Mary Ball, his second wife, was the daughter of an English immigrant who had arrived in Virginia in the 1670s and who soon accumulated a small fortune as a planter. Joseph Ball waited until he was nearly sixty to marry, and Mary, George Washington’s mother, was born less than a year afterward. Orphaned at age twelve, she was raised thereafter by a family friend, a prosperous farmer who lived at Sandy Point on the Potomac. She was twenty-three and still living there when she met and married Gus Washington. In the early eighteenth century it was unusual for a lady in Virginia still to be single at such an advanced age; for a lady who already had inherited a modest estate to still be single past her twentieth birthday was almost unheard of.
Augustine moved his new wife to his Pope Creek home, where her first obligation centered about raising Gus’s nine-year-old daughter, Jane. Soon, however, Mary realized she would bear a child of her own, for by June, three months after the marriage, she knew she was pregnant. The next February she gave birth to a large, healthy boy.1
Neighbors dropped by in the weeks following the child’s birth to aid the Washington family, to cook and tend to little Jane, to assist with the chores until Mary was back on her feet. These were a frontier people, a group that the governor only a few weeks earlier had labeled as the most disorderly and ungovernable of his subjects.2
In this society wealth determined one’s status, and the Washingtons, owners of several thousand acres and about twenty slaves, enjoyed a loftier perch than their neighbors. But their wealth was too meager to permit them to live pretentiously. The family dwelling was small, only about twenty-four feet square. Like most others in the area their house probably was constructed of wood frame with a shingled roof, and in all likelihood it was a two-room abode, partitioned down the middle by a whitewashed mud wall. A few outbuildings—a barn and a stable, and probably a hen house, as well as a corncrib, a detached kitchen, and a few squalid cabins for the slaves—were scattered in a clearing to the rear. Because of Gus’s overseas business interests, the house was more elegantly furnished than most in this primitive area. The family owned a few nice pieces crafted in England, and some of their clothing likewise had been purchased abroad.3
George lived on Pope’s Creek for only three years, long enough for him to witness the arrival of a brother and another sister—Samuel and Betty—and to watch helplessly as his half-sister Jane died before her twelfth birthday. Then his father was ready to move. The Northern Neck was becoming a boom area and Gus, always a speculator, hoped to locate in a more advantageous spot.
Up till now, colonists had trickled into this region at a snail’s pace since it had been opened three-quarters of a century before. Everywhere else Virginia’s frontiers were being besieged by restless citizens. But not the Northern Neck, this region between the Rappahannock and the Potomac. For one thing, the earliest title to the domain had been bestowed upon friends by a king in exile (Charles II in 1649), and such circumstances inevitably resulted in a wearying, protracted battle over the legitimacy of the grant. Moreover, colonial authorities feared that the silk-stocking friends of the Crown who claimed to have received the region someday would use their influence to have the Northern Neck detached from Virginia and made into a proprietary colony; Virginia’s rulers had only to look across the Potomac to Maryland for proof that the Crown would tolerate such a colony. So Virginia did nothing to facilitate immigration across the Rappahannock, and it was not until about the time of George Washington’s birth that immigrants began to flow in considerable numbers into this region. By then the land ownership question at last had been resolved. About 6 million acres belonged to Thomas Lord Fairfax, who still lived in England. Otherwise, the Virginia Burgesses had finally completed a long overdue series of liberalizing land reforms that lowered both sale prices and property taxes in this corner of the province.4
In 1735 Gus transferred the family upriver forty miles or so, to yet another piece of his property, this on the Little Hunting Creek. Here, at Epsewasson, as it was called, he moved the family into a larger, more comfortable domicile, though it too was merely a one-and-a-half-story farmhouse. The house stood atop a bluff above the Potomac. Invisible much of the year, the mile-wide river, a languid highway that flowed from the unexplored West toward the Chesapeake and the markets and the civilization of the East, could only be seen when the dense wilderness foliage tumbled down in the late fall.
