In the second year of Washington’s administration, the government was removed to Philadelphia, there to remain for the next ten years. The household furniture of the Washingtons was moved thither by slow and weary processes of land and water, the President, in addition to his public cares, superintending personally the preparation and embarkation of every article himself. Mrs. Washington was sick at the time, but the following year, the house of Robert Morris having been taken by the corporation, as the President’s house, Mrs. Washington again opened her drawing-rooms from seven to ten P. M. Sensible woman! No haggard and faded beauties dancing all night, faded and old before their time, owed their wasted lives and powers to her. In Philadelphia and New York, when the clock’s hand pointed to ten, she arose with affable dignity, and, bowing to all, retired, leaving her guests to do likewise. With this action, it was unnecessary to repeat the announcement which she made at the first levée held by her in New York, viz.: “General Washington retires at ten o’clock, and I usually precede him. Good-night.”
At these levées Mrs. Washington sat. The guests were grouped in a circle, round which the President passed, speaking politely to each one, but never shaking hands. It was reserved to a later generation to shake that poor member till it has to be poulticed after official greetings. It was the habit of Mrs. Washington to return the calls of those who were privileged to pay her visits. A Philadelphia lady who, as a child, remembered her, wrote: “It was Mrs. Washington’s custom to return visits on the third day. In calling on my mother she would send a footman over, who would knock loudly and announce Mrs. Washington, who would then come over with Mr. Lear. Her manners were very easy, pleasant and unceremonious, with the characteristics of other Virginia ladies.”
An English manufacturer, who breakfasted with the President’s family in 1794, says:
“I was struck with awe and veneration when I recollected that I was now in the presence of the great Washington, the noble and wise benefactor of the world.... Mrs. Washington herself, made tea and coffee for us. On the table were two small plates of sliced tongue and dry toast, bread and butter; but no broiled fish, as is the custom here. She struck me as being somewhat older than the President, though I understand both were born the same year. She was extremely simple in her dress, and wore a very plain cap, with her gray hair turned up under it.”
It is as the wife of Washington, through sentiments called out by the greatness of his character and the love which she bore him, that the moral capacity of Martha Washington’s nature ever approaches greatness. In her reply to Congress, who asked that the body of George Washington might be placed beneath a monument in the capitol which his patriotism had done so much to rear, her words rise to the patriotic grandeur of Abigail Adams, they could not rise higher. She says:
“Taught by that great example, which I have so long had before me, never to oppose my private wishes to the public will, I must consent to the request made by Congress, which you have had the goodness to transmit to me, and in doing this, I need not, I cannot say what a sacrifice of individual feeling I make to a sense of public duty.”
But it is in the little room at Mount Vernon, in which she died, that Martha Washington, as a woman, comes nearest to us. Here one can realize how utterly done with earth, its pangs and glory, was the soul who shut herself within its narrow walls, there to take on immortality. The rooms of Washington below, a thrifty mechanic of the present day would think too small and shabby for him. Here he died. And when the great soul went forth to the unknown, as a human presence to inhabit it never more, the wife also went forth, and never again crossed its threshold. Here, in this little room, scarcely more than a closet, surrounded only by the simplest necessaries of existence, Martha Washington lived out the lonely days of her desolate widowhood—and here she died.
Abigail Adams was the first wife of a President who ever presided at the White House—the President’s house, as it was so fitly called in those days. Only in this latter time of degenerate English has it swelled into the “Executive Mansion.”
In February, 1797, John Adams was elected President of the United States, to succeed President Washington. From her country home in Massachusetts, Mrs. Adams sent to her husband the following recognition of his exaltation to be chief ruler of the United States: