Mary Ball Washington

by Craig Shirley

  War had come to America. In lore, the firing by the Americans at Lexington and Concord became forever known as “the shot heard ’round the world.”

  THE DATE OF THE SECOND CONTINENTAL CONGRESS WAS ESTABLISHED AT the close of their first meeting and could not have come at a better time. Delegates met at the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia on May 10, with a simple question: since no tension had abated, what should they do? The answer, however, was not so simple. Unlike the first, this congress would last until March of 1781, a period of nearly six years, through war, through upheaval, and through independence.

  Militiamen and civilians welcomed incoming delegates at the outskirts of Philadelphia, making this a different and more popular—perhaps more urgent—congress. “The spirit of almost everything that day seemed encouragingly different” than those eight months earlier.4

  For its day, the congress worked quickly.

  On Wednesday, June 14, 1775, a Continental Army was formed.

  The next day, a mere month after first convening, George Washington, dressed in his red military uniform, was unanimously appointed commander in chief and general of all the combined Continental forces, first nominated by Thomas Johnson, delegate of Maryland. Other nominees included John Hancock, president of the congress, who John Adams said had “an ambition” to lead.5 Hancock was crestfallen.

  It was not an easy vote, or a vote by acclamation that everyone wanted to support. The congress was worried. As honorable and valiant as Washington was, to appoint a commander of the forces would be yet another no-turning-back move for the colonists. Further, and perhaps more important, was a Virginia planter such a perfect choice to head a Massachusetts-led rebellion?

  “What shall We do?” asked Samuel Adams of his cousin, in private; to which, John replied, “I am determined this Morning to make a direct Motion that Congress should adopt the Army before Boston and appoint Colonel Washington Commander of it.”6

  When the congress met again, John Adams did exactly that. As he wrote in his diary, “I had no hesitation to declare that I had but one Gentleman in my Mind for that important command, and that was a Gentleman from Virginia who was among Us and very well known to all of Us, a Gentleman whose Skill and Experience as an Officer, whose independent fortune, great Talents and excellent universal Character, would command the Approbation of all America, and unite the cordial Exertions of all the Colonies better than any other Person in the Union.”

  Hearing his name, George Washington fled from the room without saying a word.

  Several delegates immediately raised objections, according to Adams, and Hancock himself fell into despair, feeling “mortification and resentment” at not being named.

  With support so much greater than opposition, those who opposed were persuaded enough to vote aye.7 Any objection to a Virginian leading, if any did exist, was squelched. A wealthy colony perfectly situated in between the north and south, the oldest of the colonies, to boot, with mighty ports and resources, was as good if not better an ally as any.

  Washington’s diary noted a simple entry, no different in tone than any other: “Dined at Burns’s in the Field. Spent the Eveng. on a Committee.”8 Not a whisper about being appointed to take on any impossible task: to lead a ragtag group of volunteers against the most powerful army and navy in the world. But his mother was also known for keeping things close to her vest, as well.

  Mary Ball Washington’s son had been chosen to lead a revolt against the British Empire.

  ON THE SIXTEENTH OF JUNE, WASHINGTON, WITH GREAT RELUCTANCE AND honesty of fear, accepted his nomination:

  “Tho’ I am truly sensible of the High Honour done me in this Appointment,” he said to the assembled men, “yet I feel great distress, from a consciousness that my abilities and military experience may not be equal to the extensive and important Trust. However, as the Congress desire it, I will enter upon the momentous duty, and exert every power I possess in their service, and for support of the glorious cause. . . .

  “But, lest some unlucky event should happen, unfavorable to my reputation, I beg it may be remembered, by every Gentleman in the room, that I, this day, declare with the utmost sincerity, I do not think myself equal to the Command I am honored with.”9

  One story, told secondhand, had Washington, upon accepting, walk up to Patrick Henry, fellow Virginian and not-so-fellow radical. Tears filled his eyes as the responsibility hit him. Tears of fear, nervousness, duty, honor. “Remember, Mr. Henry, what I now tell you,” George said, quivering. “From the day I enter upon the command of the American armies, I date my fall, and the ruin of my reputation.”10

  On June 19, his commission as “General and Commander in Chief of the army of the United Colonies” was officially signed by Hancock. George Washington, forty-three years old, was officially commander of the entire thirteen colonies. The first order of business was to refuse a salary, accepting expenses only.

