Washington- The Indispensable Man

by James Thomas Flexner

  Martha became all the more protective of her final remaining child. Almost uninterfered with by his stepfather, Jackie ripened into the monster he was to become.

  Washington was to comment, in relation to the political excesses which followed the triumph in the American Revolution, that it was natural for heirs who had received a large legacy to “riot for a while.” His activities during the French and Indian War had been profitable: he had received not only his salary but a commission on everything which, as his own supply officer, he bought. The death of Lawrence’s widow had raised him from renter to owner of Mount Vernon. And then had come the large infusion of Custis cash.

  In preparation for his marriage, Washington had used a good part of his wartime earnings to raise Mount Vernon from one and a half to two and a half stories. The Custis windfall then encouraged him to enlarge the plantation with extremely extensive purchases of adjoining acres: to buy (he had not yet been assaulted with qualms about slavery) blacks to work the new land, and to make his style of living comparable with that of the leading planters whose luxury he had as an impoverished boy so envied. This paroxysm of expense “swallowed before I knew where I was, all the money I got by my marriage. Nay more, brought me into debt.”

  According to usages almost universal in tidewater Virginia and dating back for generations, the economy of the colony had only one foot in America: the other was in England. The rivers on which the plantations bordered were also estuaries of the Atlantic Ocean. Ships dispatched by English merchants came annually to the planters’ own wharves. They loaded Virginia’s sole cash crop, tobacco, and unloaded what the merchant (known as a factor) had bought in London, presumably with the earnings from the previous crops. This system, which circulated Virginia’s cash abroad, had been responsible for that lack of Virginia manufactures or even fine handicrafts which had forced Washington and Forbes to supply their armies in Pennsylvania, where the economy was more self-contained.

  In the relationship between factor and planter, the factor had every advantage. Taking his profit on every transaction, he determined the prices at which he sold the Virginian’s tobacco, and also the prices at which he bought objects for the Virginian’s account. The only alley of escape open to a planter who concluded that he was being cheated—changing to another factor—was usually closed because the planter had been maneuvered heavily into his current factor’s debt.

  Before his marriage, Washington had done his business with one Richard Washington, who he assumed might be his cousin and might therefore treat him fairly. When he came into the Custis money, he gladly changed to the Custis factor, Robert Cary and Company, but his letters across the ocean continued to be an unbroken series of angry charges. His tobacco was being sold for a fraction of its value, he was sent inferior goods at superior prices, and his orders were handled with inexcusable incompetence. Farm machinery would arrive with parts missing, which meant that the necessary and expensive objects would have to lie idle for a year, since there was only one shipment annually. There was the time that Patsy followed him around in tears through the hold of a ship searching for a trunk of adornments and toys that were listed on the invoice but had been left behind. Washington bought all his best clothes abroad; he sent careful measurements, but the clothes never fitted. Since this was the typical situation, we have a vision of grand parties where all the Virginians were handsomely dressed in costumes either too small or too large.

  HOW MOUNT VERNON GREW

  (Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union)

  The house George Washing lived in as a boy, and eventually rented from his brother’s window

  Mount Vernon, after the enlargement made during 1759 in preparation for Washington’s marriage to Martha

  The completed mansion. The 1759 house was extended during 1774 to the right, to supply private living quarters. A similar wing to the left, begun in 1776, was mostly filled by a two-story parlor. Washington added the pediment and cupola after the Revolution.

  Washington so accepted the system that, as he ordered lavishly, he paid little attention to what the Cary bookkeepers were scratching down in their ledgers. When the factor decided that the time had come to notify him of debt and needle him for payment, he responded with outrage: “I must confess that I did not expect that a correspondent so steady and constant as I have proved, and was willing to have continued to your house while the advantages were in any way reciprocal, would be reminded in the instant it was discovered how necessary it was for him to be expeditious in his payments. Reason and prudence naturally dictates to every man of common sense the thing that is right, and you might have rested assured that so fast as I could make remittances without distressing myself too much, my inclinations would have prompted me to it.” Why did not Cary and Company put their minds on getting decent prices for his tobacco? Having appended a large order for luxuries and farm machinery that would increase the debt, he wrote grandly that he would not wish anyone to “suffer in the most trivial instances in my account.” He would agree to pay interest on what he owed.

  Washington might write loftily, but he knew that debts forever swelling with interest were a sure progression to bankruptcy.

  Although Washington now reduced his capital investments in more lands and slaves, this did not by itself solve his problem. At a later date, he was to write a little parable explaining why an extravagant planter found it impossible to practice economy. “‘How can I?’ says he … ‘I am ashamed to do it; and besides, such an alteration in the system of my living will create suspicions of a decay in my fortune, and such a thought the world must not harbor.’” Whether or not Washington expressed ideas that had been his own, he failed to apply to his day-by-day expenses that virtue he found hateful: “frugality.” He would have to find another way out.

