Washington最新章节_Ron Chernow著

CHAPTER SEVEN

A Votary to Love

AFTER HIS WOUNDING CONFRONTATIONS with the haughty agents of British imperial power—Dinwiddie, Shirley, and Loudoun—Washington could only have concluded that his dreams of a military career would always be foiled by deep-seated prejudice against colonial officers and that it made more sense to become an independent planter. While posted to the frontier in the summer of 1757, he daydreamed about Mount Vernon and compiled shopping lists of luxury goods to be shipped from London. Though he had never been to England, he tried to imitate the style of an English country gentleman, instructing Richard Washington that “whatever goods you may send me, where the prices are not absolutely limited, you will let them be fashionable, neat, and good in their several kinds.” ¹ The young man’s social ambitions seemed boundless. He ordered a marble chimneypiece with a landscape painting above the mantel and “fine crimson and yellow papers” for the walls. ² Such rich colors for wallpaper were then thought very fashionable. Though mahogany was an expensive imported wood, Washington opted for a mahogany bedstead and dining table and a dozen mahogany chairs. To entertain in regal style, he ordered a complete set of fine china, damask tablecloths and napkins, and silver cutlery whose handles bore the Washington crest—a griffin poised above a crown, set above an ornamental shield with three stars, the whole emblazoned with the Latin motto Exitus Acta Probat (“The outcome justifies the deed”). ³ In his purchases, Washington instinctively trod the fine line between showiness and austerity, defining a characteristic style of understated elegance.

Mount Vernon would be George Washington’s personality writ large, the cherished image he wished to project to the world. Had the estate not possessed profound personal meaning for him, he would never have lavished so much time and money on its improvement. It was Washington’s fervent attachment to Mount Vernon, its rural beauties and tranquil pleasures, that made his later absences from home so exquisitely painful. He believed in the infinite perfectibility of Mount Vernon, as if it were a canvas that he could constantly retouch and expand. There he reigned supreme and felt secure as nowhere else.

In December 1757 he made his first additions to the property, buying two hundred acres at nearby Dogue Run and another three hundred acres on Little Hunting Creek. This proved the first wave of an expansion that would ultimately culminate in an eight-thousand-acre estate, divided into five separate farms. Since few professional architects existed at the time, Washington followed the custom of other Virginia planters and acted as his own architect. He worked from British architectural manuals, coupled with his own observation of buildings in Williamsburg and Annapolis. Drawing on popular classical elements, he melded ideas from various places and devised a synthesis uniquely his own.

In 1758 Washington doubled the size of the main house and began to convert Lawrence’s farmhouse into an imposing mansion. He could have swept away the old foundations and started anew, making the house more symmetrical and architecturally satisfying. Instead, he built on top of earlier incarnations. Whether this stemmed from economy or family reverence is not known. But where Lawrence, a naval officer, had placed the entrance on the east side of the house, facing the water, George, an army officer and a western surveyor, switched the entrance to the west side, presenting an arresting view for visitors arriving by horse or carriage. First glimpsed from afar, the house would impress travelers with its grandeur. At this point, however, it was still boxy and unadorned and devoid of the elements that later distinguished it: the cupola, the piazza with the long colonnade, the formal pediment above the entrance. In a geometric pattern likely copied from Belvoir, Washington laid out a pair of rectangular gardens with brick walls in front of the house, allowing visitors to experience his magnificent grounds before alighting at his door. Washington also fleshed out the upstairs, making it a full floor, reworked most of the ground-floor rooms, and added a half-story attic, resulting in eight full rooms in all.

In 1758 Washington’s aspirations still outstripped his means, and he resorted to ruses to make his abode seem more opulent. Unable to afford a stone house, he employed a method known as rusticated boards that created the illusion of a stone exterior. First plain pine boards were cut and beveled in a way that mimicked stone blocks. Then white sand from the Chesapeake Bay was mingled with white paint, which lent the painted wood the rough, granular surface of stone. In many respects, Mount Vernon is a masterpiece of trompe l’oeil. Washington used another sleight of hand on his study walls, a technique called “graining” that transformed cheap, locally available woods, such as southern yellow pine or tulip poplar, into something resembling expensive imported hardwoods, such as mahogany or black walnut.

