Martha Washington by Patricia Brady Read Free Book Online Page A

stood firm.
    John Custis’s confidants during this emotional period were Anne and Matthew Moody, tavern keepers near the Queen’s Creek ferry outside Williamsburg. Almost every day, Custis rode out to his plantation and stopped at the Moodys’. They were the audience for his violent outbursts, benefiting as he began giving them pieces of valuable Custis family silver and furniture. When they demurred (according to their own account), Custis threatened to throw the silver out into the road rather than allow that Dandridge girl to enjoy it.
    Through these nerve-racking months, there is no doubt that Patsy helped strengthen Daniel’s resolution. Without her fortitude, he might well have let this chance for happiness drift away like all the others. Neither Daniel’s arguments nor the support of Power and Blair seemed to be making any headway with his father.
    Never one to wait around helplessly, Patsy somehow contrived to talk with the crusty old tyrant herself. Just how she managed it, we don’t know. Like many bullies, Custis was impressed by strength of character: he actually found the spunky little lady engaging. It is tempting to imagine the scene in which the petite young woman, by now eighteen, reasoned with the bewigged seventy-year-old colonel.
    Soon afterward, when James Power visited Custis’s home, a brick house (two rooms down and two up, separated by passageways) in the middle of a very large garden on Francis Street, he found the old man in a calmer frame of mind. After all, the Dandridges were socially acceptable planters, not riffraff, and the size of the Parke/Custis fortune made a large dowry unnecessary. Seized by a bright idea, Power handed over a little horse and bridle he had just bought for his own son to Jack, pretending that they were a gift to the boy from Daniel. In 1749, for one of the few times in his long life, John Custis changed his mind. He consented to his son’s marriage to the woman who had the nerve to stand up to him.
    Power immediately wrote to Daniel Custis out in New Kent County: “This comes at last to bring you the news that I believe will be most agreeable to you of any you have heard—that you may not be long in suspense I shall tell you at once—I am empowered by your father to let you know that he heartily and willingly consents to your marriage with Miss Dandridge—that he has so good a character of her, that he had rather you should have her than any lady in Virginia—nay, if possible, he is as much enamored with her character as you are with her person, and this is owing chiefly to a prudent speech of her own. Hurry down immediately for fear he should change the strong inclination he has to your marrying directly.”
    John Custis made a will in Daniel’s favor, making generous provision for little Jack, and died in November 1749 before he could change his mind again. Patsy and Daniel postponed their wedding for a few months of respectful mourning, meanwhile winding up the elder Custis’s tangled bequests.
    On May 15, 1750, when Patsy was a couple of weeks shy of her nineteenth birthday, she married Daniel Custis at home in the parlor at Chestnut Grove. Weddings in colonial Virginia were very different from the traditions that would later develop in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Everyone simply gathered in the parlor and hall without any sort of procession. Brides wore their brightest-colored and most beautiful silk gowns. The very idea of their friends dressing in matching gowns or the groom in mournful black would have sent them into fits of laughter. The wedding party and guests, men as well as women, were like a rich, silken flower garden in the vibrant colors and combinations that suited their fancies.
    Almost every wedding was celebrated at the bride’s home. Churches stood by themselves out in the country with no place nearby for the festivities to follow. Although the Church of England required