Martha Washington

Martha Washington was the richest widow in Virginia before she married George Washington, spent every winter of the Revolutionary War in camp with the army, and burned their correspondence. She was born Martha Dandridge, married Daniel Parke Custis at eighteen, and was widowed at twenty-five with two surviving children and control of a very large estate - which is the reason the marriage of 1759 mattered to Washington's prospects as much as it did. She managed Mount Vernon's household of dozens of enslaved people, and those she brought to the marriage were dower slaves belonging to the Custis estate, whom neither she nor Washington could legally free. She travelled to winter quarters every year of the war, including Valley Forge, organised the officers' wives into sewing and nursing, and was credited by soldiers with holding morale together. As the first president's wife she held weekly receptions and disliked the role, describing herself as more like a state prisoner than anything else. Washington's will freed his own slaves on her death, which put her in the position of being worth more to them dead; she freed them early, in 1801. She burned almost all their letters before she died. She raised two of her grandchildren, Nelly and George Washington Parke Custis, after her son died of camp fever in 1781. Ona Judge, an enslaved woman of her household, escaped from the presidential residence in Philadelphia in 1796 rather than be given away as a wedding present, and the Washingtons tried for years to recover her, which is the clearest surviving record of how Martha regarded the people she owned. She destroyed the letters within months of his death in 1799 and died at Mount Vernon in 1802. She was the first woman shown on a United States postage stamp.

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