The sowing of wheat was begun August 16 and was continued to September 8. Soon the tobacco was cut, and the annual argument over the probable size and price of the new crop was renewed. Washington set out November 10 for Williamsburg, where the General Assembly had met on the second—for the third time that year. En route, he found the crops on the York relatively better than those on the Potomac and he permitted himself to hope, as he phrased it, that “the tobacco, what there is of it, will prove exceedingly good this year. . . .”
The legislative session was interesting to him in his role of planter. Governor Fauquier explained that he had called the Assembly together to enter upon the usual business of the country and provide for the future safety and well-being thereof. Of particular importance, said the Governor, were carefully matured action to relieve the shortage of bullion and measures of similar wisdom to regulate trade with the Cherokees. Military operations on American soil had ended, though the war against the French and Spanish continued at sea. The Burgesses enacted a new election law, amended militia legislation, put on the books a measure for the relief of insolvents, provided for the inspection of pork, beef, flour, tar, pitch and turpentine, and fashioned a modified plan to encourage wine-making and silk-culture in Virginia.
This diversified legislation kept the General Assembly in session until December 23, but it did not detain the senior Burgess from Frederick until so close to Christmas. He reached home December 1 in time to see the corn crop measured and shared with the overseers. Of meat he set down the total for the use of “the family” at 6632 pounds. This weight of meat, virtually three tons, was typical of the magnitude of many of the operations at Mount Vernon. Everything was expanding; some things were prospering. The Washington and Custis tobacco crop from the several plantations was almost 60,000 pounds.
That seemed a reassuring figure but, now that he was completing his fourth year’s work after his retirement from the army, a number of circumstances should have kept the Colonel from financial complacency. He had done the essential things at Mount Vernon. In 1759, neglect was visible under every shed and in every field. Even now repair seemed endless; but the place was decently equipped in almost every requirement—teams, livestock, implements, buildings, Negroes. All this made the estate more valuable but it had cost many hundred pounds and it had not demonstrated what Washington had taken for granted—that first-class tobacco could be grown at Mount Vernon in quantity and at a sufficient profit to pay off the debt and keep up the plantation.
These were the concerns of a man who intended to remain a planter, grow richer if he could, and enjoy the luxury of a life he had earned for himself. In larger preparation for the uncertainties of the future, political and personal, he had learned more of law-making, had gained in good will to men, and, facing the vagaries of season and of human nature, was becoming more patient and more willing to bear what he could not cast off. By the thorough performance of commonplace, daily duties he was building slowly the stronger structure of the spirit that men call character.
During four years of struggle to make Mount Vernon a profitable tobacco plantation, Washington had been drawn closer to the church and October 25, 1762, had been elected a vestryman of Truro Parish. His first important official duty was to attend a vestry meeting at Falls Church and consider the need of a new structure there. Beyond this election, Washington had no new public distinction. He did not shine as a Burgess, though his character and his military reputation gave him influence. More and more he was becoming a planter who had his holidays and enjoyed them but had, between them, to discharge duties that were as humdrum as they were numerous.
Good bargains seemed better and bad crops appeared not quite so intolerable when set against the joyful news of the Treaty of Paris, signed February 10, 1763. The struggle then ended between France and England had cost the lives of 853,000 soldiers and of unreckoned hundreds of thousands of civilians. England was supreme in North America and had gained enormously in India. The Earl of Granville did not exaggerate when he aroused himself from the languor of his last illness to affirm this “the most glorious war, the most honorable peace, this nation ever saw.” Very different were the comments of the Virginia former Colonel. “We are much rejoiced at the prospect of peace which,” he wrote, “ ’tis hoped will be of long continuance and introductory of mutual benefits to the merchant and planter, as the trade to this Colony will flow in a more easy and regular channel than it has done for a considerable time past.” That was all: peace meant easier, profitable trade.
Climbing debt and dragging repayment did not keep Washington from ordering another pipe of a “rich, oily” Madeira, nor was he deterred from new expenditure by a controversy over exchange that now threatened the amity of Virginians. British merchants trading in the Dominion had filed in February a protest against the volume of paper money issued by the Colony. The injustice of the act for the relief of insolvent debtors likewise had been challenged in the memorial, which the Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations had hastened to transmit to Fauquier. The Governor, in turn, had laid the paper before the Council on April 28 and had said he thought it imperative that the Assembly be convened. A call then had been sent out for May 19.
MAP / 6
THE PROCLAMATION LINE OF 1763
When the Burgesses filed into the council chamber, they found the friendly and diplomatic Governor in a mood of unwonted stiffness. Fauquier did not undertake to suggest how the merchants were to be satisfied, but he urged the lawmakers to provide adequately for the redemption of the paper currency on maturity and called on them to repeal the amended act for the relief of insolvents. The Burgesses were ready for the Governor, Emission of treasury notes had been necessary, the Burgesses maintained, because there had been no other means of meeting the King’s requisitions. The notes had been made legal tender, except for quit rents, in the conviction that this was essential justice to all. Provision for judicial determination of disputed rates of exchange was proper; sufficient funds had been provided for the redemption of the notes; “no person trading to this Colony could receive any injury” ; British merchants would gain as much as they would lose in the fluctuations of exchange. The general tone was one of professed surprise that the House was censured for what it had considered “acts of duty to our Sovereign.” To this view, the Burgesses adhered. No appeal, no persuasion, could shake them. The insolvency act of the previous November was repealed. More than this the Burgesses refused to do.
