Mary Ball Washington Read online

  Though the exact date or year is unknown, a fight between historians had taken place, with the implications of some years over others. Benson Lossing, whose historical works were gospel to the nineteenth-century American, said flat out that Mary was born in late 1706.4 Mary Terhune, writing as Marion Harland in her Story of Mary Washington, repeated similarly that it was an “autumnal day in the year of our Lord 1706.”5 From there the year 1706 was repeated continuously, as in an article in The Spirit of ’76, among many others.6 Though poetic that the mother of Washington was born exactly seventy years before the year of independence, there was a serious, and possibly damning, implication: if Mary was born in 1706, as attested, then that would mean she was born out of wedlock. Hayden pointed to a deed between her father, Joseph, and his son on the seventh of February, 1707, in which the former stated that “at this date I have no wife,” so any date before that directly accused her of illegitimacy. Laws were in place for bastard children, resulting in fines and additional punishment to the parents, especially if master and servant were involved. Mary Johnson, the mother, was rumored without foundation by several sources to have been the maidservant of the Balls. A “freeman” and maidservant having an illegitimate child would have resulted, per an act of the Virginia General Assembly in 1657 to 1658, in paying “five hundred pounds of tobacco to the vse of the parish where the said act is comitted or be whipt.”7 That’s not exactly a light sentence by any means. For this egregious assertion, Hayden called Lossing’s book “historical fiction,” further gnawing back, “I do not wonder when Lossing, an historian, has set his pace by his romances.”8 In another publication, his gnaw became a bite: these anecdotes that were repeated time and time again “destroy faith in historical writers,”9 he said.

  All is fair in love and war . . . and historical research, apparently.

  Whether or not her birth was in 1706 or 1707 or 1708, and whether or not Mary Ball was born in or out of wedlock in the Northern Neck, it “came without fuss and feathers . . . Colonial families increased with such rabbit-like regularity that there was not much more excitement over a lying-in than over the making of an apple pie. . . . [It] was merely an episode in the daily life at Epping Forest.”10 A lack of extant records may prove this, and multiple children through previous marriages may have diluted the exceptional circumstances of a new life.

  WHERE WAS SHE BORN? THAT LOCATION WAS MOST LIKELY EPPING FOREST Plantation in Lancaster County, owned by her father. This building currently sits less than a mile from State Route 3—which is also appropriately known as Mary Ball Road, noted for its pass through historical Virginia and for having possibly been a major colonial route and winding through Lancaster County, through the small town of Lively, moving northward through farms and forests and Balls Branch, until it merges with River Road to become History Land Highway right at Chinns Pond. Moving southward from Lively, Mary Ball Road hits Lancaster, where the Mary Ball Washington Museum and Library stands, down about seven miles to Kilmarnock. This fifteen-mile stretch of road commemorates this event on this unknown day in this unknown year, with signs pointing to Epping Forest.

  Early-twentieth-century biographer Nancy Byrd Turner succinctly described the period of Mary’s birth in the early eighteenth century as “peaceful air.”11 Mary was born as Virginia was relatively settled and calm, the threats of Indian attacks or counterattacks minimal. England’s civil war half a century earlier was over, and the monarchy had been restored from the hands of parliamentarians.

  An unimportant birth to her parents, maybe, during an unimportant time—but certainly not for the United States.

  BABY MARY WOULD HAVE SLEPT IN A CRADLE OF WOOD OR WICKER, COVERED with quilted blankets, homemade. It was custom in the colonies to have the initials of the child embroidered on the blanket. Her clothes as an infant were made from linen, most likely, according to Alice Earle, whose book Child Life in Colonial Days, while focusing on New England, did allow some thoughts on the Virginian lifestyle. “Linen formed the chilling substructure of their dress, thin linen, low-necked, short-sleeved shirts; and linen even formed the underwear of infants until the middle of this century. These little linen shirts are daintier than the warmest silk or fine woollen underwear that have succeeded them; they are edged with fine narrow thread lace, hemstitched with tiny rows of stitches, and sometimes embroidered by hand.”12

  MARY HAD NO BROTHERS, SISTERS, OR COUSINS AROUND HER AGE. THE youngest child of her father’s first marriage, Mary’s half brother Joseph Jr., went to England, married Frances Ravenscroft, and settled in his ancestor’s country as a lawyer in London by the time of her birth.13

  Mary was practically brotherless and sisterless living in Epping Forest with her mother and father. Within a few short years, she was also fatherless.

