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How did Mary Ball Washington influence her exceptional son, the first president? A Fredericksburg historian takes a closer look at George Washington's mother. By Paula S. Felder Date published: 3/12/2005
IN CONTEMPLATING the life of Mary Ball Washington, we need to set aside the negative characterizations that have been attributed to her by George Washington's 20th-century biographers. For the most part, they are filled with subjectivity and bias--and backed by no scholarly research on the woman herself. The concerns and problems George Washington's mother experienced during the War for Independence reached her son in third-hand accounts that have been accepted uncritically by his biographers. And although Washington was understandably preoccupied with a war not yet won, it is not to his credit that he failed to refer these hearsay accounts to his sister Betty to deal with. Much of the dysfunction in family matters in Mary's last decade was due to the death of Fielding Lewis, Betty's husband, who had been George Washington's faithful surrogate problem-solver and the dedicated caregiver for his aging mother-in-law. This was a reality that seemingly went unrecognized by Washington himself--and also by the biographers who merely searched out instances (taken out of context) that supported a preconceived bias. For a long time, their pronouncements have intimidated Mary Washington's defenders, who did not wish to seem parochial or run the risk of being classed with the 19th-century writers who elevated her to near-sainthood. Still, Fredericksburg-area historians, who are now broadly searching local records with increasingly sophisticated methods, have accumulated documentation and sound circumstantial evidence to begin developing a chronology of her life and some reasonable conjectures about her youthful character. And since we are going in search of George Washington's genes, Mary Washington should be a prime candidate for study.
Mary's father was Joseph Ball, a prominent landowner of Lancaster County in his 50s with grown children, who married a widow named Mary Johnson about 1708, fathered one daughter, and died in 1711. Mary Johnson Ball already had two children from an earlier marriage, Elizabeth and John Johnson. The only contemporary description of her is by a member of the Ball family who referred to her as "an English woman."
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