In the winter camps of the American Revolution, she arrived through mud and cold to sit beside the commander-in-chief, sew for soldiers, and steady a household on campaign. At Valley Forge in 1777, Martha Washington was already becoming Lady Washington, a public symbol almost by accident.

She had begun far from that stage, born in 1731 at Chestnut Grove in New Kent County, Virginia, the eldest child of Frances Jones and John Dandridge. Raised in a planter household with good manners and real responsibility, she learned early to manage people, rooms, and expectations.

In 1750 she married Daniel Parke Custis, a wealthy Virginia planter, and moved to White House Plantation on the Pamunkey River. Four children were born, but only two lived past childhood. When Daniel died in 1757, she was twenty-six, suddenly responsible for a vast estate, several plantations, and hundreds of enslaved people. She handled the business herself.

In 1759 she married George Washington at White House Plantation and moved to Mount Vernon. Their marriage lasted forty years and brought no children together, but she raised her son John and daughter Patsy with fierce care. Then in 1773 Patsy died during an epileptic seizure, a family wound that never really closed.

When war came in 1775 and George Washington took command of the Continental Army, she stayed first at Mount Vernon, then joined him in Cambridge, later returning to camp most winters when fighting slowed. She hosted officers, organised sewing, and gave the army a domestic centre. In 1781, during the Yorktown campaign, her only surviving child, John Parke Custis, died of camp fever. She and her husband then took in two of his children, Nelly and Washy.

She wanted quiet when the war ended in 1783, but the new republic would not leave the Washingtons alone. In 1789, when George became president in New York, she reluctantly entered public life again. As Lady Washington, she held weekly drawing rooms, returned social calls with strict discipline, and worked out a careful style for a republic: dignified, but never queenly. Abigail Adams, Henry Knox, and Tobias Lear all moved through that world.

Back at Mount Vernon in 1797, she at last had the retirement she had long wanted, though admirers kept arriving. Then came another blow. George Washington died in 1799 of a severe throat infection. In her last illness in 1802, Martha burned their letters, took communion, laid out her funeral dress, and died on 22 May at the age of seventy.

Her final irony is plain: a woman who disliked display helped invent one of the most public roles in American life. The title First Lady was coined later, but the pattern was hers first, set in New York and Philadelphia, then carried forward by the women who followed her into the president's house.