Mary Ball Washington

by Craig Shirley

  The immeasurably important relative and descendant George Washington Parke Custis sometimes also got chronology wrong in Mary’s and George’s lives. Others simply wrote thinly sourced stories with contradictory facts; for instance, how Mary and her husband, Augustine, met in England when the latter was tended to by the former after an injury, like some story seen in a romance novel. All these works have shaped the legacy and portrait of who Mary Ball Washington was—and was not.

  But Flexner’s and Freeman’s works are, without fail, some of the most comprehensive biographies of the first president’s life, as is Ron Chernow’s masterpiece.

  Slants or presentism in history, whether consciously or not, encouraged the reader to ignore context or brush away any excuse that may contradict it. What Mary or others may have seen as protective in George Washington’s teenage years, Freeman sees as controlling and authoritarian. This bias erases facts, maybe implying something that it is not. This is dangerous.

  This book is just as much a history of Mary’s times as her near century of life. The eighteenth century in the New World saw a fundamental change that echoed across the globe, as the loyal colonies, fighting for the Crown in the 1750s, went against King George III twenty years later, establishing a system of government previously unseen in history. Whether she knew it or cared for it or supported it or not, how Fredericksburg was run, how the colonies fought, who died nearby, and how nations were forged affected her. Though she probably knew little of it, the way in which the Continental Congress in 1781 debated the ins and outs of the Articles of Confederation and how it again debated a new constitution in 1787 affected her. While she was a key influence on one of history’s greatest men, during the Revolution she was but one person in a vast system known as the American experiment.

  THIS “HONORED MADAM” WHO DIED NEARLY THREE HUNDRED YEARS AGO was many things, often contradictory and often paradoxical: we know many things of her, and we know little; we know how she treated her son, but we have no known motive; we have interpretations of historians over centuries, both sides getting some basic known facts wrong, which makes the modern reader question what else was wrong in these fundamental works. But despite their difficult relationship, George and Mary shared an important bond of blood. “Whoever has seen that awe-inspiring air and manner so characteristic in the Father of his Country, will remember the matron as she appeared when the presiding genius of her well-ordered household, commanding and being obeyed,”21 wrote George’s cousin. And as George himself wrote, it was by Mary’s “Maternal hand [that,] (early deprived of a Father) I was led to Manhood.”22

  She was the mother of the Father of our Country. She was authoritarian and frustratingly singular, the royalist woman who shaped history’s most famous patriot.

  She was Mary Ball Washington.

  Chapter 1

  Virgin Land and Virgin Love

  LIFE IN AND AROUND THE COLONY OF VIRGINIA

  1600‒1780

  “The specter of the Old World . . .”

  In 1651, the county of Lancaster, Virginia, was created out of a combination of York and Northumberland counties. A few years later, George Washington’s ancestors arrived in the New World and made their way here, where Mary Ball Washington was born in 1708.

  By the end of the Revolutionary War and the independence of the American colonies from England in 1783, the number of Virginia’s counties tripled as population shifted and frontiers opened. Spotsylvania County, established in 1721, was a prominent place of interest for the Washington clan—and it was in the county’s largest city, Fredericksburg, that George was raised into adulthood, and where Mary lived for most of her life.1

  Slowly but surely the New World became less a temporary way of life and more a permanent home. New settlements were springing up, port towns like Alexandria were in the proto-stages, new grants for businesses were signed, and new manors were built. Iron ore, useful for making tools, weapons, structures, and more, was discovered here and became particularly important for settlers, especially as a means of cutting off English dependency on Sweden.2 John Carter had built the first church in the region.3 His son, Robert Carter, born 1662 on Corotoman Plantation in Lancaster County, acquired enough land and wealth appropriate for his nickname, “King” Carter.

  THE SPECTER OF THE OLD WORLD WAS NOT YET BANISHED. ONE OF THE most prominent houses in Essex County was Ben Lomond, a Georgian manor a short riding distance from the town of Tappahannock. With land stretching out to the Rappahannock River, it saw frequent renovations through the years as prominent Essex family members settled in, including its most famous occupant, Judge Muscoe Garnett. It was named after a mountain in the Scottish Highlands.

