Picking at the Martha Washington Dress Quilt

In the Colonial Revival period, many Americans came forward with relics of the Revolution passed down in their families or discovered in attics.

And some of those were even authentic.

Others, however, were not. I retold the saga of a reputed Thomas Oliver portrait here, for example.

Among items donated to the Bostonian Society in its early decades, I’m skeptical about the machine-woven “Sons of Liberty flag.”

I worked with Dave Ingram on a report about a powder horn ascribed to Richard Gridley; we determined it was almost certainly a Colonial Revival–era creation.

The Old South Meeting House also became a public institution at that time and began receiving donations. In the 1890s one important supporter, Mary Hemenway, gave Old South “a quilt made from fragments of Martha Washington’s dresses,” as Lori Fidler, Associate Director of Collections at Revolutionary Spaces, recently described in this article.

That’s just the sort of object that Americans oohed and aahed over breathlessly during the Colonial Revival. From the Age of Homespun! Touched by the great Washingtons themselves! But how reliable is its lore?

We know the quilt came to Hemenway from Fannie Washington Finch, an actual great-grandniece of George Washington. Her story:

Fannie was born Frances Louisa Augusta Washington in Virginia in 1828. Her mother, Henrietta Spotswood, was the granddaughter of George Washington’s half-brother, Augustine, Jr., while her father, Bushrod, was the grandson of George’s brother, John Augustine. Fannie’s grandmother, Jane Washington, had made the quilt out of scraps she received directly from Martha.

We also know from Finch’s letters in 1884–1886 that she was selling heirlooms from Mount Vernon, including this quilt, because of her “pecuniary condition.” In other words, she needed money.

There are also intriguing details about the quilt itself:

In 1979, a textile curator at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts examined the quilt, finding the silk pieces to be expensive English-made loom-woven fabrics, consistent with textiles worn by wealthy women of the 1700s. He mentioned that the designs represented a range of time periods, with larger floral patterns from the mid-18th century and tiny blossoms from the late 1700s. . . .

In May 2024,…[Zara] Anishanslin noted that a fabric used in the quilt appeared to be an Anna Maria Garthwaite design. Garthwaite was a female silk designer who lived and worked in the Spitalfields area of London in the mid-1700s.

Thus, Finch might have had a motive to concoct a connection between this quilt and Martha Washington—but the artifact itself really does contain the fabrics a wealthy British-American woman in the mid- to late 1700s would have owned.

Furthermore, Fidler reports, “In her writings, Martha Washington mentions cutting up her garments and distributing pieces to family members and friends as mementos.” Finch couldn’t have inserted that into the historical record.

So on this item, I’m inclined to accept the lore.

“Lifetime Tenure” When the Supreme Court Began

The U.S. senate is holding hearings on the nomination of a new Supreme Court justice. Some senators have come out against giving this nominee a “lifetime appointment” despite having previously approved her lifetime appointment as a federal judge at two levels.

Social-media discussions of this issue got me thinking of what a “lifetime appointment” meant when the U.S. Supreme Court first met.

Lifetime judicial appointments were common in the British and thus British-American legal systems. Although overall life expectancy was lower in the eighteenth century, that’s largely due to childhood mortality, so once a mature man was appointed to the bench he often served for many years.

(Colonial Rhode Island was an exception to that system of lifetime appointments. Under its eighteenth-century constitution, judges were elected for one-year terms, though they could be reelected. Which just shows how anomalous Rhode Island was.)

I decided to look at the Supreme Court justices appointed in the 1790s to see how long they stayed alive and stayed on the court.

• John Jay / 6 years on the court / 40 more years of life after appointment 
• John Rutledge / 1 one year on the court, then another stint of a few months four years later / 11 more years of life 
• William Cushing / 20 / 20 
• James Wilson / 9 / 9 
• John Blair / 5 / 10 
• James Iredell / 9 / 9 
• Thomas Johnson / 2 / 28 
• William Paterson / 13 / 13 
• Samuel Chase / 15 / 15 
• Oliver Ellsworth / 4 / 11 
• Bushrod Washington / 31 / 31 

Thus, from early on we see Supreme Court justices serving for a decade or more. Six of these eleven men sat on the bench until they died, with an average tenure of over fifteen years. Three more justices nominated by the Presidents active in the Founding—John Marshall, William Johnson, and Joseph Story—also served more than thirty years.