  The “‘Rose of Epping Forest’ was a tiny bud indeed when her father died. . . .”14

  The first evidence of Mary Ball’s existence did not come from her birth or baptismal records, which, if even recorded, have long been lost, but from the death of her father, Joseph Ball, who was around fifty years old at that time. His will, made out on June 25, 1711, and recorded sixteen days later on July 11, was a lengthy and dry document. Joseph Ball died shortly thereafter (one historian on Mary Ball mistakes this will for his father’s, saying that he was “lying upon the bed in [his] lodging chamber”15). To his youngest child, Mary, about three years of age, he mostly gave:

  Item I give and bequeath to my daughter Mary four hundred acres of Land Lying in Rchmd County in ye freshes of Rapphn River being part of a pattin for sixteen hundred acres of Land to her[.] The s[ai]d Mary and the heirs of her body Lawfully to be begotten for ever . . .

  Item I give to my daughter Mary my negro boy Tome and ye negro Joe and Jack yt formerly were belonging to Jo Carnegie, decd.

  Item I give to my daughter Mary all my feathers yt are in ye Kitchen Loft to put into a bed for her.

  Joseph gave most of his estate and possessions to his older son Joseph, Mary’s half brother. To his wife, including slaves, “one half of all ye posessions and corn [that] is now ye house for her better support and maintenance,” effectively setting her up for life.16 At least a third of the estate was required by law to be given to a widow.

  He died in July of that year, less than a month after his will was made. An inventory of his estate dated July 25 exists, suggesting he died sometime prior. According to the lengthy appraisal, Joseph had clothes and bottles and cases and punch bowls and pots and carpets and table drawers. He had a wealth of possessions. He had cattle of many ages, oxen. He had tables and chests. His estate was valued at well over 350 pounds.17 He was rich, certainly, though not the richest.

  WIDOW MARY JOHNSON BALL REMARRIED, WITHIN A YEAR, EXCHANGING vows with Richard Hues (or Hewes, or Hughes, depending on the document), “a vestryman of St. Stephen Parish living on 161 acres at Cherry Point on the Potomac River side of the Northern Neck.”18

  Cherry Point, Mary’s home after her mother’s second marriage, was situated between the Yeocomico and Coan Rivers, near the Potomac. The trip from Epping Forest to Cherry Point took the three-year-old girl about fifteen miles through the beautiful Northern Neck of Virginia. For ten years, from three to thirteen, ages bookended with the deaths of her father and her mother, respectively, Mary lived and was raised here.

  THE MARRIAGE TO HUES DID NOT LAST LONG. HE DIED IN FEBRUARY 1714, less than two years after his marriage, with no children of their own, when the young Mary was about five years old. She was not mentioned in Richard’s will.19

  First a father and now a stepfather, gone. All before the age of awareness.

  FOR THE NEXT SIX YEARS, THE LITTLE DAUGHTER WAS MISSING FROM history.

  Mary Johnson Ball Hues, already with a lengthy and long-winded name, did not marry a third time, leaving the little girl with no one she could call father. Sarah Pryor wrote, “The limits of an early colonial house allowed no space for the nursery devoted exclusively to a child and filled with every conceivabl
e appliance for her instruction and amusement. There were no wonderful mechanical animals, life-like in form and color, and capable of exercising many of their functions.”20

  Manners were priority for little girls, partly for future maternal responsibilities. She was responsible for house tasks as deemed fit by her mother, perhaps assisting slaves and servants, and perhaps helping in the gardens of the plantation. It was a typical girl’s upbringing.

