Mary Ball Washington

by Craig Shirley

  These were the years in which every decision made by Mary could alter his path, or his career, away from the future generalship of the Continental Army and the future presidency of the United States of America. Whether Mary intended it or not, these years were to shape the future for George.

  By extension, they were to shape the future of the colonies.

  AUGUSTINE WASHINGTON WAS BURIED AT THE BRIDGES CREEK PROPERTY, later called Wakefield, shortly after his death, in the family crypt. Today a crypt stands together with the vaults of his parents and grandparents, bearing the name of the father of George. Over thirty of the Washington family members’ grave markers still stand there.

  Augustine’s will was probated in early May of 1743 by Lawrence, his eldest, placing the will in legal effect and thus lawfully allowing Mary to have the control of his property. Their children who had not come of age were now under Mary’s jurisdiction. She was left with full custody of the children, as well as the property that they inherited. This was not an unusual move in the eighteenth century. The most challenging issue was how to afford the children, with education being a priority in many husbands’ wills. “Raising children alone could be an expensive and difficult responsibility for a widow,” wrote historian Daniel Smith.7

  THE IMMEDIATE EFFECT OF THE DEATH OF AUGUSTINE WAS APPARENT, AS Mary was forced to pull George out of his formal education. Both Lawrence and Augustine Jr., George’s older half siblings, received formal education in England, at the same Appleby School that their father attended. Child George met them both when the two brothers returned sometime in 1738, when the Washingtons were isolated in Little Hunting Creek. Esteemed historian Douglas Freeman noted that George “quickly made a hero of Lawrence,” who had the “bearing and manners that captivated” the young impressionable boy.8 Indeed, it later became evident how that hero worship and emulation applied to the teenage George as he matured.

  Mary could not afford to send George to England, whether or not she wanted to, considering the conflicts that plagued Europe. During the 1740s, England was in the midst of a war with the French, Spanish, Bavarian, Swedish, Russian, and other monarchies and dukedoms. It would be called the War of the Austrian Succession and would end in 1748. It was a complicated series of battles and conflicts over whether Maria Theresa, daughter of the deceased emperor Charles VI, had the right to lay claim over Austria. As continental as the conflict seemed, England was hit hard in 1745 by an insurrection of Jacobites, who demanded the restoration of the Stuart dynasty, whose army invaded England to the panic of many. Ultimately, the Jacobites were defeated in 1746. (Among the possible rebels was Hugh Mercer, friend of Washington, physician, apothecary, and surgeon, who fled to the colonies but settled in Fredericksburg, Virginia, decades later.)

  Mary may have been aware of all that was happening and decided England was no place for her young, eleven-year-old boy. Surely if it wasn’t appropriate for him, it wasn’t for her other sons, either. Samuel was nine years old by the time of his father’s death; John Augustine, seven; and Charles, five. John Augustine and Charles were still too young to think about formal education, but the situation in Europe only deteriorated in the next decade.

  Mary perhaps saw no need for formal education overseas, with George’s older half siblings already having completed their schooling. Her own education was uninspiring, being only average—or worse—for a woman in the early eighteenth century in Virginia. In the years following, wrote Nancy Turner, “though more attention was being paid, by this time, to the matter of education, opportunities and resources were still meagre in the colonies. People continued to regard knowledge as a gift rather than an attainment.”9

  Scant facts exist about the education of George Washington. Even fewer exist for his younger siblings. But there was some education, and certainly it was not equal to the expense or the extent of that of his older brothers. The instructor was a sexton of a local parish, named Hobby, rumored to be a former convict, who had arrived from England with Augustine. For the next two years, George was taught by a private tutor, Williams, farther north by Popes Creek. Upon returning to Fredericksburg in 1738, he and his four younger siblings were instructed by Reverend James Marye. A Frenchman, Marye in 1726 renounced Catholicism and his Jesuit priesthood education, fleeing to England, where he married Letitia Staige, sister of the rector at Saint George’s Parish in Fredericksburg. Soon after 1728, Marye and his wife arrived in Virginia, where he was a minister for French Protestants. He was deemed popular enough to be assigned to Saint George’s Parish in October 1735.10

