Dec. 2, 1853—Signed by “A Southern Matron,” a letter published in the December issue of the Charleston Mercury urged the women of the South to save Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington, before it fell into ruin or commercial despoliation. The plea not only rescued one of America’s most historic sites, but initiated the first national preservation organization—and the first national women’s organization.
Undoubtedly recalling his mother Rose’s successful tea party fundraisers, John F. Kennedy observed, “There’s an old saying, ‘Never send a boy to do a man’s job, send a lady.” Seldom has that been truer than in the effort by the “Southern Matron”—in reality, a 37-year-old South Carolina woman named Ann Pamela Cunningham—to preserve the estate of America’s first President.
Cunningham succeeded where a host of the nation’s most powerful males either believed her effort couldn’t work or urged her toward a governing philosophy that would have radically diminished the home.
Thirteen years ago, amid the idiotic government showdown instigated by Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, I discovered that historic sites in one city after another were closed because of the impasse. One hope remained for my salvaging a vacation somewhere: San Antonio and its shrine of Texas independence, the Alamo. I called the site to see if it was closed. “No, we’re not,” the voice at the other end of the line answered, “because we’re run by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, or DRT.”
As soon as I finished my best Texas-style “Wah-hoo!”, I rejoiced in the thought of a non-governmental organization running a cultural site I could actually visit. But the template for the DRT was created by Ms. Cunningham.
My favorite song on my favorite Joe Jackson CD, Body and Soul, is called “Go for It.” It concerns the need to maintain hope, no matter how long the odds. Offhand, it’s hard for me to think of anyone who’s faced longer odds than Ms. Cunningham.
It wasn’t just that she spearheaded her pioneering organization in a deeply patriarchal society in which women couldn’t vote, run for office, or possess the same untrammeled property rights as men. Worse than that, she faced severe physical limitations.
You remember the scene in Gone With the Wind when the apple of Rhett Butler’s eye, daughter Bonnie, goes riding on a horse far beyond her practically nonexistent ability, only to get thrown off and die?
Well, imagine if Bonnie had been a teenager like Ms. Cunningham instead of a little girl, and she was suddenly closed out of the usual avenues of advancement for Southern belles—confined to her bed because of a spinal injury sustained through the equestrian accident, enduring rounds of treatments and medications that left her increasingly isolated and depressed.
Only the story didn’t end there. Imagine now if Bonnie/Ms. Cunningham—forever deprived of the suitors that followed mom Scarlett around like plantation dogs all over Tara—suddenly felt a reason to live. Imagine if, instead of living for her own selfish pleasure, as Scarlett did, Bonnie led a cause that mobilized thousands—men and women, even black and white—in a great national grassroots movement.
Undoubtedly recalling his mother Rose’s successful tea party fundraisers, John F. Kennedy observed, “There’s an old saying, ‘Never send a boy to do a man’s job, send a lady.” Seldom has that been truer than in the effort by the “Southern Matron”—in reality, a 37-year-old South Carolina woman named Ann Pamela Cunningham—to preserve the estate of America’s first President.
Cunningham succeeded where a host of the nation’s most powerful males either believed her effort couldn’t work or urged her toward a governing philosophy that would have radically diminished the home.
Thirteen years ago, amid the idiotic government showdown instigated by Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, I discovered that historic sites in one city after another were closed because of the impasse. One hope remained for my salvaging a vacation somewhere: San Antonio and its shrine of Texas independence, the Alamo. I called the site to see if it was closed. “No, we’re not,” the voice at the other end of the line answered, “because we’re run by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, or DRT.”
As soon as I finished my best Texas-style “Wah-hoo!”, I rejoiced in the thought of a non-governmental organization running a cultural site I could actually visit. But the template for the DRT was created by Ms. Cunningham.
My favorite song on my favorite Joe Jackson CD, Body and Soul, is called “Go for It.” It concerns the need to maintain hope, no matter how long the odds. Offhand, it’s hard for me to think of anyone who’s faced longer odds than Ms. Cunningham.
It wasn’t just that she spearheaded her pioneering organization in a deeply patriarchal society in which women couldn’t vote, run for office, or possess the same untrammeled property rights as men. Worse than that, she faced severe physical limitations.
You remember the scene in Gone With the Wind when the apple of Rhett Butler’s eye, daughter Bonnie, goes riding on a horse far beyond her practically nonexistent ability, only to get thrown off and die?
Well, imagine if Bonnie had been a teenager like Ms. Cunningham instead of a little girl, and she was suddenly closed out of the usual avenues of advancement for Southern belles—confined to her bed because of a spinal injury sustained through the equestrian accident, enduring rounds of treatments and medications that left her increasingly isolated and depressed.
Only the story didn’t end there. Imagine now if Bonnie/Ms. Cunningham—forever deprived of the suitors that followed mom Scarlett around like plantation dogs all over Tara—suddenly felt a reason to live. Imagine if, instead of living for her own selfish pleasure, as Scarlett did, Bonnie led a cause that mobilized thousands—men and women, even black and white—in a great national grassroots movement.
What ignited Ms. Cunningham’s interest, transformed her life, and altered the cause of American national memory was a letter from her mother.
