 Good afternoon and welcome to the William G. McGowan Theater here at the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, and I'm pleased to welcome you to the theater, whether you're joining us here in the theater or on our YouTube or Facebook channels and a special welcome to our C-SPAN audience. Today's talk is one of the many programs we've developed to tie into our new exhibit upstairs, Lawrence F. O'Brien Gallery, rightfully hers, American Women in the Vote. But before we hear from Martha Sexton about her new biography of Mary Washington, I'd like to let you know about two other programs coming up this week. Tomorrow at noon, Lester Gorlich will present an illustrated lecture on the Faulkner murals revealing their stories in which he'll describe artist Barry Faulkner's creation of and the composition of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution murals in the rotunda of this building. And on Wednesday, July 3rd, at noon, we'll host a conversation between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail Adams, portrayed by Stephen Adenbeau and Kim Hanley. Expective spirits of discussion are their views on the events that surround the struggle for American independence in the establishment of the United States under the Constitution. Check our website at archives.gov or sign up at the table upstairs to receive email updates. You'll also find information about other National Archives programs and exhibits. Another way to get more involved in the National Archives is to become a member of the National Archives Foundation. The Foundation supports all of our education and outreach activities. Their website, archivesfoundation.org, gives you more information about joining. I mentioned our new exhibit in honor of the centennial of the 19th Amendment. One of the goals of the rightfully hers is to shine a light on women whose stories have long been overlooked. The exhibit also explains tangible economic, political, and social harm women endured before they were treated as full citizens. Mary Ball Washington was born two centuries too early for the suffrage movement, but in her own time, she was a strong, hardworking woman. She also faced adversity as a widow with five children on a farm to keep afloat. Mary Washington's story has long been subsumed under her famous sons. George Washington looms so largely in the story of our nation that it was easy to forget that the father of our nation also had a mother. Little has been written, painted a picture of a demanding, difficult person. In her new biography, Martha Saxton has reexamined the old judgmental portrayals of widow Washington and looks at her through a new lens. Martha Saxton has taught at Columbia University in Amherst College, where she joined the history and women's and gender studies departments in 1996. She's the author or co-author of several works, including Being Good, Women's Moral Values in Early America, two revisions of interpretations of American history and the transformation of this world depends on you. She retired from Amherst in 2016 and is currently editing a volume of historical essays about the college for its bicentennial. She was a fellow for two years at Columbia Society of Fellows in the Humanities. She's received a Bunting Fellowship from Radcliffe College, and she had a fellowship at the Coleman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library while I was the director there. So it's really nice to welcome Martha to my house. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Martha Saxton. Thank you, David, for that wonderful introduction. I'm really honored to be here. This is a great pleasure to me to be in this institution. Before I start talking about Mary Ball Washington, I thought I would read something that her son wrote that totally delights me. In 1777, he wrote to one Nathaniel Sackett, who was apparently a spy, quote, it runs in my head that I was to correspond with you by a fictitious name. If so, I have forgot the name and must be reminded of it again. I am, sir, your most obedient servant, George Washington. For me, George is tired and sober admission that he forgot his alias is particularly appealing, apart from the way it makes me feel about my cell phone and my bank accounts. He could be very defensive, but he knew he was wrong sometimes. He was usually polite and often self-deprecating. He had a kind of rye self-knowledge that still seems charming to me. The reason I start out this way is because after reading my manuscript, a Washington scholar said, well, I guess I just like Washington better than you do. But I don't dislike Washington. In fact, I admire him more every single day. But I don't think we necessarily have to see him as infallible on the subject of his mother. Most people aren't infallible on the subject of their mothers or fathers. And I don't see this as a zero-sum game. I don't understand why you can't see both of them in relation to each other and still admire them both and note that there was some friction between them. So that's sort of where I want to start. As to his mother, I find somewhat to my consternation that the person I most agree with in very broad strokes about her is Andrew Jackson. He gave a speech about her while dedicating a memorial tour that actually never got erected. Jackson got it right, I think, when he said that George learned his sense of proportion, his commanding presence, his persistence as well as a measure