In this discussion, Washington had no place of prominence. He probably was not present when the Governor called the Burgesses to the council chamber May 31, scolded them mildly for their failure to act, and then prorogued them. The absence of the senior member from Frederick was not due to unconcern over sterling debts but to a desire to increase his fortune and discharge some of his own debts otherwise than from the uncertain returns of an unpredictable crop. Washington was convinced that land speculation held as good a promise of profit as ever. He still was looking westward; but, along with some of the planters and merchants, he now turned to an undeveloped area not far away, the Great Dismal Swamp.
There was general belief that if the swamp were drained, tens of thousands of acres of ideal farming land would be the reward. William and Thomas Nelson and a few of their friends had decided to seek the patent of the unoccupied and waste land of the swamp and to draw off the water from the best of it. These men readily interested Washington, who agreed to visit the Great Dismal and see for himself what it would offer of fine timber while it was being drained and of rich flatlands when it was cleared. The ground seemed, in his own phrase, “excessive rich.” The prospect was one of undisguised speculation; but if the swamp could be drained successfully, the reclaimed land might yield fabulous crops, close to the market of Norfolk and the open sea. Washington decided he would make the venture along with the Nelsons, Robert Tucker, Robert Burwell and the others who had shown special interest in it.
Washington returned north to resume his
everyday life as a planter, but he did not abandon his reawakened interest in speculative land enterprises. Almost immediately he became a sharer in a new Mississippi Company that had bold, ambitious designs: Fifty subscribers, and no more than that number, were to contribute funds with which to send to England an agent to solicit the grant directly on the Mississippi River of a domain large enough to allow each member of the company fifty thousand acres. The terms, like the aims that shaped them, were the ideal of speculation, such an arrangement as the land-hungry dream about.
Later in June Washington went to Frederick County and while there had news of the sort grimly associated in his mind with that region. After the surrender of Montreal, many of the French Indians, particularly those around Detroit, had refused to accept the rule of the conquering English. During the spring of 1763, these Indians captured English outposts north of the Potomac and the Ohio. No massacres had been reported from any part of Virginia, but terror once again had gripped the frontier. Washington knew what to expect. When he returned home at the end of June he wrote: “. . . it is melancholy to behold, the terror that has seized them and the fatal consequences that must follow in the loss of their harvest and crops, the whole back country being in forts or flying.”
Happily for the Colonies, some of the Highlanders who had fought in Forbes’s campaign of 1758 had been left in Pennsylvania under Colonel Bouquet. That veteran struck west from Carlisle on July 18 with approximately 460 regulars. Detaching a handful to garrison Raystown, which now had become Bedford, and another score and a half to guard Fort Ligonier, formerly Loyal Hannon, he hurried along the route he had followed five years previously. On the afternoon of August 5 the Indians attacked in force on Bushy Run. Their tricks were those that had led to the massacre of Braddock’s men; but Bouquet was not Braddock, nor were his troops untrained in the warfare of the woodlands. Bouquet matched the Indians’ worst until nightfall, and, when they renewed the battle August 6, he lured them forward by a pretended retreat, then delivered a fierce bayonet charge and finally routed them. Relief of Fort Pitt followed immediately. West of that outpost, the savages still were violent, but the retired Colonel of Mount Vernon knew that the defeat administered by Bouquet would dull their zeal for war.
Closer at hand Washington had a multitude of vexatious duties that would have alarmed a timid planter or have harassed a man less reconciled to detail than he was. By October 1 Washington had harvested his summer crops, sown his winter wheat and cut his tobacco. He was pessimistic about his “money crop.” The yield on the York appeared to be good, “but,” Washington had to write his London dealer, “my crops on the Potomac are vastly deficient; in short, a wet spring, a dry summer and early frosts have quite demolished me.” When the hogsheads had been filled on all the plantations, the total was better than the Colonel had thought it could be. On the other hand, quality was so lacking in the leaf that bulk and weight were more than cancelled. Washington realized this and did not purchase luxuries as recklessly as in the past. His largest single item in the orders that fall was for chariot harness for six horses.
Land was different; he could not resist that. By the end of summer he had carried his total holdings to 9381 acres, and almost before the tobacco crop was housed he went to Stafford Court House to attend a meeting of the men who sought the vast grant on the Mississippi. Later in October Washington started again for the Great Dismal Swamp—to get still more land. Washington “went the rounds” of the swamp, as he said, and visited its southern border in North Carolina where he saw some excellent land he subsequently determined to purchase. He concluded that profitable drainage of the swamp was possible and, with the other speculators, returned to Williamsburg in an effort to procure action on a petition filed the previous May for the grant of lands in the swamp. It developed that the petition itself had disappeared and that the Council had done nothing about it. Thereupon a new paper was circulated in the names of the original applicants, their kinsmen, friends and tenants, to a total of 148 persons. On presentation of this paper, the Council was quick to make amends for delay and neglect. It resolved November 1, “that each of the petitioners have leave to take out a patent for 1000 acres of the said land upon condition of giving legal notice to the proprietors of the contiguous high lands and that they will not interfere with any entries antecedent to this day. . . .” Seven years were allowed for the return of the surveys.
