Washington [6]
From spotty early records, Augustine emerges as a remorseless, hard-driving businessman. He started with 1,100 acres that he inherited along the Potomac and augmented that with 1,750 acres from the dowry of his first wife, Jane Butler. He specialized in tobacco farming until he began snapping up properties rich in iron ore at Accokeek Creek, near Fredericksburg. In 1729 he traveled to England to seal a contract with the Principio Company, which owned iron operations in Virginia and Maryland. By the time he returned to Virginia, his wife had died, saddling him with the care of three small children: two sons, Lawrence and Augustine Jr. (often called Austin), and a daughter, Jane. Minding children on his own wasn’t an option for a hard-pressed colonial widower, and Augustine may not have been overly fussy in his urgent quest to find a country bride. On March 6, 1731, the thirty-seven-year-old Augustine married Mary Johnson Ball, a pious, headstrong woman who would exert a profound formative influence on her son George. At twenty-three, Mary was already slightly old for marriage, which may say something about her feisty personality or about Augustine’s hopeful conviction that he could tame this indomitable woman.
Mary Ball was born in 1708 into a situation that skirted the edge of local scandal. Her English-born father, Joseph Ball, a thriving businessman, had settled on the Potomac, married, and raised several children before his wife’s death. Lonesome at fifty-eight, he then shocked propriety and threatened his children’s inheritance by wedding an illiterate woman named Mary Johnson. Their daughter, Mary Ball, was only three when her elderly father died, leaving her with a bequest of four hundred acres, fifteen head of cattle, three slaves, and a sackful of feathers from which to fashion a bed. Her mother remarried but then died, converting Mary into an orphan at age twelve. The girl was farmed out to an obliging family friend, George Eskridge, who treated her so humanely that she would honor his memory by naming her first son George after him. It was probably Eskridge who acted as go-between in matching up Mary and Augustine Washington.
A crusty woman with a stubborn streak, Mary Ball Washington made few concessions to social convention. In a lesson internalized by her celebrated son, she didn’t adapt or bend easily to others but stayed resolutely true to her own standards. We can only assume that her forlorn childhood, characterized by constant loss, left innumerable scars and insecurities, producing an anxious personality. With flinty self-reliance and iron discipline, she ran a thrifty household and was sparing in her praise and very definite in her opinions. A plain, homespun woman who may have smoked a pipe, she betrayed little interest in the larger world, confined her attention to the family farm, and shunned high society. Since her own mother was illiterate, Mary probably received scant education. Her few letters are replete with spelling errors, dispense with all grammar and punctuation, and confirm the impression of an unlettered countrywoman.
The thick family Bible at Mount Vernon records that George Washington was born around ten A.M. on February 11, 1732, at the family farm at Pope’s Creek in Westmoreland County, an area of bucolic beauty less than a mile from the Potomac River. The modest birthplace later went up in flames. The newborn boy was reputed to be a baby of unusual heft. His original birthday derived from the Julian, or Old Style, calendar, which remained in effect in Britain and its colonies until the mid-eighteenth century, when the new Gregorian calendar deferred it by eleven days to February 22. Until the