of humility from his mother. So okay, George's mother. Stories abound about Mary Ball Washington, which is a little surprising because the founder's mother left no diary about five letters and a few objects of no great value compared to her son's 54 volumes of published letters that's not much evidence about his mother. The absence of evidence has either been a problem or a great boon to historians depending on what kind of story they wanted to write. It certainly has not meant that historians have tread carefully in describing her relationship with her son. She's been portrayed as Pi as insanely and more recently and far more persistently as a shrew, selfish, crude, illiterate, slovenly, worst of all possibly a pipe smoker. A mother who tried to thwart her son's career and someone who George could not possibly care for although he would try. And that was sort of his dutiful side tried to be correct with her. Not surprisingly historians have treated Mary as a satellite to George reflecting his light not generating her own. But although they have occasionally criticized his decisions or choices about other things they have been utterly uncritical of his negative observations about his mother and many have seen his positive sort of protestations and words as dutiful at best. Another somewhat related problem is that biographers have relied on a combination of their common sense and the gender stereotypes of their times to fill in her silences. While most historians reject the notion of common sense as a yardstick for economic or political behavior and instead work to reconstruct the historical context for every decision and every action that their subjects take. Gender relations and family history remain areas where many writers largely men go with their gut feelings about what relationships between men and women should be, not looking at the historical context in which they occur, which of course changed very dramatically. Shifting versions of Mary have come partly from historical gender stereotypes. Her reputation as a mother particularly corresponds pretty closely to contemporaneous ideas about what constitutes a good mother. So in the early years she was on the Christian pedestal as the self-sacrificing pious and sort of excellent mother. That lasted until a little bit after the Civil War and at that point toward the end of the 19th century the whole idea of biography began to change and this is important too. Biographies up until that point had been largely stories of the unfolding character and good deeds of a good man almost exclusively biographies were about men. In the late 19th century that began to change with deepening psychological analysis of people and the emergent kind of what they call therapeutic narrative is what we have now which is a narrative that really explores influences on people and doesn't imagine that character is innately born and unchanging. So because mothers are so immensely important in the therapeutic narrative that had a profound effect on the way Mary came to be seen. Her reputation plummeted in the late 19th and early 20th century and she became not his moral educator not self-sacrificing pious but the unloving obstacle that he had to overcome. About 10 years ago I thought we might be arriving at a sort of a good enough mother moment for her and the biographers would stop doing that but Ron Chernow's 2010 biography continues and intensifies the demonic Mary tradition. Often this way of telling George's story seems to be a covert struggle not just over George's professional fulfillment but also his sexuality. If he had failed to dominate and separate from this shrewish and controlling woman he might have become her emasculated overseer incapable of fathering anything including the country. It makes for a very good tale but it makes for quite a flawed one. It also handily makes him completely self-made and basically extinguishes her role as mother. Mary has also been a vehicle for political work. For example in the post-Civil War period two women who were interested for their own reasons in rehabilitating the south in the eyes of the north wrote laudatory books about Mary as a caring slave mistress practically an abolitionist and I can assure you she was not. Similarly in the same period George's biographers praised her for being healthy, robust and having good Anglo-Saxon genes in a period when high immigration and the northern migration of recently freed black citizens worried the ruling class. So I thought at this point I'd describe a couple of the flash points that are quite reasonably well documented between George and his mother that underlie the negative characterizations of her and then I'll provide some go back and provide some context from her life for these developments to offer another way of thinking about the relationship. Mary acquires importance to George's biographers when her husband Augustine dies and she is left in her mid-thirties to raise five children. George was 11 years old, he was the eldest and there was Betty, his sister about a year younger, Samuel, John Augustine and Charles about five years old. He had recently also hosted her husband's two older sons by his first marriage back from England where they were educated. They both married about the time of Augustine's death. Early historians saw her as valiantly stepping up and managing her household under very difficult circumstances and doing the very best she could for her young