The Widow Washington, page 31
Those things said, he repeated his familiar defensive litany, a detailed description of how much money she had had from him and how he never thought it anything but his filial obligation to supply her with everything she asked for, despite never having received a “copper” from her farms. “She has had a great deal of money from me at times, as can be made appear by my books, and the accounts of Mr L. Washington during my absence—and over and above this has not only had all that was ever made from the Plantation but got her provisions and every thing else she thought proper from thence. In short to the best of my recollection I have never in my life received a copper from the estate—and have paid many hundred pounds (first and last) to her in cash—However I want no retribution—I conceived it to be a duty whenever she asked for money, and I had it, to furnish her notwithstanding she got all the crops or the amount of them, and took every thing she wanted from the plantation for the support of her family, horses &ca besides.”
It was the story he had constructed for Benjamin Harrison and perfected in letters to John Augustine and Mary herself. He wanted Betty to know it. There is literal truth in it, but it is a partial story, leaving out his father’s ungenerous treatment of Mary in his will (even for a society miserly toward widows), not counting income that George did sometimes receive from his reorganization and rental of Ferry Farm, the diminishing value of the money that Lund gave her during the Revolution, and his relentless skepticism about her understanding of her own needs. It also obscures what he himself said to Lund: that he had, before the war, an estate that would permit him to buy anything he “had in view.” He was an immensely wealthy man, too wealthy, one might think, to begrudge his elderly mother some money here and there. But it was his story, and it comforted him to repeat it to his sister. Most historians and biographers have, by and large, taken it as the truth, and it has limited subsequent accounts of her to the subject of how he had to deal with this supposedly troublesome, insatiable old woman.
George’s secretary and biographer, David Humphreys, lost both his parents in 1787. George wrote in commiseration that because they had both been old, David had to have been prepared for the “shock; Tho’ there is something painful in bidding adieu to those we love or revere, when we know it is a final one, Reason, religion & Philosophy may soften the anguish, but time alone can irradicate it.” George, like his correspondent, was prepared for the “shock” of his elderly mother’s death. He would call on time as well as his deep reserves of “Reason, religion & Philosophy” to abate the “anguish.” Of the two verbs he offered David, “revere” probably came closer to his core feeling about Mary than “love.”39
Mary opened her will by asserting her good health and sound mind. She invoked “the uncertainty of this life,” as well she might at about seventy-nine years old. She had lived a remarkably long time for the period, outliving two of her grown children, the others dying at much younger ages than Mary had attained. Only 5 percent of the population in colonial America lived beyond sixty.40
Unlike her late husband, Augustine, she recommended her “soul in the hands of [her] Creator, hoping for a remission of all [her] sins through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ.” With the religious formula observed, not perfunctorily in Mary’s case, she bequeathed six slaves with apparently reckless disregard for them and their ties—separating her cook Old Bet and young Bet (and her “increase”), who were without doubt mother and daughter. She gave the Negro boy “George,” who was probably Old Bet and Stephen’s other child, to his namesake, her firstborn son, separating him from his mother. Old Bet instead went to Mary’s grandson Corbin Washington (John Augustine and Hannah’s son). Her daughter, “Little Bet,” went to Mary’s granddaughter Betty. Lydia went to Lawrence Lewis, Betty and Fielding’s son (who married Martha’s granddaughter Nelly Custis). Mary left Fielding junior the enslaved Frederick and an array of silver spoons, a blue-and-white tea service, and household furnishings.
She did not dispose of Patty, because it seems likely that Patty was the child Augustine gave to Betty in his will; that is, Patty already belonged to Betty. Whether Mary discussed her plans for her slaves is unknown. What little we know of Silla’s unwilling months of service to Mary suggests that Mary did not discuss such matters with slaves. George had come to yield to the preferences of his slaves not to be sold away. It is not at all clear that Mary allowed those kinds of conversations even to take place.