That said, while the first generation of U.S. politicians could conceive of Supreme Court justices serving for decades, the number of jurists who actually do so has gone up. As of today the historical average tenure on the court stands at sixteen years, but no justice has left the bench before that time since the late 1960s.

The other career model we see these days, a justice serving for decades and then retiring, was less common in the 1790s. Indeed, the three early justices who resigned citing reasons of health—John Blair, Thomas Johnson, and Oliver Ellsworth—did so after only a handful of years. The job was more physically demanding when Supreme Court justices still rode the circuit to hear federal cases rather than staying in the capital.

One path we haven’t seen for a long time was a justice resigning from the top bench because he preferred a different government role. John Jay left the court to be governor of New York, having already run for that offce in 1792 and gone overseas as President George Washington’s treaty negotiator in 1794.

Finally, there’s a storyline we really don’t want to see repeated. John Rutledge (shown above) resigned from the U.S. bench to become chief justice in the home state of South Carolina. Then President George Washington put him back on the Supreme Court as chief justice, only for the senate to decline to confirm him. Rutledge attempted suicide, withdrew from public life, and died five years later.

West Ford and the Washingtons

The New Yorker just published an article by Jill Abramson titled “Did George Washington Have an Enslaved Son?”

It discusses the paternity of West Ford (1784/5–1863, shown here), a man of both African and European ancestry enslaved at Mount Vernon as an adolescent in the early nineteenth century. Legally freed on reaching maturity, he helped to manage the plantation and tourist spot for decades.

I remember reading about this question in the New York Times in 1999. In the wake of discoveries about the Jefferson D.N.A. haplotype, Nicholas Wade filed a story headlined “Descendants of Slave’s Son Contend That His Father Was George Washington.”

There doesn’t appear to be new evidence on the question. The link between George Washington and West Ford still appears to rest on an oral tradition passed down by descendants of two different Ford grandsons and first mentioned in print in 1940.

That’s not negligible, but it’s not as strong as the evidence about Thomas Jefferson. We have public statements about Jefferson’s enslaved children from the period of his presidency. We have a detailed 1873 statement from Madison Hemings about how he and his siblings were Jefferson’s children. That description of Sally Hemings’s family turned out to be entirely consistent with the D.N.A. findings more than a century later while other claims proved untenable.

One of the last-gasp arguments that “defenders” of Thomas Jefferson then seized on was that the father of Sally Hemings’s children was the President’s brother, Randolph Jefferson. That relied on overlooking the facts that:

• Thomas, not Randolph, owned and controlled Hemings.
• Thomas lived at Monticello with Hemings while Randolph lived on his own slave-labor plantation twenty miles away. (Not to mention Thomas and Hemings were in Paris while Randolph remained in Virginia.)
• Thomas is documented to have been at Monticello around every period when Hemings conceived children, and there is no strong evidence that Randolph visited Monticello at any of those times.

The theory that George Washington was the father of West Ford looks like a mirror image of that claim about Randolph Jefferson:

• John Augustine Washington, not his brother George, owned and controlled West Ford’s mother, Venus.
• John Augustine lived at Bushfield with Venus while George lived on his own slave-labor plantation ninety miles away.
• It’s not clear when Venus gave birth to West Ford and thus when that child was conceived, but George’s movements are well documented and there’s no strong evidence showing that he and Venus were near each other at the crucial time. (By one interpretation of the ambiguous birthdate, George was still away commanding the Continental Army.)

In addition, we know that Thomas Jefferson impregnated his wife Martha six times in their ten-year marriage while George and Martha Washington never had children together. Most historians therefore believe the “Father of His Country” was infertile.

The West Ford descendants have pushed for D.N.A. testing of the sort that produced new evidence about Jefferson and Hemings. However, that sort of testing wouldn’t distinguish among George Washington, John Augustine Washington, or the latter’s sons.

West Ford came to Mount Vernon after George Washington died and the property passed to his nephew Bushrod, a son of John Augustine Washington.

To me it appears likely that West Ford and Supreme Court justice Bushrod Washington (1762–1829, shown here) were related in some way—probably more closely than West Ford and the late President.