Mary Ball Washington

by Craig Shirley

  On September 9, 1746, William Fairfax wrote to Lawrence, “The weather being so sultry, and being necessarily obliged to go about this town to collect several things wanted, I have not yet seen Mrs. Washington. George has been with us, and says He will be steady and thankfully follow your Advice as his best Friend. I gave him his Mother’s letter to deliver with Caution not to shew his. I have spoke to Dr. Spencer who I find is often at the Widow’s and has some influence, to persuade her to think better of your advice in putting Him to Sea with good Recommendation.”25

  Presumably George’s one letter to Mary would have been more diplomatic, perhaps even yielding to Mary’s ultimate decision. It was almost a tale of brothers keeping something hidden from their mother, lest she ruin the fun or disapprove. This particular instance revealed a great deal about George’s early relationship with his widowed mother.

  Within the following week, the news was told to Mary of George’s plans. George was eager enough to have his bags packed to travel, or even to be onboard the ship itself.26 She may have agreed . . . until she didn’t. Robert Jackson, a Washington family friend and Fredericksburg neighbor, said to Lawrence on September 18, just a week after the first letter from William, that he was “afraid Mrs. Washington will not keep up to her first resolution,” that first resolution being approval. Then she thought it over. Well, he said, Mary “seems to intimate a dislike to George’s going to Sea and says several persons have told her it’s a very bad Scheme.”

  Jackson continued, “She offers several trifling objections such as fond and unthinking mothers naturally suggest, and I find that one word against his going has more weight than ten for it.” “Unthinking” to him, perhaps, but not to Mary. She would give it much thought. He promised to talk to her in the very near future, knowing full well that this was a high priority for everyone involved.27

  Again, historians are left to wonder what happened in the conversation.

  The controversy did not die until the spring of 1747, about eight months later, when Mary received a reply to her letter from her brother Joseph in England. In these intervening months there may have been conversation among George, Lawrence, and Mary.

  In the May letter from Joseph, he confirmed all her worst fears: “I think he had better be put apprentice to a tinker, for a common sailor before the mast has by no means the common liberty of the subject; for they will press him from ship to ship, where he has fifty shillings a month, and make him take twenty-three, and cut and slash and use him like a negro, or rather like a dog.” The navy was abusive to young boys like him. The conditions were horrible. But that wasn’t all. Joseph continued, “If he should get to be master of a Virginia ship (which is very difficult to do), a planter who has three or four hundred acres of land, and three or four slaves, if he be industrious, may live more comfortably, and have his family in better bread than such a master of a ship can.”28

  Strike two and strike three. Abusive, dead-end, and ultimately pointless for a Washington.

  How did George react to his mother’s decision? He would have surely thought of rebelling against his mother—he was a rebel in later life, after all; why not during his teenage years? Any conversation between mother and son could have seesawed between begging and anger and hurt, involving a mother whose son was abandoning her for a life of danger and abuse and a son whose mother wanted to change and control his calling. The relationship they had would have been tarnished, maybe even irrevocably.

  JOSEPH’S ACCUSATION OF ABUSE WAS NOT A WILD EXAGGERATION. ONLY forty-two years after this letter, the famed mutiny of the crew on the HMS Bounty occurred when they seized the ship from Lieutenant William Bligh, partly because of his abuse against the crew in the name of “discipline.”

  If George joined the Royal Navy, and any infraction was held against him at sea, then the Washington name would be associated with his actions. Punishment was very public, either whipping, flogging with a cat-o’-nine-tails, or other means, such as cutting back on rations of rum. It was the ultimate deterrent.

  Further, rumors of sexual abuse from the older and senior seamen were rampant. Indeed, instances of punishment exist during this time for not just homosexuality and “buggery,” but also pederasty. A twelve-year-old boy, John Booth, accused one Henry Brick in 1757 of raping him in bed. It was potentially a capital offense; after trial, Brick was instead sentenced to five hundred lashes and forcibly discharged from the navy.29 Other instances and trials exist of pedophiliac sexual abuse (for boys even younger than George at the time), so this was not a onetime offense, but relatively common, and certainly a concern.

