Martha Washington Read Online Free Page A

coins, others as indentured servants who had signed away four to seven years of their own hard labor to repay the costs of their passages; but rich and poor alike aspired to landownership. And not just any land. Immigrants wanted acreage on one of the four great tidal rivers of the Chesapeake Bay—the James, York, Rappahannock, or Potomac—as European settlement moved northward. This was the Tidewater, the land between the coast and the fall line, where the first waterfall on each river prevented ships from sailing any farther upriver.
    With the labor of indentured servants, Virginia planters cleared hundreds, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands of acres for tobacco cultivation. By the mid-1600s, fleets of English merchantmen set off across the Atlantic each summer, fetching up in the Chesapeake Bay by early fall. They sailed directly up the hospitable rivers—no need here for port cities—anchoring to take on board tightly packed hogsheads or bundles of dried, golden brown tobacco leaves and to deliver hoes, plows, axes, scythes, and other manufactured goods.
    Thirty miles or so from its mouth, the York River splits in two: the southern branch is the Pamunkey River, named for the Powhatan tribe that lived along it. Although the Pamunkeys were forced to accept the authority of the colonial government, they still retained considerable land on the frontier when New Kent County was created there in 1654.
    No one knows exactly when or under what circumstances Martha Dandridge’s maternal forebears came from England to try their luck in Virginia. In 1664, her great-grandfather William Woodward first appears in the documentary record. That summer, Queen Cocka Coeska, leader of the Pamunkeys, sold him 2,100 acres of river land in New Kent County. In a petition to the Governor’s Council, she declared her desire to have him as a neighbor and translator for herself and her people.
    Family lore holds that Woodward had moved out to that “howling wilderness” sometime in the 1650s as an Indian trader. To English colonists, the great forests were alien and frightening places, where not only the wind and the wolves howled, but the native inhabitants as well. In their eyes, trees were to be chopped down, wolves to be killed, and Indians civilized, beginning with learning the English language and giving up their own “foule noise.” Woodward must have been an unusual Englishman, for he learned the Pamunkeys’ language and gained their confidence. So very unusual was this linguistic skill that he was always identified as “William Woodward, the Indian Interpreter.” Although not a colonial official, he was employed for specific negotiations between the Indians and the governor.
    Even the name of Martha Dandridge’s great-grandmother, the woman who married William Woodward, is unknown, as are those of so many colonial matriarchs. The seventeenth century was concerned with brute survival and the acquisition and protection of wealth. Men owned land, held office, and fought wars: many of their names survive in a document somewhere. Not so with women. Nearly four hundred years of indifference, fires, floods, and vanished burial plots means that a goodly percentage of Virginia foremothers are unknown.
    Mrs. Woodward may have been Martha West, a descendant of Lord Delaware; whether or not she was Martha West, this great-grandmother was almost certainly Virginia born. The Woodwards married sometime in the mid-1600s. Like almost all early planters, even the most successful, they doubtless lived in a modest frame home of two rooms with an attic. Cultivated fields were interspersed with forests teeming with game—squirrels, rabbits, deer, and turkeys, as well as predators like gray wolves. Wolves posed such a menace to settlers’ livestock that Virginia’s ruling council offered a bounty for killing them, requiring delivery of the ears as proof.
    The Woodwards had five children,