At the death of his father, Winfield, being but six years old, was
left to the charge of his mother, to whom he was devotedly attached.
It is a well-warranted tradition of the county in which the Scott
family resided, that the mother of General Scott was a woman of
superior mind and great force of character. In acknowledging the
inspiration from the lessons of that admirable parent for whatever of
success he achieved, he was not unlike Andrew Jackson and the majority
of the great men of the world. He wrote of her in his mature age as
follows: "And if, in my now protracted career, I have achieved
anything worthy of being written, anything that my countrymen are
likely to honor in the next century, it is from the lessons of that
admirable parent that I derived the inspiration."

In his seventh year he was ordered on a Sunday morning to get ready
for church. Disobeying the order, he ran off and concealed himself,
but was pursued, captured, and returned to his mother, who at once
sent for a switch. The switch was a limb from a Lombardy poplar, and
the precocious little truant, seeing this, quoted a verse from St.
Matthew which was from a lesson he had but recently read to his
mother. The quotation was as follows: "Every tree that bringeth not
forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire." The quotation
was so apt that the punishment was withheld, but the offender was not
spared a very wholesome lesson.

General Scott's mother, Ann, was the daughter of Daniel Mason and
Elizabeth Winfield, his wife, who was the daughter of John Winfield, a
man of high standing and large wealth. From his mother's family he
acquired his baptismal name of Winfield. John Winfield survived his
daughter, and dying intestate, in 1774, Winfield Mason acquired by