His Excellency_George Washington

by Joseph J. Ellis

  THE EMPIRE’S FACE

  WASHINGTON’S MAN in London was Robert Cary, head of Cary & Company, one of the city’s largest and most successful mercantile houses. The Cary connection was another legacy of the Custis estate, since the firm had handled the business of Martha’s first husband, as well as her own business during her brief time as a widow. One of Washington’s earliest letters to Cary set the tone and defined the subsequent direction of the relationship. He complained about the price his first tobacco shipment received and about the multiple charges for shipping, insurance, and freight, plus Cary’s own commission. This was not the kind of arrangement that Washington had expected, and from the very start he threatened to take his business elsewhere. “I shall be candid in telling you,” he warned, “that duty to the Charge with which I am entrusted as well as self Interest will incline me to abide by those who gives the greatest proof of their Abilities.”15

  His reference to “the Charge with which I am entrusted” did not just mean his patriarchal responsibility for Martha, Jackie, and Patsy. It also meant the Custis estate, three plantations totaling eighteen thousand acres spread out along the York River in the Tidewater region of Virginia, lands that were worked by more than two hundred, eventually nearly three hundred, slaves. His marriage to Martha made Washington the legal owner of one-third of these “dower plantations,” and his status as legal guardian of her children made him responsible for managing the other two-thirds. Mount Vernon may have been his signature statement as a new member of the planter elite, but the Custis plantations in the Tidewater, devoted almost entirely to tobacco, produced the bulk of his cash crop.16

  And it was the size of his annual tobacco production that made him eligible for the services of Cary & Company. Smaller growers, and by the middle of the eighteenth century the majority of Virginia planters, sold their crops to domestic buyers and purchased most of their consumer goods locally. But the planters with the largest estates, those at the very top of the social pyramid, preferred the consignment system, whereby they consigned or entrusted sale of their crop to mercantile houses in England. At least theoretically, this arrangement assured the highest price for one’s crop. But the greatest advantage of the consignment system was the access it offered to London’s shops and stores.

  A consumer revolution was brewing in England, producing newly affordable commodities like Wedgwood china for a burgeoning middle-class market. By consigning his tobacco crop to Robert Cary, Washington was joining the elite within the Virginia elite, who could wear the latest English fashions and, in their own provincial world, consume just as conspicuously as members of polite society back at the metropolitan center of the empire in London. A letter from Washington to Cary conveys the flavor of the enterprise: “Mrs. Washington would take it as a favor, if you would direct Mrs. Shelby to send her a fashionable Summer Cloak & Hatt, a black silk apron . . . and a pair of French bead Earings and Necklace—and I should be obliged to you for sending me a dozen and a half Water Plates (Pewter) with my Crest engraved.”17

  Even more eloquent as testimonials to the spending frenzy going on at Mount Vernon were the invoices of goods that were boxed, crated, and shipped by Cary & Company during the early 1760s, when Washington was furnishing and embellishing the house. A veritable cascade of essentials and fineries came pouring in: dessert glasses by the dozen, a hogskin hunting saddle, a custom-made mahogany case filled with sixteen decanters, a 124-pound cheese, sterling silver knives and forks with ivory handles, satin bonnets, custard cups, snuff, felt hats, engraved stationery, wineglasses by the score, prints of foxhunts in the English countryside, even six bottles of Greenough’s Tincture with accompanying sponge brushes to clean Washington’s notoriously bad teeth. In an average year Washington ordered more than £300 worth of goods from Cary & Company. And this did not include his expenses for new slaves and adjoining land. Modern dollar equivalencies are impossible to calculate with any precision, but a rough estimate would place his spending during five years in the early 1760s in the range of two to three million dollars.18

  Gradually, it began to dawn on Washington that he was running through his entire Custis inheritance. In 1763 he rejected a request for a loan from an old army friend, explaining that his Mount Vernon expenses had “swallowed up before I knew where I was, all the money I got by marriage nay more.” But he was truly stunned the following year when Cary apprised him that his account was more than £1,800 in arrears, a debt that was only going to increase once Cary began charging 5 percent interest annually on the principal. Washington was caught in the trap that was snaring so many other Virginia planters and that Thomas Jefferson, another victim, described as the chronic condition of indebtedness, which then became “hereditary from father to son for many generations, so that the planters were a species of property annexed to certain mercantile houses in London.” In Jefferson’s version of the sad syndrome, once a planter crossed the line, it was virtually impossible to recover: “If a debt is once contracted by a farmer, it is never paid but by a sale,” meaning bankruptcy proceedings.19

  Washington’s initial reaction to Cary’s horrible news was the farmer’s perennial lament: bad luck and bad weather. Then he began to question Cary about the tobacco market. He understood that markets fluctuated, almost by definition. But why was it that swings in the market always seemed to go against his interest? And why was it that the price he received for his tobacco stayed low while the prices he paid for Cary’s shipments kept going up? He had been complaining about both the quality and the cost of the imported goods from the beginning—the linens wore out in a few months, the nails were brittle, the shoes fell apart after a few wearings, the clothes never fit—but now he accused Cary of deliberately selling him inferior goods and hiking the price by 20 percent because he was a mere American colonist, who presumably was too ignorant to know the difference. He also claimed that Cary and his kind sold him outdated items “that could only be used by our forefathers in the days of yore” instead of the fashionable styles requested. The goods shipped to him, in short, were inferior because Cary regarded him as inferior, a provincial rube, a soft touch, another one of those vapid and vacant Virginia grandees.20

