measles epidemic and the fate of the harvest.

The author makes a strong case for Martha as the good woman behind the Great Man of the American Revolution. But that still leaves the difficult business of her enthusiasm for slave labour, while George was all for emancipation. Did this difference of opinion on such a fundamental subject cause a rift? Fraser doesn’t have direct evidence but she doesn’t think so. George and Martha had built a remarkably modern marriage of intellectual independence. All the same, when George died Martha was devastated. ‘All is now over, I shall soon follow him!’ she declared. And less than three years later, she did.