  MARY HUES, FORMERLY MARY BALL, FORMERLY MARY JOHNSON, WROTE her will on December 17, 1720. She died shortly after, in the summer of 1721, as she noted that she was “sick and weak in body.”21

  The person of interest aside, the will itself was remarkably unique. “It is seldom that in a document of this kind,” commented historian George Beale, who had accidentally discovered the will in the Northumberland County archives a century ago, that “maternal affection, having other and older children to share its bequests, so concentrates itself upon a youngest daughter, and she a child of thirteen summers.”22 All but two items in the will went to Mary. Among the young Mary’s inheritance included, according to the will:

  One young likely negro woman . . . to be delivered unto her . . . att [sic] the age of Eighteen years. . . . I give and bequeath unto my said Daughter Mary Ball two gold rings the one being a large hoop and the other a stoned Ring . . . one young mare and her Increase . . . sufficient furniture for the bed her father Joseph Ball left her [including] One suit of good curtains and fallens, one Rugg, one Quilt, one pair Blankets . . . one good young Paceing horse together with a good silk plush side-saddle.

  By 1721, Mary Ball, daughter of Joseph and Mary, was fatherless and motherless. She was thirteen years old and she had inherited quite a bit—not enough to be considered rich—at a tender age.23

  LOSSING CITED A LETTER “IN POSSESSION OF A FRIEND IN BALTIMORE” dated January 14, 1723, from Mary’s own handwriting, to her half brother Joseph, the son of her father and his first wife. The fifteen-year-old girl noted,

  We have not had a school-master in our neighborhood until now in nearly four years. We have now a young minister living with us, who was educated at Oxford, took orders, and came over as assistant to Rev. Kemp, at Gloucester. That parish is too poor to keep both, and he teaches school for his board. He teaches sister Susie and me and Madam Carter’s boy and two girls. I am now learning pretty fast. Mama and Susie and I all send love to you and Mary. This from your loving sister, Mary Ball.24

  The education of young girls was different from that of the boys and certainly different from that of the men. Governor William Berkeley, the hated leader of Virginia during the 1670s, once wrote, “I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these [for a] hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world.”25

  Years after this condemnation of learning backfired, after the establishment of the College of William and Mary and after both public and private tutors became popular, Mary’s own half brother, Joseph Jr., wished to educate young men. Court records showed, in 1729, that he submitted a measure of “instructing a certain number of young gentlemen, Virginians born, in the study of divinity, at the county’s charge.”26 Of women, though, there was no such measure and no need for one.

  “Their destiny was Kinder, Küche, Kirche; whether or not they knew German, they knew that,” wrote Nancy Turner.27 Children, kitchen, church. A wholly domestic life.

  The schools were few and far between though, as the size and rural setting of Virginia were an impediment. Bishop of London Henry Compton, toward the end of the seventeenth century, noted that “this lack of schools in Virginia is a consequence of their scattered planting.”28 What towns in Virginia in 1700 existed were sporadic.

  The most popular way to teach was through a hornbook, a medieval-origin tablet typically with the alphabet and phonemes and the Lord’s Prayer. It was also called a horn-gig, a horn-bat, a battledore-book, absey-book, and other names, and its use as a simple primer for children was standard practice in both Europe and colonial America.

  Young Mary used these hornbooks to learn to read and write, probably, due to her mother’s and stepfather’s wealth, with the use of a private tutor, if not partly taught by Mary Hues herself.29 It was popular a half century later in Pennsylvania and New York to gift them to children, implying that it was effective in providing that rare quality of being both fun and useful.30 Willard Randall states that in her studies “she learned what was expected of a Virginia gentlewoman: sewing, dancing, embroidery, the Anglican catechism . . . painting, horseback riding, how to treat her slaves.”31 It was “practical and judicious,” meaning numbers, writing, Bible studies.32 No studies in law or philosophy or science or theology would have been necessary for a young or old woman, being exclusively for the men of those professions.

  WHO WAS THIS “SISTER SUSIE” MENTIONED IN THE LETTER? NO SUSAN OR Susie is mentioned in either her father’s or mother’s will, nor in any primary documentation. It is possible that this was a transcription error from Lossing, reading “Susie” or “sister” for another word, or she used it as a term of endearment for a girlfriend. This letter was reportedly filled with spelling errors and “the handwriting was stiff and cramped,” so perhaps it was just misreading.33 This was not out of the ordinary, however, in a time when standardized English did not exist.

