Mary Ball Washington

by Craig Shirley

  As he had so well in life, George Washington was still looking after the affairs of his mother.

  By this point, Mary had been dead over four years. George had been reelected to the presidency. The Bill of Rights was completely ratified. Rhode Island and Vermont, the fourteenth state, had ratified the Constitution. Kentucky became the fifteenth state, taken from western Virginia. The United States dollar was standardized throughout the country. In France, the monarchy was overthrown and the Reign of Terror under the First Republic was well under way. Benjamin Harrison had died in 1791, and John Hancock died only a week before Carter’s letter. The capital of the United States had moved from New York City to Philadelphia.

  The country created moved on, and so did George. In a letter on May 29, 1794, he wrote Carter. It was a short letter, clearly wanting to put the whole matter behind him. Among the short passages he wrote, he forgave Carter of the remainder of his debt. He waved it away.43

  Finally, his mother’s posthumous problems were behind him, and he could serve the rest of his term as president. When he finished that, he could finally, again, for a final time, retire in peace as Mary rested in peace.

  But Mary’s legacy was yet to come.

  Epilogue: A Monumental Legacy

  “‘Mary, the Mother of Washington.’ No eulogy could be higher.”

  Honored Madam.” That was how George Washington always greeted his mother in his letters. It was a phrase that revealed her austerity and his awe of the woman who had been called “commanding” and “strict” throughout her life, as well as “truly kind.” Through all of this contradictory information, however, an image emerges of a woman whose fierceness and individuality are obvious antecedents to the same qualities in her bold son.

  While, in George, these qualities evinced themselves through nobility and sacrificial leadership, Mary’s authority was used quite differently. Her small-time tyranny hung over the son who would go on to found the freest nation on Earth. He was the man who, when he could have seized kingship for himself, walked away. His stubbornness and singularity that such independence required must have come from the single mother who ran a plantation on her own.

  THE FIRSTBORN SON OF MARY BALL WASHINGTON, GEORGE WASHINGTON, former president, former commander of the Continental Army, died at the age of sixty-seven on December 14, 1799, at his Mount Vernon home. A mere three months before, he had lost his younger brother, Charles, who died at age sixty-one. His only surviving sister, Betty, sixty-three years old, had died two years earlier. “The death of near relations, always produces awful, and affecting emotions, under whatsoever circumstances it may happen,” George wrote to Burgess Ball after learning of Charles’s death.1 The oldest child, the son of Mary and Augustine, was the last to die.

  Washington was left unburied for three days, as he had requested, to make certain he was indeed dead. In accordance with his will, he was interred at Mount Vernon plantation, ensuring he would never again leave that dearly loved home. Throughout the years, he had left his home and his beloved Martha so many times; he was determined to stay for good. His remains are there today, as are those of Martha, and other family members, including his cousin Bushrod, and his brother John Augustine, to name a few. Etched into the stone above his crypt: “Within this Enclosure Rest the remains of Gen’l George Washington.”

  WHEN HE DIED, THERE WERE 317 SLAVES ON HIS FIVE FARMS, SOME OF WHOM were too old or too young to work. Of those 317 slaves, he freed them all upon his death. Martha closed the master bedroom door at Mount Vernon where he had died. She began sleeping in an attic bedroom. She would live another two and a half years, and die at the age of seventy.

  AS FOR HIS BOYHOOD HOME, FERRY FARM PLANTATION HAD PASSED FROM history, and from the Washingtons, all the way back in 1774, when Dr. Hugh Mercer, physician, neighbor in Fredericksburg, fellow Fredericksburg Masonic member, and friend to George, bought it all for 2,000 pounds, to be paid in five annual installments. Washington had trouble selling the farm, it seemed, evidence of its failing status; Mercer’s offer came two years after the first advertisement in the Virginia Gazette. Within the week of the agreement, George wrote to him: “The Land may be conveyed to you at any time, & for this purpose I will bring down my title papers & leave them with you.”2

  Washington went to Fredericksburg on May 13, at which time he presumably gave his papers to Mercer, finalizing all documents during the short stay.

