Martha Washington: First Lady of Liberty

This book was a wonderful insight into America's "first" First Lady. Not only did the book delve into Martha's life, it painted a picture of the times in which she lived. I learned more about the period and slavery than I thought I would ~ very well written. My favorite part was learning more about her first marriage to Daniel Parke Custis. Background is everything and most biographies lack it ~ this book doesn't. Read it and learn.

Ms. Bryan does for Martha Washington what David McCullogh did for John Adams. This compelling and thoroughly researched account brings Mrs. Washington to life and paints the social forces in operation during her time. It is only once we understand the context in which important historical figures exist that we can understand those figures as people.

"First Lady of Liberty" is a well-documented, yet easily readable, account of the life of Martha Washington and the cataclysmic times in which she lived. Martha emerges as a complex character, not just the one dimensional figure about which most Americans learn in school. Privately preferring a life at home with her extended family,she becomes an active participant in George Washington's military and political career, doing much to ensure his success.Bryan's extensive research reads lightly. There is a wealth of new material about each of her husbands, her little known half-sister who was part-African, part-Cherokee, Martha's views on slave owning, and indiviual stories and dramas involving many of the people to whom she was closest. (Look, for example, for the mystery of Mulatto Jack and the story of the Dunbar suit.)Readers of biography, American history, Black history, feminist history, and those who enjoy a good read will all come away fulfilled from reading this book.

I never realized what a central figure Martha Washington was in our country's history until I read this book. The author, Helen Bryan, does a superb job of uncovering Martha Washington's complex and intelligent character, in a fresh perspective and voice. Anyone interested in colonial life, women's studies, the American Revolution, or just an entertaining read, should pick up this book.

Based on exhaustive research and much new information and filled with period detail, this book is a fascinating portrait of Martha Washington, her two husbands, her epileptic daughter and feckless son, her grandchildren, slaves, her part-African half-sister, her plantation homes, the winter camps of the Revolution and the first presidential mansions. At the same time it traces many of the complex social, political, and economic developments of the earliest years of Virginia Colony, from Jamestown until the revolution and beyond, highlighting the issues of slavery, trade with the British mother country and plantation life in the New World and links them with the growing political tensions which arose with the Stamp Acts and, eventually, the American Revolution. It provides superb insights into a turbulent period of American history, when thirteen English colonies in North America severed themselves from control by the English king and parliament and began the laborious process of establishing a new form of republican government with no precedents to guide them.Bryan wears her scholarship lightly, however, cleverly weaving Martha's personal story through the issues and events of the times, quoting from letters, diaries, and newspaper accounts of the period as well as from the memoirs of Martha's Custis grandchildren, little-known anecdotes, and oral traditions. She examines the partnership of George and Martha Washington, America's first "power couple," making the interesting point that had Washington not married the widowed Martha Custis, he might never have become the leading military and political figure of his age. It highlights Martha's little-known contributions to the war effort which made her enormously popular with the long-suffering, ragged, and hungry soldiers of the Continental army, who cheered her as "Lady Washington" and called her a "gallant trooper". It also examines Martha's invaluable role as the Nation's first official hostess, and the dilemmas she faced in the early days of George's presidency over how to give the two adored grandchildren she was raising a normal life in the presidential mansion and how the wife of the head of the new republic ought to dress, entertain, or receive visitors in a manner which conveyed the dignity of the fledgling country she represented yet which avoided the appearance of behaving in "queenly fashion".Martha's unflagging support for her husband and her success in public life reflected well on him, and it is interesting that so important a role as Martha played at Washington's side has received so little public recognition. In keeping with one of the discrete obituaries written when Martha died two and a half years after George, Martha Washington has been forgotten in "the silence of respectful grief." Bryan's book, published to mark the 200th anniversary of Martha's death, finally sets the record straight.