which is actually a reasonable position and one that I have come to. Later historians have seen her as managing her resources poorly, having little or nothing to commend herself as a mother particularly to young George and this is where the portrayal of her as a literate, crude, dirty and pipe-smoking starts to crop up and then George acquired all of his manners and his good behavior at the house of his elder step, his half-brother Lawrence who then occupied Mount Vernon. Early biographers saw the next sort of flash point is his military career. Early biographers saw her as worried about George's safety and George actually saw it that way too. Later biographers started to criticize her for being overly protective and trying to keep him at home and failing to see, failing to allow him and encourage him to follow his dangerous bliss. You can see how the therapeutic narrative sort of starts to work here that you can interpret exactly the same set of feelings and activities in quite different ways. The other issue is money and this is probably the one that runs most through their story. Early historians made very little of the idea that Mary requested small sums of money from George after he married the richest woman in Virginia, Martha. They simply believed that, which was what she said, that she needed the cash and they overlooked his complaints about it because it made him look bad. Later historians have argued that she was greedy, acquisitive and money-grubbing asking George for money when she didn't need it. The climax of that critique comes at the end of the revolution. Benjamin Harrison, who is a friend of George's, let him know that there had been a discussion at the previous session of the assembly of Virginia about getting Mary a pension. Since she was worried about paying her high-war time taxes and she was going to lose the last piece of property that she owned. This, of course, embarrassed George tremendously. He wrote angry letters to several friends and siblings about it. She's been blamed for initiating that discussion, for petitioning the assembly herself and for deliberately shaming her son, the assumption being that she was actually quite well off. George's letter is in the main source, indeed just about the only source for all of this. So now I'd like to go back a bit and just sort of sketch in some important parts of Mary's life so that we can reconsider some of these conflicting tales. She's abrupt widowing in 1743 left her, as I said, taking care of five children. Her two step-sons, Lawrence and Austin, went off immediately and took the property that they had been left the most important pieces of land and houses in Augustine's will. And so they immediately went off and occupied those properties and quickly married wealthy women. The house that Mary and her children were in was the most, the land was the most exhausted from tobacco raising. And she also lost, at the time that the older children went off, she lost the proceeds from the iron foundry that Augustine had founded. And so her income dropped very dramatically, obviously, and she had these children to raise. This drained her and her children of most of the income she was accustomed to. And George recalled these as the poorest years of his life. He remembered very poignantly not being able to go to a gathering because there was no corn for his horse to eat, so he couldn't take the horse. Augustine was extremely stingy to marry in his will, even given the sort of typical wills of the time. He left her basically with what she came with, which she legally couldn't dispose of. Two pieces of property from her father on the Rappahannock, as well as the right to live at Ferry Farm, the house that she and the children were in, until George came of age at 21. Then she was supposed to build a house for herself on land by the Potomac. She was living on the Rappahannock. He left her some land without house and directed her to build a house there. He left her six enslaved workers. She had brought four to the marriage, possibly five, so this wasn't any particular gift. If she needed more workers, she would have to take them out of the slaves, which he had designated to his children. So he set her interests at odds with those of her children. He also stipulated that if she were to remarry, her accounts would be closely monitored and she could lose the children if there was any kind of irregularity in the accounts. This was very, very common in second marriages. You never really knew, if you were remaring, who might turn out to be a scandal about money. So this was quite a disincentive for her to take a second husband. The legal structure itself shaped and encouraged friction between mothers and sons, particularly first born sons, because it was really considered illegitimate for women to own property and Augustine's will in that regard is not particularly unusual. Women owning property was seen as a sort of a temporary and bad solution to something that shouldn't happen. The assessments of her as crude, illiterate, and having a little offer to George are just inaccurate. She had a skimpy education, but she could read and write not particularly well, but better than the vast majority of Virginia women. Certainly on a level with Martha. Martha's handwriting was a little better and more of her letters persist, but Mary was perfectly literate. Mary was the daughter of an extremely wealthy planter who was at the social and economic