The general's family held their posts in calm silence, expressing no excitement or alarm. Tarleton's cavalry--mounted on Virginia's race-horses--were dashing all over the country, and liable at any moment to appear wherever it pleased him. For Mary Washington there was no security, no peace, save in the sanctuary of her own bosom. Virginia was the battle-ground, convulsed through her borders with alarms! Finally, General Washington could bear it no longer. Despite her remonstrance he removed his mother to the county of Frederick, in the interior of the state, where she remained for a short time to escape the Red Dragoons of the dreaded Tarleton. "As for our present distresses," he wrote to George Mason, "they are so great and complicated that it is scarcely within the powers of description to give an adequate idea of them. We are without money and have been so for a long time; without provision and forage, without clothing, and shortly shall be (in a manner) without men. In a word; we have lived upon expedients till we can live no longer." The eventful year of 1781--destined to bring so great a deliverance to the country--brought infinite sorrow to Mary Washington and her daughter. The good man and pure patriot, Fielding Lewis, died in January. Always too frail in health to bear arms, he had sent his sons to the front, advanced £7000 for the manufacture of arms, and so impoverished himself by advances of money to the colony that he was unable to pay his taxes (Calendar State Papers, Vol. i, p. 503; Henings Statutes, Vol. ix, p. 71). In the same year Samuel Washington died at his home, "Harewood," in Jefferson County. The family bond was close in Mary Washington's household and no one was dearer than her son Samuel! Washington's letters in 1780 repeat the story of Valley Forge. "The present situation of the army" (Jan. 8, 1780) "is the most distressing of any we have experienced since the beginning of the war. For a fortnight past the troops, both officers and men, have been almost perishing from want. The troops are half starved, imperfectly clothed, riotous, and robbing the country people of their subsistence from sheer necessity." In April things had not improved. "We are on the point of starving," he wrote to Reed of Pennsylvania. "I have almost ceased to hope. The country in general is in such a state of insensibility and indifference to its interests that I dare not flatter myself with any change for the better." And he adds, like a sigh of hopeless anguish, "In modern wars the longest purse must chiefly determine the event." The English were fully cognizant of this state of affairs. "We look on America as at our feet," wrote Horace Walpole, in 1780, to Mann.