George lived here just three years before his father again yielded to the urge to move. Learning of the availability of an estate known as Ferry Farm on the west bank of the Rappahannock, Gus successfully negotiated the purchase of the property and the lease of three hundred adjoining acres. He thought it too good an opportunity to let pass. He retained Epsewasson, of course, and he left it in charge of Lawrence, George’s half brother, who had just returned from school in England. The rest of the family moved south. Ferry Farm seemed to occupy a felicitous site, close to Gus’s iron works, and just across the river from Fredericksburg, a rustic village to be sure, but a place where Gus could arrange for the formal education of his sons. His family had continued to grow. In addition to George and Sam, there now were John Augustine and Charles, both born at Epsewasson.
The family of seven, plus a domestic servant or two, moved to Ferry Farm late in 1738. They found the new house larger and more accommodating than their previous residence. This too was a frame structure, but with six rooms. Like Epsewasson, it sat atop a knoll that sloped gently down toward the river, the artery that would convey each year’s tobacco crop to market. The house bulged with family treasures, the reward of Gus’s frenetic business endeavors. Thirteen beds and twenty chairs mingled with a couch, two chests of drawers, a dining-room table, dressing table, card table, and a desk; mirrors graced various rooms, and expensive hardware adorned some of the six fireplaces. The family also owned more than a modest amount of china and silverware. Scattered to the rear of the house, in meager apertures carved out of the forest, stood the barn, dairy, kitchen, toolshed, and three or four rude cabins erected by the twenty slaves.5
In many ways George Washington’s boyhood years were quite commonplace. He hunted in the enveloping woods around his home, and he fished and swam and sailed in the narrow river nearby. He and his brothers—especially John Augustine, to whom he was closest—played the perdurable games of young people, and he frolicked with the children of the slaves until he was nine or ten. Then the striplings were separated so that one could be taught the habits of the master and the others could learn those of the bondsman.
But Washington’s youth was not identical to that of all boys in Virginia. His proximity to Fredericksburg afforded the opportunity for frequent visits to a bustling little town, and his wealth and status provided entrée to the elegant mansions of other planters in the county; moreover, his father’s money bought some formal education for him, albeit less than that provided his half brothers. What scant training he did receive probably was intended to prepare him both for the more intensive curriculum of the Appleby School and for the routine duties faced by a Virginia planter. He learned to read and write, studied penmanship, read poetry, and was schooled in the social amenities; in addition, half or more of his training was in mathematics, including geometry and trigonometry, which his teachers emphasized as a precursor to exercises in surveying. To his later chagrin he never was introduced to the mysteries of Latin or other classical languages. Some of his training was at the hands of private tutors (one of whom was a convict indentured servant), although later he was enrolled in a small school in Fredericksburg operated by an Anglican clergyman.6
His reading habits as a young man were not much different from those he exhibited as an adult. For him reading always was a utilitarian exercise, a means to self-improvement and advancement. By nature an impatient sort when inactive, Washington never enjoyed reading as a leisure pastime. As a boy he read a little poetry, a bit of history, a few political essays; he was moved most by the ancient story of Cato, which he encountered through Joseph Ad
dison’s blank verse tragedy, a drama that depicted the resolve of Cato to resist the tyranny of Caesar, or to die. But George did not pursue any subject in a systematic manner. The one book that he seems to have studied most conscientiously was the Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation. Compiled by sixteenth-century Jesuits for the instruction of young French noblemen, the Rules listed over one hundred maxims for the proper conduct of a gentleman. Some admonitions dealt with hygiene and appearance: keep fingernails and teeth clean, maintain an erect posture. Some tips showed the way to an engaging manner: neither lie nor flatter, do not laugh or talk too loudly, stand when meeting a stranger, accept all advice graciously, control your temper, speak slowly and distinctly, listen attentively when in conversation, and in public eat in moderation. The most hopeless rubes were advised not to pick their teeth with their knives, not to spit seeds into their plates, not to scratch their private parts while in public, and not to stare at the blemishes of others.7
If young George was influenced by this book, he was even more profoundly affected by Lawrence, his elegant half brother. In fact, he probably was lured to read the Rules when he compared his own rustic manners to Lawrence’s urbane demeanor. Polished and cultivated in England, Lawrence had been privy to a world that George had never seen and could not imagine. Lawrence, with his graceful, cosmopolitan habits, became the boy’s first role model, more influential even than the youngster’s parents.
