Tracy was assisted by Upton Herbert, a Virginian and longtime friend of the Washington family, who was recommended for service as Resident Superintendent of the property by John Augustine Washington III, the last Washington to own Mount Vernon. Unable to return due to the start of the war and her own health issues, Cunningham entrusted the Mansion to her secretary, Sarah Tracy of Troy, New York. When the war began, Ann Pamela Cunningham, the founder of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association and its first Regent, was at home in South Carolina managing her family's plantation after the death of her father. On April 12, 1861, Confederate artillery opened fire on Fort Sumter, in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, signaling the start of the Civil War. After the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States in the fall of 1860, the country slid deeper into a sectional crisis that made armed conflict between the north and the south look inevitable.
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