  JAMES SHARPLES, AN ENGLISH PAINTER WHO EMIGRATED TO THE NEWLY formed United States in 1794—and who created portraits of such American giants as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton—was said to have conversed with the former president at Mount Vernon about his mother.

  Here we learn of Thomas Baker, a reverend from England. He was a native of England but sailed to Virginia to the delight of the educated. He kept “up active correspondence with old University chums,” author James Walter wrote, second- or thirdhand, “and became a very fountain of European intelligence among the various English families who had turned their backs on the ‘old country.’” Sharples noted that George Washington said,

  Thomas Baker was a man of refined education, and devoted much of his leisure, of which he had a good deal, in grounding my mother in religious knowledge, which her mind was naturally inclined to receive, so also in directing her studies in such other branches of instruction as he deemed most fitting and likely to serve her in the education of children. He was in the habit of reading translations of portions of the best classic authors, and which he was very apt in making interesting by contrasts with modern writers. This most excellent man derived very real pleasure in these labours of love, and strove his utmost with, as he was pleased to speak of my mother, “the most amiable, and yet the most impressional character I have ever known, a girl of great personal attractions, and yet utterly unconscious of their possession.”

  Washington, Sharples claims, continued to speak of an unknown female French tutor also teaching his mother, especially the “rules for female deportment” such as dancing, which suited “my mother’s tall and perfect figure.”34

  Of Reverend Baker, we know nothing else. Not his age or skills, though according to one source, he was a mathematician and great-grandfather of English artist Joshua Reynolds.35 We can infer that Mary Ball learned the tenets of the Anglican Church.

  AFTER HER MOTHER’S DEATH, MARY LIVED WITH HER HALF SISTER ELIZABETH and her first husband, Samuel Bonum, whom Elizabeth had married in 1717 or 1718. George Eskridge, the executor of Mary’s mother’s will, was Samuel’s uncle, and lived close to Mary’s new, and third, home at a plantation east of Bonum’s Creek, Westmoreland County. It was this Samuel, presumably, that Mary honored when naming one of her sons Samuel. The house that they lived in no longer exists, and by the early twentieth century was nothing but a “pile of bricks,” but it overlooked a bank of the Potomac River, a setting not rare but still just as extraordinary.

  George Eskridge’s responsibilities to Mary perhaps extended only to the property, and not to her upbringing, as reported by P
aula Felder, as upon Mary Hues’s death, the Northumberland court ordered him to “appraise the said decd: Estate in money” and “exhibit an inventory thereof.” No mention of tutoring or raising Mary.36 Nevertheless, many biographies emphasize the personal relationship between the two, often due to the fact that she named her oldest son, to be the future president, after him.

  When he was a young law student at the end of the seventeenth century, George Eskridge was said to have been captured by the “Press Gang” in Wales, grouped with forcibly recruited men of the British military, and sold to an unknown planter in Virginia as a servant. “During that time,” wrote Sara Pryor, “he was not allowed to communicate with his friends at home. He was treated very harshly, and made to lodge in the kitchen, where he slept.” Eight years later, when his “term of service” was over, he left his master, became a lawyer in England, and returned to the Virginia Colony. He had become “eminent among the distinguished citizens of the ‘Northern Neck,’” residing in Sandy Point in Westmoreland County.37

  Tradition both old and new said Mary often visited and lived under George’s care at Sandy Point until her marriage ten years later. Sandy Point, only three and a half miles from Elizabeth’s house in Bonum’s Creek and about twenty-five miles from her future husband’s Wakefield plantation, granted Mary many opportunities to ride her inherited horses, sharpening her already considerably talented equestrian skills. She visited the Lee family in Machodoc, to the northwest.

  The local church, along with other plantations, manors, and buildings of fertile Westmoreland County and neighboring countrysides, offered a rich route that Mary could ride alone or with George’s children, some of whom were close to Mary’s own age.

  HOW DID THE YOUNG MARY WASHINGTON LOOK? THERE IS NO RELIABLE DESCRIPTION of her that exists, yet we can assume that she looked purely English—her long ancestry attested to that. George might have inherited his blue eyes and dark brown hair from his mother. If she was a horseback rider, which is fair to assume considering her inheritance from relatives’ wills, her body would have reflected a strong, nimble build of an equestrian.38