Mount Vernon’s history is inseparable from that of its resident slaves, who toiled in its shadows and shaped every inch of it. The mansion renovation absorbed a vast amount of human labor: sixteen thousand bricks were forged for two new chimneys that arose at either end of the house, and slaves scoured nearby woods for the white oak that underlay roof shingles. For more specialized work, Washington typically hired a white craftsman or indentured servant to supervise skilled slaves as assistants. By the late 1750s Washington had assembled an expert team of seven slave carpenters. During the remodeling, overseer Humphrey Knight assured Washington that he didn’t hesitate to apply the lash, if necessary, to these enslaved artisans: “As to the carpenters, I have minded ’em all I posably could and has whipt’em when I could see a fault.” ⁴ It was a relatively rare example in Mount Vernon annals of an overseer confessing that he whipped slaves, a practice Washington grew to abhor, though he condoned it on rare occasions.

AS GEORGE WASHINGTON introduced new splendor at Mount Vernon, he needed a wife to complete the pretty scene, and Martha Dandridge Custis made her timely appearance. Their speedy courtship began in mid-March 1758, right after Washington journeyed to Williamsburg to consult Dr. John Amson, who allayed his medical fright by reassuring him that he was recovering from dysentery. Relieved and elated, Washington rode off to nearby New Kent County to stay with his friend Richard Chamberlayne, who introduced him to his neighbor, the widow Custis. Her husband, Daniel Parke Custis, had died the previous July, as had two of her children in early childhood. She now lived with her four-year-old son John Parke (called Jacky) and two-year-old daughter Martha Parke (called Patsy) in baronial splendor on the Pamunkey River at a bucolic mansion known, prophetically enough, as the White House. Family legend suggests a spontaneous romance between George and Martha, but the mutual attraction may well have been anticipated. Though this was their first documented meeting, their social circles must have crisscrossed in the small, clubby world of the Williamsburg elite.

On leave from the Virginia Regiment, Washington courted Martha with the crisp efficiency of a military man laying down a well-planned siege. He spent that first night at the White House before returning to Williamsburg—he tipped the servants liberally to strengthen his image as a wealthy suitor—and dropped by twice more during the first half of 1758. A brisk competition had already arisen to snare the wealthy widow. A prosperous tobacco planter and widower named Charles Carter, who was nearly twice her age, had grown enamored of the short, attractive woman with the “uncommon sweetness of temper,” as he saw it. ⁵ Carter had sired a dozen offspring in his previous marriage, and Martha, twenty-six, may have been intimidated by the prospect of being stepmother to this numerous brood. Carter faced stiff competition from Washington, a tall, handsome, young military hero with room both in his heart and in his home for a wife and two children. To a solitary, anxious widow, George Washington could only have appeared manly, rock-solid, and utterly fearless.

We cannot pinpoint the precise moment when George and Martha agreed to wed, but we do know that within weeks of their first meeting, George was transformed into a giddy man of fashion, urgently ordering expensive fabric for what must have been his wedding outfit. He directed his London agent to ship “as much of the best superfine blue cotton velvet as will make a coat, waistcoat, and breeches for a tall man, with a fine silk button to suit it and all other necessary trimmings and linings, together with garters for the breeches.” ⁶ He also ordered six pairs of tony shoes and gloves. A month later he ordered a gold ring from Philadelphia that he doubtless intended to slip on the diminutive widow’s finger. Not to be outdone in brightening up a wardrobe, Martha ordered her London tailor to send her “one genteel suit of clothes for myself to be grave but not to be extrava[ga]nt and not to be mourning.” ⁷ Throwing off her widow’s weeds, she packed off a nightgown to London “to be dyed of fashionable color fit for me to wear.” ⁸ Though such letters may give the unseemly impression of an overly lusty widow, it was then routine, as a matter of economic necessity, for the bereaved to remarry quickly. The prolonged mourning rituals that came with the Victorian era would have seemed like futile self-indulgence in the eighteenth century.

By marrying Martha Dandridge Custis, Washington swiftly achieved the social advancement for which he had struggled in the military. Almost overnight he was thrust into top-drawer Virginia society and could dispense with the servility that had sometimes marked his dealings with social superiors. Marriage to Martha brought under his control a small kingdom of real estate tended by dark-skinned human beings. She had a bountiful collection of properties, including thousands of acres around Williamsburg, nearly three hundred slaves, and hundreds of head of cattle, hogs, and sheep. The property came, however, with a significant catch. Inasmuch as Daniel Parke Custis had died intestate, English common law decreed that only one-third of his estate could be claimed directly by Martha during her lifetime. She thus owned only eighty-five slaves, referred to as “dower” slaves, who would revert to Jacky Custis after her death. The other two-thirds of the estate were pledged to the financial support of the Custis children. George would serve as custodian of this wealth, entangling him in legal complications for the rest of his life. It’s worth noting that after her husband’s death, the practical Martha hadn’t thrown herself at the mercy of older male financial advisers but had had the pluck and fortitude to handle his business affairs by herself. Whether sending tobacco to England, placing orders with London merchants, or extending loans to neighbors, she gained an invaluable education in plantation management.