  The more Washington thought about it, the more he concluded that no amount of diligence on his part, no spell of excellent weather, no favorable fluctuations in the tobacco market, could combine to pull him out of debt, because the mercantile system itself was a conspiracy designed to assure his dependency on the likes of Cary. When Washington thought of that abstract thing called the “British Empire,” he did not think politically, envisioning the Hanoverian kings and the members of Parliament. He thought economically. The face he saw was Robert Cary’s. And he did not trust him.

  Was Washington’s diagnosis of his predicament correct? As far as Robert Cary is concerned, all the evidence suggests that he was an honest merchant who provided his Virginia clients with fair market value for their tobacco, charged them appropriately for their purchases, and did not smuggle excessive charges into his invoices. What’s more, historians of the planter class in Virginia have documented the inherent difficulties of growing tobacco as a cash crop. From the very origins of the colony, skeptical observers were troubled by an economy built on smoke and a plant that seemed to possess a unique capacity to deplete the fertility of the soil. More recently, economic historians have called attention to the vagaries of the tobacco market in Europe, chiefly because of Spanish production of cheap tobacco which drove down prices. And most recently, social historians have targeted the lavish lifestyles of the Virginia planters, which combined a blissful obliviousness to the proverbial bottom line with an apparently irresistible urge to imitate the styles and consumption levels of the English gentry.21

  On the other hand, the consignment system, by its very definition, did place Washington’s economic fate entirely in Cary’s hands, providing him with total control over the price Washington got for his tobacco, the cost and quality of all the goods he received in return,
and the debits and credits to Washington’s account, as well as the separate accounts kept for Jackie and Patsy based on their Custis inheritance. All the risks of weather, spoilage, market fluctuations, and shipping mishaps fell on Washington’s side of the ledger. All the leverage lay with Cary. Every time one of the invoices from Cary & Company arrived at Mount Vernon, it served as a stark statement of Washington’s dependence on invisible men in faraway places for virtually his entire way of life. If the core economic problem was tobacco, the core psychological problem was control, the highest emotional priority for Washington, which, once threatened, set off internal alarms that never stopped ringing.

  By sheer coincidence, in the fall of 1765, just as Washington was grappling with the bad news from Cary and his own response to it, the much-despised Stamp Act was scheduled to go into effect in Virginia. This provocative piece of legislation, Parliament’s first effort to impose a direct tax on the colonies in order to help defray the costs of managing its expanding empire, generated widespread opposition throughout Virginia and all the American colonies. Washington was not an active participant in the debate, but he was a strongly supportive witness for the opposition. “The Stamp Act Imposed on the Colonies by the Parliament of Great Britain engrosses the conversation of the Speculative part of the Colonists,” he observed, “who look upon this unconstitutional method of Taxation as a doleful Attack upon their Liberties & loudly exclaim against the Violation.” But while most outspoken opponents of the Stamp Act, those whom Washington called “the Speculative part,” emphasized the constitutional argument, his response more directly reflected his personal experience with Cary & Company. Such “ill judged Measures” as the Stamp Act, he suggested, were likely to have the ironic but salutary effect of reducing American dependence on British imports: “And the Eyes of our People—already beginning to open—will perceive that many Luxuries which we lavish our substance to Great Britain for, can well be dispens’d with while the necessaries of Life are mostly to be had within ourselves.” Others could make the legal arguments about taxation and representation. Washington’s thinking, conditioned by his personal experience with the practical operation of the British Empire, moved instinctively to the much more palpable issue of economic independence.22

  He also chose to act in a direct and personal fashion to recover his own independence from Cary & Company. Starting in 1766, he abandoned tobacco as his cash crop at Mount Vernon, one of the first of the major Virginia planters to make the change. From now on he would grow wheat, construct his own mill to grind it into flour, and sell the flour in Alexandria and Norfolk. Nor was that all. He built his own schooner—or, rather, had slaves build it for him—to harvest the herring and shad of the Potomac and sell the fish locally or in the Caribbean. He eventually purchased a ship, which he christened The Farmer, to carry his flour, fish, and corn to such distant markets as Lisbon. Along the way, he developed a full-scale spinning and weaving operation at Mount Vernon to produce linen and wool fabric for workers’ clothing. He was not completely free of tobacco, since it remained the chief crop in his Custis plantations. Nor was he completely free of Cary & Company, which continued to fill annual orders for Washington until 1774, though usually for smaller shipments. Despite these lingering London dependencies, his preferred course after 1765 made it quite clear that this was a man determined to defy the pattern of indebtedness that swallowed up so much of the Virginia planter class, and hell-bent on freeing himself from the clutches of Robert Cary. If only in retrospect, he was already in personal rebellion against the slavish seductions of the British Empire.23