Gus was too busy to devote much time to George. He provided his son with books and a tutor, and he planned to send him to England for his formal schooling. But as a father of seven, and one who chose to spend his time shuttling between his farm and his mines and his furnace, he did not overindulge this boy. The result was that young George does not appear to have been especially close to his father. In all the millions of words that he ultimately penned, George Washington never mentioned his father. He neither praised him nor damned him. It was as if he had never known his father, as if Gus, in his unremitting preoccupation with wealth, had so ignored his offspring that he ceased to matter to his son; or, perhaps, that his son, rather than live with an unpleasant reality, unconsciously repressed every memory of the father.
His mother was a different matter entirely. Mary Ball Washington was a tough, opinionated, selfish, overly protective, and possessive woman. One person who met Mary described her as “majestic and venerable”; another spoke of her “awe-inspiring air and manner” and went on to describe her as quiet, aloof, almost imperious, and very strong. A nephew of young George, a lad who frequently came to Ferry Farm, confessed that he was “ten times” more afraid of her than of his own mother. She exercised such dominion over her children that only George would really break away from her, and he succeeded only after a painful and drawn-out test of wills.8
Lacking a strong parental model, it was thus the example set by Lawrence that George found enticing. When they first met, George barely got to know his half brother. Living a substantial distance away, Lawrence seldom made the ride over Virginia’s pitiful roads to Ferry Farm. Besides, his time was consumed by the management of Epsewasson and by whatever minimal social opportunities were available at that cloistered estate. Probably lonely and bored, certainly ambitious, Lawrence was caught up in the excitement that gripped the colony in 1740 when news arrived that Britain sought to raise a three-thousand man colonial army—four hundred of whom would be procured in Virginia—for an invasion of Cartagena, part of Spain’s South American empire. Lawrence was the first in his province selected to command a company in the “American Regiment,” as Virginia designated its contingent. Lawrence was an unlikely looking soldier. His face was soft, almost effeminate; round-shouldered, slightly paunchy, looking neither muscular nor particularly hardy, he exhibited more the countenance of the aesthete than that of a robust adventurer. In Douglas Southall Freeman’s memorable phrase, he looked like the kind of person “to whom, in a crowd, a stranger would go to make an inquiry.”9
Lawrence sailed in October, leaving behind parents and friends who waited anxiously for nearly two years for his return, a wait that would have been even more agonizing had they known of the pernicious ill-fortune that haunted the expedition. Only about one in three of the colonial recruits survived the campaign. Disease set in quickly, ultimately killing men by the score each day; the Spanish defenders extirpated the others. Lawrence was one of the lucky ones. He made it back in June, 1742, to tell all that “war is horrid in fact but much more so in imagination” than in reality.10
He returned to find that Augustine, George’s other half brother, had just arrived from England. Now twenty years old, Augustine—Austin, he liked to be called—had quit school, perhaps at the behest of his father so he could manage either Ferry Farm or the iron works.11 Though closer in age to Austin than to Lawrence, George never was close to this brother. The two were of strikingly different temperaments. Not very ambitious or self-reliant, more sedentary than George, and perhaps more certain of himself, Austin was content to live the life of a planter, leaving soldiering and politics, as well as the adventure and uncertainty of high-stakes financial speculation, to others.
It was to Lawrence, a man whom he perceived as a cosmopolitan adventurer, that little George was drawn, although, at first, the elder soldier-planter scarcely had time for his ten-year-old brother. After a visit with his relatives, Lawrence settled at Epsewasson. His first act was to give the place a new name, Mount Vernon, so designated in honor of Admiral Edward Vernon, commander of the Cartagena expedition. Thereafter, he seemed to have time only for the management of an estate that had been entrusted in his absence to an indifferent overseer.
Lawrence was superintending the planting of his first crop when jolting news arrived. Gus Washington was gravely ill, stricken with “gout of the stomach.” Lawrence hurried south, but there was nothing he could do. Within hours of his arrival his father, just forty-nine years old, was dead.