  Bishop William Meade, a century later, said that “Mr. Marye was a worthy exception to a class of clergy that obtained in Virginia in olden time. So far as we can learn, he was a man of evangelical views and sincere piety. We have seen a manuscript sermon of his on the religious training of children, which would do honour to the head and heart of any clergyman, and whose evangelical tone and spirit might well commend it to every pious parent and every enlightened Christian.”11 Under Marye’s tutelage, George was taught the basic education and morals needed for the time. The only authorized biographer during Washington’s life, David Humphreys, wrote that “he was betimes instructed in the principles of grammar, the theory of reasoning, on speaking, the science of numbers, the elements of geometry, & the highest branches of mathematics, the art of mensuration,” among other studies.12

  When George was thirteen, only a short two years after his father’s death, he learned surveying, a necessary skill in the Virginian planter’s life. He was also learning geography and geometry, without which surveying landscape would be impossible.

  “SURVEYING,” he wrote in August 1745, in what was suggested to be his earliest writing, in clear, elegant script, “Is the Art of Measuring Land and it consists of 3 parts. 1st. The going round and Measuring a Piece of Wood Land. 2d Plotting the Same and 3d To find the Content thereof and first how to Measure a Piece of Land.”

  This same schoolbook, in his geography lesson, contained a list of the major colonies, provinces, and islands of North America. This includes “Colofornia,” “Porto Rico,” and “the Caribbee Iselands.”13

  THE EDUCATION THE YOUNGER WASHINGTON CHILDREN RECEIVED WAS INFERIOR in both quality and quantity to that of Augustine’s first children. Take, for example, the knowledge of Latin or Greek. There were no in-depth lessons for George or the others. What use would the language of the ancient Romans or Greeks be to plot a piece of land? Would Cicero have helped him when measuring the frontier? Certainly not. The skills he learned were egalitarian. This was used against George decades later when Reverend Jonathan Boucher, the fierce Loyalist and former tutor of George’s stepson John Parke Custis, wrote with a hint of elitism that George “like most people thereabouts at that time, had no other education than reading, writing and accounts.”14 How infuriating to the Loyalists and royalists that a simple farmer, in their eyes, with no college education, was leading this revolution. George’s education stopped when he was fifteen, a mere teenager, typical for the time.

  How, too, George and his younger siblings would have changed had his father not died or had his mother, Mary, decided not to keep them in Virginia. Had he been educated in England, he would have come to sympathize with the European way of thinking. Perhaps seeing London and the House of Parliament and St. James’s Palace would have struck him not as excessive and authoritative, but as a rich and proud display of power for the mighty British Empire, especially against the Spanish or French.

  This was the first of many of Mary’s decisions to shape him. Per Jared Sparks, “There never was a great man, the elements of whose greatness might not be traced to the original characteristics or early influence of his mother.”15

  THE INTERVENING YEARS, FROM 1743 AT THE DEATH OF AUGUSTINE, TO THE year 1758 when George Washington resigned from the Virginia militia in the French and Indian War, were ultimately what shaped the man to become the rebellious tactician and general who the war-torn colonies sorely needed decades later, in
the opinions of many, including historians Douglas Freeman and Ron Chernow.

  This decade shaped him more than any other in the antebellum colonies. Not just because of his war experience in Ohio or the failed Braddock Expedition, or his experience in surveying, or the budding relationship with a woman named Martha Dandridge, but also through his relationship with his mother.