level of the Washington's. The Washington's were very proud of their ancestry, but Mary's father's family was of equal status. The difference was that her father married a woman who was probably came over as an indentured servant, a woman who in this very fluid period in the early 18th century was able to fill a lot of roles that women normally didn't fill. She often witnessed wills and legal activities in the court, something that women really didn't do after. She would witness with an X, but I suspect she could read since those two skills were taught separately. Certainly Mary was a good reader. Mary then lost her father at three. So she is left with a mother who is litigating to protect the property that her husband left her. The rest of his family, since he was a widower, he had grown children, tried very hard to keep her from taking anything away from the estate. Mary, on the other hand, was left two plots of land on the repahannock and three male slaves. She was three years old. She grew up having to, they talk about her commanding presence. She simply had to develop a commanding presence in order to force people who were her property to behave like slaves. And since she was a girl and then a woman, she had to learn this authority and carry it more credibly. And this was much tougher for a woman than for a man to do. Her mother married again, was widowed again, and then her mother died at 12. So Mary was completely orphaned at 12 years old. And lived with her elder half-sister. She became devout very early. She had a collection of books, three or four books, which over her lifetime, devotional books. And she really learned them by rope. They became parents to her in a way, both parents and ministers. And they gave her a very firm philosophy and religious beliefs that she passed on to George and which were enormously similar to his. She did not become a novel reader, like Martha and like many of the well-bred gentry girls who were a bit younger than she. So they say that novel reading creates empathy, at least for the characters, because you're sort of drawn into them in a way that you're not when somebody is telling you the truth, which were the kinds of books that Mary read. Whether it's from not novel reading or what, Mary was not a particularly empathic person. She had correct manners, very little small talk. She was tall, strong, and healthy, and loved to ride horses. All of these things were also true of George. While she was neither prudent nor illiterate, neither was she to the manner born. Her frugality really demonstrated that. As did her relentless work habits, she never sat down if she could possibly keep going like her son. George would have gone to England to school, but for his father's death. Instead, Mary patched together tutors in schools for George and Betty and the younger boys and provided them with enough polish, despite her real absence of any cash, to help them mingle with Frederick's best society. She could only afford to lend George the money to pay for his dancing lessons. So in his first little tiny account book, he writes about paying his mother back for his dancing lessons, which taught him not just dancing, but also correct posture and the carriage of a well-bred man. George, too, had his, like Mary's devotional books, he got the famous book on rules of civility to learn how to be a gentleman at a young age. Mary bought Betty a tambour hook, which allowed her to do a very sort of cutting edge kind of needle work that put her in sort of things that gentry class girls would learn. She kept her son's wigs. There were four wigs to dress. She kept them all extremely well taken care of. And at Fairy Farm, they found an unbelievable stash of wig curlers, little ceramic wig curlers that are just still there after 200 years. Archeologists have found the remains of a card table. So they obviously played cards and games. And all of her children, like Mary, married up. I'm not commending the practice, but I do think she did the very best she could and deserves credit for working to get her kids under very difficult straits to get her kids of the social opportunities to travel and marry in Virginia's elite circles. George's biographers have accused her of being overprotective, but she doesn't seem to have been that way. She let George go for several months surveying trip, where he encountered all kinds of dangers in Native Americans or savages, as they both would have said. Soon afterwards, George accompanied his brother, Lawrence, to the Caribbean in search of a cure for his brother's TB. Instead, he got smallpox. George, not his brother. And the TB, of course, wasn't cured. When George decided to join Braddock's campaign against the French and Indians in 1755, Mary traveled 50 miles from her home in Fredericksburg to Mount Vernon to plead with him not to go. She was frightened. She'd recently nursed him back to health after about a smallpox. She knew she couldn't prevent him from going, but she was alarmed, as George wrote. Cula's surprise-winning Thomas Flexner has her, quote, stamping angrily out of Mount Vernon after failing to change her son's mind. There's no evidence for stamping. Many of his historians have seen this as her desire to thwart him, which is psychologically a dramatic story, but it doesn't really capture what George witnessed, which was her fear and concern, particularly because he had been sick more than once, though smallpox was only one of a