  FACING WEST

  IN THE FIRST renovation of Mount Vernon, completed in 1759, the main entrance was switched from the east to the west side of the mansion. There were architectural and landscaping reasons for the change, to be sure, but the symbolism of the switch, from an eastward to a westward facing, accurately expressed one of Washington’s deepest convictions; namely, that the future lay in those wild and wooded lands of the Ohio Country that he had explored and fought over as a young man. Gaining control of the vast American interior, after all, had been the central achievement of the French and Indian War, at least as Washington understood it. When John Posey, one of his foxhunting companions, complained about the impoverished condition of his own debt-ridden plantation, Washington urged him to abandon his eastern prejudices and make a fresh start: “there is a large Field before you,” he explained, “an opening prospect in the back Country for Adventurers . . . where an enterprising Man with very little Money may lay the foundation of a Noble Estate in the New Settlements upon Monongahela for himself and posterity.” Even while ensconced on the eastern edge of the continent at Mount Vernon, Washington spent a good deal of his time and energy dreaming and scheming about virgin land over the western horizon.24

  The dreaming received considerable inspiration when Washington looked out his back door at the majestic view Mount Vernon afforded of the Potomac. Though it might seem bizarre to modern students of American geography, Washington shared the eighteenth-century version of “Potomac fever” that was especially virulent among Virginians, believing that the very river that flowed past his mansion provided the most direct access to the interior waterways of North America. The illusion probably derived its credibility from the long-standing claim that the western borders of the Old Dominion extended to the Mississippi, or even to the Pacific, producing a habit of mind that regarded Virginia as the gateway to the West. Washington embraced this illusion with passionate intensity—so did Jefferson—and starting in 1762 began joining and leading several organizations for improving navigation on the upstream sections of the river. The Potomac mythology stayed with him all his life. (It even played a significant role in the decision to locate the national capital on the Potomac in 1790.) His strenuous efforts yielded no practical results—the natural water route to the interior did not exist, and the man-made version, the Erie Canal, turned out to be in New York—but they did reveal where his thoughts were flowing.25

  In 1763 he briefly turned his attention south to an undeveloped plot of ground rather ominously called the Dismal Swamp, which was a geological anomaly, a kind of Louisiana bayou mistakenly plopped down on the border of Virginia and North Carolina. He joined a group of ten investors, most members of the Virginia Council or House of Burgesses, who used their influence as insiders to purchase forty thousand acres of swampland that they proposed to drain and develop. Each investor also agreed to provide five slaves to do the draining and dredging. As with his Potomac improvements, nothing much came of this venture, though Washington held on to his four thousand acres until 1795. An aberration within his more enduring obsession with western land, the story of the Dismal Swamp Company does expose his voracious appetite for acreage of any and all sorts, along with his willingness to use political connections in Williamsburg to get what he wanted.26

  But the big prize lay over the mountains. Washington’s several initiatives to acquire tracts in the Ohio Country crisscrossed in dizzying patterns of speculation, and the jurisdictional problem created by border disputes between Virginia and Pennsylvania, the overlapping claims of different Indian tribes, and the shifting policies of the British government all enhanced the confusion. But at bottom lurked a basic conflict about the future of the Ohio Country: Washington believed it was open to settlement; the British government believed it was closed; and the Indians believed it was theirs.27

  In 1763, George III issued a proclamation, in effect making the enormous region from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi to the western slope of the Appalachians an Indian reservation, closed to Anglo-American settlers. From the beginning, Washington regarded the proclamation as a preposterous joke. “I can never look upon that Proclamation in any other light,” he acknowledged, “than as a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians.” He regarded the Indian tribes of the region as a series of holding companies destined to be displaced as the growing wave of white settlers f
lowed over the Alleghenies. There was nothing right or wrong about this development, as he saw it. It was simply and obviously inevitable. The Indians, understandably and even justifiably, would resist. After all, they had dominated the region for several centuries. But they would lose, not because they were wrong, but because they were, or soon would be, outnumbered. (Later on, during his presidency, he would attempt to guarantee tribal control over Indian enclaves, his effort to make a moral statement amidst a relentlessly realistic diagnosis of the demographic facts.) And if the strategists in London chose to block this manifest destiny, they were either stupid, not understanding what the French and Indian War had won, or sinister, plotting to reserve the bounty of the American interior for themselves, all the while confining the colonists to the Atlantic coastline.28

  Washington’s most grandiose western venture, called the Mississippi Land Company, was launched in 1763, the very year of George III’s proclamation. Fifty investors requested proprietary control over 2.5 million acres on both sides of the Ohio River. In 1765 the company retained a London agent to lobby the Privy Council and Parliament on behalf of their proposal, which envisioned nothing less than the creation of a feudal kingdom in the Ohio Valley with the settlers as serfs and the owners as lords. The British ministry not only rejected the proposal, claiming such a grant would violate treaties recently signed with the Iroquois and Cherokee, but then, in 1770, approved a similar request for 2.5 million acres by a group of English investors to create a whole new colony called Vandalia in the same region. Washington wrote off his investment as a loss in 1772, eventually describing the experience as clear evidence of the British government’s “malignant disposition towards Americans.”29