  Mary, when inquiring, very well could have heard about these predators at sea. The horrid image of a son being abused would have sent any mother into hysterics.

  The letter from Mary’s brother Joseph solidified Mary’s resolve. Mary refused to honor George’s request.

  Though George had allies among both friends and family, he accepted his mother’s wish, if reluctantly. She had legitimate fears, not just for his safety but for the well-being of her family. “This was her eldest son,” wrote Jared Sparks, in defense of George’s mother, “whose character and manners must already have exhibited a promise, full of solace and hope to a widowed mother, on whom alone devolved the charge of four younger children.”30 Mary’s disapproval was blistering. “Of the mother,” said George’s cousin Lawrence, who frequently visited his family at the Fredericksburg farm, “I was ten times more afraid than I ever was of my own parents. . . . I have often been present with her sons, proper tall fellows too, and we were all as mute as mice.” Yet she was still George’s mother, and could still show affection. “She awed me in the midst of her kindness,” Cousin Lawrence continued, “for she was indeed truly kind.” She was “commanding,” he noted, an apt description for the mother of the future commander of the Continental Army, and he “could not behold that remarkable woman without feelings it is impossible to describe.”31

  To some historians, this was the fracture of the Mary-George relationship. This was when she turned into a bitter authoritarian. “She would always be strangely indifferent to his ambitions,” wrote Washington biographer Ron Chernow. This, he said, was a selfish act, putting her own wants above that of her son’s.32 Custis saw it a different way: His great-grandmother instilled obedience into George. Less authoritarian, more maternal authority—an important distinction. She “taught him the duties of obedience, the better to prepare him for those of command. . . . The matron held in reserve an authority, which never departed from her.”33

  HOW WOULD THIS HAVE CHANGED THE BOY? LIKE HIS HYPOTHETICAL EDUCATION in England, it would have broadened his horizons. Going to sea at the command of a Royal Naval ship would have brought a distinctly different perspective than the Virginian planter’s lifestyle that he knew. Would history have had Captain George Washington fighting alongside Admiral of the Fleet Sir George Martin, blockading rebel ports in the continent? Perhaps, but he was called to be more than a captain of a ship or a midshipman.

  Benson Lossing, with a religious twist that Mary surely would have appreciated, put it eloquently: “He was destined by Heaven for a far nobler career than man had conceived for him. This incident illustrates the truth of the familiar apothegm, ‘Man proposes but God disposes.’”34

  Mary’s fear of losing her oldest child was well-founded. She had already lost Mildred, her second daughter and youngest child. She had lost her husband. She lost both parents and multiple guardians. Some of her stepchildren had died prematurely, far before their time. However, it was several years later when George took his one and only trip outside the continent that perhaps proved to Mary that her decision was not only a mother’s intuition, but real-world wisdom.

  In late September 1751, nineteen-year-old George and his companion-brother Lawrence sailed off to Barbados. Lawrence had tuberculosis and hoped to find a cure in the tropics away from the upcoming cold Virginia winter, following months of failed remedies. He took his younger brother with him, i
n his only venture outside of the American continent. It was perhaps a concession to the young lad, who surely must have been sad, still, not to have a life at sea.

  The voyage was rough, with high winds and a rocking ship. For five weeks they were “toss’d by a fickle and Merciless ocean,” and any report of a steady day after weeks of seasickness was welcomed news. By November 2, they landed, sooner than George had expected.

  Not long after, George contracted smallpox, with all the classic signs of a fever and infection. It was the great destroyer and plague of the Native Americans, whose immune systems had never encountered such a disease. Years of exposure left many tribes in North, Central, and South America dead. It was their Black Death, of even greater proportions. For Europeans, it was still fatal, though not nearly at apocalyptic scales. It “reportedly disfigured, crippled, or killed every tenth person” during the eighteenth century; an outbreak occurred in Williamsburg only three years earlier, infecting nearly eight hundred people, and killing, of those, over fifty.35

  And George contracted it.