series of illnesses that she had nursed him through. In follow-up letters, George, after that scene, George assured her that Braddock was an unpretentious commander and that he wouldn't be suffering from British snobbery or humiliating treatment, something that they'd both discussed, obviously. And George invited her to stay at Mount Vernon with his younger brother, Johnny, who was going to look after Mount Vernon while he was away. She did. She spent a lot of time there. And Johnny and the woman that became his wife named their first child after her. After Braddock's failed campaign in George's subsequent service in Virginia, he suffered several more bouts of very bad illness, and he frequently stated at his mother's house to be taken care of. These kinds of passages never make it into the biographies of George. And Mary wrote that George was the main victim of a termigant mother. Nor do these biographers recognize that George actually seemed to enjoy stoking his mother's fears. He wrote at one point about the number of horses that got shot out from Mount Durham and the number of musket balls that had gone through his cape. So he obviously liked playing her and making her more fearful. So the relationship was closer, more complex, and interesting than the story of the victimized son of a nasty mother. Then there's the issue of money. Mary stepped into adolescence parentless. She suffered from the massive deaths as other children in the Chesapeake in this era suffered, but in a greater degree than most. Historians have hesitated to try and diagnose what the psychological syndrome that might result from these kinds of widespread deaths. But it doesn't seem like a stretch to say that they predisposed Mary to fears of abandonment want and made her struggle with all her formidable will to be self-reliant. After her mother's death, Mary stayed on in the house she lived in with her mother, which now belonged to her elder step-sister Elizabeth, and Elizabeth's new husband. Mary and Elizabeth's late mother's overseer sued the estate successfully for back pay. Mary would have watched him fill up and take off a wagon full of corn, barley, flax, and other crops from the farm. It must have been a pretty frightening moment, and I can't imagine that she might never have forgotten it. Mary spent her adolescence helping to manage her sister's house and taking care of her growing family. She acquired the habits of vigilance, frugality, and ceaseless work. Decades later, George wrote a poor young relative, a girl, advising her to make herself useful using the example of a young girl of 16, unnamed young girl of 16, so responsible that she ran a whole household. It's pretty clear to me, I think it's pretty clear that the virtuous model was his mother. Early ownership of land and slaves gave Mary a role to inhabit, but probably not much flexibility in understanding that role. Her devotional texts guided her. She tried to live by the readings, and she taught her children and her grandchildren from these books. The central lesson was that world of glory was nothing. What was essential was being a good Christian so that when death came, God would welcome you to heaven. On earth, one should be a good steward of what was entrusted to you in life. All else was vanity and flattery. She believed these things fervently, and she taught them to her children intensely. Most of all, George, who was her first and the person in the family on whom she also began to rely as he became a little bit older. During the 1760s, George became irritated about his mother. This is after his marriage, and everyone's gone away, and everyone's married out, and she's poorer than ever. She begins asking George for little bits of money, five pounds, six pounds, eight pounds, as much as 20 pounds one time. He was then married to Martha Custis. His wealth opened him up to large avenues of credit with London merchants, which was very tempting. The couple bought elegant clothes. They traveled in a new English carriage. They acquired more land and enslaved people, and they made very expensive improvements on Mount Vernon. Tobacco prices were falling, and George was going deeply into debt. He hated debt, but he saw his own and his fellow planters escalating consumption as a trap from which they could not emerge, because they were just trying to show each other how successful they were with all of the things that they would buy. So this competition fed a vicious cycle, and he was 10,000 pounds in debt by the 1760s. His younger brothers borrowed enormous sums, 400, 500 pounds from him. But the thing that really galled him were his mother's requests for 5, 10, 15 pounds, which were requests that would keep her out of debt as she was so cash poor. At the end of the decade, in 1777, he decided to stop his mother's request, and he decided to take over Ferry Farm, make it productive, and put her in a house in town. She chose a house. He bought it. She went to live there. She still had land on the Rappahannock that was hers, and she would go and visit that land, but she was no longer at the Ferry Farm. He doesn't seem to have made much progress making Ferry Farm profitable. During the war, it was first rented, and then it was sold. George turned his attention rather rapidly to the growing imperial crisis and stopped complaining about his mother. When he left for the revolution, he had his overseer and manager, his cousin, pay his mother the rents that he now