  IN THE NEWLY CHARTERED PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY AROUND 1740, THE brick home of Bel Air was erected by Captain Charles Ewell, whose wife, Sarah Ball Ewell, was a younger cousin of Mary Ball Washington. (Decades later, Charles Ewell’s granddaughter Frances and her husband, Mason Locke Weems, moved into Bel Air, from which Weems would write the first posthumous and legendary biography of George Washington in 1800.)4

  The Northern Neck of Virginia, the geographically northern peninsula that stretches from the Potomac to the Rappahannock, was bustling. Prominent families like the Carters, the Lees, the Washingtons, the Balls, and the Wares all settled in this area, quickly making it more than just another remote region of the colonies.

  It was beginning to look like home. People were no longer looking to Europe, the Old World, for guidance and sustenance. They had become Americans.

  IN THE PAPERS AND DOCUMENTS OF THE DAY, THOSE WHO CAME TO AMERICA from the Old World were routinely referred to as “immigrants,” while Native Americans were frequently referred to as “hostile Indians.” “The early pioneers found the Indians very troublesome,” wrote F. L. Brockett and George Rock in the late nineteenth century, “and in order to [secure] the protection of their families from the raids of these unwelcome visitors, they were compelled to almost constantly be under arms, as these visits were generally made when civilized people were supposed to be asleep.”5 This was an unceasing issue into the eighteenth century, as white settlers continued to expand into former Indian territory. Mary herself heard of these stories, akin to boogeymen or ghost stories by campfires, of entire villages and families being killed. There was some truth to these stories, as her ancestors well knew of the scathing relations between Native Americans and colonizing Europeans. It was a looming threat.

  Things were certainly better in Mary’s time than they were many years earlier in Jamestown, down the Potomac River and out into the Chesapeake Bay, where Captain John Smith’s establishment failed and the residents fell to cannibalism during the “starving time.” Later reports were macabre and ghastly, including one of a husband who killed his wife and then salted her flesh. Eighty percent of the colonists died, having starved to death or being killed to eat. The population dwindled from three hundred inhabitants to sixty within months.6 Such haunting stories reverberated throughout the colonies and indeed back to England. This terror from America may have easily struck the attention of William Shakespeare in his play The Tempest, whose inspiration of islands and dangers unknown to the average Londoner may have been based partly in truth.

  Virginia’s population increased; so did the means of communication. The Virginia Gazette, founded in Williamsburg in 1736, offered weekly updates from across the royal colony. It was essentially a statewide paper. Various competitors emerged in the latter half of the paper’s life, before its final publication in 1780. Regional newspapers started popping up, focusing on local news—everything from advertisements of land and business, to notices of stolen property and runaway slaves, to major news in England or Europe. Breaking news took precedence, though by the time a crisis was known to the printer, it was many days old. The same applied to courier letters.

  IN THIS ERA, TOBACCO WAS THE FAVORITE CROP, BUT CORN, RICE, AND OTHERS also found room to thrive. Whole armies of freemen and slaves were devoted to the growing, har
vesting, curing, hogsheading, and shipping to Europe of the much sought-after tobacco leaf. Currency was often tobacco weighed by the pound, as an alternative to the pound sterling in England. Spanish coins received from trade were sometimes used, but tobacco was the most stable, and more local than the far-off English or Spanish coins. Corn and wheat were also accepted to pay off debts. In 1751, over a hundred thousand pounds of tobacco was accepted to help build a church in Stafford County. Clergy was also paid with tobacco, and merchants and prospective buyers bought anything, from ferry passages to books and land, with the crop.7

  Credit was another popular method of purchasing goods and services, and a relatively new one at that. “Credit refers not just to the money you possess but also to what others believe you will be able to pay. One economist has described it as ‘money of the mind,’” as historian Joseph Ellis described the colonial novelty. It was risky, but it was a step necessary for building the economy that would be known as capitalism.8 The prevailing economy, though, was mercantilism, which held the belief of a static amount of capital in the world, and that through economic activity, if one got more, it meant that someone got less.

  IT IS WRONG TO THINK THAT WOMEN DID NOT ENGAGE IN PUBLIC AFFAIRS OR commerce in the 1700s. Names like Elizabeth Burtin and Ruth Day and Sara Knowles and Susan Phelps and Ruth Smily were frequently in the papers, organizing Alexandria, Virginia, as early as 1669.9 They also included Mary Ball Washington. After her husband’s death, she was engaged not only in child-rearing as a single mother but also in supervising large tracts of land, farms, and slaves, the buying and selling of horses, and crop management and sales.

