Martha Washington Read Online Free

inaugurated president himself, who must have leaned down to embrace his sorely missed little wife and the excited children, with perhaps a grateful handshake for the faithful Bob Lewis.
    The spanking new, brightly painted presidential barge, built for Washington’s reception by civic leaders, was forty-seven feet long; in case of rain, the back of the deck was covered by an awning of festooned red curtains. But rain isn’t mentioned in any account of this exhilarating day, the culmination of what Martha regarded as a “very agreeable journey.” The smartly dressed New York pilots in their white smocks and black-fringed caps, thirteen in all, shipped their oars and waited for their guests to board the craft for the fifteen-mile trip. The servants, carriages, horses, and baggage would follow by ferryboat.
    At the coxswain’s command, the oars flashed in unison as they crossed Newark Bay, went up Upper New York Bay, received yet another thirteen-gun salute from the Battery at the tip of Manhattan Island, entered the East River, and docked smartly at Peck’s slip after a trip of a little more than an hour. Crowds of cheering New Yorkers awaited them there, along with Governor George Clinton, who couldn’t resist delivering a welcoming speech to Martha. He escorted the Washingtons and their friends from the landing to No. 3 Cherry Street just a couple of blocks away, where Congress had rented a house for the presidential family and staff.
    Not one to sing her own praises, Martha wrote her niece, “The paper will tell you how I was complimented on my landing.” Thanking God that “the President”—her first written use of George’s new title—was very well, she plunged immediately into the capital’s social whirl without any time to rest or settle in. The day after her arrival, she was the hostess at an official dinner for leading members of Congress; on Friday evening, the presidential mansion was crowded with New York’s social and political elite, both women and men, at her first public reception. So much for her expectation of leading the kind of private, domestic life she had enjoyed during the Revolution.
    Much to her surprise, at the end of her long trip from Virginia to New York, Martha Washington discovered that, like George Washington, she belonged to the nation and that she too had become part of American history.

CHAPTER ONE
    Little Patsy Dandridge
    H istory’s Martha Washington was born Martha Dandridge in rural New Kent County, Virginia. She was called Patsy (often spelled Patcy) by her family and friends as a matter of course. In those days, Patsy, Patty, and Pat were the nicknames for Martha, just as Margaret was commonly shortened to Peggy or Peg and Mary became Polly or Poll.
    A true child of the colony, she was at least a fourth-generation Virginian on her mother’s side. For more than a hundred years, her maternal ancestors had been respected landowning gentry, but they were not grandees with uncounted acres. They lived in a web of relationships based on marriage, kinship, business, and neighborhood. Without strong community ties, no individual could have survived the rigors of early colonial life. Patsy Dandridge was part and parcel of English Virginia and the world of its tobacco planters.

    Starvation, disease, hostile Indians, and years of financial losses—for its first twenty or thirty years, the little colony planted in 1607 at Jamestown teetered on the edge of extinction. Then the vagaries of European fashion turned Virginia’s future as golden as the mines of Spain’s Latin American colonies. Almost overnight, tobacco became all the rage—whether smoked in pipes or daintily inhaled as snuff—and Virginia lands seemed predestined for its cultivation. To most of the world, tobacco and Virginia became synonymous.
    Prime tobacco land meant wealth and prestige. Some colonists came with leather satchels bulging with