owed her for the tools and the livestock on Ferry Farm and the enslaved people. During the war, Ferry Farm was sold after it was rented. During the revolution, Mary suffered like other white Virginians from rising taxes, ruinous inflation, scarce food, no salt, the British fear of slave uprisings, fear of both smallpox and the inoculation process. She was responsible for growing enough corn to feed her enslaved men and women, and she couldn't always do it. She complained of nearly starving at one point. As a land and slave owning old woman, she'd become a vulnerable target. Poor white men like her overseer were angry about their exploitation and eager to take advantage of the confusion and the class conflict that had come much more dramatically to the fore during the revolution. In the absence of any powerful man, checking on him, her overseer cheated her for much of the war. Her youngest son, Charles, who was to help her look after the farm was drinking heavily, in any case, and wasn't paying attention. Shortly, this is the concluding anecdote, and then I'll stop. I'm sorry to go on quite so long. Shortly before the battle of Yorktown, Mary and her nearby children and grandchildren were evacuated from Fredericksburg. They feared that the British were gonna come to Fredericksburg because there was an arms manufacturer there run by her son-in-law. And instead, the British went to Yorktown. Nevertheless, Mary, who was not quite 80 at that point, had just recovered from an illness, trekked 100 miles across the Shenandoah into the Alleghenies, where her son Samuel and Charles and her son-in-law, Fielding Lewis, all had homes. They all crammed into one little house, Samuel's house, and within three weeks of each other that winter, her son Samuel died, and her son-in-law, Fielding, who had been of all of her relatives, probably the most responsible in making sure that everything was okay with her, they both died, and Betty almost died from the stress and her own ailments, which were many. Under these circumstances, Mary taught to anyone and everyone who had listened about how poor she was, how hard times were, and she wondered out loud about how she could pay her taxes because she would lose the last piece of property that she had if she couldn't pay her taxes. Charles was drunk and negligent, George was gone, and Johnny Augustine lived far away and didn't seem to be paying any attention. She was feeling completely lost and the unremitting anxiety of living through the war alone had just put her in a crisis of fear. It was at this terrible moment that someone in the Virginia Assembly raised the issue of a possible pension for Mary. The president of the Assembly, Benjamin Harrison, as I mentioned, Washington's friend, wrote Washington and told him about the subject being raised and that he had stopped this discussion knowing it would be embarrassing to Washington. When George heard he was enraged at the potential slight to his reputation, he wrote Harrison and all of his siblings defending himself and his behavior toward his mother and accusing her of imaginary needs and of having no sense of propriety. Historians have used this as damning evidence of her greed, her insensitivity, and perhaps seen this as the worst of the many indignities that he had to endure at her hands. George said quite correctly that he didn't know what difficulties she'd labored under. He hadn't seen her for seven years. But then he went on to say that she really couldn't labor under any real difficulties because her whole family was ready to take care of her. But half of her family had just died. Betty couldn't take care of her because Fielding's estate was 7,000 pounds in debt. Johnny Augustine wasn't paying any attention at all. And, you know, it was a nightmarish and Mary really didn't know what to do. George had not spent, he had spent the war as the top, you know, as the top, as the commander in chief of the Continental Army. And although he endured many difficulties and dangers, he was never in danger of starving or, you know, these issues of inflation and so on, didn't affect him in a very personal way. It took him a long time when he came back to Fredericksburg at the end of the war to understand why it was economically such a disaster area and why somehow the end of the war hadn't just picked things up, made things pick up. Both George and Mary had a kind of rhetorical habit of exaggerating their poverty and perhaps they both wrote from time to time, I will be ruined, I am ruined, I'm about to be ruined. So perhaps he felt that, you know, this was the kind of thing that she was doing. But in that period, she simply wasn't. I can't prove how the discussion arose in the Virginia Assembly, but I do have a theory because a bitter enemy of George's was in the Assembly in that period and he lived up in the Allegheny's right very close to where Mary had been evacuated. And it's perfectly possible that he used the occasion and heard the gossip and used the occasion to embarrass George. I can't prove this, but in any case, it doesn't really matter. But what is important is that in 2010, the story comes down to us like this in the most recent biography of Mary and George. Churnow, Ron Churnow wrote that in spite of Mary's complaints about her poverty, quote, she had amassed such substantial holdings that George alone inherited 400 acres of valuable pine land. All of this property had been owned by a woman who had seen fit