Martha Washington

Martha Dandridge was born in 1731 to a prosperous Virginia planter family, married Daniel Parke Custis at 18, and was widowed at 26 — left with four children, two of whom survived infancy, and one of the largest estates in Virginia. She married George Washington in January 1759, bringing to the union a fortune that helped establish him as one of the wealthiest men in the colony. The marriage was, by all accounts, a genuine partnership: Washington consulted her on decisions both personal and practical, and she managed the complex domestic economy of Mount Vernon while he was absent on public business for most of their married life.

The Revolutionary War separated them repeatedly and for long stretches. Martha spent each winter of the war at the encampment with Washington — Valley Forge, Morristown, Newburgh — nursing sick soldiers, organizing supplies, and maintaining the morale of the army's officer corps with a steadiness that those who observed it found remarkable. She hated it. Her letters describe the camps as the most terrible place she had ever been. She came anyway, every winter, for eight years. When Washington became president in 1789, she moved to the temporary capitals at New York and Philadelphia and found herself the subject of an attention she found equally unwelcome.

The role of the president's wife had no precedent, no title, and no defined responsibilities. Martha Washington invented it by default, holding weekly receptions and managing a household that functioned as a semi-official seat of government. She was addressed as "Lady Washington" rather than First Lady — that term came later — and she described the presidency as a kind of well-gilded prison. She survived Washington by less than two and a half years, dying at Mount Vernon in May 1802. She burned their private correspondence before her death, leaving historians the outline of a partnership whose intimate dimensions she refused to share.