Mary Ball Washington

by Craig Shirley

  The view itself was spectacular, and purely American, however, with an overlook to the grand Potomac River, the shore of colonial Maryland visible on the other side. It was surrounded by fig trees and vines, shrubs, and flowers.60 The house was mounted on a hill twenty feet in elevation, allowing surrounding fields and marshes to dominate. A farm road going northwest passed the family cemetery, where George’s grandfather and great-grandfather were buried, eventually ending at the Potomac River itself.

  HIS BIRTHPLACE HAS BECOME ALMOST A SHRINE FOR THE AMERICAN RELIGION. Indeed, James Thomas Flexner noted that had Washington’s birth “taken place in classical times, surely some prodigy would have been initiated from Olympus: a snake sent down to be strangled by the hero in his cradle, or at least a weird clap of thunder.”61 Centuries later, many see George Washington’s birth as a spiritual day of observance. In commemoration of the centennial of his birth, sculptor Horatio Greenough, commissioned by the United States government, created a massive eleven-foot-high sculpture of Washington, right arm raised and finger extended upward. He sits on a chair—or a throne, depending on one’s point of view of the first president. In his left hand is a sheathed sword. It’s classical Roman and classical Greek in style, looking more like Zeus or a sculpture of a Roman emperor. The imposing larger-than-life sculpture sits overlooking the west end of the west wing of the National Museum of American History.

  MARY WASHINGTON HAD FIVE MORE CHILDREN WITH AUGUSTINE, SOMETIMES with hardly a break. George was born in early 1732, according to the New Style of the calendar. In 1733 came his sister, Elizabeth “Betty” Washington, who married Fielding Lewis in 1750. In late 1734 came Samuel Washington, then John Augustine in 1736. Charles Washington, George’s youngest brother, was born in May of 1738. Elizabeth and Samuel were also names of the Eskridge clan and relatives of George; it can be presumed, if she named her firstborn after George himself, that she named her others after the wife and children of Eskridge as well, if not her own siblings.

  Finally, there was Mildred, born June 21, 1739. She died a mere infant, at sixteen months of age on October 23, 1740.

  With each pregnancy came the risk of childhood mortality. George, or any of the children, could have died before even seeing the light of day, whether through complications of birth or being stillborn or miscarried. In 1771, one of the twins born to a couple in the Chesapeake region “hanged himself in the navelstring.” Landon Carter, the son of Robert “King” Carter of Virginia, saw everyone in his house “in a great fright and [the mother, Landon’s daughter-in-law] almost in dispair [sic]. The child was dead and the womb was fallen down and what not.”62 This easily could have occurred in the Washington household.

  Likewise, Mary herself could have simply passed away, leaving Augustine a widower once again. The high death rate among childbearing women could have easily killed Mary in these seven years, with all the pregnancies being so close together.

  MARY WAS NO LONGER A BALL—SHE WAS NOW A WASHINGTON. SHE WAS NO longer a maiden—she was a mother. With her marriage and the birth of her first child, Mary’s life entered a new phase and new chapter that, though common among all women, nonetheless affected her. And though her marriage to Augustine lasted twelve years—he died in 1743—this was a life-changing and history-changing union. We know of Mary not as a maiden Ball or the “Rose of Epping Forest”—but as a mother, of George Washington.

  And that changed everything.

  Chapter 5

  In the Shadow of the Empire

  THE EARLY MOTHERHOOD OF MARY BALL WASHINGTON

  1732‒1738

  “A baby of unusual heft.”