  “Saddled with responsibility for the four younger siblings, the boy was hostage to her whims and steely will. . . .”16

  IT WOULD BE A BLUNDER TO TALK ABOUT GEORGE’S UPBRINGING WITHOUT mentioning his meticulous copying of 110 maxims of civility. The work, currently in the Library of Congress, is titled Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation. It was a collection of one-sentence advice for formal and social events and good manners that young George clearly took to heart. George had written the rules in his schoolbook when he was a young teenager; the ten-page exercise, even when taken alone, provides a peek into his character.

  1. Every action in company ought to be with some sign of respect to those present. . . .

  8. Let your discourse with men of business be short and comprehensive. . . .

  11. Shift not yourself in the sight of others nor gnaw your nails. . . .

  15. Mock not, nor jest at any thing of importance; break no jests that are sharp-biting, and if you deliver any thing that is witty and pleasant, abstain from laughing thereat yourself. . . .

  23. Utter not base and frivolous things among grave and learned men; nor very difficult questions or subjects among the ignorant; nor things hard to be believed. . . .

  24. Be not immodest in urging your friend to discover a secret. . . .

  39. Let your recreations be manful, not sinful.

  And so on, for over one hundred items.17 These rules were adopted from French Jesuits at the end of the sixteenth century, who were connected to one of young George’s own teachers, James Marye.

  “What, then, made Washington the greatest man of this great generation?” asked an article in the Daily Signal in 2015. “It was his character.” He was autonomous, able to make quick decisions on rationality and not on “undisciplined passion, whether a personal passion, like pride, or an intellectual passion.”18 And though this same article says he self-taught these virtues, it was his mother and older half brother who planted the seeds.

  As influential as his mother’s devotional texts were when he was young, especially Sir Matthew Hale’s Contemplations, Moral and Divine (he kept it in his library with his own bookplate), these short teachings stuck with him. Perhaps Mary imparted some of these wisdoms and manners to the little boy, to maintain the status of the Washington family. His own maxims were published in book form mere decades after his death, taking phrases from letters or speeches, and compiled according to topic by scholars; his book was a clear mirror of these rules.19

  A TALE AS TOLD BY GEORGE WASHINGTON PARKE CUSTIS SHOWED A DIFFERENT side of Mary, not one of authority but of comforter. At an unknown age, but surely after Augustine’s death, teenage George and a few friends tried to saddle and place a bit in the mouth of a prized horse, beloved by Mary. It was a “blooded horse” that Augustine admired, which “was the Virginian favorite of those days as well as these.” This horse had never before been ridden, and young George, cocky as he was, believed it to be time. The horse did not, and through an ensuing fight of bucks and kicks, apparently burst a blood vessel and immediately died.

  Soon after, at morning breakfast, Mary asked the children, “Pray, young gentlemen, have you seen my blooded colts in your rambles? I hope they are well taken care of; my favorite, I am told, is as large as his sire.”

  George replied, without missing a beat, “Your favorite, the sorrel, is dead, madam.”

  “Dead. Why, how has this happened?”

  “The sorrel horse has long been considered ungovernable, and beyond the power of man to back or ride him; this morning, aided by my friends, we forced a bit into his mouth; I backed him, I rode him, and in a desperate struggle for the mastery, he fell under me and died upon the spot.”

  Mary was flustered. But as fast as anger or sadness arose in her, it disappeared. She said, slowly, “It is well; but while I regret the loss of my favorite, I rejoice in my son, who always speaks the truth.” The italicized was in Custis’s original text.20

  This story was the equivalent—a part two, perhaps—of the morals of George’s honesty. Instead of his father and the cherry tree, it was the mother and her horse. The story is nearly identical: George, full of wonder, brazenly committed an act that destroyed some prized possession; the parent asked what happened; George admitted his culpability. But here, without a father, the mother took this role. Much of the responsibility fell on her to teach, comfort, praise, and in times of need reprimand.

  THERE WERE OTHERS WHO INFLUENCED GEORGE AS WELL, WHILE HE WAS under Mary’s care. From the first time George met his older, wiser half brother Lawrence, the heir to the Washington estates, the younger boy admired him more than anyone else in his early life. After the death of Augustine, Lawrence himself became that missing father figure so needed in the child’s and teenager’s life.

