The Widow Washington, page 11
Shrove Tuesday was traditionally a day in which boys threw cudgels and stones at a cock that was tethered to a stake or buried in the ground up to its neck. It is not clear whether this “almost universal” practice in rural England continued in Virginia.3 In England by the 1740s, writers were beginning to point out that it was cruel.
At the time of Mary and Augustine’s wedding, thirteen-year-old Lawrence Washington and eleven-year-old Augustine (also called Austin) Washington attended the Appleby School in Cumbria, Great Britain, where their father had studied. Mary took into her full-time care the sad, bewildered, motherless nine-year-old Jane.
Mary well knew how little Jane felt. A planter in Stafford County, recalling his childhood losses, wrote to his mother in 1698, “Before I was ten years old as I am sure you very well remember I look’d upon this life here as but going to an Inn, no permanent being.” But he dreamed up this metaphor long after he was nine.4 Hale’s and Scott’s devotion to the benefits of contemplating our own end and the ephemeral nature of life was of much less use to a child reeling from the loss of a parent than to a grieving adult. Mary’s training in stoically carrying on might not have helped dispel Jane’s woe.
The young Mrs. Washington characteristically solved problems by working hard, and she would have begun to introduce Jane to housekeeping responsibilities. Mary was likely a more hands-on housekeeper than Jane’s mother had been, because she came from humbler origins. From Mary’s point of view, Jane was of an age to be responsible for some household tasks in the kitchen or the cowshed and the vegetable garden. While Jane might have found employment dulled her loss, she might also have resented her stepmother’s expectations of discipline and industry.
Mary now commanded or, in the words of one slave owner, tried to make slaves of the people she and Augustine owned.5 Jane knew them better than Mary did. Jane and the enslaved at Wakefield would have had to adjust to Mary’s no-nonsense style of management, frugality, and incessant activity. The slaves at Pope’s Creek numbered between twenty and twenty-five, including Bess, Bett, Priscilla, Little Sarah, Moll, and Frank, whom Jane had put in trust for her sons. An inventory of house slaves taken at the time of Augustine’s death some ten years later mentions Lucy, Sue, Judy, Nan, Betty, Jenny, Phillis, and Hannah. The men included Jack and Jack (at least one of whom probably came with Mary), Bob, Ned, Dick, Toney (who might also have come with Mary if he was Tony of Tony and Dinah), Steven, Jo (valued at one shilling), London, George, and Jcumy.6 Richard Hughes’s slaves, Abba and Winney and Darby, went to Elizabeth in the settlement of Mary Ball Hughes’s estate. They were listed along with “negro Tom,” who might be the Tom whom Joseph Ball had willed Mary in 1711. James Straughan, Elizabeth Bonam’s second husband, who died in 1740, also listed Dinah, who was probably the Dinah whom Joseph Ball had left his wife.
It is possible that the three young boys and men that Mary’s father had willed her had all died. Fifty percent of white children died before reaching the age of ten, and the mortality rate was higher for slaves, who had demanding work, less care, less food, fewer clothes, and more exposure to the weather. They were especially vulnerable to anemia, cholera, tuberculosis, and influenza.7
Mary oversaw the production of home brews at Wakefield. The water in eastern Virginia was bad, and Virginians consumed on average a gallon of ale daily. Everyone thirsted. Joseph Ball ordered his plantation manager to “let the Negroes have what [cider] will do them good; but more for feasts.”8 Doctors thought alcohol good for the health. It was less expensive than milk, and in the warmth everything made from fruit started to ferment right away, so there was little choice.9 In Virginia, women largely brewed for home consumption. There was little commercial market for liquor in early Virginia except in the labor-intensive business of running a tavern.10 Mary’s father had left his still, a costly apparatus, to his son, so Mary had to learn her skills at Wakefield.11 She oversaw the distillation of pears and apples, peaches, and persimmons to make, respectively, “perry” (cider from pears) or cider from apples, brandy from peaches, and beer from persimmons.12 Ale came from homegrown corn and molasses from the Caribbean. One Virginian ale started with a mix of water and crushed or whole corn kernels that was then fermented, making a sweet drink with a bite.
