George still loved the plantation. It could not be emphasized enough. “To see the work of one’s own hands,” he wrote in 1787, “fostered by care and attention, rising to maturity in a beautiful display of those advantages and ornaments which by the Combination of Nature and taste of the projector in the disposal of them is always regaling to the eye.”38
With a new year of 1786 came more duties at the plantation. But he still could not forget his old ones. On April 24, a particularly rainy Monday, he headed down to Richmond for some legal issues on land deeds as sold to him by George Mercer. He paid a stop at Fredericksburg and “dined at my mothers [sic]” before again heading out, spending the night at nearby General Alexander Spotswood’s residence.39
And even though some things continued to seem routine compared to less than a decade earlier, the fame and wonder that George continued to receive baffled him. The fame that his mother received likely baffled him even more. In May of 1786, he replied to a letter from the Marquis de Lafayette’s wife, Marie-Adrienne. It was in answer to a letter she had sent him over a year earlier, in April 1785, in which she included a postscript: “Should I dare, beg you to pay my respects to your mother, I will certainly receive, an additional pleasure, in america, to present my self in person my respectful hommage.” Clearly the Marquis had been telling his wife of all the grand people he saw and met in the United States, Mary Washington included. Whatever respect he had for her, he passed on. What an impression she must have made on the French couple.40
Now, here was George, in spring of 1786, writing from Mount Vernon in response:
“Of all the correspondencies [sic] with which I am honored,” he opened, “none has given me more pleasure than yours.” He apologized for the horrible delay in replying; as it turned out, the letter had been stuck at Bordeaux for “a considerable time” before being shipped off again to America. But the shipment took a “very circuitous” voyage, further delaying the reply.
He further apologized for being unable to visit France. He and Martha were now older, of course, and a visit would be too much. His explanation was poetic and almost bittersweet. Going into retirement again placed a sense of normalcy on him. “The noon-tide of life is now passed with Mrs Washington & myself, and all we have to do is to spend the evening of our days in tranquility, & glide gently down a stream which no human effort can ascend.” Little did Washington know that his life stream would be ending later than he presumed.
“My Mother will receive the compliments you honor her with, as a flattering mark of your attention,” he closed the letter, and “I shall have great pleasure in delivering them myself.”41
“ALL WE HAVE TO DO IS TO SPEND THE EVENING OF OUR DAYS IN TRANQUILITY . . .” If those words were true for the fifty-four-year-old planter-turned-general-turned-planter, they were even truer for the elderly Mary. In 1786, she was in Fredericksburg, and while still small in comparison to the likes of Richmond, it continued to grow steadily. The road or path between Richmond and Fredericksburg, seeing increased traffic, was ordered by the Virginia Assembly to be straightened for more convenient accessibility according to a statute in October of 1786.42
MEANWHILE, RELIGIOUS HISTORY WAS CHANGING. IN RICHMOND, A PIECE OF legislation was passed that would become a hallmark of American and global liberty. First drafted in Fredericksburg, in 1777, the call for religious freedom was a cause that Thomas Jefferson fought for dearly. It was called the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, written by the deist Jefferson.
On January 19, 1786, after years-long fights both small and large, the “act for establishing religious freedom” was signed into law. “Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free,” the preamble began. Yet government and church officials had believed it possible to govern people’s religious beliefs, even demanding monetary tithes to the Church of England and the Church of England only.
“Be it enacted,” it said, “by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.”43
The Church of England was no longer state sanctioned.
In the past couple of years, the official Anglican Church in the colonies had been going through an identity crisis. Anglican theology’s whole philosophy, settled centuries earlier under King Henry VIII, asserted that the monarch of England, be it a king or queen, was the head of the institutional church, not some foreign pope in Rome. “Defender of the Faith” was and continues to be one of the formal titles of the British monarch.