  What would it have been like if George Washington was born not in Virginia, but in his ancestral England? For a time, some thought he was. Pamphlets had been written, claiming that the Father of America was in fact English, placing a greater emphasis on breaking with his native land.1 This was a direct contradiction of a vast majority of accounts, and what proof they offered was shortly swept away. George Washington Parke Custis wrote a letter in 1851 to the Boston Evening Transcript in response to those who claimed he was born on English soil. He held nothing back: “Lord Byron wrote of an age of bronze, but we live in an age of brass; for surely the very idea that Washington was born in England is too monstrous an absurdity to be brazened to the world in the nineteenth century.” He considered it insulting to both his step-grandfather and his country to even suggest such a thing.2 Parson Weems, who brought to us the myths of chopping down cherry trees in the first hagiographical biography of the first president, shrugged off the idea as well, arguing that George Washington was great not because of his false English birth, but because of his actual American birth.3

  Still, it raises the question: How would George have grown? For one, his education may have been phenomenally different. The education in, say, London would been much more theoretical than what George actually received in Virginia, perhaps dwelling on law or theology. Plantation management and surveying were more of an emphasis in the colonies and not in Old England.

  More important, an English-born George would have, perhaps, been raised in an English culture, not a colonial culture, where the troubles of taxes and Indians and French colonies were only a faraway problem, not a crisis experienced firsthand.

  All that said, George did spend his first few years very much under the influence of the British Empire. He lived in Britain’s prize colony, attended the Anglican church, and was raised in a world defined by his privilege and pedigree.

  AS IT IS, GEORGE NEVER DID WRITE ABOUT HIS EARLY LIFE. IF HE HAD, WE might have been reading even now of his infancy and childhood with colorful, sharp, and personal anecdotes that would have brought realism to the otherwise larger-than-life man. Mary’s influence during these years was probably more spiritual than practical, as she guided her children’s religious upbringing. The first years of George’s life would invariably affect his outlook on the world, but most important his character. In John Stevens Cabot Abbott’s biography of Washington, he wrote, “Trained by such parents, and in such a home, George, from infancy, developed a noble character. . . . Happiness in childhood is one of the most essential elements in the formation of a good character. This child had before him the example of all domestic and Christian virtues.”4

  The closest thing we have to an account of Washington’s childhood is the long-ago authorized biography from David Humphreys, an aide-de-camp and friend of Washington. Still, this work had some factual errors and gaps, such as Washington’s own birthday and year, which was cited as 1734. Several hints were given to George’s childhood in it, though: He was raised with a typical eighteenth-century education for the upper class. He learned numbers, geometry, mathematics, geography, history, and humanities. Very early on, he became interested in dancing, fencing, and horseback riding—and military exercises were of particular interest. It was typical for a boy of his age, extending into the teenage years.5 It was not remarkably different from any other planter’s childhood. The first twenty years of his life in Humphreys’s biography got no more than five paragraphs. For a man about whom many want to know every facet of life, they are left teased with generalities.

  Compared to, say, the youth of Benjamin Franklin, a wordsmith and reader himself, who devoted several chapters of his autobiography to his own childhood—describing his relationship to his mother and father and siblings, as well as his love of reading and education—Washington’s childhood is lacking in detail in written works. The Father of His Country never wrote an autobiography.

  Born over twenty years before George, in 1706 in Boston, Franklin in his own works offered an insight into his childhood. “From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books,” he had written. “Pleased with the Pilgrim’s Progress, my first collection was of John Bunyan’s works in separate little volumes.”6

  However, differences in age and location were fundamental enough that one can’t compare the childhoo
d of one Founding Father, such as Franklin, to that of George Washington.

  Perhaps other autobiographies, such as that of John Adams, born October 1735, only three years after George, would work. But again, the cultural differences of Massachusetts, with its Puritan emphasis and background, could not be compared to rural, Anglican Virginia. Adams’s profession as a lawyer—and he was a graduate of Harvard University, to boot—also was radically different from Washington’s background.

  Perhaps the life of Thomas Jefferson, born a relatively few eleven years after George, near Charlottesville, Virginia, would be more appropriate in terms of piecing together the life of an early Virginian infant to a Virginian plantation owner. He—Jefferson—was born in April of 1743 to Peter and Jane Jefferson, who had ten children, and by the age of five was taught by Reverend William Douglas of Saint James Northam Parish, Goochland County, Virginia. By age nine, he was taught Latin, the lingua franca of the educated world. Jefferson’s father died when he was fourteen.7

  In many ways Thomas and George, contemporaries, grew up in similar households. Their fathers died when they were teenagers, and they were left with plantations in rural Virginia. Yet still we see a diverging commonality during their childhoods, and no two Founding Fathers—no matter how close in age or place—could accurately be compared.

