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CHAPTER 1
Foundations of Independence — Mary and Augustine Washington
"I was early denied of a father," the adult George Washington reflected. He had also been denied the educational opportunities his half-brothers had received. His father, Augustine, had died too young to specify them in his will. George was only eleven. All his life, the father of our country felt deeply his lack of intellectual attainments, an opinion shared by the other founders, however much they esteemed Washington's importance in unifying their fragile new nation.
Miriam Ann Bourne suggests that even given so few years together, it is inconceivable that so energetic a man as Augustine Washington "would not have had some influence on his best-known son." Whatever the extent of that influence, Paul Longmore concludes, "Perhaps we can see in the loss of his father" George Washington's "extraordinary drive for public fame." In either case, the public image Washington crafted for himself came out of both what he'd lost and what he'd sought. The tall, dignified silent figure wearing his old uniform at the Continental Congress was the picture of resolve, in itself a call to action and an offer to lead.
The private George Washington was far less austere. He enjoyed entertaining, had an eye for a trim ankle, was known to indulge in coarse conversation, operated the largest distillery on the continent, and was acquisitive almost to the point of excess. H. L. Mencken called him "the Rockefeller of his time." He poured out his emotions in a constant stream of letters, both official and personal. Throughout the War for American Independence he castigated Congress for its lack of support, and throughout his life he conducted a candid correspondence with many relatives.
There was one notable exception — his mother, Mary Ball Washington. To her, his letters were few and formal. What to make of this perplexing woman has long challenged historians. As Bourne puts it, "Nineteenth-century sentimentality created a virtuous myth; twentieth-century revisionism has created a nagging monster." Of one quality there is no doubt. In an age of male domination, Mary Ball Washington was a woman of immense will, which she constantly sought to exert on her oldest son, and which, in a protracted contest, he sought to escape.
Much has been made of the patrician origins of our first six presidents, four of whom were the sons of Virginia planters and the other two from a well-established Massachusetts family. In the saga of the Washingtons, however, there are humbler themes and a dramatic mobility akin to that of later generations of immigrants. For generations, the Washington family had lived in the Essex region of England, rising to become landed gentry, just below the aristocracy. Their estates were prosperous enough to enable young Lawrence Washington to answer a call to the Anglican priesthood. However, he wound up on the wrong side of the English Civil War of the 1640s, and the ascendant Roundheads found this heavy-drinking minister too cavalier for their tastes and expelled him for "immorality."
Before long, his high-spirited son, John, decided it prudent to go to sea. In 1657 he landed in the Colony of Virginia and wasted little time in finding himself a prosperous bride, the most direct form of upward mobility. Soon they had a son, another Lawrence, who would be George Washington's grandfather. As James Thomas Flexner points out, "The Wild West was then on the Atlantic seaboard, and John Washington was a turbulent spirit well suited to so violent a world." Sued by his captain for desertion, he responded by accusing the captain of murder on the high seas.
Energetic John Washington became a self-taught lawyer, rising to become both advocate and judge, ultimately sitting on both the county court and his church vestry. Most important, he indulged in what Flexner calls a "passion for acreage," a quality to be emulated by his successors. In short, this first Washington in Virginia soon restored his family to the level it had enjoyed in the old country, his success exemplifying the ambivalence of a colonial society overlaying raw acquisitiveness with a veneer of English sensibilities.
Not surprisingly, John's son, Lawrence, a respectable, introspective lawyer, chose to overlook some of the foundations of his father's prosperity. Lawrence's second son, Augustine, the father of George Washington, enjoyed the benefits of an education in England, no longer at war with itself, and also married the daughter of a well-to-do Virginia planter. By the time he came of age in 1715, he was the master of some 1,750 fertile acres.
The descriptions that have come down to us about Augustine Washington have almost a mythic quality. Douglas Southall Freeman quotes young George as describing his father as a gentle, genial giant: "tall, fair of complexion, well proportioned, and fond of children." Flexner notes that Augustine, called "Gus" by his friends, was "blond, of fine proportions and great physical strength ... standing six feet tall in his stockings. His kindly nature matched his towering strength." Adding to this, his possession of a spacious plantation at Pope's Creek made him at twenty-one as attractive a catch as his popular teenage bride, Jane Butler.
Only three generations removed from the arrival of tempestuous John Washington in Virginia, Augustine would be an acknowledged leader in each of the three localities where he and his family would reside. Apparently, he always had a profound love of the land. Eventually, he built a handsome home called "Wakefield" at Pope's Creek. By then Jane had given birth to four children, three of whom survived. The two boys bore familiar family names — Lawrence and another Augustine.