Mary left “little Bet and her future increase” to her granddaughter Betty Lewis Carter, who had been close to both her mother and Mary. (Betty and her husband, Charles, married just before the family exile to the mountains, had to leave his father’s house unexpectedly and moved into one of Betty’s properties. After Mary’s death, they lived in her house for a while.)41 She left her granddaughter Betty furniture, household goods, her red-and-white tea service, teaspoons, and other useful items more or less equivalent to those left to Fielding junior. Mary gave Betty her phaeton and her bay horse. To Corbin, she gave her riding chair and two black horses. She left her lined shag cloak (“purple” in the will, “red” when ordered from London) to her recently widowed daughter-in-law, Hannah Bushrod Washington. And, recalling her mother’s careful division of clothes, she invited Betty to select two or three favorites before her grandchildren Betty, Fanny Ball (the daughter of Burgess Ball and Frances Washington, Charles and Mildred’s daughter), and Mildred Washington divvied them up among themselves. Those who selected and wore Mary’s clothes were believed to “animate” them, and “the clothes seem to reciprocate, recalling the shape of the absent body and accommodating its current inhabitant in the remembered form.”42
Mary left George the most meaningful and “best” of her possessions. She left him the land her father had willed her as a tiny child, the only thing left from that time of her life. Eighteenth-century thinkers saw a direct link between objects and memory. “Particular rooms of things contained traces of original experiences, triggering an endless train of related impressions.”43 Mary left George furnishings from her “best bedroom”: her “best bed” and curtains and her “best” dressing glass, and her blue-and-white quilt. She insisted, poignantly, on only the best for George, and her bequests were strikingly intimate, replete with, perhaps, her “best” memories. She left him her marriage bed, possibly the bed George was first nursed in, and a coverlet she probably quilted and certainly slept under. She wanted him to know that whatever she had done for him, it had been her best. She left her son Charles a slave named Tom.
The family was precise in divvying up those people and items that Mary had and had not mentioned in her will. Burgess Ball wrote that the “negroes” were “divided” after Betty learned that she was not to share in them because her father’s will, which determined their distribution, excluded her. How she received that news, given her debts, is not recorded. Ball and George were pleased that no families had to be separated. George sold her white Fredericksburg house for a hundred pounds more than he had paid for it.44
The remains of Mary’s agriculture enterprise included a modest array of tools, hoes for the slaves, two flax wheels, three plows, axes, two grindstones, a crosscut saw, and a pair of hand irons. She left twenty-odd cows and heifers, a few sheep and oxen, a boar, four sows and numerous piglets, and four hogs (“not choice”). The Quarter had produced nineteen bushels of wheat, four and a half bushels of oats, one of flaxseeds, half a bushel of corn, and four hundred pounds of hay. On hand were three yards of linen and two yards of “cloth.” The total of these and other household items like sugar boxes, tea canisters, counterpanes, curtains, and tables came to seventy-six pounds and some change as her grandson Bushrod recorded on October 29, 1798. Among the buyers were Isaac Newton, whom Mary had thought was encroaching on her brother Joseph’s land; her granddaughter Betty’s husband, Charles Carter; Burgess Ball; and Lewis Willis, a contemporary and school friend of George’s. These sales more than paid off her few debts. Materially, she ended life in some ways as she had begun it, except that no overseer left her farm with a cart piled high with her produce.45
Mary’s views of slavery did not alter during her life, at least if her will is evidence. Born and raised in the fierce years of large importations of Africans, Mary owned slaves from the time she was a small child. Being a slave owner shaped her consciousness and was a constant piece of her identity in the years when her family members were dying around her and forcing her to rethink herself after relationships evaporated. Her mother had left her a woman and her “increase,” providing Mary with the imaginary yet psychologically powerful security of someone else’s future. Mary did the same thing.
Her views on family obligations and the responsibilities of kin to take care of each other changed little as well. Forced early to a brittle self-reliance, she remained actively productive and independent as long as her health would allow. When her independence failed to provide for her and her “family,” she asked that her blood family help her out. Over their lifetimes, she and George struggled over the terms of this bargain but not its basic justice.
