George Washington’s Mom Was
Essential to His Success
By Chris Costanzo

History doesn’t deal much with Mary Ball, yet members of Congress donned black armbands for a month when she died.

Born in Virginia into a respectable, middle-class family, she married a British-educated American widower and land speculator who already had four children. She raised them along with the five additional children they had together.

They lived at first in a small six-room farmhouse in Virginia on the Rappahannock River. They were of middling means, although he later became moderately well-to-do by adding land to his holdings.

The eldest of their five children together was George Washington—and therein lies the importance of Mary Ball. For she was the mother of the greatest of a generation of great men, whose singular greatness derived mostly from his towering character and incorruptible integrity. All attempts to explain that character have led to Mary Ball Washington.

Personality

As a young woman she was described as very beautiful, intrepid, free-spirited, decisive, self-confident, yet also quiet and unassuming.

Her husband died when George was 11. She inherited some land, but the bulk of her husband’s estate passed to his children by his first marriage. In those days it was the usual practice for widows in such circumstances to remarry. She refused.

As a single mother, Mary Ball Washington insisted on shouldering the daunting task of running her farm and home-schooling her many children in her own way. Her determination and perseverance seem to have been the source of those same qualities evident in her son.

She drilled into young George the principles of moral and civil behavior found in Sir Matthew Hale’s "Contemplations." Her autographed copy of that book remained in George Washington’s possession all his life. Still extant are maxims that young George copied from it as exercises while still a boy.

Physically strong and unusually tall, Mary Ball passed on her splendid physique to George. Her personal bearing and her quiet but consistent firmness generated awe in her children as well as a modicum of fear. It was much as George Washington himself affected others as an adult. When he and his siblings were still teenagers, a visitor to her farm described them as "all proper tall fellows" who were "mute as mice" in her presence.

Flaws and Failures

Without considering George Washington’s character, it would be impossible to explain his greatness, for he was also a man of many flaws and failures.

He had only the equivalent of a grade school education, and possessed little of the brilliance or originality of some of the other founding fathers. As a young man he was vainglorious and reckless. Although originally affable, he soon became cold and taciturn.

In military matters he was of indifferent ability. While a young officer in the Virginia militia, his recklessness caused innumerable problems, as did his incessant squabbling with his British superiors about his abilities, his rank, and his status.

Years later, as commander of America’s revolutionary forces, he almost lost his army through unwise tactics. He also engaged in several military ventures that went awry. While other revolutionary generals were achieving significant successes, most of Washington’s activities were lackluster.

A Hero, Nevertheless

But Mary Ball’s son was also one of those rare people who never stop maturing—a quality that most historians believe came from a capacity for honest introspection, certainly the result of the moral instruction and personal humility that he got from his mother. He did indeed make many mistakes in his life, but he was chastened by them, and he rarely made the same mistake twice.

In his steady maturation he shook off the fetters of sanctimoniousness and prejudice. His youthful recklessness changed into decisiveness. His judgment became sober. His courage and determination, also passed on by his mother, enabled him to exercise that judgment at critical moments with astonishing success.

His imposing physique gave him an inspiring presence which, coupled with his other qualities, rendered his leadership irresistible. It enabled him to hold together his army, and allowed him to succeed when it counted—as when he led his small and disintegrating ragtag force across the Delaware River during a nighttime snowstorm to revive the dying Revolution with two victories of strategic importance.

Or later, when commanding American forces near New York he learned that the main British army in the south had moved to the Virginia coast. He quickly brought his own army southward before anyone knew what was happening, and he won the war by trapping the British army on a peninsula.

Integrity

Equally significant was his reaction to a plan that his officers devised to make him a king or dictator to forge national unity. Such a seizure of power has been a temptation to which almost all military leaders in similar situations have succumbed throughout history.

But Washington would have none of it. He denounced the scheme in an eloquent public rebuke in which he extolled the concept of a free republic. He shamed those who had concocted the plan, and brought some of them to tears. Then he disbanded the army, resigned his commission, and retired again—this time a true national hero.

Later, he presided over the constitutional convention to unite America’s states into one nation. Rarely in human history have sovereign states willingly yielded any of their sovereignty. But Washington’s support for the new union was crucial, and it succeeded. His commitment to liberty was beyond question and the nation trusted him deeply. Nobody else could have made it happen.

As America’s first president he endowed the presidency with a stabilizing aura that endures today. Tall and imposing as ever in his later years, and still a superb physical specimen, George Washington comported himself as president with such dignity and majesty that it was commented that the crowned heads of Europe would seem like commoners beside him.

There are countless stories which, even if apocryphal, indicate how the public perceived him. The tale about his unwillingness as a child to lie about cutting down a cherry tree, although probably fictitious, was seen in the public mind as typical of George Washington.

Once, when someone was slighted by prejudice in his presence, Washington said nothing publicly but later let it be known that he had invited that person to dine with him—a singular honor. Having acquired a sense of shame from his mother, Washington had a gift for communicating shame to lesser men without humiliating or angering them. The lessons he taught are part of the fabric of America.

He refused a third term as president. At the close of the ceremony to inaugurate his successor, the attendees rose and waited for the great George Washington to precede the others upon departing. But in an important avowal of republican principle, he refused, and instead bowed respectfully to the new president to go first.

Washington’s religiousness was utterly unfettered by sectarianism. The first chaplain whom he appointed in the American army was a Unitarian, whose theology was at odds with most Christian sects of those times. On another occasion he assured a Jewish congregation that the U.S. government "gives bigotry no sanction and persecution no assistance." Washington’s religious tolerance is also part of our American tradition.

He frequently expressed his repugnance towards slavery. He could not legally free those slaves who came to him as his wife’s property, because he held them in trust for her children by an earlier marriage. But he treated them all with exceptional leniency, looked after the elderly and infirm, and refused to split up slave families. As for his own slaves, he eventually ensured their freedom--the only slaveholder among the founding fathers to do so.

Mary Ball Remembered

Mary Ball Washington lived to a ripe old age, and saw her son become president.

Always an unpretentious but extremely dignified woman, she occupied a house that her son had provided for her in Fredericksburg, Va., living there "without the slightest affectation of magnificence," according to a neighbor. When the Marquis de Lafayette paid her a call, she received him while working in her garden in a homespun dress and a straw bonnet.

She rarely discussed her son’s achievements nor displayed any vanity or pride regarding them. Some people even wondered whether she grasped the momentous importance of what he had done. When Lafayette enthusiastically talked to her of her son’s great success, she merely said. "I am not surprised … for George was always a good boy." Lafayette later compared her to the noble and austere Roman matrons of antiquity.

When George visited her at the end of the revolutionary war, she said afterwards that they did not speak at all of his exploits. But, leaning on his arm, she did accompany him to a ball in his honor, and they danced a minuet together.

George Washington and his siblings always treated their mother with deference and respect. But more remarkable was Mary Ball’s lifelong ability, through her simplicity, firmness, and bearing, to elicit the same deference from absolutely everyone.

One visitor noted that "whoever has seen that awe-inspiring air and manner so characteristic of the Father of His Country, will remember the matron."

Perhaps the greatest tribute came from George Washington himself who referred to her as "my reverend mother by whose maternal hand, early deprived of a father, I was led to manhood."