Braddock to Virginia, refused to take orders from Washington, and officers of higher grade in Virginia Troops, declaring that their commissions were assigned only by Colonial officials, whereas he had his own from King George.  This led, of course, to insubordination and frequent quarrels.  To put a stop to the wrangling, Washington journeyed to Boston, to have Governor Shirley, the Commander-in-Chief of the King’s Forces in the Colonies, give a decision upon it.  The Governor ruled in favor of Washington, who then rode back to Virginia.  But he spent a week in New York City in order to see his enchantress, Mary Philipse, and it is even whispered that he proposed to her and that she refused him.  Two years afterwards she married Lieutenant-Colonel Roger Morris, and during the Revolution the Morris house was Washington’s headquarters; the Morrises, who were Tories, having fled.

Persons have speculated why it was that so many of the young women whom Washington took a fancy to, chilled and drew back when it came to the question of marriage.  One very clever writer thinks that perhaps his nose was inordinately large in his youth, and that that repelled them.  I do not pretend to say.  So far as I know, psychologists have not yet made a sufficiently exact study of the nose as a determining factor in matrimony, to warrant an opinion from persons who have made no special study of the subject.  The plain fact was that by his twenty-fifth year, Washington was an unusually presentable young man, more than six feet tall, broad-shouldered, very strong, slender and athletic, carefully polite in his manners, a boon companion, though he talked little, a sound and deliberate thinker; moreover, the part he had taken in the war with the Indians and the French made him almost a popular hero, and gave him a preeminent place among the Virginians, both the young and the old, of that time.  The possession of the estate of Mount Vernon, which he had inherited from his half-brother, Lawrence, assured to him more than a comfortable fortune, and yet gossip wondered why he was not married.  Thackeray intimates that Washington was too evidently on the lookout for a rich wife, which, if true, may account for some of the alleged rebuffs.  I do not believe this assertion, nor do I find evidence for it.  Washington was always a very careful, farseeing person, and no doubt had a clear idea of what constitutes desirable qualifications in marriage, but I believe he would have married a poor girl out of the workhouse if he had really loved her.  However, he was not put to that test.

One May day Washington rode off from Mount Vernon to carry despatches to Williamsburg.  He stopped at William’s Ferry for dinner with his friend Major Chamberlayne.  At the table was Mrs. Daniel Parke Custis, who, under her maiden name of Martha Dandridge, was well known throughout that region for her beauty and sweet disposition.  She was now a widow of twenty-six, with two small children.