After Mary’s death, and in grateful, perhaps guilty, memory of her, George took under his wing Elizabeth Haynie and her daughter, Sally (also called Sarah and Sallie), the daughter and granddaughter of his mother’s half sister Elizabeth. He gave them a cabin, or “tenement,” in the west, rent-free, and some help in “putting the place in order,” for their lifetimes.46 Rob Lewis described Elizabeth as “genteel” and nearly blind, and Sally as a “beautiful girl of 16 or 17 helping to support her mother by hard work.”47 Washington instructed Lewis that he must not let Mrs. Haynie “suffer, as she has thrown herself upon me; your advances [of money] will be allowed always,” and for the daughter “make the latter a present, in my name, of a handsome but not costly gown.”48 George carried on his careful, measured help to Mary’s closest surviving relatives. He wanted Rob Lewis to understand that his heart and purse were open to these indigent maternal kin, up to a certain point.
EPILOGUE: AN UNEASY AFTERLIFE
IN 1826, GEORGE WASHINGTON PARKE CUSTIS appealed for money to build a monument to Mary. He succeeded in getting some local donors and a wealthy New Yorker to contribute. On May 7, 1833, officials, including President Andrew Jackson and future justice Roger B. Taney, presided over the laying of the cornerstone. All Fredericksburg turned out: the Masons, teachers and students, and three local military companies, despite Mary’s distaste for the armed services.
Not known for his feminism, but closely in touch with the antebellum zeitgeist as it related to mothers, Andrew Jackson said, “[George] approached her with the same reverence she had taught him to exhibit in early youth. This course of maternal discipline no doubt restrained the natural ardour of his temperament, and conferred upon him that power of self-command, which was one of the most remarkable traits of his character.… Affection less regulated by discretion might have changed the character of the son, and with it the destinies of the nation. We have reason to be proud of the virtue and intelligence of our females.”1 The president, surprisingly, came closer to describing Mary and George’s relationship than many scholars have.
George Washington Parke Custis’s wealthy New Yorker appointed a contractor to erect the monument, but the former left for China, and the contractor died. The Fredericksburg monument remained unfinished. Meanwhile, the nascent Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association had managed to acquire Mount Vernon and was beginning the long work of establishing the country’s first and most significant house museum.2 In December 1862, the Union general Ambrose Burnside failed to proceed with his troops to Richmond according to his battle plan. The fighting that Mary hated spilled over her uncompleted monument lying on its side in her once peaceful spot for prayer and meditation.
In 1878, Captain George Washington Ball, a descendant of Burgess Ball and Fanny Washington, helped found the Mary Ball Washington Association, hoping to restart the enthusiasm for a monument for Mary. Before much money could be collected in those poor years, a real estate firm in 1889 advertised that the land on which Mary was buried was for sale. George Shepherd, who owned the land, evidently did not know either that Mary was buried there or that it was illegal to sell a grave in Virginia, or both. In either case, public outrage encouraged him to withdraw the land from sale, but the realtors sued him. Shepherd won the suit (although the realtors’ lawyer reportedly threw a bottle of ink on the suit of Shepherd’s lawyer).
