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Excerpts from an Article in The Washington Post dated May 12, 2017 by Gregory S. Schneider

The Mother Who Made George Washington

And Made Him Miserable

When George Washington was elected president, he did what a good boy should do: rode to Fredericksburg,
Va., to tell his mom.

Mary Ball Washington was 80 years old, ancient for a woman of that time, but still formidable. George’s visit,
according to some accounts, produced one of the great archetypal mother‐son conversations.
George: Guess what? They want me to be president.

Mom: I’m dying.

George, flustered: Well, as soon as I get settled in New York, I’ll come back and …

Mom: This is the last time you’ll ever see me. But go, do your job. That’s more important.

George and his mother had an unusual relationship for the 1700s, more like what you might see in a sitcom
from the 1970s. She was indispensable to him but intolerable. She hectored him; he performed Enlightenment‐
era eye rolls with quill and ink.
Two hundred years ago, when the mythology of George Washington was being etched in marble, Mary
Washington enjoyed a flowering of attention as the Grandmother of Our Nation. Then historians recast her as a
con‐ trolling shrew.

There’s so much material. When George was 15, he was all set to go off and join the British Navy. But his
mother wouldn’t let him. Too dangerous.

In the heated final months of the Revolutionary War, George got a heads‐up from a buddy in Williamsburg that
his mother had written to the House of Delegates asking for money. From the battlefield, grappling with the
Benedict Arnold scandal, Washington dashed off an exasperated reply, begging the House not to give her
anything.
Listing all that he had done for her — bought her a house, rented her land, “answered all her calls for money”
— George fumed that any of her five children would “divide the last sixpence to relieve her from real distress.
This she has been repeatedly assured of by me.”

But maybe the best example came in 1755, when young George was fighting the French alongside Gen. Edward
Braddock in the wilds of Pennsylvania. Things were going poorly; Braddock would be killed in the next few
weeks. And George got a letter from his mother asking him to send her a servant and — not making this up —
some butter.

Addressing his response to “Honourd Madam,” George replied that he was “sorry it is not in my power to pro‐
vide you with a Dutch Servant, or the Butter … you desire. We are quite out of that part of the Country where