  “Was strongly attacked with the small Pox,” he wrote on Saturday, November 17, in his diary.36 For the next month, until December 12, his diary remained blank, presumably as he recovered. He had contracted the disease sometime two weeks earlier, possibly on November 4, when he had dinner at Gedney Clarke’s residence. “We went,” George wrote that day, “myself with some reluctance, as the smallpox was in his family.” In an ominous note that same day, George wrote that Gedney’s wife, Mary, “was much indisposed, insomuch that we had not the pleasure of her company.”37 Perhaps it did not matter whether he came in direct contact with her; the Clarke family passed it on, symptoms first showing in George thirteen days later.

  The purpose of the trip—to heal Lawrence—failed, and George’s own disease left him seasick and scarred. He never left the country again. It did give him a lifelong immunity, however, a beneficial advantage decades later during the Revolutionary War, when smallpox was rampant among his troops (it was so bad, in fact, that in 1777 it was required that all recruits be inoculated before joining the Continental Army).38 For the foreseeable future, though, it validated Mary’s fears of her boy’s adventures at sea. It surely vindicated her; and to George, that was his end of that fleeting dream.

  WITH MARY’S REFUSAL TO GEORGE’S SEAFARING REQUEST IN 1747, THE BOY looked elsewhere to fulfill a life of adventure that he so wildly needed. He often saw his brother Lawrence at Mount Vernon, the former Little Hunting Creek plantation, which provided an escape from his mother. This was his first step beyond home. John Locke had noted as much, that a child “will, perhaps, be more innocent at home, but more ignorant of the world, and more sheepish when he comes abroad.”39 This was him outside his shell.

  George decided to take up surveying, using his newfound connection to the local Fairfax family to jump-start his way. Surveying was a profitable, high-demand career. “Educated young men on their way up in the world often took to surveying as an entry-level profession. They started as apprentices before moving on to freelance work or salaried appointments.”40 George’s skills excelled, and within years he was an expert in the field. In July of 1749, he surveyed Alexandria, Virginia, far north on the bank of the Potomac River.41

  Truly, Lord Thomas Fairfax saw great potential in George’s prospects, as within a few short months, right after his sixteenth birthday, in March 1748, he and his friend George Fairfax, Lord Fairfax’s cousin’s son, were off to the western Virginian mountains on a surveying party. Here he had on-site experience with a circumferentor, or compass, and other instruments, learning triangulation and geometry. This was the first breath of expansion that the teenager had, outside of the family moving to and from houses when he was little. George made meticulous diary entries every day—some more exciting than others. On those less exciting days, he nonchalantly wrote “nothing remarkable happen’d.” On Tuesday, March 15, he wrote that the party “Worked hard till Night,” before going to bed on “nothing but a Little Straw.” The next day, he enjoyed a nice feather bed in modern-day Winchester, Virginia.42

  Back at Ferry Farm, Mary perhaps had second thoughts about the path she forced upon her oldest. Lawrence, then directly cultivating the boy, probably wanted to send him to England for education. Maybe, he thought, international experience was a great idea, no matter what Mary said. Certainly the interest of family friend Thomas, Lord Fairfax, in George would offset any financial worries. Mary wrote a letter to Fairfax at Belvoir, asking his advice as to what the young man, by that time living away from his mother, could or couldn’t do. He responded some time later with an examination of the young man, his abilities and personality:

  You are so good as to ask what I think of a temporary residence for your son George in England. It is a country for which I myself have no inclination, and the gentlemen you mention are certainly renowned gamblers and rakes, which I should be sorry your son were exposed to, even if his means easily admitted of a residence in England. He is strong and hardy, and as good a master of a horse as any could desire. His education might have been bettered, but what he has is accurate and inclines him to much life out of doors. He is very grave for one of his age, and reserved in his intercourse; not a great talker at any time. His mind appears to me to act slowly, but, on the whole, to reach just conclusions, and he has an ardent wish to see the right of questions—what my friend Mr. Addison was pleased to call ‘the intellectual conscience.’ Method and exactness seem to be natural to George. He is, I suspect, beginning to feel the sap rising, being in the spring of life, and is getting ready to be the prey of your sex, wherefore may the Lord help him, and deliver him from the nets those spiders, called women, will cast for his ruin. I presume him to be truthful because he is exact. I wish I could say he governs his temper. He is subject to attacks of anger on provocation, and sometimes without just cause; but as he is a reasonable person, time will cure him of this vice of nature, and in fact he is, in my judgement, a man who will go to school all his life and profit thereby.