The Governor’s irresistible inclination to consult the Assembly prompted His Honor to summon the lawmakers on January 21, 1764. The reason was the familiar one—a call for Virginia troops to join in a new campaign against the Indians. The Redmen still were halting the advance of English settlement and were threatening to bring the torch and the scalping knife to the frontier again. Thomas Gage, who had served in Braddock’s campaign, was now Major General and American Commander-in-Chief and urged that Virginia supply five hundred men for a western offensive to relieve Detroit and annihilate the resisting Indians or force them to make peace.
Fauquier asked the lawmakers whether it was not better “to march into the enemies country than by waiting at home to revenge yourselves when they think proper to enter yours and commit all kinds of outrages and murders.” He had been employing the militia, Fauquier said, and had found it expensive. The force had been reduced to five hundred men and would have been diminished still further had not the call for the Assembly been sent. The Assembly preferred using the militia to raising troops by extravagant bounties, and it promptly named a commission, with Washington as chairman, to examine the accounts of the militia and certify them for payment. After the close of the short session, Washington remained in Williamsburg long enough to arrange for the shipment of fifty-two hogsheads of tobacco.
Washington was not stinting the luxuries he, Martha and their guests enjoyed. He, indeed, was becoming a bit reckless, not to say extravagant. He was not deterred from the purchase of luxuries or of Negroes by the size of the debt he owed Robert Cary & Co., his factors in London; he scarcely was restrained by the fact that money was scarcer than ever, that many planters were in difficulty, and that several bills of exchange given him in repayment of loans proved worthless at the time. His eyes were opened to reality, if not to frugality, by a letter he received shortly before May 1 from Cary & Co. The merchants informed him that Jackie Custis’s balance had shrunk to £1407 and that Washington was in their debt for no less than £1811. They would be pleased to have him reduce that obligation and, meantime, to pay interest on it. As a matter of right, Cary should be told to charge interest. The merchant might be reminded that poor crops and bad debtors explained the magnitude of the debt. Buying need not be stopped. Cary & Co. could wait for their money from a customer who was sending them fifty-two hogsheads of tobacco, with more to follow.
While some of that tobacco still was at sea, America received unwelcome word of new taxes that might be levied by Parliament. In the war with France from 1754 to 1763, Britain had increased her national debt to £130,000,000. Her interest charge alone was £4,500,000; new and continuing expense must be assumed for the protection of the American frontier. George Grenville, Chancellor of the Exchequer, had raised the question of Colonial contribution to the cost of defending the English settlements. He asserted and the Commons promptly agreed that “it may be proper to charge certain stamp duties in the said Colonies and plantations.” No action to this end was taken at the time, but Parliament seemed ready to act whenever the Ministry brought in the bills.
Reports of this reached Virginia and Maryland about the middle of May and met with instant challenge. Direct taxation of the Colonials by act of Parliament never had been attempted. Such general levies as had been imposed in any Colony had been by laws of its own Assembly, chosen by the people who were to pay the taxes. This had been so unvarying a practice that only constitutional lawyers of inquisitive mind had taken the pains to analyze taxation in terms of inherent political right. Colonials had now to unlock the forgotten armory of their rights to get weapons for
their defence against parliamentary taxation. Practice had to be vindicated by principle. The Colonials rediscovered their inheritance in protecting their interests. Had not their forefathers possessed all the rights of British subjects, including the right of taxation through representatives of their own choice, when they came to America? What had they done that deprived them of any guarantee they possessed under the English constitution? The first rumors of direct taxation of Americans by Parliament prompted every Colonial who knew anything of history to think of Runnymede and of the long struggle of Parliament itself to establish taxation as the right of the taxpayer. Even before the precise form of contemplated British action was known, Washington’s fellow-Burgess, Richard Henry Lee, put the question that shaped endless protests: “Can it be supposed,” he asked a correspondent in London, “that those brave adventurous Britons, who originally conquered and settled these countries . . . meant thereby to deprive themselves of that free government of which they were members, and to which they had an unquestionable right?”
Washington, like most Virginians, was concerned and instinctively disposed to resist, but, as usual, was not inclined to anticipate events. That applied to taxation and, more immediately, and more personally, to his debts. Summer brought from Cary & Co. a letter which its recipient somewhat indignantly regarded as a dun. Washington undertook to answer it with a statement that “mischances rather than misconduct” had been responsible for his financial ills. He was chagrined but not chastened. Orders from England must be reduced. Luxuries for the time being were banned. He would defer other purchases in order to reduce his debt.
Washington Page 28