  And on May 14, it was no longer Washington’s. Mercer wanted but never managed to move there, and hoped to build a settlement on the farm.

  It was all for naught.

  Then general Hugh Mercer was mortally wounded in the Battle of Princeton, New Jersey, on January 3, 1777. The farm passed on to his heirs, and an executor of Mercer’s will, George Weedon, agreed to pay the remaining debt.3

  Ferry Farm through the rest of history experienced decline and war. The Mercers never lived on the property itself, and it was sold to Winter Bray in 1846. The Bray family kept the land until the 1870s. Strangely enough, the farm itself never saw action during the Revolutionary War. Only during the American Civil War a century later, when Union troops stationed themselves by Ferry Lane near the Rappahannock, was George Washington’s boyhood home occupied by a military presence. The Rappahannock was a necessary waterway for the Union Army to secure. Canisters, unspent bullets, and buttons were later found buried in the farm’s soil.4

  IMMEDIATELY UPON HIS DEATH, HE WAS ELEVATED TO A NEAR GODLIKE STATUS in the new nation, both figuratively and literally. David Edwin’s engraving from 1800 showed a burial-shrouded Washington, crowned with laurel from angels, as he ascended into heaven from Mount Vernon. The more famous depiction of this veneration is the not-so-subtly named The Apotheosis of Washington by Roman-born Constantino Brumidi, painted in 1865, which reigns overhead in the Capitol rotunda. Brumidi had previously worked under Pope Gregory XVI in the Papal States, so his imagery of Washington, ascending on a cloud in royal purple surrounded by the goddesses Victoria and Libertas, had heavy religious overtones. Horatio Greenough’s larger-than-life sculpture, now sitting in the Smithsonian, celebrated the centennial of Washington’s birth, and depicted him more as a Julius Caesar or Zeus than a president, bare chested with a shroud draped over one arm raised in blessing, a sheathed sword in another.

  A lock of Washington’s hair was found recently in an eighteenth-century almanac, given by the president while he was still alive, and it made worldwide news.5 It was and has been kept very much like a relic, coveted.

  The phrase “George Washington slept here” entered the common vernacular many years ago, in and around the trail from Mount Vernon to Fredericksburg to Williamsburg, and New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, as well. The claim is often true, as plaques on houses and hearths proudly announce. Washington was also known to pace in these houses, late into the evening. Many have records of the leader of his country walking the floors, heard by residents, still as part of their lore. Hollywood once made a comedy entitled George Washington Slept Here based on a play of the same name. His friend, former Revolutionary War major general, member of the Continental Congress, and father of Robert E. Lee, Henry “Light Horse” Lee, was commissioned by the Sixth Congress to write a eulogy of the first president of the United States. In his elegant and touching tribute, he famously wrote that Washington was “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”

  GEORGE WASHINGTON WAS PART OF, AND WITNESS TO, THE FORMATION OF the United States of America. He was the grand commander and grand president of the newly formed nation and the savior of Americans’ very freedoms. As Americanism took hold, Manifest Destiny and westward expansion, immigration and the desire for American freedom grew; so, too, did his status. “The first name of America, not only is, but always will be, that of Washington,” wrote John Frederick Schroeder in 1850, in his preface to his compilation of Washington’s sayings. “We pronounce it with filial reverence, as well as gratitude.”6

 
And yet Mary, his mother, floated at the time above the truth, almost mystical, hagiographical. Fanciful books from Benson Lossing or Sara Pryor in the mid- to late 1800s certainly contributed to the early legends of her status as the mother of Washington—almost a goddess in her own right. But these works, popular and definitive for over a century, were oft ignored once twentieth-century histories, including Douglas Southall Freeman’s and James Thomas Flexner’s multivolume and momentous biographies, rewrote the depiction of Mary from matron to shrew.

