Mason, Charlotte Elizabeth

Charlotte Elizabeth Taylor was born in Albemarle County, likely in the last decade of the eighteenth century. Charlotte was the youngest of three children. Her parents, John Powell Taylor Jr. and Sarah Williamson Ruffin, were wealthy planters in the county, owning hundreds of acres of land, a mill, enslaved people, and stock. While the Taylors were not quite as affluent as the Masons, they nonetheless maintained an elevated status in Virginia’s agricultural economy. 

John Taylor died in 1806. In his will, he divided property and debt among his wife and children. Charlotte’s portion included property in Dinwiddie County, near Petersburg, shares in the “Virginia Bank,” half of her father’s funded certificates of stock, and all debt due from two tenant farmers working to own a tract of their land. The “Virginia Bank” in Taylor’s will likely refers to the Bank of Virginia in Richmond, which had been chartered by the legislature just two years prior. Ownership of these shares speaks to the prosperity and stature of the family, as they were part of the trend of southern elites gravitating toward private banking under government charters. So, too, does the size of Charlotte’s inheritance as the youngest and female child. Typically, younger children and daughters received much smaller portions of their parents’ inheritance because the majority was reserved for the eldest son and daughters were assumed to be financially taken care of through marriage. Charlotte’s brother did receive the core of their parents’ estate; however, because there was so much property to share, she and her sister Sarah were given sizable and even comparable portions. 

On 27 April 1817, Taylor married Armistead Thomson Mason, inheritor of the Raspberry Plain plantation in Loudoun County and former U.S. senator. She was his second wife. His first, Eliza Opie Parker Mason, had died childless just three years earlier. Taylor, Armistead Mason, and a small group of friends gathered in her sister’s house in Albemarle County, where her brother-in-law, Dr. Charles Cocke, witnessed the marriage and certified that Taylor was of age, meaning that she was at least twenty-one years old. Two years later, in 1819, Charlotte Eliza Mason gave birth to a son they named after his grandfather, Stevens Thomson Mason. In the same year, Armistead was killed in a duel with his cousin John Mason McCarty, leaving Charlotte widowed with a young child to care for. 

This fatal duel was highly publicized in newspapers in Virginia and beyond because of the men’s stature and their close familial ties. Nearly every article written about the event mentioned the wife and son Armistead left behind, either to illustrate the moral rightness of Armistead as a family man or for dramatic effect in recounting his traumatic death. Press coverage described Charlotte’s mourning, but one article in particular relayed an exceptionally vivid scene. The author described how Charlotte prayed loudly and was “frantic with despair, precipitating herself upon the corpse of her bleeding husband, mingling her tears with his flowing blood, and contending with the icy arms of death for the lifeless prize.” None of these gruesome and moving articles gave Charlotte’s name, however. As her personal and intimate tragedy was dramatically splashed across newspapers nationally, she disappeared into anonymity. 

In his will, Armistead named Charlotte as his primary executrix and left to her and his son the entire estate besides an annuity to be paid to his widowed mother. When his son turned twenty-one years old, Charlotte was to transfer half of the estate, including land and sixty-nine enslaved people, to his name and retain the other half for herself. Upon her death, Charlotte would be allowed to give two thirds of her half to anyone she wanted. Armistead also included a clause promising to take care of and pay for Charlotte’s living expenses if she decided to move to another residence. 

When Charlotte Eliza Mason died in 1846, her son Stevens had already been granted his half of the Mason estate, but she still had the power to give two thirds of her half away to anyone of her choosing. As Stevens entered adulthood, the two of them were plunged into great debt. It is unclear exactly how this happened, but since after Charlotte’s death Stevens was also largely indebted to her, it is likely that he, of the two of them, was responsible for their rapid acquisition of debt. Their accrual of debt may have also been the result of the Panic of 1837 and the recession that followed. Three years before Stevens would inherit his half of the estate, unregulated banking, the bursting of the land market bubble, declining market values, and myriad other causes kicked off investment anxiety and bank runs. Into the mid-1840s, banks failed and the purchasing power of planters like the Masons in Virginia plummeted. Financial strain is reflected in Charlotte’s will, which states that she and her son had already sold the entire Selma estate to George Rust two years prior, and that with her death, her small remaining portion of the property also became officially Rust’s. 

Charlotte Mason’s estate was appraised and inventoried in Jefferson County (adjacent to Loudoun, though now in West Virginia), where she died on 2 February 1846. The most valuable of her possessions was a reserved pew at St. James Episcopal Church in Leesburg. Mason’s collection of books made up the majority of her other listed property. The appraisers included the title of each book, including History of the Reformation, History of the British Empire, Addison’s Travels, Tales of My Grandfather (seven volumes), Millers Dictionary, Common Prayer, and many more. Just before his mother’s death, Stevens Mason wrote his will upon enlisting as a soldier to fight in the Mexican-American War. He expressed his wishes to be buried in the St. James Episcopal Cemetery and stipulated that should his mother die before his return, she was to be buried there as well. The intention was for Charlotte to share her final resting place with her son, her daughter-in-law, her husband, and her husband’s first wife. Nevertheless, Charlotte was buried in Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. 

 

By Annabelle Spencer