  Neither Augustine Washington nor Mary Washington kept diaries. Letters of contemporaries certainly existed, sharing a human element for many of the families, but, again, it was difficult to re-create these early years of George’s life.

  BEFORE HIS FATHER’S DEATH, BEFORE THEIR MOVE TO LITTLE HUNTING Creek, before their move to Fredericksburg, before much of what defined George Washington as George Washington—his adolescence, his striving for independence—there was the newborn George, firstborn child of Mary and Augustine Washington.

  He was described as “a baby of unusual heft,” according to Ron Chernow.8 These first years were the most vulnerable for the young George, as was true of all babies of this era. Diseases all but eradicated today were rampant and dangerous to the immune system of the young. In the eighteenth century, one-tenth of infants died before they were a year old, and two-fifths died before they were six.9 (To compare, infant mortality in the United States today is less than six deaths per thousand births, or less than 0.6 percent.10) But the average was sometimes more disastrous in reality, and statistics changed from place to place and from location to location. Samuel Sewall, known primarily as one of the judges during the Salem witch trials in the late 1600s, and his first wife, Hannah, saw seven of their fourteen children die before they were two, and another was stillborn. Another New England woman, Mary Vial Holyoke, who married in 1759, had twelve children in the first twenty-three years of marriage—she was pregnant for about a third of these years. Eight of her children died before they were three, with all but one dying at birth or infancy. “Mary Holyoke had more pregnancies and suffered more child deaths than her average contemporary, but her story presents a poignant example of the extreme physical trials some women endured.”11 Indeed, Mary Washington’s last child was one of those claimed in death during infancy as well, showing even the Washington-Ball bloodline was not immune for the times.

  FRENCH MEDIEVALIST PHILIPPE ARIèS, IN HIS PIONEERING WORK (MAINLY considered the first) of the history of childhood, Centuries of Childhood (1962), argued that during the medieval era of Europe, the notion of what “childhood” was did not exist. In an era of high infant and child mortality, perhaps it did not matter. Horrible as it sounds, an infant was as expendable as any, and the idea that “childhood” was separate from “young adulthood” would have raised a few eyebrows.12

  Centuries later, the development of childhood became more sophisticated, including clothing that distinguished the youth from adults. This undoubtedly came from philosophers like John Locke, whose 1689 work An Essay Concerning Human Understanding argued that there is “little reason to think [newborn children] bring many ideas into the world with them.” Children weren’t just mini adults, he argued.13 Yet parents were still uncertain how to treat them. Historian John F. Walzer called it “a period of ambivalence” in which birthdays for infants and children were not celebrated, and, as we see with the simple facts-only notes of the Washington family Bible and various diaries, were mentioned almost in passing.14 One wouldn’t see George celebrate his first birthday with candles, cake, and presents.

  But it wasn’t out of the question for Mary, or any mother for that matter, to have such affections toward their children. Nancy Shippen Livingston of Pennsylvania wrote several diary entries absolutely gushing over her newborn daughter Peggy. “My sweet Child,” she wrote one May day, “my whole soul is wrapp’d up in you!” Days later, she wrote, “I allmost [sic] devour’d it with kisses . . . I spend so much of my time in caressing & playing with Peggy that I allmost [sic] forget I have any thing else to do.”15 It was a sweet private moment between daughter and mother—one that Mary Ball Washington may have very well felt toward her newborn and first son, as well.