George and Martha Washington formed an oddly matched visual pair: she barely cleared five feet, and her hands and feet were as petite as George’s were famously huge. A portrait of Martha done shortly before Daniel died displays nothing especially soft or alluring to set a young man’s pulse racing. She wears a low-cut, satiny blue dress, shows a shapely figure and bosom, and wears her dark hair pulled back, adorned with pearls. The small head, set on its elongated neck, isn’t especially pretty: the forehead is too low, the hairline receding, the nose too hooked, the mouth too short, the jaw too round. Her hazel eyes are serious and watchful. It is the portrait of a plain, sensible young woman who already seems a trifle matronly. All the same, one suspects that the artist failed to catch the irrepressible warmth and charm that animated her features. The sitter’s soul is smothered by the stiff pose of a woman holding a blossom and staring at the viewer. It should also be said that Martha had the reputation of being a beauty in her youth. “She was at one time one of the most beautiful women in America and today there remains something extremely agreeable and attractive about her,” recounted a Polish nobleman several years before her death. ⁹ From surviving artifacts, such as the purple satin shoes with high heels and silver sequins that she wore on her wedding day, we know that Martha Custis was a stylish young woman and even something of a clotheshorse.

In the eighteenth century, marriage was regarded more as a practical arrangement than as a vehicle for love, and the Washington marriage may never have been a torrid romance. But that aside, in selecting Martha Dandridge Custis, George Washington chose even better than he knew. She was the perfect foil to his mother: warm and sociable, always fun to be with, and favored with pleasing manners. She would give George the unstinting love and loyalty that Mary had withheld. By offering her husband such selfless devotion, she solidly anchored his life in an enduring marriage. Martha had the cheerfulness to lighten his sometimes somber personality and was the one person who dared to kid her “Old Man,” as she teasingly referred to him. Despite the many people in his eventful life, George Washington lacked a large number of close friends or confidants, and Martha alone could cater to all his emotional needs.

In every respect, Martha turned out to be an immense social asset to his career. She was the perfect hostess, with a ready smile, overflowing goodwill, and a genuine interest in her guests. With company, she was convivial and welcoming, where George tended to be more cordial and correct, and she worked her influence in a self-effacing style. “His lady is of a hospitable disposition, always good-humored and cheerful, and seems to be actuated by the same motives with himself, but she is rather of a more lively disposition,” observed one visitor to Mount Vernon. “They are to all appearances a happy pair.” ¹⁰

Martha never craved wealth or status, perhaps because she already had it; nor did she feed her husband’s ambitions. She was never dazzled by his later fame and never put on airs. Nevertheless she faithfully supported George’s plans and bowed to the exorbitant demands of his career, if not always with unmixed enthusiasm. Direct, plainspoken, and free of frivolity, she lacked the feminine wiles that had so aroused George with Sally Fairfax. Abigail Adams captured Martha Washington perfectly when she said, “Her manners are modest and unassuming, dignified and feminine, not a tincture of hauteur about her.” ¹¹ In fact, she remained a bustling, hardworking housewife, occupied with domestic chores until the end of her life, and was fully equal to the administrative demands of Mount Vernon.

Eight months older than George, Martha Dandridge was born on June 2, 1731, in rural New Kent County, the eldest of eight children, three of whom died young. Her father, John Dandridge—a county clerk, militia colonel, and minor tobacco planter on the Pamunkey River—had married Frances Jones the previous year. Fifteen or twenty slaves worked the tobacco fields on their plantation, Chestnut Grove, which covered five hundred acres. Their agrarian household was fairly spartan, and Martha, or “Patsy,” was raised as a domestic helpmate to her mother. She grew up in a proper though hardly genteel house and was never too superior to perform house-work. The provincial world of Martha’s girlhood didn’t spoil young ladies. “She told me she remembered the time when there was only one single carriage in all of Virginia,” said a later visitor to Mount Vernon. “Ladies invited to entertainment arrived on horseback.” ¹² As the eldest child, Martha Dandridge was occupied with domestic skills that she later taught to indentured servants and slaves at Mount Vernon. Her industrious nature must have pleased George Washington. Both of them were early risers, used every moment profitably, and stuck to the same daily routines.

