Mary Washington

“ Martha Lamb when she was helping to organize the Colonial Dames—and I was early, heart and soul, interested in the Daughters of the American Revolution. Of Jamestown and the noble society which owns it—everybody knows. I managed a great ball at the White Sulphur Springs to help build a monument over Mary Washington's grave. The governors of New York and of Virginia each sent flags—from the state of my birth and the state of my adoption. General Lee conducted the Mary Washington of the hour. ”

“ Mary Washington, mother of George Washington, died August 25, 1789. Her will, registered in the clerk’s office at Fredericksburg, Virginia, is a peculiarly interesting document, and is here given in full. ”

“ This lady, flashing by in many hues, represents what one sees continually in Washington—a new woman. Not new to the city merely, but new to position and honor. These are but slight external accidents to a nature that has ripened from within, drawing culture, refinement, and dignity out of the daily opportunities of retired life. But, when the public position is all that gives the honor, how easy to tell it! There is all the difference in the quality of the put-on, puckering manner, and the simple dignity of real ladyhood, that there is between the quality of a persimmon and a pomegranate. ”

“ In the lives of the Presidents of the United States, it is found that the nation owes much to American mothers.
George Washington was only eleven years old when his father died, leaving the widowed mother, Mary Washington, with five children to educate and direct. She used daily to gather her children around her and teach them the principles of religion and morality from a little manual in which she wrote all her maxims. ”

“ The principles and conduct of this illustrious matron were closely interwoven with the destinies of her son. Washington ever acknowledged that he owed everything to his mother-in the education and habits of his early life. His high moral principle, his perfect self-possession, his clear and sound judgment, his inflexible resolution and untiring application-were developed by her training and example. A believer in the truths of religion, she inculcated a strict obedience to its injunctions. She planted the seed, and cherished the growth, which bore such rich and glorious fruit. ”

“ Here, on their marble couch, amid the grassy slopes and tutelary trees of their ancient domain, rest the bodies of George and Martha Washington. Full of years and full of honors they laid down, and their tomb has been the Mecca of this continent. It never can be other than it is. ”

“ Nevertheless, in poetry of feeling, in grandeur of conception, in exquisite fineness of detail and in execution, Horatio Greenough’s statue of George Washington is transcendently the greatest work in marble yet wrought at the command of the government for the Capitol. It is scarcely human, certainly not American, but it is godlike. The face is a perfect portrait of Washington. The veining of a single hand, the muscles of a single arm are triumphs of art. ”

“ Washington, so useful in the domestic sphere, did not abound in incident. She passed through the trials common to those who lived amid the scenes of the Revolutionary era. She saw the son whom she had taught to be good-whom she had reared in the principles of true honor, walking the perilous path of duty with firm step, leading his country to independence, and crowned with his reward-a nation's gratitude; yet in all these changes, her simple, earnest nature remained the same. She loved to speak, in her latter days, of her boy's merits in his early life, and of his filial affection and duty ”

“ Under such a light, some morning, spring suddenly spreads forth its whole panoply, with a vividness of green, a prodigality of foliage never seen in a more northern latitude. One wide wilderness of unbroken bloom sends up its fragrance through waves of purple yellow and azure light, and then, till the day when, without warning, summer suddenly transmutes all into molten brass, Washington in light and color, in bloom and fragrance, is a city of enchantment. ”

“ Washington shared neither the least nor the most of the educational advantages of his colony. The elder brothers, Lawrence and Augustine, had realized their father's hopes, and had been sent to England for their schooling as he had been for his, but the early death of the father defeated that plan for George, so he obtained the early preparation for his life work from the "home university," over which Mary Washington presided, a loving and wise head. At times George was with his brother Augustine at Bridges Creek, to be near the best parish school, and then he was at home ”

“ Taylor, the wife of General Taylor, the twelfth President of the United States, was one of those unknown heroines of whom fame keeps no record. Her life, in its self-abnegation and wifely devotion, under every stress of privation and danger on the Indian’s trail, amid fever-breeding swamps, and on the edge of the battle-field, was more heroic than that ever dreamed of by Martha Washington—or continuously lived by any Presidential lady of the Revolution—yet time will never give her a chronicler. ”

“ By the way, a lady in private life in Washington,—a scholar and caustic writer,—used to earn all her pin money, before her ship of fortune came in, by writing, in the solitude of her room, the learned, witty and sarcastic speeches which were thundered in Congress the next day, by some Congressional Jupiter, who could not have launched such a thunder-bolt to have saved his soul had it not been first forged and electrified by a woman. ”

“ People of sensibility do not wish even to board in a house so haunted with tragic memories of human lives. The house is now used for Government purposes. Its site is so superlative; central to the most interesting objects of Washington, and facing the waving sea of summer-green in Lafayette square. In the march of change its place will soon be filled by some soaring Mansard mansion of the future. But when every brick has vanished, the memories of the old club-house and Seward mansion will survive while any chronicle of Washington endures. ”

“ Then if the father of his country can look down from any star upon the city of his love he will behold in the new Washington that which even he did not foresee in his earthly life—one of the most magnificent cities of the whole earth. ”

“ The lady of the manor in crude Washington revives the stately graces of old days.
How quaint and rare they are! How I look and long for it; how glad I am when I find it,—that indefinable, yet ever-felt presence of fine womanliness, a thing as precious as the highest manliness,—each the rarest efflovescence of human nature. I confess to a clinging adoration for it, whether felt in the lady of the manor or in the sad-eyed woman who cleans my gloves. The womanliness that is not ashamed nor dissatisfied with womanhood, nor yet vain of it ”