Mary became pregnant in June, but she would not have been certain until “quickening,” or when she could feel the baby move—between four and five months—sometime in September. Given the constancy of her pregnancies, she and Augustine enjoyed what medical experts recommended: a regular sex life. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women’s desire was taken for granted once it was aroused.13 Sexual desire was believed to heat men’s and women’s bodies, although men’s were thought to be inherently hotter. In early modern thought, both men and women contributed seeds formed by blood to create the baby. Orgasm released the seeds from both men and women. A woman’s orgasm both released her own seed and sucked the man’s into her. Writers advised men and women, but men particularly, not to make love lazily or feebly, lest from lackadaisical conception the resulting child not enjoy robust health. Experts thought that sexually inactive or unsatisfied women suffered from greensickness, or a longing for orgasm. Medical writers warned that greensickness among married women could inhibit reproduction and damage health, while it was a source of jokes about virgins. Writers advised husbands to give their wives frequent, enthusiastic sexual satisfaction.14
Mary’s sister Elizabeth, who had married James Straughan after Samuel Bonam’s death, was probably pregnant with one of her two girls at around the same time as Mary’s first pregnancy. Mary would not have lost the freedom of horseback riding until quickening. Before that, she could have taken one of her horses and ridden much of the day to the familiar house at Cherry Point to talk to Elizabeth. She could have used affection and guidance in her new adventures—marriage to Augustine, pregnancy, household responsibilities, little Jane, and her relations with the numerous bond people who were new to her. Further pregnancies and growing household duties would keep her homebound in future years. And after quickening, medical writers discouraged vigorous physical exercise.15
As Mary gained weight and her shape changed, she would have loosened the strings of her bodice for comfort, revealing her chemise underneath. She would have worn a sack, a comfortable, loose, waistless garment that decades later became identified as a dressing gown—only for wear around the house. In this period, however, women wore them when and where they wished. Women did not distinguish between lingerie and outerwear in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as they would later. Mary continued to dress comfortably, according to the practice of her generation, long after refined society had ruled that women should put on fussier and more elaborate clothes to appear in public.
Stepping up in social class meant higher standards for bodily cleanliness. The early eighteenth-century mistress was to appear in spotless linens and keep her family in them. Medical writers considered linen against the skin a good cleaning agent, better than daily baths, which were not common. Linen was thought to brush away the pollutions of the body—of which women accumulated the greatest and most varied share—and elite men and women typically changed their underclothing often. Mary would already have known about using buttermilk to bleach linens, but her marriage brought more linens to tend and more critical scrutiny of them, along with more enslaved laundresses to wash and iron them. As the scholar Kathleen Brown has observed, “Elite women, in particular, bore the pressures of supporting emerging class distinctions as well as overcoming an age-old presumption of their inherent filth.” These pressures would grow and become a source of tension through Mary’s lifetime.16
Colonial women had an average of eight children, more than their contemporaries in Europe. Women regarded childbearing as their duty and destiny. Some women knew how to limit childbearing. Some extended the intervals between babies by prolonged lactation.17 A few knew about and sometimes used abortifacients and occasionally practiced infanticide. But the colonies punished abortion and infanticide and extolled the virtues of prolific women.
Women were, however, less enthusiastic about uninterrupted childbearing than men were. In the later eighteenth century, women privately discussed the health hazards of many pregnancies and thought some “Lords of Creation” should abstain from sex to protect their wives.18 The Quaker Elizabeth Drinker expressed a feeling that resonated with many, including Mary, apparently, who, contrary to pervasive local practice when widowed, never remarried. Drinker wrote, “I have often thought that women who live to get over the time of Child-bareing, if other things are favourable to them, experience more comfort and satisfaction than at any other period in their lives.”19 Thomas Jefferson was well aware of the extreme dangers birth placed on his frail wife and watched her die after one of her excruciating deliveries.20 But religion, the law, and men agreed on women’s biological destiny and husbands’ sexual rights. In Virginia, where some men referred to their wives as “breeders,” men took pride in their wives’ fertility.21 Mary did not challenge her duty to bear children during her marriage, and her constitution was up to the task.
