Martha, who was a few months younger than her husband, is described as having been "amiable in character and lovely in person." By the courtesy of the period she was called Lady Washington, and whether in her own home or at the "federal court," she presided with marked dignity and grace.

She died at Mount Vernon, May 22, 1802, having survived her husband two and a half years._ Courtesy Herbert L.Pratt] Admitting the case to be of sufficient importance to require reprisal, and to be ripe for that step, the power of taking it was vested by the constitution in congress, not in the executive department of the government.
Of the reparation for the offence committed against the United States, they were themselves the judges, and could not be required by a foreign nation, to demand more than was satisfactory to themselves.

By disavowing the act, by taking measures to prevent its repetition, by prosecuting the American citizens who were engaged in it, the United States ought to stand justified with Great Britain; and a demand of further reparation by that power would be a wrong on her part.
The circumstances under which these equipments had been made, in the first moments of the war, before the government could have time to take precautions against them, and its immediate disapprobation of those equipments, must rescue it from every imputation of being accessory to them, and had placed it with the offended, not the offending party.
Those gentlemen were therefore of opinion, that the vessels which had been captured on the high seas, and brought into the United States, by privateers fitted out and commissioned in their ports, ought not to be restored.
The secretaries of the treasury, and of war, were of different opinion.

They urged that a neutral, permitting itself to be made an instrument of hostility by one belligerent against another, became thereby an associate in the war.

If land or naval armaments might be formed by France within the United States, for the purpose of carrying on expeditions against her enemy, and might return with the spoils they had taken, and prepare new enterprises, it was apparent that a state of war would exist between America and those enemies, of the worst kind for them: since, while the resources of the country were employed in annoying them, the instruments of this annoyance would be occasionally protected from pursuit, by the privileges of an ostensible neutrality.