  Where were the monuments? Where were the cities in her name? Unverified and unlikely lore said that her son, the president, wished for a monument to be erected soon after her death, and some even reported that Congress passed a resolution. None exist.7

  George Washington Parke Custis, that great-grandson who knew and remembered her fondly from his childhood, was the first to lead the hagiographical charge. His remembrance of his great-grandmother, partly published in 1821 in the National Gazette, brought Mary and her grave to national attention again. “Had she been of the olden time,” he had written, “statues would have been erected to her memory in the capitol [sic], and she would have been called the Mother of Romans.” He lamented the lack of recognition that she deserved. “When another century shall have elapsed, and our descendants shall have learned the true value of liberty, how will the fame of the paternal chief be cherished in story and in song, nor will be forgotten her. . . . Then, and not till then, will youth and age, maid and matron, aye, and bearded men, will pilgrim step, repair to the now neglected grave.”8

  Years passed, and the grave continued to go unmarked. To this day, no one knows exactly where Mary was buried, and no remains have ever been found. The supposed neglect of the area was exaggerated sometimes, as by an anonymous writer in the Richmond Visitor and Telegraph, who wrote, “Her grave is in a deserted, dreary, solitary field—the mound of earth that was originally raised over her sacred remains is now washed away.” Fredericksburg’s own newspaper, Political Arena, chided this writer: “He surely never saw the spot . . . or his description would have been different.” Instead of a solitary field, it was on a “beautiful knoll” within the town, “in a highly cultivated and fertile field.” The paper continued, definitively saying the grave “stands in no danger of being profaned.”9

  By 1830, the people of Fredericksburg wanted something to commemorate her. Over a century later, James Thomas Flexner wrote a damningly negative view of the delay: “She had, by her complaints that had made her seem a Tory, so disassociated herself from her son’s charisma that it was not until she had been long dead, and her living presence had been completely eroded away by the Washington legend, that any marker was placed on her grave.”10 There may be a grain of truth in this. People have long memories. But though forty years had passed since her death by then, and thirty had passed since her eldest son’s death, there were still people who probably grew up knowing her or were raised by those who knew her—and they wanted some commemoration. Hardly a lack of “her living presence” was felt in the town. The desire was there. The hope was there. They simply needed the money for to erect something befitting the Mother of Washington.

  It came when Silas Burrows of New York, a man of considerable wealth, wrote to the Fredericksburg mayor, wishing “to erect a monument over the remains and to rescue from oblivion the sacred spot where reposes the great American mother, Mary, the mother of Washington.”11

  Within two years, a cornerstone had been placed, laid by President Andrew “Old Hickory” Jackson in a special ceremony on May 7, 1833. Secretary of War Lewis Cass, Attorney General Roger Taney, and private secretary Andrew Jackson Donelson also attended. The ceremony was followed by a barbecue and procession of monument committee members, clergy, architects, mayor and councilmen, teachers and students, musicians, and others.

  The president spoke with vigor and strength, a long eulogy for both Mary and her son. “In the grave before us, lie the remains of his Mother. Long has it been unmarked by any monumental tablet, but not unhonored. You have undertaken the pious duty of erecting a column to her name, and of inscribing upon it, the simple but affecting words, ‘Mary, the Mother of Washington.’ No eulogy could be higher, and it appeals to the heart of every American.”

  ON JUNE 7, 1924, PRESIDENT CALVIN COOLIDGE SIGNED INTO LAW A BILL TO create a replica of the house where Washington was born at Wakefield in Westmoreland County, Virginia, but it was later criticized as being a “totally inaccurate reproduction of the birth house, both in design and location.”12 It was opened, however, in July of 1931, just months before the anniversary of Washington’s two hundredth birthday. While excavating, they did discover priceless artifacts in the area, including glass, tableware, and other household accessories possibly used by the Washington family themselves.13

  WHAT OF HER CHARACTER? SHE DID MORE THAN GIVE BIRTH TO AND RAISE George. She shaped him. “Tradition says, that the character of Washington was strengthened, if not formed, by the care and precepts of his mother. She was remarkable for the vigor of her intellect and the firmness of her resolution,” said President Jackson. There were still people who remembered her from their own childhoods. President Jackson understood this. “It is impossible to avoid the conviction,” he said to his audience, that based on what people had told him, her “principles and conduct . . . were closely interwoven with the destiny of her son. . . . Look back at the life and conduct of his mother, and at her domestic government . . . and they will be found admirably adapted to form and develop, the elements of such a character.”

