The Safest Guardians
Last weekend, on what I later learned was International Women’s Day, my son and I went to visit Mount Vernon, George Washington’s former estate in Virginia. As expected, the tour was an interesting, informative, painful exploration of the life and home of our first President. Standing outside of Washington’s tomb, during a discussion with the docent, he kept referring to “the ladies,” as if they were someone we all knew. Eventually we discovered that he meant The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association (MVLA), the organization of women who, unbeknownst to me, own and operate the site. So, in honor of Women’s History Month, I share one small slice of that history: the inspiring story of Sarah C. Tracy, who lived at and helped preserve Mount Vernon for the duration of the Civil War.
First, some background. The MVLA, the first national historic preservation organization, was founded by the daughter of a wealthy South Carolina plantation owner, Ann Pamela Cunningham. In 1853, Cunningham’s mother was traveling by steamer down the Potomac River when the captain blew the horn to alert passengers as they were passing Mount Vernon. Subsequently, she wrote her daughter a letter noting the “ruin and desolation of the home of Washington” and questioning “Why was it that the women of his country did not try to keep it in repair, if the men could not do it.”
That letter inspired Cunningham to undertake an effort to restore Mount Vernon. After failing to convince the state to acquire the property, she asked Washington’s great-grandnephew and the last private owner of the estate, John Augustine Washington III, to sell it to the MVLA. Ultimately, he agreed, noting “the women of the land will probably be the safest, as they will certainly be the purest, guardians of a national shrine.” The transaction was finalized in 1858 for a total price of $200,000, and Cunningham and the MVLA took over the operation of the estate in 1860.
Around that time, Cunningham’s father died, and she had to return to South Carolina. Unable to travel once the war began and believing that a woman’s presence was needed to protect Mount Vernon from being vandalized during the conflict, Cunningham asked her secretary, Sarah C. Tracy, to return to the estate with another woman as chaperone and help run it with the first Resident Superintendent, Upton H. Herbert. (Obviously, Cunningham’s unspoken assumption was that a white woman was needed since a number of free African-American employees, including several women, were already working at the site.)
Sarah Tracy had the courage to agree to Cunningham’s request even though, at that time, Mount Vernon was “firmly between the lines” of Union soldiers in Alexandria just nine miles to the north, and Confederate soldiers a few miles south. As a native of New York and thus a Northerner, Tracy was tasked with traveling to Alexandria to negotiate with Union officials to get the supplies the estate needed since Herbert, the Resident Superintendent, was a native Virginian who rarely left the property.
As you might expect, those trips through a war zone didn’t always go smoothly. Military passes were required and even when Tracy and her employees had them, the passes were sometimes questioned or disregarded. At least one time, Tracy was forced to stay overnight with a neighbor when her pass was refused. Another time, she had to travel into Alexandria alone when officials wouldn’t respect her employees’ passes.
A woman with the fortitude to accede to her boss’s request and hunker down on a rundown historic estate in the middle of a civil war wasn’t likely to take that rejection lightly—and Tracy didn’t. When the general who issued the pass did little to help and said that only the President could resolve the problem, Tracy wrote to Lincoln herself, who apparently got the matter sorted out.
Sarah Tracy is linked to another astonishing tale of cleverness and bravery, although this one has weaker corroborating evidence. As the story goes, Federal troops wanted to confiscate the money that the MVLA had paid to John Augustine Washington. They first searched for it at the Burke & Herbert Bank, where the funds were originally deposited. (Yes, the same Herbert family—the bank was run by the brother of Upton Herbert.) When that failed, they searched Mr. Burke’s home. Twice. The money was still not found. Apparently, after initially hiding the funds in his house, Mr. Burke had asked Sarah Tracy to do a “great favor for the Washington family” and travel through army lines to Washington, D.C. to deposit the money at the Riggs Bank, where the MVLA had its accounts. One version of the story says Tracy hid the money in a basket of eggs; another claims she sewed it in her petticoat. Either way, Tracy is credited with saving the day.
As always when you dig into any historical subject, you unearth both the virtues and the flaws of the men—or in this case, women—involved. The MVLA is no different. The ladies were undeniably slow to address the full complexities of George Washington’s history and the stain of slavery at Mount Vernon. The first presentation of the estate’s now permanent exhibit, Lives Bound Together: Slavery at George Washington’s Mount Vernon, wasn’t until 2016. However, despite her own family’s status as slave owners, Cunningham did provide the foundation for that exhibit; in the face of pressure to destroy evidence of slavery on the property after the end of the Civil War, Cunningham kept everything, including the slave quarters. From the beginning, the MVLA operated in what we would call a bipartisan fashion—drawing “Vice Regents” from each of the then-existing states (10 Southern, 10 Northern, 3 border and 7 Western) during the most divisive period in American history. Although the Vice Regents were all socially prominent women in their spheres, they began working together—remotely, since most of them never met in person—at a time when women had no actual political power and put aside their significant differences in the interest of a single, unifying goal: the preservation of a unique historical site. In the end, John Augustine Washington was right. It was the MVLA and women like Sarah Tracy who were the safest guardians of his uncle’s legacy. Because without them, a priceless historical record would likely have been destroyed.