  I hope, madam, that you will find pleasure in what I have written, and will rest assured that I shall continue to interest myself in his fortunes.43

  Fairfax indeed kept his promise and took a keen interest in the boy, more so than any of the Washingtons, perhaps even more than in Lawrence the heir.

  WHATEVER DIFFICULTY IN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MOTHER AND SON, George still continued to care for his mother. On July 15, 1748, while visiting relatives in Gloucester County, George made a stop in nearby Yorktown—about ninety miles southeast of Fredericksburg—and shopped for his mother. There he bought ribbons from a Mr. Mitchell for 1 pound, 3 shillings, and a glass ring for 3 shillings and 4 pence. The money had been provided specifically from his mother.44 Only a week before, 165 acres of Ferry Farm were sold for 110 pounds. George was aware of this deal and presumably approved—or, at least, he did not object.45 Nevertheless, Mary continued to provide George financial support for both his and her needs when applicable.46

  THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF WIDOWHOOD AND OVERSEEING PROPERTY MUST have hit her when she received the estate’s bills. Financial matters could no longer be swept away for someone else to handle; they were her duties now.

  For instance, in June of 1751 and January and April of 1752, Dr. Sutherland treated various members of the Washington estate. On April 3, he helped a “negro fellow” drain a tooth, for which he charged Mary an exact 2 shillings, 5 pence. Other slaves were treated, and even John Augustine and George on one occasion, for various ailments. The total bill for these visits came to 1 pound, 1 shilling, and 5 pence.47

  Another account a decade later showed she paid James Buchannen over 25 pounds for a month’s worth of material. An extremely deteriorated receipt shows Mary had purchased in July 1765 “110 yds of [destroyed],” “3 Gallons of [destroyed],” and so on. The total sum of these purchases certainly added up.48

  Mary, as a plantation owner, had to take care of her property, always at her expense. S
he had to provide for her slaves and her family, and herself. She had to keep herself in the gentry status. For a woman whose infamy in history paints her with an almost obsessive interest in money, this was a drain on her ambitions, whatever they may have been.

  AS IF THE CONSTANT EXPENSES OF THE PLANTATION WERE NOT ENOUGH, tragedy struck the Washington family in July of 1752, when Lawrence Washington, heir apparent, died at about the age of thirty-three. He never recovered from the tuberculosis that haunted him for years, and remedy after remedy failed him. It was less than a year after he went to Barbados, and his return trip just a month before his death was clearly an acceptance of his fate. He was going to die. He knew it, and his family knew it. He and his wife, Anne Fairfax, had no children who lived past four years old. Most died within, or soon after, their first year. As heroic as Lawrence seemed to be to George, he was still mortal.

  When his half brother, his second father, died, George received condolences from friends and family. “I most heartily condole You on the Loss of so worthy a Brother & Friend,” wrote a neighbor.49 George and Lawrence’s relationship had never dwindled, and the brothers had become confidants. George complained of Mary’s refusing to build a house on Deep Run tract for herself, in accordance with her husband’s will, and instead staying at nearby Ferry Farm.50 The land was only hers until George turned twenty-one, which was fast approaching. George trusted Lawrence, in part because he was the oldest of the generation and had more sway with Mary (when she wasn’t obstinate).

  In Lawrence’s will, he designated his wife to be heir of the Mount Vernon estate; upon her death, it should pass to his daughter, Sarah.51 Sarah, however, did not live past four years old, dying only two years after her father. Since Anne had already remarried to Colonel George Lee and had no use for the Mount Vernon land, she agreed to rent it out to George that same year.