  LETTERS FLEW. TO HIS BELOVED MARTHA, HE WROTE ON JUNE 18, “I AM NOW set down to write to you on a subject which fills me with inexpressable concern—and this concern is greatly aggravated and Increased when I reflect on the uneasiness I know it will give you.” He continued, “It was utterly out of my power to refuse this appointment without exposing my Character to such censures as would have reflected dishonour upon myself, and given pain to my friends.”11 It is an eerily similar theme from his letter to Mary twenty years earlier, when appointed commander of the Virginia Regiment during the French and Indian War. It was humbling, certainly, but this was a cause greater than himself or any one man, and to refuse outright due to fear would be rebutting everything for which they’d worked.

  To his brother-in-law, the husband of Martha’s sister, Burwell Basset, he wrote, “I am now Imbarkd on a tempestuous Ocean from whence, perhaps, no friendly harbour is to be found. . . . [This position] is an honour I by no means aspired to—It is an honour I wished to avoid.”12

  To his adopted son John Parke Custis, he wrote similarly. As the oldest of Martha’s surviving children, Custis had an additional responsibility. “My great concern upon this occasion, is the thoughts of leaving your Mother under the uneasiness which I know this affair will throw her into,” Washington confessed. “I therefore hope, expect, & indeed have no doubt, of your using every means in your power to keep up her Spirits, by doing every thing in your power, to promote her quiet.”13

  To his brother John Augustine in Westmoreland County, he penned his opening, “I am now to bid adieu to you, & to every kind of domestick ease, for a while.”14

  To Martha his love, again, on June 23, the day he departed Philadelphia for Boston, he wrote a quick letter:15

  Phila. June 23d 1775.

  My dearest,

  As I am within a few Minutes of leaving this City, I could not think of departing from it without dropping you a line; especially as I do not know whether it may be in my power to write again till I get to the Camp at Boston—I go fully trusting in that Providence, which has been more bountiful to me than I deserve, & in full confidence of a happy meeting with you sometime in the Fall—I have not time to add more, as I am surrounded with Company to take leave of me—I retain an unalterable affection for you, which neither time or distance can change, my best love to Jack & Nelly, & regard for the rest of the Family concludes me with the utmost truth & sincerety Yr entire

  Go: Washington

  He left Philadelphia that morning, knowing completely the task that had been handed him and what would happen should he fail.

  To all, he sent similar notes: his reluctance in accepting; the ache it would bring to his family; that the congress had adopted a Continental currency to help raise payment for troops and materiel; the appointments of Major Generals Charles Lee, Artemas Ward, Philip Schuyler, and Israel Putnam. Each of these letters, while similar in words and themes, could not be read with a sense of calm and serenity. There was a real sense of urgency.

  The next years would be frenetic, and no fact highlighted this more
than the absence of any diary entries by George Washington, so copiously penned for decades prior, from June 19, 1775, to early 1780.

  The coming days irrevocably changed his routine.

  ONE FAMILY MEMBER WHO WAS CONSPICUOUSLY ABSENT FROM THE LIST OF letters he had written was his mother, the same woman who worried about his trip to Barbados, his trip to Ohio, his trip to sea. The same woman who asked him for money and allowances. The same woman who couldn’t help but worry. If a letter did exist, it is long lost; whether through the march of time, or the pillaging of souvenir seekers and Civil War soldiers, or Mary discarding the letter, none has been found.

  What did she think? When did she find out? Most likely, she heard it from Betty. The Virginia Gazette first reported the news on July 6, with one sentence, “The honorable congress have appointed GEORGE WASHINGTON, esquire, of Virginia, generalissimo of the American army.” In the same issue was news of his leaving Philadelphia for Massachusetts, where he would personally command the stationed army.16 The Gazette was four days late in publishing, as Washington had arrived at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on July 2. Whatever news Virginia was going to hear would be delayed.