Like her future husband, Martha Dandridge grew up in a world where slavery was taken for granted, as were illegitimate children sired by the master. A few historians (though by no means all) believe that she had a young half sister named Ann Dandridge who was the offspring of her father and a slave woman of mixed black and Cherokee Indian blood. The little girl, who was likely much younger than Martha, didn’t know the true story of her identity. If the story is to be believed, Martha, to her credit, kept Ann Dandridge in the Custis family and brought her to Mount Vernon; to her discredit, she never emancipated her half sister, who wasn’t freed until 1802, after Martha’s death. ¹³ Helen Bryan, a Martha Washington biographer, believes that Ann Dandridge was free, although perceived to be a slave, while the historian Henry Wiencek thinks she was treated as a slave, albeit a privileged one. ¹⁴ George and Martha Washington never dropped hints in their letters about Ann Dandridge, who was all but expunged from their history and never listed in Mount Vernon records.

Martha Washington enjoyed a steady faith from the time of her childhood. Her father was a church vestryman, and she was an observant member of the Church of England until the Revolution. “After breakfast, she retired for an hour to her chamber, which hour was spent in prayer and reading the Holy Scriptures, a practice that she never omitted during half a century of her varied life,” said her grandson. ¹⁵ As was palpable later on as she endured many family deaths, she retained a simple but intense belief in the afterlife. Her philosophic and religious outlook tallied well in most respects with George Washington’s. They both believed in a world replete with suffering in which one muddled through with as much dignity and grace as one could muster. Neither George nor Martha ever reacted to grave setbacks in a maudlin, self-pitying manner.

Before she died, likely for privacy reasons and perhaps by prior agreement with her husband, Martha Washington committed to the flames their entire personal correspondence; only a handful of messages survived the bonfire. From two of her surviving letters—one addressed to “My Dearest” and the other to “My Love”—we can tell that she adored her husband, and George wrote in the same vein. ¹⁶ Martha had little, if any, formal schooling and had a habit of torturing the English language. Her grammar was poor, her spelling eccentric, her punctuation nonexistent. (She seemed to specialize in run-on sentences.) Nonetheless she was an avid newspaper reader and kept up with some of the best literature imported from London in the 1760s, including Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield and Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, as well as gothic romance novels.

That Martha concealed a vein of steel behind her conciliatory manner—that she was much more than the sweet, grandmotherly little woman of popular legend—is manifest in the story of her marriage to Daniel Parke Custis. Daniel’s father, Colonel John Custis IV, was a rich, tyrannical man who had made life sheer misery for his equally difficult wife, Fidelia, née Frances Parke. Their marital spats were the stuff of legend on the eastern shore of Virginia. When the couple rode by the shore one day, John became so enraged at Fidelia that he drove their carriage straight into Chesapeake Bay. When Fidelia asked where he was going, John replied with a sneer, “To hell, Madam.” To which she retorted boldly, “Drive on, sir.” ¹⁷

The tightfisted Custis, an overbearing father, was appalled when he learned that his bachelor son Daniel, in his late thirties, was secretly engaged to the adolescent Martha Dandridge. He had already vetoed a series of potential brides and dismissed Martha as a social-climbing commoner “much inferior in point of fortune” to his son, vowing that he would rather toss his silverware into the street than allow her to inherit it. ¹⁸ Adding to this combustible mix was a mulatto son named Jack that John Custis had fathered with a slave called Alice. Once before John had threatened to disown Daniel and leave all his money to “Black Jack.” This seemed a distinct possibility if Daniel didn’t shelve his plans to marry Martha Dandridge. Far from hiding Black Jack, the irascible John Custis doted on him, and when the little boy was five, he submitted a petition to the governor to free the boy “christened John but commonly called Jack, born of the body of his Negro wench young Alice.” ¹⁹ To celebrate his emancipation, the boy was given four slaves as playmates. ²⁰ Obviously John Custis didn’t rate very highly as a child psychologist.