The Americans had a dilemma: The War of Independence refused to recognize the Crown as the political and earthly leader. What was to happen to the Crown as its spiritual leader? The Revolution itself could have been classified as a holy war, changing the very fabric of the country not just socially or politically but religiously. George himself demanded that chaplains were needed throughout the Continental Army, the most impressive of which to him was Abiel Leonard of Connecticut. John Adams called the Bible “the most Republican book” he had read, inspiring many for truths. Thomas Paine, who was no friend of Christianity, still quoted from the Bible in Common Sense.44
The Episcopal Church, breaking away from the Church of England, was established. Its first bishop, Samuel Seabury, was consecrated in Scotland.
Mary and George did not really care for the exact doctrinal differences between Episcopalianism and Anglicanism. George resigned from the vestry of Truro Parish in 1784, a move that Mary Thompson, historian at Mount Vernon, believed indicated that Washington “could no longer promise to be subject to the doctrine and discipline of the Anglican Church” after leading such a grand rebellion. Pohick Church in Lorton, Virginia, of which his father was vestryman, was expanded in 1767. Washington had surveyed the land and contributed to its finances and construction. To resign from its vestry was not a small move.45 To Mary, whose faith continued steadfastly, it would not make any difference, certainly. She would continue to go to Saint George’s Church in Fredericksburg whether it was Anglican or Episcopalian. Theologically, it was the same. The Book of Common Prayer was similarly retained by both churches.
AS 1786 CAME TO A CLOSE, SO DID ANOTHER CHAPTER OF AMERICA’S LIFE. The year 1787 would be unlike 1786, unlike 1785, unlike 1784. The country had been going through creative turmoil. As Washington tried to adjust to normalcy, his nation would be plagued by rebellions, exploited weaknesses as befitting a flawed confederacy, debt, and incompetence. The Annapolis Convention tried to change that, but to little real immediate effect. By the end of 1786, the Seventh Confederation Congress was under way, again returning to New York. (Philadelphia, Princeton, Annapolis, and Trenton had all been previous locations.) The Northwest Territory, including the Ohio Valley that had been fought over decades earlier, was again the center of tension as the United States claimed ownership of Indian-controlled lands.
Would the country he desperately fought for, and so many men died for, itself fail? Was that his destiny?
Mary, in Fredericksburg, perhaps did not care. Or perhaps she didn’t even know. Political misgivings were never her forte. And she wouldn’t need to know or care. She lived all her life worrying only about her son’s safety. Since there was no war, there was no issue requiring her to stay up at night. She would tend to her garden and live on.
The year 1787 would be destined to be a year of a second revolution, in ways different from the first a decade earlier. Instead of a bloody revolution, it would be a political one, a legislative one.
In 1787, this new convention would convene to draft the Constitution of the United States of America. Quite literally it was a new chapter in the country’s history.
Mary, too, entered a new phase
of life. It was her last.
As her country was beginning a rebirth, Mary was dying.
Chapter 12
Honored Madam
THE LAST YEARS OF MARY BALL WASHINGTON
1787‒1788
“Age is a Disease, and the decay of nature . . .”
I am an old almanack quit[e] out of date.”1 So Mary Ball Washington wrote touchingly to her son John Augustine around 1781. Just eight years later, that old “almanack” would go out of print.
By 1787, Mary was at the remarkable age of seventy-nine. Life expectancy was short in colonial America, generally around the midfifties, though the statistic was skewed considerably due to infant and child mortality throughout that time period. Despite that, it was higher in the 1700s than in the 1600s, and historian Daniel Blake Smith, who studied this data, conceded that giving simple raw numbers “is too extreme because it indicates” that people died in their fifties and no older. Each stage of life marked a milestone in survival; if one survived to twenty, some Virginia men were expected to live another 28.8 years. If they reached fifty, they were expected to live another 7.7 years. And so on.2
Mary’s age was somewhat unusual for the time, but not unique throughout the colonies. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, by 1787, was eighty-one, and would go on to live another three years. Thomas Jefferson lived to be eighty-three. John Adams lived to be ninety.
