George Lewis: “diligent in whatever duty is required”?

Yesterday’s Boston 1775 posting introduced George Lewis (1757-1821), a son of George Washington’s sister Betty. On 14 Nov 1775 his father, Fielding Lewis, wrote to the general:

You will receive this Letter by my Son George who accompanys your Lady, the Winter is so far advanced that I am fearfull she will have a very disagreeable Journey but I expect she will meet with every assistance. . . .

George is very desireous of remaining with you as long as you stay with the Army, this I have no objection against provided he can have some little part that will bear his expences, I am in hopes your will find him diligent in whatever duty is required of him…

That letter closed with the news that George’s brother Charles, younger by three years, had died eight days before “of an Inflamitary Fever after a short illness.”

So Gen. Washington, in the middle of the siege of Boston, was asked to find some paying work for his eighteen-year-old nephew. Young George was apparently skilled as a horseman, which might have been useful along the road from Virginia to Cambridge, but he could not have been experienced in business or travel. As I noted yesterday, he made so little impression in Philadelphia that the newspapers misidentified him.

George Lewis almost certainly lived in the John Vassall house after he arrived at Cambridge in December 1775. Over the next three months, he may have helped with administrative tasks at that headquarters. The latest editors of Gen. Washington’s papers suggest that Lewis wrote a 19 Feb 1776 letter to Christopher French, a captured British officer who sent the commander a ceaseless stream of complaints about his detention; apparently the unsigned copy on file is not in the handwriting of any known aides.

In March 1776, Lewis was commissioned as a lieutenant in the commander-in-chief’s guard. This unit was created to guard the headquarters papers and equipment. He served in that capacity until December, and then became a captain in the 2nd Continental Dragoons, seeing action in 1777.

Capt. Lewis spent a lot of 1778 away from his regiment. The general wrote him a chiding letter on 13 Feb 1779, so he resigned his commission and went home to Virginia to stay. George Lewis had evidently lost the desire to serve with his uncle “as long as you stay with the Army.”

(The thumbnail photo above shows Lewis’s gravestone, courtesy of waymarking.com which gives his full name as George Washington Lewis.)

Mrs. Warner Lewis and the Chain of Errors

Martha Washington arrived at the mansion that is now Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site on 11 Dec 1775. (The portrait at right shows her fifteen years later, as painted by Edward Savage.) With her was Elizabeth Gates, wife of Gen. Horatio Gates, who I think was also staying in that house. Both women had traveled from Virginia, though they had met and started sharing a carriage only in Philadelphia.

Also on that northern leg of the journey, according to Helen Bryan’s Martha Washington: First Lady of Liberty (2002), was “Mrs. Warner Lewis, a relative of George’s.” Yet there’s no indication of why Mrs. Warner Lewis would have come along, nor anyone who recorded meeting her in Cambridge.

Bryan evidently relied on Anne Hollingsworth Wharton’s Martha Washington (1897), which states:

From the “Pennsylvania Gazette,” of November 29, it appears that Mrs. Washington and her party, which had been joined by Mrs. Gates, wife of General Gates, and Mrs. Warner Lewis, left Philadelphia on the twenty-seventh…

That book was in turn probably informed by a footnote in the 1889 edition of Washington’s writings, edited by Worthington Chauncey Ford, which quotes the 29 Nov 1775 Pennsylvania Gazette this way:

On Monday last, the Lady of His Excellency General Washington, the Lady of General Gates, J. Curtis, Esq; and Lady of Warner Lewis, Esq; set out for Cambridge.

But in fact that newspaper item reads:

On Monday last, the Lady of His Excellency General WASHINGTON, the Lady of General GATES, J. CURTIS, Esq; and Lady, and WARNER LEWIS, Esq; set out for Cambridge.

So the “Lady” in question was actually the wife of Curtis, and Warner Lewis was a man. Which offers the lesson of always relying on the earliest sources.

Except that the 1775 newspaper contained mistakes as well. “Curtis” was really John Parke Custis, son of Martha Washington and her first husband. He and his wife Nelly accompanied his mother to Cambridge and back home in the spring.

And while there was a prominent Virginia planter named Warner Lewis related to the commander-in-chief, he didn’t travel with Martha Washington in 1775. Nor did his son of the same name. The newspaper printer misidentified Washington’s teen-aged nephew George Lewis.

TOMORROW: Why George Lewis came to Cambridge.