I know less of my grandfather Lawrence than of his father. He did not increase the importance of the family, neither was he inclined to public business. He was, as I have understood, a quiet, thrifty man, and no seeker of adventure by land or water. He married Mildred Warner, by whom he had children, and died leaving a competent estate, but none to be compared with the great lands accumulated by the Byrds or Carters.
I conceive him to have been a person of moderate opinions concerning the Church of England, and as one who may have considered the dissenting sects as ill used. This I gather from a book given to me three years ago by a gentleman of Philadelphia, of the Society of Friends, who would have had me to believe that my grandfather was of that sect. This book is the life of one John Fothergill, a Quaker preacher, who says that in 1720 he “held a meeting at Mattocks, at Justice Washington’s, a friendly man, where the Love of God opened my heart toward the people, much to my comfort and their satisfaction.” I do not suppose it to have meant more than that, as the church could not be used by a dissenter, Justice Washington willingly gave the good man the use of his own house.
III
My father, Augustine, was born in 1694, on the plantation known as Wakefield, granted, in 1667, to his grandfather, and lying between Bridges’ and Pope’s creeks, in Westmoreland, on the north neck between the Potomac and the Rappahannock. My father, in his will, says: “Forasmuch as my several children in this my will mentioned, being by several Ventures, cannot inherit from one another,” etc.
What he speaks of as his “Ventures” were his two marriages. A venture does appear to me to be an appropriate name for the uncertain state of matrimony. The first “venture” was Jane Butler, who lies buried at Wakefield. Of her four children two survived—that is, my half-brothers Lawrence and Augustine, whom we called Austin. I was the first child of my father’s second “venture,” and my mother was Mary Ball. I was born at Wakefield,[1] on February 11 [O. S.], 1732, about ten in the morning. I was baptized in the Pope’s Creek church, and had two godfathers and one godmother, Mildred Gregory. Mr. Beverly Whiting and Mr. Christopher Brooks were my godfathers. I do not recall ever seeing Mr. Whiting, although his son, of the same name, I met in after years. Of Mr. Brooks I know nothing, nor do I know which one of the two gave me the silver cups which it was then the custom for the godfather to give to the godson. I still have them. I was told by a silversmith in Philadelphia that the cups are of Irish make, and of about 1720. There were six of these mugs, in order to be used for punch when the child grew up.
[1] This estate was bought by my father from his brother John.
The Balls were respectable, and came out first as merchants. My maternal grandmother we know to have been Mary Johnson, of English birth, but of her family nothing more. At a later time the older planter families, both with us and in the West Indies, paid more attention to their ancestry, sometimes, it is to be feared, with pretensions which had no just foundation.
Many assumed arms to which they were not entitled, or, like Mr. J——n, commissioned an agent in London to purchase some heraldic device, having Mr. Sterne’s word for it that “a coat of arms may be purchased as cheap as any other coat.”
I have had some reason to believe that our friends did not regard my mother’s family, being in the mercantile line, as on the same social level as our own. But, in fact, we ourselves were not until a later day considered as of the highest class of Virginia gentry. Why this was I do not fully know. It is certain, however, that nowhere were aristocratic pretensions and the distinctions of social rank more marked than in Virginia. For a long time families like the Lees, Byrds, Carys, Masons, etc., regarded themselves as superior to other planter families, of as good or better blood.