  AMONG THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE EARLIER CENTURY AND GEORGE’S time was the clothing of children and infants. Baby George—and his brothers and sisters too—wore clothing akin to a dress, with a bodice fastened around the back. For the first three months of his life, George may have been swaddled tightly, but as he matured in the following years, he would have been dressed more like an adult. He also may have worn stays as an infant, a sort of unisex precursor to the corset, designed for proper posture.16

  MARY, MEANWHILE, COULD NOT PART WITH HER APRON—A PIECE OF CLOTHING as familiar then as now, with the same purpose, from tending to the children to cleaning to cooking. Opulent aprons were embroidered with fabrics and rich flowery designs.17 More intimately, undergarments were unlikely to be seen until the nineteenth century, with the nearest garment to the skin being white linen or cotton or a shift—which also acted as sleepwear. Since Mary was prosperous enough, some shifts (nightgowns, we would call them now), would have been exclusively for the evening. Formally, gowns of silk would have dominated Mary’s apparel, with gores and gussets—little inserts to fluff out the dress—abounding.18

  MARY WAS PROUD OF HER SON. “BEFORE [GEORGE] WAS A MONTH OLD SHE bundled him up, too full of pride to wait another day, and drove away to show him to her favorite cousins, the James Balls of Bewdley,” wrote historian Nancy Turner.19 Located in Lancaster County, that house in Bewdley was burned to the ground in 1917, leaving only one chimney from a one-and-a-half-story building. James Ball, born 1678, was the third son of William Ball, the brother of Mary’s father, Joseph. During his nearly eighty-year-long life, the cousin to Mary Ball was married thrice (as was his son, James Jr.).20

  An apocryphal letter from Augustine made its way to author Moncure Conway through a Washington descendant, saying that, as Conway noted, “He and his wife will make [a certain ‘Mr. Jeffries’] a visit on their way to Moratico,” where James Ball lived, and that “they will bring with them their ‘baby George.’”21 Historian and Washington expert Douglas Freeman was skeptical of the letter itself due to its second- or thirdhand nature. A trip to James Ball would have occurred, at some point, but taking a long-distance trip with a newborn baby at the edge of the winter season would have been a risk Mary and Augustine would not want to take.22 Certainly, showing newborns and young children to extended family was not an uncommon practice, and sometimes, in letters recorded, the newborn children were doted on more by the uncles and aunts and grandparents than the actual fathers and mothers!23

  THE CHILDREN OF MARY BALL WASHINGTON, GEORGE INCLUDED, MAY never have been nursed from her. Often, especially in rich families, the infant would have been fed from a wet nurse, either an informal or a legitimate community position, and sometimes by a slave. Though the New England Puritans in the early eighteenth century objected to their use on religious and practical grounds, the upper class of English Virginians continued to employ nurses. They were seen as necessary in a time of deaths during childbirth,
as a healthy woman who was lactating may not have been so susceptible to illness as the mother herself, at that time.24 A woman’s time needed consideration as well, and the wife of a plantation owner did not sit idly by while the man did all the work—she was to manage it equally. “Contrary to popular imagination, an early–eighteenth century homemaker of moderately prosperous means spent little time sewing dresses or baking pies.” To breastfeed—much less breastfeed more than one child—was time-consuming, and was more likely from someone who was hired to do so.25

  The wet nurse was also, far less practically, a cultural position; a mother of those times to breastfeed her own children would be a debasement, something that high-class or proper women would never consider. Landon Carter, the son of Virginian colonist Robert “King” Carter, called his own daughter “such a vile, obstinate woman” for her choice to breastfeed.26

  Advertisements were posted many times in this age, specifically about hiring a wet nurse. One in December 1775 asked for a wet nurse with no children; another, in April 1777, a wet nurse “with a good breast of milk,” and if she had child, she could not bring it in.27

  In the case of Mary, more than likely, the wet nurse she employed was a slave of the plantation, an increasingly common duty through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century for the South.28 The irony that they owned other human beings yet trusted them to feed their children may have been lost on them all. It was a simple fact in those days that no one questioned. If a slave wet-nursed George, that was how things were done.

  Mary’s rapid deliveries—George in 1732, Betty in 1733, Samuel in 1734, John Augustine in 1736, Charles in 1738, and Mildred in 1739—could have pointed to an inability to use breastfeeding as a contraceptive.

  GEORGE WASHINGTON WAS CLOSE TO TWO MONTHS OLD IN APRIL OF 1732, when he was baptized.