  Mary had experienced this same fear before, so many times. But this time it wasn’t just her eldest that was off to war. So too was her grandson, George Lewis, Betty and Fielding’s son. So too was Hugh Mercer, her neighbor and onetime doctor. So too was Bushrod Washington, son of John Augustine, and George Steptoe Washington, son of Samuel Washington; another of Betty’s sons, Robert Lewis; and her husband, Fielding, who used his five-plus ships for patrolling the Rappahannock, as well as smuggling goods. Others close to Mary were off to war as well: John Paul Jones and George Weedon, both Fredericksburg neighbors. While Mary’s youngest son, Charles Washington, never saw battle, he was still an active participant, taking a politician’s role in Fredericksburg. Similarly, while her next-door neighbor, James Mercer (no relation to Hugh), never saw battle in the Revolution, he did not shy away from participating behind the scenes.

  The city of Fredericksburg itself was in a revolutionary fervor. The classic exhortation “God save the king” was replaced, proactively, with “God save liberties of America,” even at official city committee meetings.17 Fredericksburg had already been chosen in July 1775 as the site of a gunnery to manufacture needed war materiel; Fielding Lewis put his all into its upkeep. Mary would have been caught up in this fervor, in one way or another. In such a time, it would have been impossible to plead ignorance or bury your head in the sand and pretend the world you knew wasn’t ending.

  A curious chronology error existed at this point in time. George Washington Parke Custis was perhaps the source of it. He noted that his grandfather, “previously to his joining the forces at Cambridge [in early July of 1775], removed his mother from her country residence to the village of Fredericksburg, a situation remote from danger, and contiguous to her friends and relatives.”18 Author Mary Terhune, in the late nineteenth century, said similarly; after the Battle of Bunker Hill in June of that year (1775), George “begged” his mother to move closer to family.19 While Fredericksburg offered some safe haven from the nearby Rappahannock and the farther Potomac, it was still a major trade city, square in the middle between north and south Virginia. It wasn’t such a dramatic move as Custis let on, either. It was only a mile’s distance between Home Farm and her house. Across a river, yes, but a small one at that juncture. However, and most obviously, the threat of war did not result in her move; she had moved there three years earlier. There were rumbles, but no one was expecting a revolution by 1771.

  But Custis and Terhune, prone in this case more to style and themes than facts, demonstrated here their belief that the general deeply worried about the elder Mary, so much so to upend her comfort for her safety. And that was perfectly true: she was elderly, she had suffered a bad case of the flu the winter before, and she was alone, caring for a by now failing farm.

  NO GOODBYE WAS SAID; THERE WAS NO TRIP DOWN TO FREDERICKSBURG BEFORE setting off. Mary, mother of Washington and nearly seventy years old, could not offer a farewell or grant a blessing. She instead had to wait to hear word of her eldest son “for a period, the duration and events of which no mortal vision could even faintly discern,” wrote historian Margaret Conkling in 1850.20 If Mary had not cared about the tensions before, she certainly did now. Not only was her son to lead a war, but it was a war against the very same people who had led him. It was one thing to fight the French or the Indians or the non-English; it was another thing altogether to fight fellow Englishmen.

  When she heard of his command and his going off to fight yet another war, it was possible, said Michelle Hamilton, manager of the Mary Washington House in Fredericksburg, that there “would have been a heavy sigh, as it’s not the path she wanted her son to go on. Being in the military is risky,” and she recognized that. But it was out of her control, which would have only been more nerve-racking. “There would’ve been a heavy dose of concern.” After all, she would have heard of the letters from her son in the French and Indian War, when he wrote how much he enjoyed the sounds of bullets ricocheting and flying past his head. Concerning, especially for a mother.21

  THE REVOLUTION RAGED UNOFFICIALLY IN THE REMAINING MONTHS OF 1775. By December, a dozen or more battles and untold skirmishes had taken place in the northern colonies. From what was a single fight in April outside of Boston to a war, there were now sieges and bloody continuous fighting. Many of these battles were victorious for the Patriots; some, like the fabled Battle of Bunker Hill in Charlestown, Massachusetts, were not, with a strategic and decisively early British victory. Though about 1,050 British troops were killed or wounded, a devastating number, about 450 American casualties were reported too, with the British successfully capturing the nearby Charlestown Peninsula.22 George Washington was not part of the battle, but at the time in command at New York City.

  THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS IN PHILADELPHIA HAD TRIED AND FAILED TO wage a final peace. In the so-called Olive Branch Petition, the congress agreed to a supplication to King George III with a tactful letter: The colonies were unhappy with Parliament’s and your ministers’ policies, not with you or your own. “Knowing to what violent resentments and incurable animosities, civil discords are apt to exasperate and inflame the contending parties, we think ourselves required by indispensable obligations to Almighty God, to your Majesty, to our fellow subjects, and to ourselves, immediately to use all the means in our power, not incompatible with our safety, for stopping the further effusion of blood, and for averting the impending calamities that threaten the British Empire.” Delegates signed and agreed to the petition, asking that peace be made and that the king live long. From Virginia, signers included Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, Edmund Pendleton, Benjamin Harrison, and Thomas Jefferson.23

  It was a last-ditch effort for peace. As radical as some of the Massachusetts rebels were, many Virginians, including Patrick Henry, did not want all-out war. That would devastate the colonies, they believed.

  Whatever the king thought when he read the petition, it failed. On Friday, October 27, 1775, in an address to both the House of Lords and the House of Commons in Parliament, King George III laid down the gauntlet. “It is now become the part of wisdom, and (in its effects) of clemency, to put a speedy end to these disorders by the most decisive exertions,” he exclaimed. “For this purpose, I have increased my naval establishment, and greatly augmented my land forces; but in such a manner as may be the least burthensome to my kingdoms.”

  He continued, making it perfectly clear his intentions: “When the unhappy and deluded multitude, against whom this force will be directed, shall become sensible of their error, I shall be ready to receive the misled with tenderness and mercy.”24

  THE WAR WAS NOT ISOLATED TO ONLY THE NORTH DURING THESE MONTHS. It was a war for the thirteen colonies. Virginia would see significant first blood spilled in battle in November of 1775 at the Battle of Kemp’s Landing (located in Virginia Beach). Kemp’s Land
ing was the culmination of tension between Lord Dunmore, governor of Virginia, and the Virginia colonists. For several months, small clashes between the two forces resulted in wounded and dead. The British HMS Hawk at one point ran aground; ten seamen were captured and its captain killed.

  Dunmore, fed up, landed over one hundred soldiers and volunteers near the Great Bridge in Virginia Beach on November 14; that, in turn, put the militia of Princess Anne County on alert for an ambush. The next day, November 15, the two clashed, 170 colonial militia versus 100 infantry and 20 Loyalists. It was a decisive British victory; though the number of troops was small and the number of casualties smaller (seven dead or wounded Virginians), it was significant in result: here, the loud Virginian colonists were overwhelmed by the mighty British infantry. One British grenadier was wounded when he hurt his knee.25

  The governor, hearing of victory, issued a proclamation, written a week prior: the Colony of Virginia was in a state of rebellion. All loyal subjects were to put it down, to “resort to his Majesty’s STANDARD, or be looked upon as traitors.” Further, and more radically, he issued a promise not to the white colonists, but to the slaves and indentured servants: “I do hereby further declare all indentured servants, Negroes, or others . . . free, that are able and willing to bear arms, they joining his Majesty’s troops, as soon as may be.”26 It was an attempt to create insurrection against the colonists.

  It was his own Emancipation Proclamation.

  The Virginia Gazette, which published the short order in full, gave lengthy commentary on it. It objected to the use of “rebel” as defenders, not attackers, of the Virginia Colony, and that such a term might deter others from joining the cause. How could one be a rebel if they were fighting for, not against, the welfare of Virginia? How could they be “rebels” when they had hardly fought at all? “We petitioned once and again, in the most dutiful manner, we hoped the righteousness of our cause would appear, that our complaints would be heard and attended to; we wished to avoid the horrors of civil war.”