The Mother of Washington and Her Times

by Sara Agnes Rice Pryor

Silence—broken at last by the bantering laugh of a pet parrot caged near them. The general took the assault upon his dignity in great good part. "Ah, Lee, you are a funny fellow!" said he; "even the birds laugh at you!"

"But," adds Irving, "hearty laughter was rare with Washington. The sudden explosions we read of were the result of some ludicrous surprise."

Still we do read of this rare laughter—this willing yielding to merriment—on the occasions of his visits to his mother.

All of which goes to prove, first, that Washington did not, as has been charged, neglect to visit her during the four intervening years between the declaration of peace and his own appointment to the Presidency, and, secondly, that these were happy visits, notwithstanding his mother's age and infirmities—happy for her, otherwise, they could not have been happy for him.

It is not the purpose of the compiler of this story of Mary Washington and her times to answer all of the witless charges that thoughtless—we will not say malignant—persons have made regarding Washington's relations with his mother; but one of these stories found its way to the columns of a newspaper, and perhaps we may check its echo, now going on from lip to lip, to the effect that after he became President, Washington denied to his mother a home in his temporary residence. He entered that residence late in the spring of 1789. His mother died in August of that year. She was ill when he parted from her, and he was prostrated for many weeks with a malignant carbuncle. He was not recovered when she died; he could not go to her. It is not possible that she wished to exchange the repose of her own home and the ministrations of her loved physician and only daughter for the stirring life of a noisy metropolis.

And as for her noble son—if the splendor of his record be more than the eyes of his critics can bear, they are at liberty to veil it for their own comfort by the mists of their own imaginings. They will never persuade the world that the purest and best man this country ever saw could be capable of neglecting an aged and infirm woman—and that woman the mother who bore him, and to whom he owed all that made him greater than his fellows.

I should doubt the authenticity of any letter, tending to lower our estimation of Washington's character. William Smyth of Cambridge University, England, in his "Lectures on History" (Lecture 34, p. 436), warns us that one volume of "Washington's Letters" is spurious and not to be respected. I have not seen this assertion of Smyth's repeated, but he could not have made it without authority.

As to the neglect of his mother during the last five years of his life—a charge that has been made more than once—there can be no foundation whatever. He never realized his dream of rest and leisure. The one ice-bound winter succeeding the declaration of peace was his only moment of repose. He found his own affairs much involved—so much so that Congress wished to aid him in restoring them. But he refused to accept any gift or any compensation for his eight years of service. He complained of the enormous burden of the letters he must answer. He found small time for the arboricultural pursuits in which he was so much interested. Hardly had he planted his balsams, ivies, and ornamental trees of various kinds, when trouble in the country claimed his attention. He writes of his longing for privacy and leisure, and remembers that his time to enjoy them must be short. Still he plants "elms, ash, white-thorn, maples, mulberries, horse-chestnuts, willows and lilacs," and writes that his trees grow fast, as if they knew him to be getting old and must make haste if they wish ever to shelter him!

All this was brought to an end by the very serious discords in the country as to the Constitution adopted by the Confederation of States. The story of these discords is a long one, and has been ably told elsewhere. Washington's feelings were intensely excited by the news that the insurgents of Massachusetts had exhibited such violence that the chief magistrate had called out the militia of the state to support the Constitution. "Good God!" he exclaims, "who besides a Tory or a Briton could have predicted this? It was but the other day we were shedding our blood to obtain the constitutions under which we now live,—constitutions of our own choice and making,—and now we are unsheathing the sword to overturn them. If any man had told me this three years since, I should have thought him a bedlamite, a fit subject for a mad house!"

The troubles ended in a call for another convention of which he was, reluctantly, compelled to accept the place of delegate. To serve intelligently he went into a course of study of the history of ancient and modern confederacies, and has left among his papers an abstract of their merits and defects. He must now learn a new trade! He must become a wise and learned statesman.