The Mother of Washington and the Making of American History
Kate Haulman appears at Washington, DC bookstore Politics and Prose.
As the nation marks its 250th anniversary, American University Professor of History Kate Haulman is examining how Americans remember the past.
Her new book, The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2025), traces the legacy of Mary Washington, the mother of the nation's first president, to reveal how the stories we tell about the past change over time—and why.
To understand how this happens, Haulman says, we must ask five questions: Who or what is being remembered? When? Why? By whom? And for what purposes?
In The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America, Haulman uses Mary Ball Washington as a case study to explore how historical memory is created and reshaped over time. Because so little documentation about her life survives, she became a blank canvas for later generations who repeatedly reimagined her to reflect changing ideas about motherhood, family, and nationhood.
The relationship between history and memory is central to Haulman's work.
"The discipline of history is grounded in evidence," she says. "Historians work to understand the past on its own terms. But memory is shaped by the stories that families, communities, and nations tell about themselves. Memory is often more emotionally charged and as much about the present as the past."
Who Was Mary Ball Washington?
There’s just a fair bit we don’t know about her, certainly her thoughts and feelings about things.
Around 1708, Mary Ball was born into a prominent Virginia family. Her childhood was shaped by both wealth and upheaval. “She lost her father when she was very young,” says Haulman, “but with that loss, she inherited land and enslaved people. The two together—privilege and loss—would in some ways typify the rest of her life.”
Mary’s mother remarried, but both she and her husband also died, leaving Mary orphaned before she was 13 years old. She lived with relatives and married Augustine Washington when she was 22. Their first child together—George Washington—was born the following year, followed by a sister, three brothers, and another sister who died very young
Augustine himself died when Mary was in her mid-thirties, and she never remarried, an unusual choice for women of her time. We know that she lived into her eighties. But the details of her life are difficult to reconstruct. “There’s just a fair bit we don’t know about her, certainly her thoughts and feelings about things,” Haulman says. Only some letters, legal documents, and books of hers survive, leaving much of the historical record fragmentary.
Imagining the “Mother of Washington”
Custis created a canon of stories that were picked up by other writers and biographers. They repeated, elaborated on, and tried to find documentary evidence for these stories, many of which are still with us today.
The first biographical sketch of Mary Washington was published in 1826, more than 30 years after her death. It was written by George Washington Parke Custis, George Washington’s adopted son (Martha’s grandson from her previous marriage), who considered himself the guardian of the family legacy. In the piece, Custis transformed Mary into the “Mother of Washington,” an idealized maternal figure whose virtues helped explain her son's greatness.
“Custis created a canon of stories that were picked up by other writers and biographers,” says Haulman. “They repeated, elaborated on, and tried to find documentary evidence for these stories, many of which are still with us today.”
The result was a powerful and enduring image of Mary Washington as a symbol of traditional motherhood. Her legacy was measured through her son. “It’s very much part of this thinking that the proof of her greatness as a mother was in the pudding,” Haulman says. “The pudding being George.”
As Haulman notes, once these stories entered the public mind, they took on a life of their own. Repeated often enough, they came to be accepted as fact. “That’s one of the ways that historical narratives take shape,” she says.
Memories that Change with the Nation
What is important to remember across all these shifts, Haulman says, is that what is changing is not Mary Washington herself, but the motives of the people describing her.
Over time, Mary Washington became many different things to different generations.
In the nineteenth century, Custis's version of Mary as an emblem of domestic motherhood dominated public memory. Her image also served as a counterpoint to other women who were beginning to enter public life and advocate for abolition and women’s rights.
That image was reinforced in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where supporters broke ground in 1833 to build a monument honoring her where she lay buried. It was unusual, Haulman points out, because monuments at the time (and to some extent, today) were typically dedicated to men—war heroes, political leaders, and other famous figures. The project stalled, leaving the monument unfinished for decades. More than 60 years later, women's organizations, including a local group in Fredericksburg and a national one with connections to the Daughters of the American Revolution, stepped in to complete the memorial and transform it into a lasting tribute. It is a simple obelisk, a smaller version of the Washington Monument, which also stood incomplete for years.
After the Civil War, Haulman notes, new layers were added to the memory of Mary. She was a slaveholder, yet slavery and enslaved people did not appear in accounts of her life until the 1880s. Informed by ideas of white racial supremacy and the genre of plantation fiction with its “loyal slave” and “good master” tropes, writers increasingly portrayed Mary as a firm yet kind Virginia slave mistress.”
But the tone would shift again. “She becomes more complicated in the twentieth century,” Haulman says. “In fact, her reputation as mother underwent a dramatic reversal.” Some biographers begin to describe her as difficult, needy, even overbearing—far less idealized than before. Drawing on limited evidence from her life, including her opposition to George Washington's joining the British Navy at age 14, they reinterpreted her role in his life. These interpretations, Haulman argues, reflected twentieth-century ideas about psychology and motherhood, as well as a desire to give George all the credit for his own greatness.
What is important to remember across all these shifts, Haulman says, is that what is changing is not Mary Washington herself, but the motives of the people describing her.
History and How We Show Up Today
Historians are trying to recover the past and do right by the people who lived it. We do this to understand both the past and the present, strengthen understanding, build empathy, and inform how we show up in the world today.
And now, as Americans commemorate the nation's 250th anniversary, this process is still unfolding.
As Americans encounter historical commemorations, monuments, and stories during the nation's 250th anniversary, Haulman hopes they will consider who is telling the story, how, and why. “What is being foregrounded in the national conversation about the founding era, and what is being downplayed or left out entirely?” she asks.
History, she notes, is always evolving as historians uncover new evidence and ask new questions. “Historians are trying to recover the past and do right by the people who lived it,” she says. “We do this to understand both the past and the present, strengthen knowledge, build empathy, and inform how we show up in the world today.”