Although Mary had witnessed Elizabeth survive childbirth and knew enslaved women who had successfully given birth, she also knew of women and infants, free and slave, who had succumbed. Mary saw one of Elizabeth’s babies die. Augustine’s mother had died from complications of giving birth to a child who also died. While colonial women bore an average of eight children, only four of them were likely to survive to the age of ten.22 (Five of Mary’s six survived to adulthood.) Statistics for slave mothers are unknown even in the better-documented nineteenth century, but one-fifth of white mothers died in one eighteenth-century community, while slaves, exhausted by work and undernourished, died at a higher rate.23
First-time mothers feared death in childbirth, and for some the terror never diminished. Mary had Matthew Hale and John Scott to consult, although their advice to make peace with the possibility of death could not calm her more incarnate fears.
Mary moved through her circuit of duties and chores with perhaps less speed but more certainty as she came to know the house and Augustine’s slaves better. In Virginia, tradition taught that pregnancies could go terribly wrong if a mother did not get what she craved.24 The idea also circulated that mothers suffering a fright or experiencing an unnaturally strong desire might mark or deform their children.25
At Christmas 1731, Mary, feeling bulky, presided over her first celebration of Christ’s birth at Pope’s Creek. Ministers preached against rowdiness and gaming in remembering the birth of the Savior, but work—even slaves’ work—stopped for the day, and feasting and drinking, dancing and play took over. Throughout the days until Twelfth Night, or the Epiphany, when the three kings made it to the manger, Virginians gave parties. They foxhunted, danced, drank, and ate together. Ministers offered Communion first on Christmas and three other times during those festive days. Twelfth Night concluded with a bang-up party, the high point of which was the cake. Martha Washington’s granddaughter later recorded her grandmother’s recipe that begins, “Take 40 eggs.”26 Mary’s preparations would have been more modest, but she carried the keys and oversaw the festivities. In both cases, slaves performed the work.
In late February, when Mary began to feel contractions, her sister Elizabeth, depending on her obligations, might have come for her first delivery. Mildred Washington Gregory, Augustine’s sister, and Catharine Washington, his sister-in-law, living in the vicinity, probably helped. Augustine paid a midwife because male doctors were still not welcome at the bedsides of laboring women. Attendants were friends or relatives, likely on a social plane with the laboring mother.27 Mary’s slaves provided food and drink for the women who gathered. She could have had some wine or cider to ease her pains, while her companions drank and chatted. By the time of delivery, the midwife and just one or two others would have remained. She could have given birth in a number of positions, sitting on a chair or small stool. She probably did not deliver lying down. The midwife cut the umbilical cord—its length of humorous interest, as indicative of the future size of the infant’s genitalia.28 Mothers like Mary had ready a set of childbed linens, probably in damask, to wear when presenting the infant at the “sitting up” visits of friends and relatives.29
The boy was born at 10:00 a.m. on February 22, 1732,30 and although there is no written proof, his parents clearly named him for George Eskridge. Virginians liked the names of warriors, knights, and kings, and George was among their favorite. Tradition in Virginia very strongly favored the continuation of family names. Lawrence and Augustine had already been covered, and John would have been the logical next choice. The couple’s joint and individual attachments to Eskridge induced them to introduce his name into the Washington line, extending their clan connections.31
Wealthy women like Mary spent the month after birth in bed. After the midwife went home, slaves made sure Mary stayed warm; that meant, in February and early March, a roaring fire, tightly drawn bed curtains, and piles of blankets. Slaves prepared her foods like red meat, eggs, wine, and ale to restore her strength. Mary had time to gather her energies, establish her milk, and nurse her infant.32