to petition the Virginia legislature for private pension during the war because of her son's alleged neglect. I think a better verb than amassed would have been held on for dear life. This was the last piece of property that Mary owned and she'd owned it since she was three years old. She'd already given the other piece to Johnny Augustine. There is no evidence that there was ever a petition and there's certainly no evidence that she was the petitioner herself, only that she spoke often about her money worries. Mary lived carefully, pinched pennies, worried a lot, much more as she got older. She never had much of a chance in her life to be sweet or compliant. The circumstances of her life didn't allow for it. Her war experience did not soothe her or make her sweeter, but she wasn't inventing her difficulties. George's historians have used their own imaginations generously toward him, but almost without exception have found it nearly impossible to bring any generosity or any real scholarship for that matter to imagining his mother's life. What they've done is to repeat stories that were established in the 40s and 50s, particularly by Douglas Southall Freeman in his definitive biography. They haven't bothered to sort of go back and check for themselves what her life was actually like. Mary and George shared grit, persistence, a sense of duty, very clear ideas of right and wrong, had identities dependent on hard work and vigilance. They were critical, both of them, and complained when they perceived things going wrong, which they often did. They were both tall and strong and good horse people. They both had commanding presences. These traits looked more becoming on her son when he was fighting to create an independent nation than they did on his mother trying to survive the war that he worked so hard to provoke and fight. George, although he was very perspicacious about human nature and individual people, had some blind spots about his mother. This doesn't diminish his greatness, but it shouldn't diminish her humanity either. Thank you. Questions? I think there are microphones on both sides of the room. If you don't mind, it's being recorded, so if you could speak into the mic on the... Can you hear me now? Yes. Okay, a couple of questions. You were talking about her well into her 80s. I know that... Into her 70s. She died just before she was, when she was about 80. So after all that she went through, very often when you get older, you sort of lose your faculties and your children now roll their eyes a little bit. Is there a lot of evidence of that that they just thought she was losing her faculties and they kind of ignored her? There's actually contrary evidence. George said, I can't remember the quote word for word, but he said she, while she became very, very frail, she never lost her wits, that she was sharp up until the end. There's no question, on the other hand, that she probably exed, sort of the traits that you have as a young person become a bit exaggerated as you get older, and I think her worries, her anxiety, and probably her tendency to repeat herself, but she does not at all seem to have lost her acuity. I see. And how old was she when she had George? You know, it's not entirely clear because it's not clear when she was born. She was born maybe 1709, and she had George in 1732, so approximately. Last question is, did you find anything other than the devotion to religion tender about her or youthful about her along the way, any sweetness, any indication of sweetness? Or was it just a bitter life that just snowballed into further bitterness? No, I'm sorry that I've given you- No, you didn't give that impression at all, but she was always suffering. She had a lot of difficulties in her life. I think she had, for one thing, she had something of a sense of humor. At one point, she describes herself as an old, it's kind of a rye sense of humor like George as she describes herself as an old almanac quite out of date. I think she was immensely fond of her small children. Just, I think it gave her real joy. I mean, that she experienced real joy having little ones. It's clear that she was an affectionate mother. All of her children, her grandchildren were enormously fond of her. So, and she would tell them these stories from her devotional books and they- So you got to learn that side of the woman? Yeah, she was a good dancer. She went to dances in Fredericksburg as a widow and she was relatively gregarious. So I think she had plenty of pleasures in her life. She started out tough though. I mean, that was a bad beginning. I thought so, you know, youth and pleasures in a bright outlook usually, no matter how tough it's been when you're young, you have the whole world ahead of you. Right. So I did- She loved horseback riding. She was a great rider and it gave her a lot of independence in the moment. So she experienced joy. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Sure. A fairy farm down in Fredericksburg has just opened up a reconstruction of the house where they imagine that he was raised in. Did you have any input in how they're telling the story that you just told us about Mary and if not, do you have any reaction to what they are saying about Mary at the new fairy farm? You know, I haven't been- I haven't, that's a nice question. I haven't been there since they started to do tours but I certainly spent a lot of time talking to the archeologists and think what they've done is fabulous. There's a woman named Laura Galky who is the one who wrote a wonderful piece on the wig curlers and other stuff and we've been in a lot of conversation. I think that they are pleased to have a story about Mary that's archivally based and as far as I know, we don't disagree. They're remarkable historians, although they're archeologists, they're also historians. Yes. Thank you so much for your lecture. I can't wait to read your book. Wonderful. A couple of questions. One, could you talk a little about her relationship to Betty? Yeah. And because they were very close. And I'll just mention that in doing the tour of her house in Fredericksburg, the guides there said that she was known for riding her horse, I think in her 60s riding her horse up and down the streets in Fredericksburg. In Fredericksburg? Yeah, that she was pretty active. And that was, I was thinking, so it coincides with your, you're talking about being a really good horse. She was extraordinary and she loved horses. She kept them down in front of the house so she could look at the ones that she liked best and there's a famous story about George breaking and then actually killing one of her colts that she was very fond of. But they both were very courageous riders. I'm surprised in her 60s that she would have been doing that. I'm remembering 60s, I'm not sure where it's, but they certainly said that into her years that you would not think someone was riding a horse was riding up and down the streets in Fredericksburg. I would say that gentry women with more money tended not to ride as much as Mary did. She was accustomed to a period when she was just growing up as a girl. She had a lot of independence and girls would have at that point. But then as the, I'm gonna push this off though. That wouldn't be wise. As the century went on and class differences became much more sort of structured and much more defined, most women stopped doing it. But Mary loved it. She did at some point, when George got married, this would have been 1760, 1759, 1760, 59, I can't, I'm blanking on it. But she was on two canes. So I don't know if that was permanent or I thought she then was in a single carriage after that. But I could be wrong. That just kind of stuck with me from the tour of her house. And talking about the other materials, if there's so little of her own letters, and you have the George biography, what other materials are available? Were there people in Fredericksburg who talked about her in their letters or in Fielding's letters or other, or Betty's? Well, one of the things that was very helpful was that her early family was incredibly litigious. So there are all kinds of- The court records are- Those kinds of letters which are not court records, which are fascinating. She had a half-brother in England who wrote her, sometimes very sort of patriarchal, this is what you should think kind of letters and do it this way and stuff. But she had respect for him and she kept up that correspondence. So there are three perhaps letters. I mean, to me, that's a treasure trove of letters. There were an awful lot of it comes out of George's correspondence and triangulating it with his diaries and what other people are saying. All of the people in town, many of them were related to the Washington's. So there are occasionally cousins saying things that you can sort of figure out where she was and what she was doing at that point. Her relationship with Betty was, I think, as close as any relationship. They really, she was there for every birth of Betty's and every death and they helped each other. They didn't correspond because they were quite close physically. But I think their most important bonds were helping each other in ways of sort of work in providing apples or honey or whatever it was. So that was, I think, the relationship of her life, basically. Thanks. Do we know anything about the relationship between Martha and Mary? Not that much. At Mount Vernon, they think that they didn't get along particularly well. Certainly, they were quite different types of women and many of George's biographers have assumed that he was desperate to get away from this gloomy old rigid mother and got bubbly, bubbly Martha. I think George brought Martha often to Fredericksburg. There are many more visits than his biographers sort of have. So they really did know each other. And Patty, Pat's Martha's daughter, who was the epileptic, was seized with an epileptic fit at Mary's house at one point. And they all stayed over for a while. They commiserated. I mean, it just wasn't as simple as, oh, they didn't like each other. And Mary always, in her notes to George, always sent her dearest, I mean, very affectionate communicates messages to Martha Mary didn't have any small talk. I mean, she wasn't, she didn't go to Mount Vernon and sort of enjoy a lead company and where she didn't dress up. She wore a shift, which is the kind of thing they wore in the early 18th century. And then when people got fancier, she didn't do that. And it was embarrassing to George, but she, I think they felt she wasn't quite presentable in the kind of company that they always, that they always kept after they became grandees, you know, after they, and certainly after the presidency. So I don't think there was animosity. I just think there was a kind of bad fit. Different lifestyle. Okay, thank you very much. Sure. Any other questions? Okay, well, thank you so much for coming. Oops, there.