After traveling to Pennsylvania, where Ann was receiving medical treatment, Louisa Dalton Bird Cunningham wrote her daughter about the moonlit riverboat tour of the Potomac that she’d just taken: “I was painfully distressed at the ruin and desolation of the home of Washington, and the thought passed through my mind: Why was it the women of his country did not try to keep it in repair, if the men could not do it?”
What was so bad about Mount Vernon and how did it get that way?
Visible to the eye were peeling paint; piazza columns rotted so badly that they needed to be propped up by the masts of old ships; and a lawn overgrown with weeds. Inside wasn’t much better—the mansion now contained only a few reminders of its proud heritage—Houdon’s bust of the President, the key to the Bastille presented by the Marquis de Lafayette to his former Continental Army commander, and a terrestrial globe.
After Washington’s death in 1799, ownership changed hands within the family five times. By the time Louisa Cunningham mournfully observed the magnificent wreck, it had fallen into the hands of the President’s great-grandnephew, John Augustine Washington III, a planter whipsawed between an imploding, tobacco-based economy that had already devastated the fortunes of Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, plus an ever-growing band of tourists who came to this still-privately-owned estate and tramp around the house and grounds--so much so that Augustine had even less money for maintenance.
To his credit, Augustine refused to take the easy way out and sell to hucksters who’d want to turn the site into an antebellum honky-tonk haven. He went first to the national government, then to the Commonwealth of Virginia, to sound them out about purchasing the site. However, both the federal and state levels were more interested in sniping at each other over slavery and succession than in honoring the man who helped create the Union in the first place.
Enter Ann Pamela Cunningham, who stands as a rebuke to anyone who’s ever believed that as only one person they have no influence. Everything that would seem on the surface to make her an impossible crusader ended up ensuring her success:
* No husbands or sons to help her: Cunningham’s inability to marry and become the mistress of a Southern plantation gave her time she could devote wholeheartedly to her endeavor.
* No knowledge whatsoever how others would proceed: This isolation meant that she was blessedly free of what passed for the conventional wisdom of the day—and, thus, could write the manual, so to speak, for the future historic preservation movement.
* Disregard for social norms: Cunningham signed the initial letter “A Southern Matron” because the social code of the time held that the only times that a female’s name should appear in a newspaper was upon her marriage or death. But after awhile, she simply stopped caring what people thought—as a semi-invalid, it was highly unlikely she’d see them anyway. So after awhile, she began signing her appeals, breaking a social taboo.
Amazingly, this woman’s shrewd managerial style was celebrated in an article in Investor’s Business Daily (“She Saved Washington’s Home,” by Kathryn McKay, Oct. 18, 2008—unfortunately, no article link). Here are the features of that style, along with the resulting accomplishments:
* Call on as much outside talent as possible— In forming the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, Cunningham appointed as vice regents at least one prominent woman from each state then in the Union, making sure the cause was beyond section.
* Empower creative people—Cunningham didn’t care about imposing her own ideas for raising money; she allowed the state vice regents to implement their own fundraising ideas. Thus, Alabama citizens held a strawberry festival; in Kansas, schoolchildren donated pennies; and in Virginia, dinner parties brought in cash.
* Hold celebrity fundraisers—Cunningham’s shrewdest catch might have been Edward Everett, who nowadays is known as the fellow upstaged at Gettysburg by Abraham Lincoln but who was known as the Demosthenes of his time. Cunningham buttonholed him after a lecture in Richmond on George Washington and convinced him of the rightness of her cause. For three years thereafter, Everett delivered his Washington lecture an estimated 129 times.
* Exert pressure through the right channels—In the spring of 1858, Cunningham was convinced she was in the best possible position to make an offer to purchase the property from Augustine Washington. The planter, not in the best of moods, threw cold water on the idea that a group of women could run the enterprise. After being shown the door, Ann collapsed in distress—then got busy, calling on Augustine Washington’s wife within 24 hours, urging her to use her influence on her husband. It worked like a dream. Twenty-four hours later, he agreed to the deal with the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association.
* Challenge the conventional wisdom: Many people peppered Cunningham with questions about tearing down the outlying areas of the estate. Nobody wanted to see reminders of the central quarrel facing Americans at that time: slavery. But Cunningham insisted on preserving the property as is. Without her firmness on this point, all traces of the hundreds of men and women who toiled here in anonymity would have been erased, and our understanding of an essential component of the Southern economy—as well as of how George Washington came to regard it as economically flawed and morally wrong—would have been lost for good.
(Speaking of John Augustine Washington: Over the weekend, I learned from a C-Span special of a fascinating experiment he conducted to wean Mount Vernon from the boom-and-bust cycles associated with slavery and tobacco. In the 1840s, according to Scott Casper, author of Sarah Johnson's Mount Vernon: The Forgotten History of an American Shrine, Augustine decided on an alternative: four immigrants from Ireland—three male, one female. Within only a few weeks, however, the experiment collapsed.)
Mount Vernon’s most trying hours might have occurred during the Civil War, when soldiers north and south converged on the great estate, while also making sure they stayed neutral. The conflict prevented Cunningham from seeing the estate for six years, and overall time her medical condition meant she could give less and less time to the project. But she had made sure it was well-launched.
Without George Washington, no American nation would have been made. But it’s also a safe bet to say that without Ann Pamela Cunningham, no trace of the most important building in Washington’s life would remain.
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