Washington was assigned to the Committee on Propositions and Grievances, which dealt with commercial and governmental matters. By the end of the year, drawing on his military experience, he sat on three committees that sorted through petitions from soldiers and army vendors. The taciturn Washington wasn’t the kind of glib burgess who sprang to his feet and orated extemporaneously. He practiced a minimalist art in politics, learning how to exert maximum leverage with the least force. Thomas Jefferson, who was to serve with Washington and Franklin in the Continental Congress, spotted their economical approach to power. “I never heard either of them speak ten minutes at a time, nor to any but the main point,” he later said of the two statesmen. “They laid their shoulders to the great points, knowing that the little ones would follow of themselves.”¹⁰ Later on Washington coached his stepson on how to be a Virginia legislator, reminding him to be punctual in attendance and “hear dispassionately and determine coolly all great questions.”¹¹ Washington’s experience as a burgess educated him in politics no less thoroughly than his combat experience on the western frontier groomed him for future military leadership, creating a rare combination of talents that endowed him with the ideal credentials at the time the American Revolution erupted.

From the outset, Washington demonstrated his conscientious nature as a legislator and attended sessions until early April to support a bill to sustain the Virginia Regiment. Then he, Martha, and her two children set off for Mount Vernon, with Martha and the children installed in the glamorous Custis coach and George trotting alongside them on horseback. Because he was still refurbishing Mount Vernon, Washington felt apprehensive about subjecting his bride and stepchildren to the dust and din, paint and plaster, of an unfinished house. He wrote ahead to have the rooms aired and cleaned and beds made up in two rooms. The nervous young husband, wanting everything just right for his new family’s arrival, instructed John Alton to “get out the chairs and tables and have them very well rubbed and cleaned. The staircase ought also to be polished in order to make it look well. Inquire ab[ou]t in the neighborhood and get some eggs and chickens.”¹² After Washington’s lengthy frontier sojourn, the house was stirring to life again, and Martha would soon describe it as a place of “mirth and gaiety.”¹³

If Martha’s wealth lifted Washington into the top ranks of Virginia planters, it didn’t emancipate him from all cares, for he was soon tangled in the legal complexities of the Custis fortune. Under the terms of the estate, George and Martha controlled one-third of the Custis property. The two children each received one-third of the income from the Custis assets, while only Jacky, as the male heir, would inherit eventually all the Custis land and slaves. In Williamsburg in late April, Washington won permission from the General Court to administer those portions of the estate vested in the two children. Being their legal guardian was a weighty, time-consuming task that required Washington to satisfy the court with annual reports on his fiduciary actions. Like every responsibility in his life, Washington executed this one with the utmost rigor, claiming that a stewardship demanded even more care from a stepparent than from “a natural parent, who is only accountable to his own conscience.”¹⁴ This arrangement, though it gave Washington extra wealth and power, also placed him in a curiously subordinate position vis-à-vis his stepchildren, making him effectively their employee and robbing him of the total paternal authority he might have wished.

Further complicating this strange situation was that while Washington adopted Jacky and Patsy, they retained the Custis surname. The children arrived at Mount Vernon with their own slaves—Jacky had a ten-year-old named Julius, Patsy the twelve-year-old Moll—who wore the formal uniforms known as livery, and it must have been annoying, if not demeaning, for Washington to have them sporting the Custis crest instead of his own. In ordering clothing for these servants from London, Washington always gave explicit orders to “let the livery be suited to the [coat of] arms of the Custis family.”¹⁵ Such details of everyday life reminded Washington of where the real financial power resided in his family. In his diary, he sometimes referred to his stepchildren as “Jacky Custis” and “Patsy Custis,” as if they were temporary visitors.

Although Washington enjoyed children, his formal presence tended to freeze their jollity. “They felt they were in the presence of one who was not to be trifled with,” said his adopted grandson.¹⁶ Washington was a doting father to Patsy, a pretty girl with dark hair, who was very fond of music. Washington found it easy to spoil her and soon got her a spinet, an early form of the harpsichord, while Jacky studied the violin and flute. He also hired a dancing master at Mount Vernon for the two children. Washington had a more relaxed style with girls and used to say ruefully that he could govern men but not boys.¹⁷ Jacky was to be a chronic problem. A foppish boy, lazy, wayward, and indulged by his mother, he shared few traits with his energetic stepfather, and their temperamental differences only aggravated matters. Forever wary of intruding upon Martha’s relationship with her children, Washington was reluctant to apply discipline to Jacky and shielded her from knowledge of his many imperfections.

However genial as a hostess, Martha was a jittery mother, a mass of anxieties, much as her own mother had been. She had already endured so many deaths—her husband, two children, her father, a brother, a sister, and Daniel’s half brother, Black Jack—that she flew into a panic at even trifling signs of illness in her children. Three years into the marriage, Martha experimented to see whether she could stand to be away from Jacky. She failed the test miserably. Every time a dog barked or some other noise occurred, Martha worried that it heralded the arrival of a messenger with dreadful news about her son. “I often fancied he was sick or some accident had happened to him,” Martha said.¹⁸ Henceforth she traveled with George only if both children came along.

Whatever the periodic tensions caused by Jacky’s lax behavior, the marriage of George and Martha Washington proceeded happily, and they seemed united by strong desire and mutual need. Almost all observers found them exceedingly well matched. In later years the British ambassador’s wife found something closer to friendship than romance between them—“Washington was a more respectful than a tender husband certainly”—but even she could identify no quarrels.¹⁹ Something about this deep domesticity and respectability pleased Washington, who was never cut out for a gallivanting, footloose life. Martha gave him a secure, happy base for the myriad activities of a busy career. She was his dear companion, trusted adviser, and confidante long after lust faded, and they delighted in each other’s company. When Washington was appointed commander in chief of the Continental Army, he wrote to Martha that “I should enjoy more real happiness and felicity in one month with you at home than I have the most distant prospect of reaping abroad, if my stay was to be seven times seven years.”²⁰ Neither George nor Martha was tormented by a romantic striving after an impossible perfection, and both understood the compromises that accompanied a successful marriage.

While Washington left no direct comments about his marriage, he discussed marriage in general terms so often—he grew into something of a cracker-barrel philosopher on the subject—that we can readily infer his views about his own. He was an unabashed enthusiast for the institution and issued so many paeans to domestic felicity as to leave no doubt of his contentment with Martha. His advice to young relatives revealed that he had known the storms of passion as a young man but understood that they were fleeting and couldn’t form the foundation of a lasting relationship; one had to enter into a match based upon practical factors, such as personality, character, temperament, and money. This seems to reflect accurately the progression of Washington’s own feelings as he and Martha went from early love (albeit laced with realism about money) to the ripening friendship of later decades.