During the impasse over the proposed marriage, Martha made the courageous decision to appeal to John Custis directly at his Williamsburg mansion and beard the lion in his den. Somehow she reached into herself and found hidden reserves of strength. We don’t know what she said to sweet-talk this cantankerous man into agreement, but she won him over completely. Although he now hailed her as “beautiful and sweet-tempered,” he still didn’t consent to the marriage. Nonetheless, soon after Martha’s visit, a family lawyer named James Power gave a horse, bridle, and saddle to Black Jack and informed John Custis that this had been Daniel’s doing. The touching display of brotherly love finally made John Custis submit to his son’s marriage to Martha. As the lawyer told Daniel, “I am empowered by your father to let you know that he heartily and willingly consents to your marriage with Miss Dandridge—that he has so good a character of her, that he had rather you should have her than any lady in Virginia.” ²¹ Power lauded the “prudent speech” that Martha made to her future father-in-law, but several scholars have speculated that Martha arranged the cunning gift to Black Jack, the master stroke of the drama. She had shown extraordinary coolness under fire, foreshadowing her ability to deal with incendiary situations later on. On May 15, 1750, Martha Dandridge, eighteen, at last wed Daniel Parke Custis, thirty-eight. Black Jack resided with the newlyweds at the White House until he died, probably from meningitis, eighteen months later.

BY EARLY APRIL 1758 George Washington was sufficiently recovered from his bout of dysentery that he traveled west to regain control of the Virginia Regiment. Due to his blossoming romance with Martha Custis, he had to deal with one piece of unfinished business: his lingering infatuation with Sally Fairfax. It seems likely that when her husband, George William, was detained in Great Britain on legal matters that winter, Sally frequented Mount Vernon and nursed George through his illness. We will never know whether their affair was consummated. Since Washington had retained the admiration of both his patron Colonel Fairfax and his son George William, it seems hard to believe he had ever lured Sally into outright infidelity. Both George and Sally would have recognized the forbidden, illicit nature of their bond, the fearful price they would pay in Virginia society for any major transgression. There was probably much saucy banter and teasing pleasantries—the stuff of eighteenth-century gallantry—mixed up with deep affection and flirtation in their relationship. At the same time, there is little doubt of George’s passionate attachment to this woman or the lasting power she exerted on his feverish imagination. His feelings for Sally Fairfax belonged to that brand of impossible, unattainable love for an older married woman that has filled the amorous fantasies of ardent young men throughout history.

On September 12, 1758, George Washington sat down at Fort Cumberland and penned a letter to Sally Fairfax that was an eloquent valedictory, not so much to their friendship, which would continue unabated, as to their sentimental affair. He had just received a letter from Sally, relayed by George William, who was helping to supervise renovations at Mount Vernon. Flooded with emotion at seeing the letter, Washington told her “how joyfully I catch at the happy occasion of renewing a correspondence which I feared was disrelished on your part.” ²² That Sally had suspended the correspondence suggests that she feared Washington might be straying into dangerous territory and had to be pointedly restrained. In his response, Washington was probably motivated by two impending events: his marriage to Martha Custis and a hazardous military campaign against Fort Duquesne that would naturally have awakened thoughts of mortality. The letter is written with the stilted syntax that Washington exhibited whenever he grappled with strongly conflicting emotions.

At the outset of this coded letter, he made glancing reference to “the animating prospect of possessing Mrs. Custis,” leaving no doubt that he planned to proceed with the wedding. Then he went on to deliver a cunningly ambiguous love note in which he was obviously talking about Sally, while making it seem to prying eyes that he referred to Martha:

Tis true, I profess myself a votary to Love. I acknowledge that a lady is in the case and further I confess that this lady is known to you. Yes, Madam, as well as she is to one who is too sensible of her charms to deny the power whose influence he feels and must ever submit to. I feel the force of her amiable beauties in the recollection of a thousand tender passages that I could wish to obliterate till I am bid to revive them. But experience, alas!, sadly reminds me how impossible this is and evinces an opinion which I have long entertained that there is a destiny which has the sovereign control of our actions, not to be resisted by the strongest efforts of human nature. ²³

