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Lund Washington to attend to her financial needs in his absence. He agreed to pay rent to her based on the proceeds from the slaves and farmland she still owned. This mismanaged property had never yielded even half the money he agreed to pay her, so that the “rent” constituted a large outright subsidy. He had even sold off slaves to pay the exorbitant property taxes. During the war Washington had never received a single complaint about Lund’s treatment of his mother and must have assumed she was perfectly content. In fact, Mary was far from content as she struggled with poor health, wartime food shortages, and the grave illness of her son-in-law and next-door neighbor, Fielding Lewis. Yet Washington heard nothing from her directly about these problems and learned about them only in an embarrassing fashion.

After consulting with the French at Newport in February 1781, Washington returned to New Windsor to discover one of the most bizarre letters of his career. Benjamin Harrison, speaker of the Virginia assembly, informed Washington, with some trepidation, that his mother had instigated a movement in the legislature to provide her with an emergency pension: “Some Gent[leme]n of the last assembly proposed to apply to that body for assistance to your mother, who, they said, was in great want, owing to the heavy taxes she was oblig[e]d to pay. I took a liberty to put a stop to this, supposing you would be displeased at such an application. I make no doubt but the assembly would readily grant the request and it now only rests with you to say whether it shall be made or not.”39 Perhaps afraid of infuriating or insulting Washington, Harrison had stalled in writing the letter. Clearly Mary had made no effort to forewarn her son of her petition. She had now progressed from quaint or eccentric to dangerously erratic.

From Washington’s abashed response, one can tell that he had not heard about the matter before or communicated with his mother in years. He was mortified by the insinuation that he was an unfeeling son and that his mother had consequently thrown herself upon the charity of the state. The charge of neglect was substantially the same one Mary had trotted out since he first rode off to the French and Indian War. Now, amid his manifold wartime duties, Washington sat down and recounted for Harrison his tortured history with his mother, telling how he had set her up in Fredericksburg before the war and instructed Lund to take care of her. He seemed baffled and hurt by her charges: “Whence her distresses can arise, therefore, I know not, never having received any complaint . . . Confident I am that she has not a child that would not divide the last sixpence to relieve her from real distress. This she has been repeatedly assured of by me. And all of us, I am certain, would feel much hurt at having our mother a pensioner while we had the means of supporting her. But, in fact, she has an ample income of her own.”40 Washington asked the assembly to desist from taking any action.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Plundering Scoundrels

AS THE WAR WANED in the northern states, it waxed ever hotter in the South. The British, stymied in their goal of galvanizing southern Loyalists, nonetheless continued to fight aggressively. Lord Cornwallis ached to avenge the humiliation Banastre Tarleton suffered at Cowpens in January. For three weeks Nathanael Greene’s ragtag army led him on a long wild-goose chase; then, on March 15, 1781, Cornwallis spotted his chance, as his men approached a phalanx of local militia that Greene had lined up south of Guilford Court House in North Carolina. After firing one volley, the North Carolina men dispersed, as Greene had ordered, but the Continental soldiers stubbornly held their ground in fierce combat until Greene signaled a belated retreat. “I never saw such fighting since God made me,” declared a thunderstruck Cornwallis, who had a horse shot from under him in the carnage.1 Desperate for victory and in defiance of his officers, Cornwallis ordered his men to fire grapeshot amid hand-to-hand combat, causing