What changed their father's life was the discovery of a rich deposit of iron ore on his plantation. It also eventually changed the senior Augustine's cheerful disposition, turning him from a gentleman farmer to an overburdened entrepreneur. Having entered into a partnership with English investors to form the Principio Company, Augustine was often away from home. While he was in England in 1729 to meet with his increasingly contentious partners, Jane, his devoted wife of fourteen years, passed away.
Despite profound feelings of guilt and grief, Augustine was obliged to find a new mother for his children. It took him two years, although amiable widows were hardly in short supply even in sparsely populated Virginia. But Augustine, then a mature thirty-seven, settled on an "old maid" of twenty-three named Mary Ball. The source of his attraction is uncertain. Flexner describes Mary Ball as "a healthy orphan of moderate height, rounded figure, and pleasant voice." Not everyone was to find her voice so pleasant in future years. She brought to the marriage in 1731 a substantial inheritance of her own, few emotional ties, and a strong will more than a match for her obliging husband's.
Eleven months into their marriage, on the morning of February 22, 1732, Mary gave birth to a boy large enough to seem a proper son of the robust Augustine Washington. He was christened George, not a traditional Washington name, for George Eskridge, who had been Mary's devoted guardian after the death of her parents. By the time he learned to walk, George had a sister named Betty. They were followed by another sister and three brothers. That five of these six children survived to adulthood, an unlikely percentage in that time and place, testifies to the vigor of both parents. Growing up, George hardly wanted for playmates, black as well as white. At Pope's Creek, the natural world was just outside his door, supplemented by a menagerie of dogs, chickens, calves, pigs, and horses. Throughout, Augustine was the parent on the move; Mary, the parent in place.
When George was only three, Augustine moved his family from Westmoreland County to a much larger plantation further up the Potomac in what is now Fairfax, Virginia. A few years later, in 1738, the family moved for the final time to be closer to Augustine's principal iron mine and furnace, at Accokeek Creek in present-day Stafford County, on the Rappahannock River, near the new town of Fredericksburg. Called "Ferry Farm," it was truly George's childhood home. If, indeed, he cut down that cherry tree, it was likely there. A precocious, lively child, George loved to hunt in the nearby woods and to fish, swim, and sail in a river narrow enough for a sturdy youth to hurl a coin across. Some of this activity had to be in the company of his nature-loving father, although by then Augustine was not only immersed in the iron business, but was also still farming tobacco and other crops and buying, selling, and leasing land to others. He also fulfilled community obligations, from church vestryman and high sheriff to trustee of Fredericksburg.
With his half-sister deceased and his two half-brothers away at the Appleby School in England, George was the oldest child at home. For a time he was enrolled in a small school operated by an Anglican clergyman, but his education was largely in the hands of tutors. He learned to write in a fine, flourishing hand, became a proficient draftsman, and was good at arithmetic. His studies included moral and natural philosophy. However, his classical education was intended to come later, like his half-brothers' across the sea at Appleby, followed by college at William and Mary.
It was particularly George's half-brother Lawrence who joined with their father as an example to emulate. When George wrote down with such care in his notebook all 110 maxims of the "Rules of Civility in Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation," devised by Jesuits for European nobility, they seemed equally to apply to Virginia gentry. When Lawrence at twenty returned as a dashing young captain from a British expedition against Spain in the Caribbean and became engaged to lovely Anne Fairfax, whose family stood at the pinnacle of Tidewater society, George shared in his own family's satisfaction.
Only a few months later, in the spring of 1743, while playing with nearby cousins, George was visited by a messenger with an urgent summons to return home. His overburdened father was dying. Augustine Washington died on April 12, 1743, at only forty-nine. The official cause was "gout of the stomach," although it may have been exacerbated by pneumonia. The usually thorough Augustine had neglected to specify in his will that George, then only eleven, was to receive the same classical education as his older half-brothers.
In other respects, Augustine tried to provide equitably for everyone. To Lawrence, the older son of his first marriage, went the house at Little Hunting Creek, which he would rebuild and rename Mount Vernon in honor of English Admiral Edward Vernon, under whom he had served. To George, to be kept in trust for him until he came of age at twenty-one, went Ferry Farm and its surroundings. Mary Washington was to be in charge until that time, yet it would be twenty-eight years until she finally left.
In 1743, however, she faced daunting challenges. Even so self-reliant a widow, now thirty-six and determined not to remarry, was obliged to maintain substantial property and to raise the five children still at home. She would need a good deal of help. Since George at eleven was the oldest, he would have to stay at home by her side, become the titular head of the household, and look after his siblings, all under her relentless supervision.