“ It is as the wife of Washington, through sentiments called out by the greatness of his character and the love which she bore him, that the moral capacity of Martha Washington’s nature ever approaches greatness. In her reply to Congress, who asked that the body of George Washington might be placed beneath a monument in the capitol which his patriotism had done so much to rear, her words rise to the patriotic grandeur of Abigail Adams, they could not rise higher. ”

“ As a result, Washington is crowded with a shoal of pretty girls, bright and lovely as God had made them; by a false life, late hours, voluptuous dances, made already hard, old, blasé, often before their feet have touched the first verge of womanhood. ”

“ A college in Fredericksburg was later named for Mary Washington.
"All that I am I owe to my honored Mother," is the tribute that the great George Washington paid to Mary Ball Washington. [Pg 165]
AFTER THE REVOLUTION
The Northern Neck, like the rest of Tidewater Virginia, changed after the Revolution. War had taken its toll of manpower and money.
The tobacco lands had become exhausted, therefore the culture of tobacco had been almost abandoned. Wheat and corn were now the main crops. ”

“ Without the pure and patriotic Mary, there would have been no Washington,—and without Washington, the Americans would have had no country, and the oppressed of all lands no asylum of liberty and prosperity. In the sacred bosom of her family, woman is like the queen of night amid the pretty stars. In our infant years, she nourishes, and shields, and cheers us in our precarious journey to maturer years. She imparts the first kiss, and moulds the first prayer, and is prouder of her offspring than a queen of her throne. ”

“ We have newer and dearer shrines, even, than the tomb of Washington; yet, in these soft, summer mornings, many pilgrims turn their faces toward Mount Vernon.
Every morning a large company, including the young and the old, the refined and the vulgar, land at the little wharf below the home of Washington. Fathers and mothers come with their children and their lunch-baskets. Pretty girls come with venerable duennas, and young men come to look at them in spite of their keepers. Lovers come and go, maundering along the lanes, as lovers will. ”

“ She has quick perceptions, and an almost unrivalled power of mimicry. The only amusement of her desolate days, while shut in from the world in Chicago, when she refused to see her dearest friends and took comfort in the thought that she had been chosen as the object of pre-eminent affliction, was to repeat in tone, gesture and expression, the words, actions and looks of men and women who, in the splendor of her life in Washington, had happened to offend her. ”

“ After the organization of the government, Washington repaired to Fredericksburg, to announce to his mother his election to the chief magistracy, and bid her farewell, before assuming the duties of his office. Her aged frame was bowed down by disease; and she felt that they were parting to meet no more in this world. But she bade him go, with heaven's blessing and - her own, to fulfil the high destinies to which he had been called. Washington was deeply affected, and wept at the parting. ”

“ Washington’s family government was steady and reasonable; his treatment of his children was kind and affectionate. George was an intelligent boy and a dutiful son. Never were parent and child more strongly attached. But, in the providence of God, only a few years more were to be allowed them for the enjoyment of each other’s society, on earth.
About the year 1739, when George was about seven years old, his father removed from his estate on Pope’s Creek to a farm which he owned in Stafford county, on the Rappahannock river, directly opposite to Fredericksburg. ”

“ The wharves of Washington and Georgetown are empty compared with those of New York, or even of Baltimore. For generations there was neither commerce nor manufacture to induce men of capital to remove from large cities of active business to the new city in the wilderness, whose very life depended on the will of a majority of Congress. Washington’s idea of the National Capital far outleaped his century. ”

“ You stand beneath the dome; but your eyes find rest in the far shadow of the Virginia hills.
And so many people seem to have come under the great dome to rest. You wonder where they could all have appeared from. They are not at all the people who crowd and hurry through the corridors in winter—the claimants, the lobbyists, the pleasure-seekers from great cities who come to spend the “season” in Washington. Nearly all are people from the country, the greater proportion brides and grooms, to whom the only “season” on earth is spring—the marriage season. ”

“ Besides these books and a number of others, she has written almost countless essays on household and other topics. Her book, “Eve’s Daughters,” is a standard work of counsel to girls and young women. She takes an active part in the literary and philanthropic organizations of New York City, and has been prominent in the Woman’s Councils held under the auspices of a Chautauquan association. She was the first to call attention to the dilapidated condition of the grave of Mary Washington and started a movement to put the monument in proper condition. ”

“ But had Martha Washington enjoyed the highest mental privileges, she would never have been known to the world as an intellectual woman, or as a woman who, by any impulse of her unassisted nature, would ever have risen above the commonplace. ”

“ Nowhere was this so apparent as in Washington. Women seeking their husbands; women, whose husbands were dead, left penniless with dependent children. Young girls, orphaned and homeless, with women adventurers of every phase and sort, all, sooner or later, found their way to Washington. The male population was scarcely less chaotic. Men, restrained and harmonized through life by the holiest influences of home, found themselves suddenly homeless, herded together in masses, exposed to hardships, danger and undreamed-of temptations. ”

“ Washington was full of needy women, of women whom the exigencies of war had suddenly bereft of protection and home. In her appointment at that hour, political differences went for nothing. Every poor woman who applied to the good General was given work if he had it. A pair of scissors were placed in her hands, and she was told to go at it. She had no official appointment or existence. During 1862, these women were paid six hundred dollars per annum out of the fund provided by Congress for temporary clerks. ”

“ Staring at relics in the midst of a jostling crowd is not particularly conducive to reflection—at least not to emotion. Even the bedstead on which Washington died seems to lose half its sacredness being handled and commented on by a careless crowd. ”