  To be clear, it was still a male-dominated world, but women had plenty of important roles to play as well. Often, as in Mary’s case, they had their motherly duties of raising children, but they also were granted responsibilities based on their husband’s or father’s line of work. Once slaves became more common, women’s labor on the farms shrunk to labor in the house.10

  There were instances of women taking more active roles in their communities, such as becoming ferry keepers, jailers, preachers, shipwrights, spinners, and poets. Still, Abigail Adams felt the need to remind her husband, famously, to “Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors” when John Adams was to draft laws for the new country.11

  FARMING WAS THE PRIMARY INDUSTRY IN THE COLONIES IN THE 1700S. “IN the backcountry or in the districts remote from transportation, a man could buy a large tract for little money and often on credit. Going into the forest with his family, the frontier farmer built a crude shelter and began to cut down the trees, usually at first merely girdling the larger ones so they would die and let in enough sun to grow corn between the stumps. His efforts the first year or two were devoted to survival, raising enough food for subsistence.”12

  One observer wrote that American farmers were somewhat similar to Native Americans, eking out a marginal living, though the Americans could also operate as “their own carpenters and smiths.” Still, it was possible for American farmers to eventually prosper, to “in [a] few years maintain themselves and families comfortably.”13 They could in time raise themselves up and join the local society, without regard to station or church. Another writer noted that America was “one of the best places in the world for a poor man.”14

  Contrary to a popular conception of America as a vast, empty new world, land was not always widely available in eastern Virginia, so many opted for other careers. “In most villages . . . blacksmithing, milling, weaving, brickmaking, keeping a store, and sometimes operating an iron mine” were all options.15

  THE ROMANTIC, SOFT IMAGES OF COLONIAL AMERICA PORTRAYED BY BOOKS or movies in later centuries were fabrications at best, even in the rural areas. Life was often dirty and diseased in colonial America in the 1700s.

  In the summers, flies and mosquitoes were unbearable. John Smith wrote tales of Native Americans whose “bodies are all painted red, to keepe away the biting of mosquitos. They goe all naked without covering.”16 Bees and even the common housefly were found in Virginia, introduced by settlers. Thomas Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, wrote in the late 1700s that Native Americans “call them the white man’s fly, consider their approach as indicating the approach of the settlements of the whites.”17 Disease and contagion were a constant threat, with influenza and smallpox wiping out settlements. Personal hygiene was reserved for the upper classes and, even then, infrequently availed upon. It was long before the time of Louis Pasteur and his germ theory of disease.

  THERE WAS A VIBRANT LOWER TO MIDDLE CLASS IN THE MIDDLE COLONIES. “I have found them having for dinner potatoes, bacon, and buckwheat cakes,” observed one Frenchman. “For downstairs rooms, a kitchen and a large room with the farmer’s bed and cradle, and where the family stays all the time; apples and pears drying on the stove, a bad little mirror, a walnut bureau—a table—sometimes a clock; on the second floor, tiny little rooms where the family sleeps on pallets, with curtains, without furniture.”18

  There was also a small but distinct upper class that was “bound to one another, and in some colonies to the landholding gentry, by intermarriage, mutual patronage, and common business interests. They were universally recognized as ‘the better sort.’” Mary Ball Washington was part of the “better sort,” as the Washington clan was in the upper gentry. Opinions were diverse as to whether she acted like it for a widowed woman of her status. The better sort was sometimes derided as “turtle eaters.”19

  It was a time of social mobility. Shopkeepers were already prominent in colonial America, and the marketplace was open for boys to become apprenticed and then adult craftsmen. Woodworking, barrel making, leather tanning, cloth making, tailoring, shoemaking—all were possible paths for the apprentice boy. Indeed, Thomas Paine, the conscience of the Revolution, was a corset maker when not calling upon his fellow colonists to use common sense. Up in Massachusetts, the great Paul Revere was a silversmith, famous for his large bells.

  MARY PROVOKED REMARKS LATE IN LIFE BY THE STUBBORN SIMPLICITY OF her dress. It was typical of her, however, to defy the fashion and forge her own path. It was also very American.