This was no small feat, either. For Mary, disease and childbirth could have taken her at any time.
THE YEAR 1787 WAS NOT ONLY IMPORTANT FOR THE GRAND THIRTEEN United States, but for George Washington himself. Early February, he laid down the law against his mother.
It was a disturbing point for him. Only a month earlier, in January, he lost his brother John Augustine. Mary had now outlived three of her children, including baby Mildred so many years before. John was about fifty-one years of age, near the same age at which his own father had died. For a third time, Mary was to go about her days knowing that another of her children had died before her, an event no mother would want to experience. This was the beloved “Johnne,” as she affectionately called him, her fourth child. Only George, Betty, and Charles were now left of the original six.
Prior to his death, in an undated letter, she had written to John Augustine a plea for help: “I am a going [sic] fast,” she wrote, “and it be time as hear I am borring a Little Corn no Corn in the Cornhous.” She continued, “I Never Lived soe por in my Life [and] was it not for Mrs. French and your Sister Lewis I should be almost starvd.”3 It was a “legitimate” plea, according to Michelle Hamilton, manager of the Mary Washington House, as Virginia that year endured a particularly bad bout of crops that even hit George.4
Now, with John Augustine, the “mediator” of the relationship, as historian James Flexner called him, gone, there were “open fireworks.”5 These fireworks were often more like cannon fire, though.
George wrote an emotional letter.
After saying that 15 guineas would be delivered to Mary via John Dandridge, Martha’s nephew, Washington got to the heart of the matter. It was poignant. According to her son, Mary had asked George Augustine Washington, her grandson and the son of Charles and nephew of the former general, for money, in a lost letter that read presumably as many of her other letters.
“I have now demands upon me,” he said in a lengthy and angry note to Mary, dated February 15, “for more than 500£[,] three hundred and forty odd of which is due for the tax of 1786; and I know not where, or when I shall receive one shilling with which to pay it.”
Mount Vernon over the past year had been a failure, with no wheat or tobacco or any sort of crop coming in. The corn Washington had grown that year was of horrible quality, and even he admitted that he found the taste repulsive. He asked others to pay him back money that they owed, and, in his view, they refused, taunting him to take them to court, which was “like doing nothing.”
How was he to pay the taxes? How was he to live?
He blamed her.
“It is really hard upon me when you have taken every thing you wanted from the Plantation by which money could be raised—When I have not received one farthing, directly nor indirectly from the place for more than twelve years if ever—and when, in that time I have paid, as appears by Mr Lund Washingtons account against me (during my absence) Two hundred and Sixty odd pounds, and by my own account Fifty odd pounds out of my own Pocket to you.” Even the Little Falls Quarter plantation on the Rappahannock, legally Mary’s but leased to George, saw all its profits going to the elderly woman.
“I am viewed,” he said, “as a delinquent[,] & considered perhaps by the world as unjust and undutiful Son.” Word traveled fast when a son supposedly neglected his mother.
Because of the guilt she had apparently imposed on her eldest son, which he clearly saw now as a final straw after many years and decades, he offered her some advice: sell or rent out your slaves, sell the land, move in with “one of your Children.” (Washington, when writing this down, perhaps was hoping she wouldn’t pick him, hoping that Mary, if she took the advice, would pick Betty or John; he had previously spoken to John about it, but it wasn’t to be.) Moving to Mount Vernon, though, would do no good; people came and went, and she would be obliged to greet each and every one, every day, and the relative isolation of the plantation would have her feeling trapped. Moving with Charles or Betty “would relieve you entirely from the cares of this world, and leave your mind at ease to reflect, undisturbedly on that which aught [sic] to come.”
This, he continued, was “the only means by which you can be happy.”
