With considerable sophistication about business and politics that already belied his image as a mere planter, Washington told Johnson that they shouldn’t just rely on legislative grants and the uncertain force of “motives of public spirit.”⁴⁹ Better to rely on self-interest and blatantly appeal to “the monied gentry” who would be drawn by prospective profits.⁵⁰ To this end, Washington would devise a plan for a joint stock company that would receive charters from Virginia and Maryland and make the river navigable from Tidewater Virginia to the Ohio Country. It would pay back investors by charging tolls on river traffic. Washington himself steered a Potomac navigation bill through the House of Burgesses. Despite his insistence that the project would produce “amazing advantages” to both Virginia and Maryland, it foundered in the Maryland legislature because Baltimore businessmen feared it might divert trade from the Chesapeake Bay.⁵¹ When the project stalled momentarily, it provided Washington with yet another early example of the need for intercolonial cooperation.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Asiatic Prince

FOR SOMEONE of George Washington’s enterprising nature, Martha Washington was the ideal spouse, with a work ethic to match his own. General Nathanael Greene once commented that Virginia ladies “appear to be brought up and educated with habits of industry and attention to domestic affairs,” and Martha Washington certainly fit that description.¹

Never the idle, pampered doyenne of Mount Vernon, she was involved in everything from distilling rose water to gathering ash for making soap. George Washington liked to say that “Virginia ladies pride themselves on the goodness of their bacon,” and Martha derived special pleasure from the ham and bacon cured in their smokehouse.² Each day, after an hour dedicated to prayer and meditation, she supervised servants in cooking and cleaning and presided over her sewing circle of slaves, who produced up to twelve hundred yards of homespun cloth yearly. All the while, she retained a folksy, unpretentious style. It was said that even when she wore the same gown for a week, it somehow managed to remain spotless. A woman with a delicate constitution, Martha was often sick for weeks at a time with liver and stomach troubles, known as “bilious fever,” but she never let illness slow her down in performing her domestic chores.

A gregarious person, Martha Washington wanted a home crowded with people. With her husband preoccupied by business and politics, she took charge of her two children and enjoyed the demands of motherhood, one visitor noting that “her happiness is in exact proportion to the number of objects upon which she can dispense her benefits.”³ She had special cause to worry about her daughter, Patsy. In Charles Willson Peale’s watercolor of her at sixteen, Patsy is pretty and elegant, slight of build, her clear eyes sparkling with intelligence. The picture shows how lovingly the Washingtons spoiled her: her black hair is dressed with pearls, her dress edged with lace, and she wears costly garnet jewelry. Parental affection for Patsy was heightened by the fact that by age six she showed incipient signs of epilepsy. A sad irony of Martha Washington’s life is that this fretful mother, chronically worried about her children’s health, had a daughter with exactly the sort of terrifying illness she dreaded. In 1768 George and Martha were returning from Belvoir with twelve-year-old Patsy when she suffered her first full-scale seizure. As these ghastly convulsions occurred with greater regularity, Dr. William Rumney turned into a frequent visitor at Mount Vernon. He tried to halt the convulsions by bleeding and purging the girl, which only weakened her further. Although he prescribed a dozen different powders, including toxic mercury and the herb valerian, nothing appeared to alleviate the problem. As they watched the wrenching spectacle of this remorseless disease, George and Martha could only have experienced a paralyzing sense of helplessness.

Such is the nature of epilepsy that Martha would have been afraid to leave Patsy alone and would have made sure she was watched at all times. An epileptic child can drown while swimming or collapse into a seizure while descending a staircase. The convulsions can erupt at any time. In his diary for April 14, 1769, Washington told of the family setting out for a social visit when “Patcy being taken with a fit on the road by the mill, we turned back.”⁴ Since other children are often terrified when someone has a seizure, the disease would have isolated the adolescent girl. Even today, when it is treated with antiseizure medications, epilepsy is encrusted with baleful legends. In the eighteenth century, people commonly imagined that it signified diabolical possession or might even be contagious.

Given the rudimentary state of contemporary medicine, the Washingtons ended up mingling science with superstition in coping with the illness. In an exasperating quest for a cure, they took Patsy to the leading physicians in Williamsburg, including eight visits to Dr. John de Sequeyra, the scion of a prominent family of Sephardic Jews in London. (This visit is the only time we know for sure that George Washington had contact with a Jew before the Revolution.) The Washingtons also consulted the pompous and self-important Dr. John Johnson, who pumped Patsy full of everything from ether to barley water, to no avail. In all, the Washingtons consulted at least eight physicians in their search to relieve Patsy’s symptoms.

Like many desperate parents, George and Martha Washington wound up in the hands of charlatans. In February 1769 a blacksmith named Joshua Evans came to Mount Vernon to forge an iron “cramp ring” for one of Patsy’s fingers. Popular superstition contended that such rings, if accompanied by suitable mumbo jumbo, could banish epilepsy. That summer the Washingtons took Patsy to the mineral waters at Berkeley Springs, hoping for relief. The resort had become more fashionable since Washington and his brother Lawrence had first visited there and now offered everything from gambling to horse racing. In its springs, the women wore prudish, old-fashioned garments, with lead weights secreted in the hems to ensure that water didn’t push up their gowns and indecently expose flesh. Writing from the spa, Washington informed a friend that Patsy was “troubled with a complaint” and “found little benefit as yet from the experiment” of taking the waters. “What a week or two more may do, we know not and therefore are inclined to put them to the test.”⁵ Washington never spelled out the nature of Patsy’s “complaint,” suggesting the stigma attached to discussing epilepsy openly.

The adolescent girl’s fits grew more horrifying and frequent, sometimes striking twice a day. They recurred so often that Washington, in alarm, began to compile a record of them in the margin of his almanac calendars. During one frightful period from June 29 to September 22, 1770, Patsy fell to the floor in convulsions no fewer than twenty-six times. To compensate for her medical tribulations, Washington treated the girl to extra clothing and trinkets whenever possible. In Williamsburg that summer he bought her a pair of gold earrings and a tortoiseshell comb. By the following year, as shown by invoices to Robert Cary, he was ordering liquid laudanum, a powerful opiate that may well have been administered to Patsy.

In a poignant letter of July 1771, Washington disclosed that Martha didn’t believe that her daughter would ever be cured or even survive into adulthood. Referring to her anxieties about her son, Jacky, Washington observed, “The unhappy situation of her daughter has in some degree fixed her eyes upon him as her only hope.”⁶ Washington harbored many reservations about Jacky, who was outwardly sweet and affectionate toward his mother and never less than respectful toward his stepfather. At bottom, however, he was a young wastrel who loved horse races, hunting, and outdoor pursuits far more than his studies. When Charles Willson Peale sketched a watercolor of him, he portrayed the eighteen-year-old Jacky dressed in a green coat with a red collar and a richly embroidered waistcoat. He had a round face with a small chin and slightly crossed eyes, a detail that subtly captured his restless, perhaps immature, nature.