The reference to a “thousand tender passages” makes clear that Sally, not Martha, was the lady in question; George’s acquaintance with Martha was too brief to have packed in so many tender memories. He seemed to be saying that their love, defeated by the practical circumstances of life, was simply not meant to be. She was married to a rich man, and he was about to marry a rich woman, and George Washington, for all his high-flown rhetoric, was an eminently practical young man, not cut out for doomed, quixotic affairs. He ended the epistle with a frank admission of love: “You have drawn me, my dear Madam, or rather have I drawn myself, into an honest confession of a simple fact. Misconstrue not my meaning—’tis obvious—doubt it not, nor expose it. The world has no business to know the object of my love, declared in this manner to you, when I want to conceal it . . . I dare believe you are as happy as you say. I wish I was happy also. Mirth, good humor, ease of mind and—what else?—cannot fail to render you so and consummate your wishes.” ²⁴

This letter overturns the conventional image of a phlegmatic Washington and shows a much more passionate figure. It shocks as well because of his apparent betrayal of his friend and patron, George William Fairfax, and his fiancée, Martha. Any moral outrage must be tempered, however, by the overriding fact that George was honorably declaring an end to their amorous relationship on the eve of his marriage, which would call an irrevocable halt to such youthful folly. Sally Fairfax had always been somewhat coy and elusive with Washington, as evidenced by her recent discontinuance of their correspondence. Her coquetry, in the last analysis, was constrained by a self-protective instinct. She had also, as the letter makes clear, insisted that she was happy with her life. So why did Washington write such a daring letter? There is always the possibility that he was testing the waters with Sally one last time before he committed to marriage. Or perhaps, at the end, he wanted some final validation of his powerful longings for Sally, some recognition that she, too, had been deeply touched by taboo feelings. That he announced his love in such dramatic fashion confirms that he had never done so before and that he and Sally had left many things unsaid and probably undone. Whatever was the true situation, Sally must have recognized and treasured the frank admission of love, for she retained the letter until she died in 1811—a period of more than fifty years.

Although Sally’s response has been lost, we can surmise its contents from Washington’s September 25 reply. Apparently she either feigned ignorance of the mystery lady’s identity, or pretended it was Martha. Washington stood his ground. “Dear Madam, do we still misunderstand the true meaning of each other’s letters? I think it must appear so, tho[ugh] I would feign hope the contrary as I cannot speak plainer without. But I’ll say no more and leave you to guess the rest.” ²⁵ Washington knew that any greater candor could wreck two marriages. That Sally refused to credit his love or openly reciprocate it suggests that she was an artful woman who had enjoyed having her vanity stroked by a handsome younger man. This would have made Washington the more appreciative of Martha, who was practical, honest, and straightforward. The youthful infatuation prepared Washington for the deeper joys of marriage, although the beguiling image of Sally Fairfax persisted in his memory. She would always be mixed up with recollections of Belvoir and an idyllic, sunstruck period of his youth. The Sally Fairfax saga may well testify to Washington’s repressed romantic nature, buried beneath many layers of reserve. But it’s even more a stoic tale of self-denial, previewing the supreme command he would attain over his unruly emotions. Washington’s storied self-control was not something inherited but achieved by dint of hard work, making it all the more formidable an accomplishment.

In later years Washington liked to philosophize about love and marriage and became a veritable Polonius with young relatives as he peppered them with sage advice. In 1795 he received a letter from his adopted granddaughter, Eleanor Parke Custis, who had attended a Georgetown ball and boasted of her indifference to the advances of young men there. Washington warned her bluntly of the often-unstoppable force of passion. “Do not therefore boast too soon or too strongly of your insensibility . . . to its power. In the composition of the human frame, there is a good deal of inflammable matter [this meant flammable in the eighteenth century], however dormant it may lie for a time and . . . when the torch is put to it, that which is within you may burst into a blaze.” Washington went on to say that this mighty blaze “ought to be under the guidance of reason, for although we cannot avoid first impressions, we may assuredly place them under guard.” ²⁶ The author of these lines seemed knowledgeable about ungovernable emotions and how to tame them.

Perhaps the best proof that the relationship between Washington and Sally Fairfax stayed deep but platonic is that the Washingtons remained intimate friends with George William and Sally Fairfax before the American Revolution and even traveled with them. In all likelihood, George confessed to Martha his longtime flirtation, which had cooled and receded to its proper place. The febrile yearnings of youth had made way for a more mature love. It speaks to the strength of the Washingtons’ marriage that they were never threatened by the close proximity of Sally Fairfax, who remained a welcome guest at Mount Vernon and no less a friend to Martha than to George. There is something admirably grown-up, sensitive, and dignified about the way these two couples handled a most delicate situation.