  The trouble was not laziness. He could hardly have paid more attention to his affairs. Many a Virginia plantation was lost through the sloth of the owner, but it was natural for the proprietor of Mount Vernon to be forever on the go. If he was prevented from being active, he fell ill and was haunted by premonitions of death (his father and his beloved brother, Lawrence, had both died in their primes). In all aspects of life he was, as Jefferson wrote, “inclined to gloomy apprehensions.” The bustle of plantation management exactly suited him. It gave his body the extensive exercise which that powerful machine craved, and, without putting his nerves on the stretch as they had been during the French and Indian War, kept his attention so filled with a succession of little problems that his innate melancholy had no opportunity to cloud over his mental skies.

  Washington was up in midsummer with the dawn and at other seasons in the dark, riding his estates in a circle that had expanded as he secured more land. There was always much to ameliorate: slave labor was inefficient; overseers were sottish and brutish and stupid; the Mount Vernon fields were far from fertile. The soil had been depleted by long cultivation of Virginia’s extremely demanding staple crop, tobacco. Furthermore, as Washington came gradually to realize, there existed “an understratum of clay impervious to water.” During heavy rains, excess water ran off, washing topsoil into the Potomac and creating unsightly gullies, while what moisture did sink in remained near the surface causing sogginess. Washington was perpetually seeking some natural fertilizer that would generate a miracle or at least help things along, his most elaborate expedient being to scoop up and spread mud from the bottom of the Potomac. He had his men eternally digging drainage ditches that were eternally inadequate.

  A devoted reader of agricultural manuals, Washington copied out long passages, probably to fix them in his memory. However, even as a beginning farmer (which he now actually was), he was unwilling to accept anything on authority. One reason was that his books were all imported from England, and he had already concluded that what would work across the ocean was not necessarily suited to America. Seeking not only to improve his own crops, to enlighten and amuse himself, but perhaps to find guidance for all Virginia far
mers, Washington undertook experiments.

  In each of ten compartments of a huge box, Washington placed soils from different parts of his estate, planting various grains at the same depth but with different fertilizers. “I watered them all equally alike with water that had been standing in a tub about two hours exposed to the sun.” All were to be cultivated in an identical manner. Thus, at the very dawn of modern science, Washington tried to set up a controlled experiment. But there were conditions he could not control: the weather, and the cultivation while he was away on a trip to Williamsburg. It is perhaps a further indication of his potentialities as a scientist that he realized that his results were inconclusive.

  Washington was eager to initiate wine culture, but he did not import European grapes. Reasoning that what was indigenous to Virginia soil grew best there, he collected about two thousand cuttings from local vines, selecting those on which the wild grapes did not ripen until late autumn. Fermentation followed, and tasting. But Washington rode off to the Revolutionary War without having hit on a delicious potation.

  His curiosity carried him into widespread investigations. He determined that there were 13,411,000 grains in a bushel of timothy. As his carpenters hewed poplar boards, he made a work-time study more suited to the twentieth century, noting their motions and deciding which could be eliminated. He invented a plow which automatically dropped seeds in the furrows, and with which he continued to tinker at various times for the rest of his career. But all this activity contributed more to his interest and amusement than to any important agricultural discovery, or to paying off his English debt.

  Washington was the completely responsible manager of a medium-sized town which, to escape utter bankruptcy, had to be as far as possible self-contained. His “family” (as he called it) included nephews and nieces, white artisans, overseers, and a force of slaves that mounted with the years to several hundred. Pork had to be produced by the thousands of pounds (6,632 in 1762); Indian corn and cereal grains grown to feed man and beast; fish seined from the Potomac by the tens of thousands to be eaten fresh or salted down; liquor (that invaluable work incentive) distilled, cider from Washington’s apple trees being stepped up to applejack. Washington’s blacksmiths shoed horses and made tools from plows to axes; his coopers ran up hundreds of barrels; his carpenters built new structures and kept the old ones in repair; his weavers and shoemakers and seamstresses made the work clothes of the community. Livestock had to be bred, fed, milked, broken to harness or the saddle. Carts drawn by oxen or horses moved—Washington hoped not aimlessly or with half loads—across his thousands of acres. He had his own freight sloop on the Potomac and his own mill, even if it was superannuated and forever ailing. For many years, he accommodated with a ferry travelers who wished to cross the river.

  Washington handled these complications with organization that singularly resembled that of an army. There was a chain of command from the leader of a work gang up to the manager of an individual farm, on to various staff officers, and finally to the proprietor. At one side, were special services—ditchers, carters, millers, fishermen, artisans—whose activities had to be keyed in at the right place and time to the general effort. With his unbounded energy and his gift for detail, Washington was at Mount Vernon an efficient commander in chief.

  Yet his debt to his English factors grew.

  After five years as a conventional planter, Washington came to a decision that included a declaration of independence from England. He decided that, although hallowed by tradition, the economic system of the Virginia tidewater, to which he had been raised, was in its essence “disastrous.” The cultivation of tobacco ruined the land. It required a disproportionate quantity of labor. As the only cash crop, it left the planter at the mercy of a single sequence of weather. And because tobacco had to be sold abroad, the planters were delivered into the hands of foreigners who pushed them into debt and kept them there while supplying them with expensive, out-of-date and inferior goods.

