Another letter, from officer William La Péronie, provides some evidence that Washington did have premarital sex. Four years before he and Martha wed, La Péronie imagined him “plung’d in the midst of dellight heaven can aford & enchanted By Charms even stranger to the Ciprian Dame (+ M’s Nel).”3 “Ciprian Dame” was eighteenth-century-speak for a sex worker, but she may have been a barmaid or a mistress or a slave. It is therefore possible that Washington had a sexual relationship with a woman other than Martha, and that possibility includes nonconsensual sex with an enslaved woman.
