The True George Washington | Page 4

passed most of his time at the homes of his two elder brothers, and this
was fortunate, for they were educated men, of some colonial
consequence, while his mother lived in comparatively straitened
circumstances, was illiterate and untidy, and, moreover, if tradition is to
be believed, smoked a pipe. Her course with the lad was blamed by a
contemporary as "fond and unthinking," and this is borne out by such
facts as can be gleaned, for when his brothers wished to send him to sea
she made "trifling objections," and prevented his taking what they
thought an advantageous opening; when the brilliant offer of a position
on Braddock's staff was tendered to Washington, his mother, "alarmed
at the report," hurried to Mount Vernon and endeavored to prevent him
from accepting it; still again, after Braddock's defeat, she so wearied
her son with pleas not to risk the dangers of another campaign that
Washington finally wrote her, "It would reflect dishonor upon me to
refuse; and that, I am sure, must or ought to give you greater
uneasiness, than my going in an honorable command." After he
inherited Mount Vernon the two seem to have seen little of each other,
though, when occasion took him near Fredericksburg, he usually
stopped to see her for a few hours, or even for a night.
Though Washington always wrote to his mother as "Honored Madam,"
and signed himself "your dutiful and aff. son," she none the less tried
him not a little. He never claimed from her a part of the share of his
father's estate which was his due on becoming of age, and, in addition,
"a year or two before I left Virginia (to make her latter days
comfortable and free from care) I did, at her request, but at my own
expence, purchase a commodious house, garden and Lotts (of her own
choosing) in Fredericksburg, that she might be near my sister Lewis,
her only daughter,--and did moreover agree to take her land and
negroes at a certain yearly rent, to be fixed by Colo Lewis and others

(of her own nomination) which has been an annual expence to me ever
since, as the estate never raised one half the rent I was to pay. Before I
left Virginia I answered all her calls for money; and since that period
have directed my steward to do the same." Furthermore, he gave her a
phaeton, and when she complained of her want of comfort he wrote her,
"My house is at your service, and [I] would press you most sincerely
and most devoutly to accept it, but I am sure, and candor requires me to
say, it will never answer your purposes in any shape whatsoever. For in
truth it may be compared to a well resorted tavern, as scarcely any
strangers who are going from north to south, or from south to north, do
not spend a day or two at it. This would, were you to be an inhabitant
of it, oblige you to do one of 3 things: 1st, to be always dressing to
appear in company; 2d, to come into [the room] in a dishabille, or 3d to
be as it were a prisoner in your own chamber. The first you'ld not like;
indeed, for a person at your time of life it would be too fatiguing. The
2d, I should not like, because those who resort here are, as I observed
before, strangers and people of the first distinction. And the 3d, more
than probably, would not be pleasing to either of us."
Under these circumstances it was with real indignation that Washington
learned that complaints of hers that she "never lived soe poore in all my
life" were so well known that there was a project to grant her a pension.
The pain this caused a man who always showed such intense dislike to
taking even money earned from public coffers, and who refused
everything in the nature of a gift, can easily be understood. He at once
wrote a letter to a friend in the Virginia Assembly, in which, after
reciting enough of what he had done for her to prove that she was under
no necessity of a pension,--"or, in other words, receiving charity from
the public,"--he continued, "But putting these things aside, which I
could not avoid mentioning in exculpation of a presumptive want of
duty on my part; confident I am that she has not a child that would not
divide the last sixpence to relieve her from real distress. This she has
been repeatedly assured of by me; and all of us, I am certain, would
feel much hurt, at having our mother a pensioner, while we had the
means of supporting her; but in fact she has an ample income of