  Lawrence certainly had the reputation of a Washington, perhaps even exceeding the reputation of his father or grandfather. He was a veteran of both the War of Jenkins’ Ear from 1739 to 1748 and King George’s War from 1744 to 1748. While both conflicts were related to the War of Austrian Succession that plagued Europe, it was King George’s War that was part of the French and Indian War, a decades-long series of on-and-off conflicts and battles over territory in the Americas. In the former, the War of Jenkins’ Ear (which only received its name a century after the fact), Lawrence was promoted to captain, leading a Virginia company under Admiral Edward Vernon in March 1741 at the ill-fated Battle of Cartagena (modern Colombia), in which Spanish forces overtook the region south of North America and staked their claim to the continent. The battle was not unknown, appearing in the Virginia Gazette.21 Of the nearly four thousand colonists who volunteered, only six hundred returned, the others mostly dying from disease. Lawrence was one of the lucky few, and in honor of Admiral Vernon’s gallantry, renamed Little Hunting Creek as “Mount Vernon.”22

  In July 1743, Lawrence married fifteen-year-old Anne Fairfax, ten years his junior and the daughter of the rich and prominent Colonel William Fairfax, who owned five million Virginian acres and lived in Belvoir, just south of the Mount Vernon estate. The marriage was not without scandal, however, as Major Washington—he was promoted a few months earlier—publicly accused Reverend Charles Green of Truro Parish of trying to defile (in the words of Lawrence, “debauch”) the young unmarried woman. This same Charles Green had been nominated as rector by Augustine Washington a decade earlier. Green denied it and countersued Lawrence for slander. Eventually this became the “only full-scale ecclesiastical trial” in the history of the Colony of Virginia. Evidence was presented, including from Anne’s stepmother, Deborah, who claimed that years earlier Green fondled Anne, who was only nine years old then. She also claimed the reverend, five years later, attempted to rape Anne. Reverend Green’s sister-in-law painted a different picture, one of Anne being a young seductress who willingly and willfully flirted with her brother. The scandal was so enormous that even the governor of Virginia, William Gooch, had to step in, making a deal between these two families: Green would not be defrocked or removed as Truro’s rector, but he would drop the slander accusation and pay for court costs. “But on the key point,” says Peter Henriques, who discovered these documents in the Library of Congress in 1990, “Green won.”

  The matter was finally settled in the spring of 1746 and everyone eventually moved on. George and Green, through the following decades, wrote numerous correspondences to each other.23

  The nine-year marriage between Lawrence and Anne was a relative failure, as far as society was concerned: they conceived no children who would survive past childhood before his early death.

  And still, through all
of this, George looked up to Lawrence. Scandals and rocky marriages or not, Lawrence was a mentor, brother, and much needed older figure for George. Perhaps this was a port in the storm of Mary. George “had plenty of young companions,” wrote Charles Moore. This included his other siblings, and members of his aunts’ and uncles’ families and their children. They were spread out in age, though all lived relatively close to George.24 Betty Washington was a year younger than George; Samuel, two years younger; John Augustine, four years younger; Charles, six. All were companions for young George as he grew up. This was in sharp contrast to his mother’s childhood, where siblings were too removed in age to be considered siblings at all. But among his family’s servants, his siblings, his cousins, his aunts and uncles, and his neighbors, Lawrence was his favorite.

  Which is precisely why he wanted to follow Lawrence into the British Royal Navy.

  ONLY A FEW SHORT MONTHS AFTER THE TRIAL, IN EARLY SEPTEMBER OF 1746, that the young George found his true calling—or, at the very least, the fourteen-year-old believed that he did. He wanted to be like his brother and join the British Royal Navy, go on seafaring adventures close and far, become a seaman. What he, Lawrence, or Mary said to him is lost to history, though clues exist from three specific letters from other figures.