When the will was probated three weeks later, Lawrence, the eldest son, received the lion’s share of the estate, including Mount Vernon. Augustine, George later remembered, got the “best part,” the lush, fertile land along Pope’s Creek in Westmoreland County. Among the children from Gus’s second marriage, George, the eldest, received the largest portion. At age twenty-one he was to acquire Ferry Farm, some land along the Aquia Creek that Gus had purchased nearly twenty years before, twenty-one hundred acres in what was called Deep Run tract, ten slaves, and three lots in Fredericksburg.12
Now independent and totally self-supporting, Lawrence married Anne Fairfax just two months after Gus’s death. When he had returned to Epsewasson in 1742, Lawrence found that Colonel William Fairfax—of the same clan that owned so much of the Northern Neck—had constructed Belvoir, a lovely manor house, on the Hunting Creek property next door. The colonel, a cousin of Lord Fairfax, had only recently arrived in Virginia, coming down from Massachusetts to act as his uncle’s agent in the sale of his lands and the collection of his quit rents. Lawrence soon knew his neighbors, and he and Anne, the colonel’s daughter, sped through a whirlwind courtship. The wedding was in June 1743.
Having married well, Lawrence had doors opened for him that otherwise surely would have remained closed. Nancy, as his bride preferred to be called, bore a dowry of four thousand acres to the marriage, but more importantly she brought along the prestige and the immense power of the Fairfax family. Soon Lawrence not only added to his landed empire but acquired two important offices: he was elected to the House of Burgesses, and he was appointed adjutant general of the Virginia militia. Meanwhile, he commenced the rebuilding of Mount Vernon, transforming it from a cottage to a small manor house; not yet a mansion, it nevertheless suited the status and habits of a rising young planter and his fashionable new bride.13
Only eleven when his father died, George still was many years away from assuming the responsibilities of a small planter. He lived most of each year with his mother, who saw that he continued his education, although n
ow with Gus gone and the estate fragmented all thoughts of schooling at Appleby were discarded. He spent a little time each year with his cousins at Chotank on Pope’s Creek, and even longer periods calling on Austin in Westmoreland County. Increasingly, too, young George longed to visit Lawrence, for life at Mount Vernon and nearby Belvoir was exotically different from any world he ever had known. An air of power and influence, of sophistication, opulence, and gentility, of the mysteries of knowledge and of faraway places, pervaded the two estates. Lawrence, already a hero to George, now must have seemed a grandee. Brave and intelligent to begin with, Lawrence, in fact, was on the verge of becoming a great planter, a man who seemed to be respected by everyone and who sat with those in the highest seat of government in the province. To young George it must have seemed that there were no worlds left for Lawrence to conquer. Indeed, that there were no worlds that his half brother could not conquer.
Lawrence Washington, by an unknown artist (ca. 1738). Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union.
When George visited Mount Vernon, he often was invited to Belvoir, close enough to be visible through the dark, bare forests in the winter months. Life at that elegant plantation took on a new dimension in 1744 when George William Fairfax, the colonel’s son, arrived following fifteen years of schooling in England. George William was seven years older than George, and with little in their backgrounds to make for compatibility, the two initially were not close. Nevertheless, young Washington observed that George William was a meticulous, urbane, sensitive, and empathetic young man, much like Lawrence. Indeed, there were many similarities in the demeanor and mannerisms of these two older men.
George continued to live with his mother in his early teenage years, but his world now was inextricably bound to that of Lawrence and his elegant neighbors. Between the ages of eleven and sixteen, in fact, his view of life changed. He grew to desire something greater than that which seemed to await him—a station as a modestly prosperous planter, albeit an unknown and a powerless one. He now knew that he wished to escape both his mother’s iron grip and the acarpous soil of Ferry Farm. He knew, too, that he yearned to be like Lawrence and George William Fairfax: Lawrence, resplendent in his scarlet uniform, revered for his courage, pandered to because of his wealth and status, the object of attention; George William, rich and powerful, a graceful man whose educated habits and tastes distinguished him from the common run of provincial planters. Young Washington had observed the beauty and the style of their milieu, and he longed to live in a world akin to theirs: to wear elegant attire, to express brilliant ideas, to enjoy refined pursuits, and to bask in the deference of others. Lawrence and George William seemed so cultivated in comparison to his own family that young Washington could not but be keenly aware of his limitations in their presence. He felt awkward and clumsy, painfully aware of his lack of refinement in the drawing room and his inarticulateness in the company of the eloquent people who gathered at these Potomac mansions.
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