  With the laying of the cornerstone, he finished his speech, saying, “Fellow-citizens, at your request, and in your name, I now deposit this plate in the spot destined for it; and when the American pilgrim shall, in after ages, come up to this high and holy place, and lay his hand upon this sacred column, may he recall the virtues of her, who sleeps beneath, and depart with his affections purified, and his piety strengthened, while he invokes blessings upon the Mother of Washington.”14

  ANOTHER FOUR YEARS PASSED, AND THE MONUMENT, A MAUSOLEUM IN shape with Doric columns, was partly built. And construction . . . stopped. Suddenly and without a clear explanation. Many, of course, have been offered, from Silas Burrows’s wealth suddenly falling, to being rejected in his courtship of a young girl descended from Mary, to the bank actually losing Burrow’s donation, to the death of the monument’s contractor, Rufus Hill. Whatever actually happened, by 1840, the monument was left incomplete, with an estimated fifty-foot-long pillar lying on the ground.

  By 1848, construction of the Washington Monument in the District of Columbia—a giant obelisk worthy of the giant founder—began. It would take four decades for its completion, however, and when the construction restarted, the builders could not match the stone precisely. Mary’s remained untouched and unfinished.

  Decades followed and the monument was still left incomplete, with nothing or no one to account for it. It was an embarrassment to many of Mary’s early biographers to see it become nothing more than rubble. The 1860s saw the Civil War tear the country apart, and Fredericksburg was no exception to what occurred; cannon and rifle fire riddled the stationary stone in cross fire. Nearby Kenmore, Betty and Fielding’s house, was used as a field hospital and damaged horribly by the ghastly war that pitted brother against brother.

  THE OVERSIGHT WAS RECTIFIED BY THE 1890S. IT WAS APPROPRIATE THAT renewed interest occurred the century after her death with almost lightning speed. The National Mary Washington Memorial Association was formally organized on February 22, 1890, in honor of George Washington’s birthday. It was an organization six months in the making, of women who, according to the Washington Post at the time, “organized themselves into an association for the purpose of erecting a monument to Washington’s mother, and maintaining and preserving the same in good order.”15

  It couldn’t have come at a better time, as an ad in the Post in early 1889 placed the grave and land up for public auction. One woman, Margaret Hetzel,
enclosed a dollar and a plea to the Post to start a fund to save the land. She became the first donor to what would become, in the years following, a successful organization (along with the contemporary and new Daughters of the American Revolution). Many prominent women joined, including the author of the oft-sourced and hagiographical Story of Mary Washington, Mary Terhune. It was a cross-country call, the first by women to honor a woman, in recognition of Mary Ball Washington.

  After thoughtful design and approval by all, with a clear mirroring of the Washington Monument, a new cornerstone was placed on her grave on October 21, 1893. It was a much less elaborate celebration compared to sixty years earlier, but it was still held in reverence by the people of Fredericksburg. A copy of The Story of Mary Washington, old pennies, a membership card to the Mary Washington association, pictures of the old house, and many other historical items dear to Mary or the Fredericksburg residents were placed at the granite base, as mementos or relics of the woman they all honored.16

  The white obelisk was completed, piercing the sky, at four o’clock on December 22, 1893. Four days later, the protective box covering the shaft was removed.

  Finally, over one hundred years after her passing, the monument of Mary Washington was completed. It was simply inscribed, “Mary, the Mother of Washington.”

  A PUBLIC DEDICATION OCCURRED ON MAY 10, 1894, IN THE PRESENCE OF PRESIDENT Grover Cleveland and members of the cabinet and Chief Justice Melville Fuller. “The town is rapidly filling up,” reported the Lisbon Sun, as the ceremony was to prove popular.17 Luncheon was served at Mary’s old house, as a procession worthy of her brought the entire town together in joyous celebration. President Cleveland, echoing his predecessor, spoke to a large audience, saying he was there “to perpetuate the memory of her who gave birth to the leader of the American armies in the mighty struggle; fashioned his genius, moulded his character, formed his soul for good, and inspired him for the work of liberating his people from the fetters of tyranny.”