In September of 1781, word reached her at Mount Vernon that George was coming. On the way to join with the French fleet in a maneuver to trap the British army at Yorktown, he would have the chance to visit the home he had not seen in six years. The previous winter, one of George’s most trusted generals, Benedict Arnold, had turned his coat and gone over to the British side, and had led their armies in raids on Virginia. Arnold had occupied the new capital, Richmond, and barely missed capturing Tom Jefferson, whose fragile baby daughter died as a result of the hardships of the family’s escape. Martha had been with George at the winter camp in New Windsor at that time, frantic with worry about her own little granddaughters; about her mother, ill at Chestnut Grove; about Fanny.

That spring, moreover, Martha herself was ill, first at Headquarters and later in Philadelphia. She was still not feeling herself by the time she returned to Mount Vernon in June—having missed the birth of little George Washington Parke Custis—and had barely recovered her strength when George wrote in September that he would indeed be able to cross his own threshold for the first time since May of 1775.

He arrived on the ninth of September after everyone was in bed. Martha, for a week too excited to sleep, heard the dogs barking, and then hooves in the driveway. It’s one of his aides coming to announce his arrival tomorrow….

But from downstairs she heard a familiar deep voice say, “If she’s asleep, for God’s sake let her sleep! That’s an order, Breechy. Just to see the roof-line and smell the gardens is worth the ride….”

“General Washington—” Martha appeared at the top of the stairs, her braid hanging forgotten over the embroidered homespun of her dressing-gown and hairpins still in her hand. “If you dared let me go six hours til dawn not knowing you were in the house, I should—I should write a letter to the Times in London saying that such conduct proved you to be no gentleman.”

He grinned wide—something he almost never did because of his teeth—and reached the bottom of the stairs in two strides, in time to catch Martha in his arms.

He had ridden sixty miles from Baltimore that day, to sleep beneath his own roof at her side.

The French did arrive the following day, General Rochambeau handsome and courtly and a little too suave in his gorgeous uniform—George had written to her that he was too hard on his men, which was something, coming from George. The day after that—the eleventh of September—the rest of the French officers appeared, and on their heels, Jacky, Eleanor, and the grandchildren whom George had never seen. The French Comtes and Chevaliers in their gold-embroidered uniforms all smiled to see the tall, stern General scoop up five-year-old Eliza and hold her like a kitten above his head.

Throughout dinner, Jacky hovered around the Generals like a smitten schoolgirl. He asked breathless questions about battles, gazed in rapture at the swords they wore and the gold of their epaulets.

Martha still remembered the men coming into the parlor—this same parlor where they now sat—after dinner that day, Jacky with his features radiant: “Papa’s going to take me with him to Yorktown! I’ve been commissioned as one of his aides!”

Eleanor’s gentle eyes flared with alarm, and her face paled. Jacky might towse the servant-girls, and waste his late father’s fortune on imbecilic land-deals for currency that wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on, but he was her husband. Without him to run Abingdon Plantation, neither Eleanor nor her four tiny children could survive.

Martha’s first reaction to this announcement—that he was going to war, but only in the safest possible position, behind the combined French and Continental armies—was to roll her eyes. She longed to reassure her daughter-in-law that Jacky might go to war—and she was willing to bet his first act in the service of his country would be to purchase a dozen uniforms that put General Rochambeau’s to shame—but she couldn’t imagine her son actually doing anything to put himself into harm’s way.

But he did. Martha had become so used to the sicknesses that ravaged the Army camps—at Morristown, at Valley Forge, at Trenton—that she seldom thought of them anymore. Her own illness had been more inconvenient than dangerous. The Knox and Greene babies whom her friends Lucy and Kitty now brought regularly to winter quarters seemed to thrive. George’s favorite aide Alec Hamilton, goldenly handsome and a few years younger than Jacky, had never had so much as a cold (or the French pox, which was even more surprising).

By the seventeenth of October, however, when General Cornwallis sent an aide out of his fortress to surrender his sword to Washington, Jacky was so sick with camp-fever that he could only watch the capture of the British army from a carriage in the road. The same letter that brought Martha news of the British surrender urged her, and Eleanor, to come at once.

Through six years of war, she had often lain awake in terror at the thought of losing George. She had never dreamed that she would lose Jacky. But at Eltham Plantation, where six years previously Martha had made her choice to follow George to war, less than three weeks after the defeat of Britain by her American colonists, Jacky Custis died.



Pattie dozed over her knitting; Nelly had fallen asleep. Outside the wind had begun to moan, puffing threads of smoke back down the chimney. On the side closer to the windows, Martha felt the air of the room growing cold. The rumble of the men’s voices continued behind the dining-room door. Fanny gathered her shawl about her: “I’ll get these little sleepyheads off to bed,” and Eliza piped up immediately that she wasn’t the least bit sleepy—