  Washington decided to apply on a large scale the economic practices of the lowly farmers who lived in the piedmont beyond the falls of the various rivers. To their farms, British boats could not penetrate; they lacked the extensive and flat acreage, and also the large work force to grow tobacco. They grew cereal grains, not only for their own use, but as cash crops, selling to local merchants who distributed produce in America as well as abroad.

  During 1765, Washington grew little tobacco and during 1766 none. The output of his farm became wheat and particularly corn. Since this required much less labor, he was able to diversify further. He increased his number of weavers so that they could work for the neighbors, and he built a new commercial mill, which could grind for the entire countryside, and which he eventually had automated by the Philadelphia inventor Oliver Evans.

  The excess produce of his estate he sold to merchants in Alexandria, who paid him in money or at least in statements of indebtedness that circulated in the middle colonies. When he wanted European goods, he could buy them from local importers susceptible to his wrath if he felt himself put upon. Or he could buy the achievements of Philadelphia artisans who regarded the American market as the basis of their prosperity that must be pleased.

  Washington’s principal contact with his London factors was now paying off in installments what he owed them. How he looked forward to being quit of them altogether! Again, as when he had abandoned his ambition to join the British regular army, Washington moved psychologically away from the England that as a youth he had unquestionably considered the center and capital of his world.

  SEVEN

  Washington in His Landscapes

  (1759–1775)

  The passionate soldier had changed into a planter commonly characterized by his friends with the adjective “amiable.” Here is a passage from his letter to a brother-in-law who had just fathered a male baby: “But harkee! I am told you have recently introduced into your family a certain production which you are lost in admiration of, and spend so much time in contemplating the just proportions of its parts, the ease and conveniences with which it abounds, that it is thought you will have little time to animadvert upon the prospects of your crops.

  “I say how will this be reconciled to that anguished care and vigilance which is so essentially necessary at a time when our growing prosperity—meaning the tobacco—is assailed by every villainous worm that has had an existence since the days of Noah (how unkind it was of Noah, now I have mentioned his name, to suffer such a brood of vermin to get a berth in the ark), but perhaps you may be as well off as we are—that is have no tobacco for them to eat, and there, I think, we nicked the dogs, as I think to do you if you expect any more.”

  In 1768, Washington went to church on fifteen days, mostly when away from home, and hunted foxes on forty-nine. He made innumerable visits, often staying several nights. He attended three balls, two plays, and one horse race. Unable to resist any kind of spectacle, Washington enjoyed cockfights and puppet shows. He visited a lioness and a tiger, and gave nine shillings to a showman who brought an elk up the long driveway to Mount Vernon. Temperamentally a gambler—now at cards, later in war—he received a rebuke from a Scotch Presbyterian friend for wasting so much of his time at the gaming table. The stakes were occasionally high, but down the years he lost only a little more than he won.

  Sometimes he took his hounds along when he rode around his farms, gleefully abandoning business if they started a fox. The breeding of horses and hounds was a perpetual concern. Several times he noted ruefully in one of his diaries that he had been outwitted by some household pet who, realizing before he did that one of the hound bitches was “proud,” had “covered” her before she had been locked up with a suitable hunting mate.

  Washington’s agricultural activities were by no means limited to utility. Although he never painted a picture and wrote no more poems after he emerged from adolescence, he was always passionately concerned with aesthetic effect. This could manifest itself in the spacing on the page of a
letter or of a survey. It found its greatest expression in the design of Mount Vernon (he was his own architect) and the embellishment of the grounds. He arranged not only his flower garden, but also his vegetable garden, with decorative paths and hedges that encouraged strolling; he transplanted onto his lawns and into his artificial “wildernesses” decorative shrubs he had happened on in his rambles: he tried to grow exotics imported from Europe or sent to him by friends in the West.

  In the seven years between 1768 and 1775, the Washingtons entertained about two thousand guests, who ranged from relations and intimate friends to passersby put up at nightfall. Hospitality was warm and food plentiful, even if the bedrooms were crowded. George found an unfilled dining room “lonesome” and Martha considered an empty house “dull,” yet they liked to alternate gregariousness with privacy. In 1773 and 1774, Washington doubled the length of Mount Vernon westward by adding a domestic wing the same height and width as the existing house. This left the structure lopsided; he planned—it was not completed as he rode away to a new war—a matching extension to the east that would contain a two-story ballroom.

  Washington sold the Custis house in the Colonial capital, Williamsburg, and bought a house in his county seat, Alexandria. As a member of the House of Burgesses, he only bothered to ride to the sessions if matters of local import were to be decided. Neighborhood offices came to him: vestryman, justice of the county court, trustee of Alexandria. He was lax about attending the boring sessions, but he was never lax if anyone knocked on his door to request charity or a loan or advice or actual intervention in tangled affairs. He wrote that no suppliant should ever be turned away from Mount Vernon “lest the deserving suffer.” In principle he was less sympathetic to the undeserving, but in fact they usually found him generous. He could not, he complained, refuse any appeal “without feeling inexpressible uneasiness.”