  Such was not the case in her childhood, however. Though the Americans would have naturally been behind in European fashion with the slow speed of cargo ships, stylish clothing was still very much in vogue. The type and quality of clothing were two indicators of wealth. For the rich it was layers of complicated and ornamental dress. “The petticoats of sarcenet [had] black, broad lace printed on the bottom and before; the flowered satin and plain satin . . . with rich lace at the bottom.”20 Clothing was exported throughout the world and into Virginia. Manufacturers advertised in the Gazette any chance they got, and clothing was often for sale.

  Among one of the fashion trends during the eighteenth century was the macaroni, outlandish and over-the-top fabrics in bright colors to signify travel experience in Europe. The poem “Yankee Doodle” of around 1755 mocked the American colonists’ bastardization of the trend, thinking that a simple “feather in his hat” was enough to be called fashion.21

  The women “adorned themselves in English fashions and [spent] much time visiting back and forth over their country estates. Lavish balls and dinner parties became the subject of public notoriety, arousing the indignation of the lower classes.” Even there, class envy and class warfare were both present. Women shopped daily, as there was no refrigeration in homes, to the butcher and baker and greengrocer.22 Said Anglican minister Charles Woodmason, visiting the New World from Europe: “The mother looking as young as the daughter. . . . The men with only a thin Shirt and pair of Breeches or Trousers on. . . . The women bareheaded, barelegged and barefoot with only a thin Shift and under Petticoat.”23

  As the Revolution began, American trends tended to become more simplistic. Men’s wigs, which could be worn by any aged adult man, became less outrageous. Women’s hair and clothing shifted from imported English goods and styles to ho
memade and modest looks. It was a sign of patriotism to renounce the provocative English fashion that came from overseas. “Of course simplicity of dress was noticeable,” wrote Dorothy Dudley in her diary in 1776. “No jewels or costly ornaments—though tasteful gowns, daintily trimmed by their owner’s own fingers, were numerous.” Domestic products were in; English royalist fashions were out.24

  SLAVERY WAS VERY MUCH A PART OF THE CULTURE AND BACKGROUND OF colonial America, especially in the South, where staple crops like tobacco needed tending. At first, white indentured men and women from Europe, and later, Native Americans, toiled on the land, but indentured servants eventually worked off their status. As the indentured became “un-indentured” and developed their own small farms, the need grew for reliable, durable, and cheap (free) labor.

  After 1619—when Great Britain entered into the slave trade—some ten million African slaves were shipped to North America and South America, all the way down to Brazil. “In Virginia, during the 1680s, there were still only 3,000 slaves in a population of 70,000, but by 1756 they numbered over 100,000, about 40 percent of the population,” wrote historian James Ferguson.25 There was not just an increase of supply but an increase in demand for slaves. In agriculture, in housework, and in entertainment, “negros” or “mulattos” were sold and bargained for. One man, William Fearson of Williamsburg, asked for “an orderly Negro or Mulatto man, who can play well on the violin.” If one were to give or rent away their slave to Fearson, he noted, the master (and not the slave) “may have good wages.”26 Other slaves were carpenters or barbers.27

  There were of course runaways, which came up in every weekly newspaper. Sometimes details were provided, physical descriptions of brands or height or facial features. Sometimes these included when the individuals were last seen. All demanded they be returned for monetary reward, and one can only imagine the horror stories behind closed doors—all legal, of course, since the 1660s. “Stringent racial laws” hit the Virginia lawbooks, which were “designed to regulate white-black relations and provide planters with greater powers to discipline their slaves.” This in turn led to a greater need for slaves, as slaveowners saw them more and more as expendable property.28 One influential planter, William Byrd II, was a known abuser of slaves, even to the shock of eighteenth-century Virginia. In his diaries, as normal and mundane as saying his prayers or having breakfast, he noted the numerous times he whipped his slaves. One slave was forced to drink his own urine after wetting the bed. A certain “Jenny” was whipped for being the “whore” of another.29 Rebellions and uprisings occasionally occurred, but for the most part, slaves, over the years, unhappily adapted to their lot. A few times, conspiracies involving whites and blacks plotting mutinies were discovered but they were quickly dealt with, usually resulting in the hanging of members of both races.30