Thomas Comber’s Short Discourses upon the Whole Common-Prayer bears both Mary’s and Augustine’s names. Comber devoted a section to the churching, or thanksgiving and purification, that Mary would have undergone about six weeks after the birth of George. This ceremony praised God for helping a woman survive childbirth. It also marked her ready to resume her religious duties and sex with her husband. Churching originated in a Jewish ceremony described in Leviticus and had to undergo some Christianizing to make it acceptable to Anglicans. Comber interpreted the ritual by denying that anything “but Sin makes any person unclean under the Gospel”; that is, childbirth itself did not make a woman impure, contrary to Jewish thought. According to Comber, a mother’s distress in labor was the proper punishment for Eve’s original sin.33
Although Comber wrote that it was “absurd” to perform such a ceremony at home instead of praising the Lord in public, the prominence of the Washingtons might have pressured the minister to visit Wakefield. Pastors in Virginia complained about making these house calls.34 The Puritans prohibited churching during the English Civil War, but it seems women liked it, and with the Restoration much of the English Anglican population took it up again. It might never have been suspended in Virginia.35
Whether at home or in church, a minister would have begun with the Lord’s Prayer and gone on to Psalm 116 or Psalm 127 or both. Comber suggested a prayer for new mothers based on Psalm 116 that recalled the pain and fear of childbirth and described the experience as being as close as humans come to the pains of hell: “I prayed earnestly in my late danger.… I could scarce speak I was so faint, but [he inclined his ear to me] and heard my inward and secret groans … the pains that are the most terrible next to those of hell violently got hold on me … and he was pleased to hear me … he was righteous in laying this punishment of the first Sin upon me, and it was purely his free Mercy to support me, and take it off from me.”36 Mary and other mothers could only have appreciated the commendation of bodily suffering, an almost unique instance of positive public attention to the female body and experience.
Because Mary had given birth to a boy, Psalm 127 was a natural (and prophetic) choice:
Sons are a heritage from the Lord,
children a reward from him.
Like arrows in the hands of a warrior
are sons born in one’s youth.
Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.
They will not be put to shame
When they contend with their enemies in the gate.
The rector of Washington Parish, the Reverend Roderick McCullough, baptized George. Because he was a boy, he had two godfathers, Captain Christopher Brooke and Beverly Whiting, who was the brother-in-law of Augustine’s brother, John Washington, and was married to Catharine Whiting.37 Augustine’s sister (George’s aunt), Mildred Washington Gregory, became his godmother. George’s white brocaded silk christening gown had a rose-colored silk lining.38 Mary probably nursed George until he was about seven months old and then either gave him to a slave to wet-nurse or started him on food. She became pregnant in October 1732.39
Mary and Augustine’s next child was a girl, born June 20, 1733, at about 6:00 a.m., whom Mary named after her sister Elizabeth. Conveniently, George Eskridge’s wife was also Elizabeth, so she would have been gratified by the name as well. Around this time, Mary’s sister Elizabeth gave birth to a second girl, whom she named Mary. Both Mary and Elizabeth and their children managed to escape death from pleurisy, which felled many in the spring of 1733.40 Elizabeth followed the expected routine, naming her first daughter after herself and her second after both her mother and her sister. Mary, however, named her first daughter after Elizabeth, and never named a child after herself (and/or her biological mother), although she bore another girl. Augustine had named his second son Augustine and his fifth son John Augustine. Mary underlined the strength of her love for her sister. Perhaps the decade or so she spent with her blurred earlier memories of her mother, or perhaps the comparison favored Elizabeth. Perhaps it was an act of self-effacement.
Over time, little Betty became the mainstay in Mary’s life. Betty and her mother lived near each other all of their lives, so there was no need for correspondence. They expressed their affection in exchanges of food and clothing, helpful visits, care for each other’s health, gifts of work and the products of work, commiseration, and intimate talk about kin, health, religion, and neighbors.