It is hardly surprising that George preferred the more congenial company at Mount Vernon, which he came to see as his true home, with access to the palatial neighboring Belvoir estate of the Fairfax family. Soon Colonel Fairfax himself began to see in this younger Washington a potential conspicuously lacking in his own weak-kneed sons.
Back at Ferry Farm, Mary worked as best she could with and through her often-absent son, a tug-of-war she was bound eventually to lose. George admired his mother's determination without wanting to share in its application. Moreover, Mary Ball Washington's undoubted strengths as a manager were compromised by difficulties in setting priorities. As Freeman notes, "A thousand trivialities were her daily care to the neglect of larger interests." One of George's contemporaries relates, "Of the mother I was ten times more afraid than I was of my own parents. She awed me in the midst of her kindness." Indeed, Mary Ball Washington could be kind, and she was genuinely devoted to her restless son, making her later concerns that he never contributed sufficiently to her welfare all the more puzzling.
Lawrence's extensive land holdings had encouraged George's interest in surveying and exploring, just as his half-brother's military prowess inspired George's dreams of his own future success. "My inclinations," he declared, "are strongly bent to arms." When he was sixteen, his mother reluctantly permitted him to accept Colonel Fairfax's offer to join an expedition surveying western lands. At seventeen he gained his first paying job as surveyor for the county of Culpepper, affording him ample opportunity, in the family tradition, to acquire land for himself in the fertile Shenandoah Valley. By his later teens, George Washington was already physically a man, at six-foot-two taller than his imposing father had been, and developing something of that commanding public persona. In one respect, however, young George was typically vulnerable. He fell in love with a dazzling young lady of eighteen, Sally Cary. Unfortunately, she was already betrothed — to a Fairfax — and had the good sense to eventually end the relationship with Washington, saving both parties from scandal and preserving for him the patronage of the powerful. When he finally did marry, it was to the sensible, amiable, very wealthy, and widowed Martha Dandridge Custis.
Lawrence Washington had returned from a session at the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg with a serious problem of his own. His chronic cough had escalated to "consumption," likely a form of tuberculosis. Seeking a cure in the beneficent climate of Barbados, he was accompanied by nineteen-year-old George, on the only ocean voyage of his life. The tropical locale enthralled him, but unfortunately George contracted smallpox and had to return home. One can imagine a likely maternal refrain of "I told you so." Lawrence went on to Bermuda. George recovered, but Lawrence did not. He died at the age of thirty-four, fourteen years younger than had his father, Augustine. By the time he was twenty, George Washington had lost both of the male role models from his own family.
Lawrence's will gave his half-brother "in love and affection" several lots in Fredericksburg, and in the event of contingencies, the ultimate possession of Mount Vernon, with its 2,000 acres. On the verge of his majority, beyond the restraint of his mother's hand, Washington embarked on his true vocation, military adventure. Assuming Lawrence's position as adjutant of the Virginia militia, he undertook a dangerous mission from the provincial governor to convince the French to abandon their plans for expansion in the Ohio Valley. The ultimatum failed, the French and Indian War followed, and Washington was engaged in periodic combat for the better part of the next eight years.
Returning home as a full colonel who had commanded all of Virginia's forces, Washington had important decisions to make. He had suffered setbacks but had accumulated vast experience. Despite this, he had been denied a commission in the regular British Army, which was to be a source of enduring resentment. He resigned his commission (but kept his uniform), comparing the valor of his Virginia militia to the "cowardice" of the British regulars.
He married Martha and set about to become the country squire his mother had envisioned. By then George had inherited both Mount Vernon and a new family to inhabit it. Martha had brought her own immense resources and her two surviving Custis children, a son and a daughter. George lavished attention on them and their eventual offspring, as well as a host of nieces and nephews, although it would be a profound disappointment that he and Martha were unable to have any children of their own.
Throughout his campaigns, as he would later, George had found time to write letters of warmth and candor to his remaining half-brother and his siblings. To his terrified mother he wrote little, although he once asked that she not be told of a "shameful defeat." Apparently, he still valued her grudging favor, even after she left Ferry Farm to move to her modest new home in Fredericksburg.
Near her daughter Betty's family, Mary Washington saw little of her oldest son and avoided sharing in his subsequent success. Flexner's view that "she was clearly a powerful woman, but all her power was centered on herself" seems excessively harsh. Her moral and religious beliefs may have been "strictly orthodox," as Doris Faber writes, but she sincerely tried to impart them to all her children throughout their time together, particularly dwelling on the grandeur of nature as embodying "the majesty of the Creator of all things." She had settled on a location near "meditation rock," her favorite retreat for reading and prayer, as her final resting place.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Cradles of Power"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Harold I. Gullan.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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