On Sept. 29, 1760, Martha Washington wrote a letter to a friend about her sickly 4-year-old daughter, Patsy.
“I have the pleasure to tell you my dear little girl is much better,” Martha wrote. Her “fitts” and fevers had abated. “We [carried] her out yesterday in the charriot and the change of air refreshed her very much.”
But Patsy’s afflictions were not over. She had what historians believe was epilepsy, a condition that would torment her most of her life and kill her at age 17, devastating her family.
The Library of Congress announced last week that it has acquired the letter Martha wrote near the start of her child’s battle with a condition that was then mysterious and not well understood.
It is the only letter in Martha’s handwriting the library has and it provides a glimpse into a private tragedy that struck the future president’s family as he rose to prominence in the years before the revolution.
Historians have been aware of the letter, but having the original is a major acquisition, the library said. And the story of Patsy’s epilepsy is not well known publicly.
The library said the letter was purchased at auction in June via the James Madison Council’s Edwin L. Cox Legacy Trust, which helps the library buy historic items. The price was $47,500, according to Heritage Auctions, where the letter was sold.
Epilepsy is a brain condition in which sudden surges of abnormal and excessive electrical activity cause recurring seizures, according to the Epilepsy Foundation. Today it can often be treated with medication.
Occasionally, as apparently in Patsy’s case, a severe seizure can cause death, the foundation says.
In 1760, George Washington was a 28-year-old planter, local legislator and well-regarded veteran of the French and Indian War. He lived on his Potomac River farm, Mount Vernon, in Virginia.
The year before, he had married the wealthy widow, Martha Dandridge Custis, 29. She brought to Mount Vernon two children from her previous marriage, John Parke Custis and Martha Parke Custis, known as Patsy.
The children had a privileged upbringing, according to an essay by Philander D. Chase, former chief editor of the Washington Papers at the University of Virginia, on the Papers’ website. (George and Martha never had children of their own.)
Washington bought Patsy clothes, jewelry and a pet parrot. She took dancing and music lessons.
“George Washington was a doting and loving stepfather,” said Zoie Horecny, an editor at the center for digital history at George Washington’s Mount Vernon.
Patsy was a toddler when her mother married George Washington in 1759, Horecny said in an interview. “For all of her known life, George Washington is going to be the closest thing she has to a father figure.”
“And you can tell in his writings he feels great affection for her,” she said.
But she continued to be struck down by seizures.
“There’s no doubt that [Patsy] had epilepsy,” David Butterfield, acting chief of the library’s manuscript division, said in an interview. “In her preteen and teen years it really accelerated.”
The Washingtons tried everything available to ease Patsy’s affliction, according to historical accounts.
They tried an iron “cramp” ring, installed by a blacksmith on one of her fingers, a folk remedy that was supposed to block seizures, according to Chase.
She was bled. She was taken to Berkeley Springs, more than 100 miles away in western Virginia to see if the warm mineral waters there would help.
Her mother administered mercury and ether to her, other letters suggest.
She was treated with what was probably cinchona bark, a remedy for malarial fevers, and “bitters,” a medicine then used for stomach disorders, Martha wrote in the library’s letter.
In the letter, Martha thanked her friend, Margaret Bolan Green, for apparently offering to have Patsy visit, and said she hoped her daughter might be improving.
“I am Extreemly obliged to you for your kind offer in taking the child, but hope the Ride will be of servis to her,” she wrote. “She seems to be quite well.”
“We will doe our selves the pleasure to call on you on wensday morin,” she wrote. “I am madam Your most Humble Sert Martha Washington.”
But Patsy did not stay well. And the seizures got worse.
In a diary entry for April 14, 1769, George Washington wrote that the family had gone to visit a neighbor, “but Patcy being taken with a fit on the road by the Mill we turnd back.”
In the summer of 1770, Washington kept a written record of Patsy’s seizures, Chase wrote. Over 86 days, she had “fits” on 26 of those days, roughly one every three days. Sometimes she had two a day.
On July 31 he wrote that Patsy had “1 very bad.”
Her life beyond those struggles was filled with promise. A miniature portrait painted by Charles Willson Peale in 1772 shows her as an elegant young woman with dark hair wearing what looks like a string of pearls around her neck.
On the afternoon of June 19, 1773, after the family had finished dinner at Mount Vernon, Patsy went to her room to get a letter, according to an account on the website of George Washington’s Mount Vernon.
Hearing a strange noise coming from Patsy’s room, a visitor found her on the floor in the midst of a severe seizure. She was moved to a bed. Washington knelt beside her, the Mount Vernon account continued.
Within minutes she was dead.
“She rose from Dinner about four Oclock, in better health and spirits than she appeard to have been in for some time,” Washington wrote a relative the next day.
“Soon after … she was siezd with one of her usual Fits, & expird in it, in less than two Minutes without uttering a Word, a groan, or scarce a Sigh,” he wrote.
The “Sweet Innocent Girl” had been “taken into a more happy, & peaceful abode than any she has met with, in the afflicted Path she hitherto has trod,” he wrote.
The loss, he added, had “almost reduced my poor Wife to the lowest ebb of Misery.”
Patsy was laid to rest in the Mount Vernon family tomb the next day.
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