Two associations gathered to repair the near disaster to Mary’s grave site and do her honor, at long last. One was based in Fredericksburg, the other national in membership. Like many other late-nineteenth-century southern women’s associations, they celebrated the Lost Cause vision of the harmonious antebellum South and its brave soldiers as a way to reconcile the white people of both sections. Two association members, the writers and energetic rehabilitators of the South, Marion Harland (the pen name of Mary Hawes Terhune) and Sara Agnes Pryor (the wife of Roger Atkinson Pryor), wrote laudatory biographies of Mary Washington to help raise money and awareness for the monument and contribute to the larger task of reconciliation. The scarcity of established facts of Mary’s life made her eminently useful for their dual purposes.3
Marion Harland (1830–1922), born Mary Hawes, a Virginian who spent most of her life in New Jersey with her Presbyterian minister husband, Edward Payson Terhune, wrote prodigious numbers of novels and housekeeping guides. She looked back lovingly on antebellum Virginia and idealized it in her books. Her Virginia included “negroes no better than grown up children” whose cares Mary bore while assuming “the responsibilities of their physical, moral, and spiritual condition.”4 Off by a century, she had Mary growing cotton, not tobacco. In her lush prose, she painted an empathic mother and a devoted and honorable boy. Harland wrote, “The mother-heart must often have reckoned [that she had] a Pyrrhian victory over the dearest wishes of the gallant boy whose filial obedience under the crucial test enhanced her appreciation of his noble nature.”
Sara Pryor (1830–1912) was born in Virginia and married to Roger Pryor, a Virginian and fire-eating secessionist. The couple and their children moved north after the war. He became a lawyer and later a judge devoted to the Lost Cause; she became a writer, interested in historic preservation, and a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution as well as the Lost Cause organization the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Sara Pryor’s paean to Mary was equally a paean to antebellum Virginia. She wrote that there was “reason to believe that [Mary’s] house servants were treated with all the affectionate consideration they deserved.” Many slave-owning Virginians in the period, she argued, were abolitionists who freed their slaves after the war and gave them land. She observed that “the negro was docile, affectionate, and quick to learn, at least these were the characteristics of those employed in households.”5 As to Mary, her strength derived partly from “the priceless gift of a long happy girlhood—that sweet fountain of pure waters, the memory of which has cheered so many women throughout a long and difficult life.”6 Both authors deflected criticism circulating about Mary’s parsimony, alleged sour temper, and “ungraceful … dress.” Mary might have had trouble recognizing herself, her childhood, and her Virginia in these portraits.
Although the associations agreed on their larger goals, the Fredericksburg one did not want to hand over the land George Shepherd had given them and lose control to the national group. Fredericksburg men persuaded them to do it, however, on the grounds that the national association, unlike the local women, could bring in helpful money to Fredericksburg. Mrs. Vivian Fleming, president of the local association, wrote with dismay that Marion Harland “went over to the nationals, horse, foot, and dragoons.”7 The local association unwillingly agreed to cede the land, and the national association had a monument built. It did not conform to the wishes of the local association but was in any case completed and dedicated by President Grover Cleveland in 1894.
The orator for the day was the Virginia senator John Daniel, a promoter of the Lost Cause and a Democratic politician who campaigned on the slogan “I am a Democrat because I am white and I am a Virginian.” He told the gathering, “It was fitting indeed that your pious hands should rear the first monument on earth erected by women to a woman.” His eulogy of Mary bore considerably less resemblance to her than Andrew Jackson’s had. He praised her as “the good angel of the hearthstone—the special providence of tender hearts and helpless hands, content to bear her burden in the sequestered vale of life.… This memorial might indeed be due to her because of who she was, but it is far more due because of what she was. It is … as the type of her sex, her people and her race that she deserves this tribute.”8
For many decades after that, interested citizens of Fredericksburg watched unhappily as weeds obscured Mary’s monument. Title to the land had somehow been misplaced between the two organizations, and concerned members of the local association could not rescue the grounds from neglect without retrieving ownership. Eventually, they were able to raise some money and establish title to the monument and grounds. The staff of Kenmore Plantation, Betty and Fielding’s mansion (which became a National Historic Landmark in 1970), took over the maintenance of Mary’s park and memorial. It is now under the direction of the George Washington Foundation. Since the 1970s, a number of local historians and archaeologists, including but not limited to the late Paula Felder, Carolyn Jett, David Muraca, Laura Galke, and Michelle Hamilton, have found out more about Mary: her ancestry, the objects she owned and their origins and uses, her court appearances, and details of her life at home. They have created the foundations of another overdue monument to Mary: reliable information on her life.