He closed the letter, “I am honored Madam, Yr most dutiful and affe[ctionate] Son, G. Washington.”6
She did not take his advice. She never left her Fredericksburg house.
A WEEK BEFORE THAT FATEFUL LETTER TO MARY, THE MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE again wrote to his American friend-in-arms. It concerned French international relations with Russia and other such matters. He ended it: “Adieu, My Most Beloved General, Be pleased to present My Best Respects to Mrs Washington, Mrs Stuart, Your Respected Mother, all your family.”7
ASIDE FROM FINANCIAL AND FAMILIAL WOES, THERE WAS OTHER STRESS IN Washington’s life. In late 1786, he had learned he was to represent Virginia, along with six others, at the upcoming Philadelphia convention. He had gone so far as to decline his appointment, and James Madison, ever vigilant, scolded him. “My name,” George wrote to John Jay, “was put there contrary to my desire and remains there contrary to my desire.” Friends on both sides of the debate—some demanding he attend, some cautioning its legal nature—weighed in, and so Washington deliberated until March 28, when he wrote to Governor Edmund Randolph.
He accepted his appointment.8
MARY WASHINGTON, APPROACHING EIGHTY YEARS, WAS GROWING FRAIL. Certainly the cane she carried was evidence of weakened knees and bones. The lack of children in her company perhaps made her more bitter to youth.
She probably found comfort in either her beloved Bible or her ever-reliable Contemplations, Moral and Divine, by Sir Matthew Hale, a work she had had for decades. (A copy of Contemplations sits in the Mary Washington House in Fredericksburg; another is at Mount Vernon.)
Contemplations delves into Christ, morals, religion, faith. The fear of God, the mediation of the Lord’s Prayer, and how to keep Sunday holy are all featured in the work. And old age was often considered as well. When Mary read the book in the 1780s, as she continued to age, she would read Hale’s advice, meditating on what he said. To Hale, old age, in his own words, “is a Disease, and the decay of nature, heat and moisture, doth in time bring the oldest Man to his end.”9 Everyone dies, everyone ages. In the Garden of Eden, of course, humanity was physically immortal, with no disease or illness or frailty. But after the Fall, humanity was resigned to a more pessimistic memento mori.
According to Hale, Mary was to be humble and not to brag about having wit, memory, prudence, or intelligence. While God gave her all she had, she should not brag. “Thou
art but a temporary owner of them,” he wrote. “If thou live to old age (a thing that naturally all Men desire) that will abate, if not wholly antiquate, thy Wit, Learning, Parts; and it is a foolish thing for a Man to be proud of that which he is not sure to keep while he lives.”10 The Book of Proverbs said clearly of pride: “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Mary’s faculties, whatever she may have had as she read the book, would soon be gone. She should not be proud of that which she would lose.
He continued, many pages later, a point he wanted to emphasize, “How brittle and unstable a thing thy Wits, thy Parts, thy Learning is. Though old Age may retain some broken moments of thy Wit and Learning thou once hadst, yet the floridness and vigor of it must then decay and gradually wither, till very old Age make thee a Child again, if thou live to it.” Disease may strike, he said, at any moment, rendering your pride “under [its] mercy.”11
Similarly, worldly possessions and worldly enjoyment will diminish. Friends will die. People will leave. You will be alone. “In the tract of long Life, a Man is sure to meet with more Sickness, more Crosses, more loss of Friends and Relations, and over-lives the greatest part of his external comforts, and in old Age becomes his own Burthen.”12
Mary understood this clearly. Three of her children had died already. Her husband was long gone, as well as her mother and father. Her son-in-law Fielding too. Her neighbor and doctor Hugh Mercer was killed a decade earlier. Anyone she knew from her first years at Ferry Farm would be long gone. And as she continued to live, so there would be more.
MARY’S OTHER FAVORITE BOOK, THE BIBLE, OFFERED HER SOME COMFORT IN her aged years—comfort from Hale’s depressing words.
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