Washington always knew how to win the interest and favor of the powerful. He courted the Fairfax tribe assiduously. When he departed for the army he even took the precaution of urging his brother, whom he left in charge of Mount Vernon, to remain in “Harmony and good fellowship with the family at Belvoir, as it is in their power to be very serviceable . . . to us, as young beginner’s. I wou’d advise your visiting often as one step toward it....”66 Following his own advice, he uxuriously beseeched aid from Dinwiddie and Shirley, from Braddock and Loudoun.
Thus, the Washington of these years was not always an attractive figure: callow, pompous at times, obsequious, and frequently self-pitying. He seems, too, to have been singularly humorless. Not only are his letters during this period devoid of wit or jocularity, but in the reminiscences of his acquaintances not one ounce of whimsicality is ever attributed to him. Instead, what appears is a figure who marshalled all his vast energies in the pursuit of one end—the realization of his fantasized goals: admiration, power, wealth. To attain these ends, he was willing to be a flatterer and an actor, and he was inclined to attribute his every failure to someone else’s ineffectuality. Some, like Loudoun, were not impressed with him. Others, like Dinwiddie, may have ultimately concluded that he was merely a dishonorable ingrate.
Young Washington established few, if any, warm, companionable relationships. The handful of surviving postwar letters sent to Washington by the men who had served under him were mostly cold and businesslike. Only rarely did a hint of intimacy break through in these communications, as when Washington’s former aide, George Mercer, writing from Charleston, South Carolina, complained of the “bad Shape of the Ladies [in that city], many of Them are crooked & have a very bad Air & not those enticing heaving throbing alluring plump Breasts comon with our Northern Belles.” Mercer immediately apologized for his brazen manner.67
Washington had permitted himself to be close only to older men, perhaps unconsciously feeling that they would be more tolerant of his shortcomings. Consequently, his most unrestrained filiations were with Lawrence and with elderly Colonel Fairfax. But neither saw him as a friend: to one he was a kid brother, to the other a surrogate son. With men his own age, there is no hint of a close friendship. He drank and gambled and relaxed with many men, and while with the British army, or on surveying jobs, or in command of the Virginia Regiment, he must have sat about campfires engaged in informal conversations. Not one letter of the scores he wrote in these years bears the ring of a communication to a friend, to an equal; and, while many who knew him left behind descriptions of this young man, none ever claimed to be anything more than a follower or an admirer. He looked upon other men in terms of his superiors and his subordinates, and toward him they reciprocated in kind.
With women, too, the pattern of remoteness is similar. He made repeated attempts at a sustained and close relationship with only one person, Sally Fairfax. Yet he knew from the beginning that he could never have her. As for Martha Custis, the woman he was about to marry, whatever the relationship ultimately became, it certainly began more as a business partnership consummated through marriage than as a passionately romantic tryst.
In a sense his life during these years seems to have been empty. Later, when much older, except for an occasional fond remembrance of Sally and the delightful days he had spent at Belvoir, he seemed strikingly disinclined to reminisce about the period. It was as if his past held no special charm for him, that he was conscious only of planning for success in the future. He certainly seems to have regarded his earliest years—those before he broke away from Ferry Farm—as too painful to recollect. Nowhere in his voluminous writings is there testimony to his tenderness or affection for anyone or anything from that period; the closest he came to expressing love for his kindred was to refer to his brother John Augustine as his “intimate companion.”68 Absent, too, is any harkening to the carefree days of youth. Life seems to have begun for him only when he at last could commence his drive to rectify the omissions of those painful early years.
One can only guess at whether Washington reflected on the past decade that holiday season as he rode up the isthmus from Williamsburg to the White House, his mount cantering along effortlessly past the lonely, scraggly pines in the barren winter forests. What must certainly have been on his mind was the stupendous change that was about to occur in his life. Within days he would be a married planter. Then he and his bride would be moving to Mount Vernon where they would try to carve out a life in this “Infant Woody Country.”69
3
The Acquisitive Planter
“My unremitting attention to every circumstance”
A two-day ride over the sandy highway that sluiced through the damp wintry forests brought Washington to Martha Custis’s estate. He arrived nearly a week and a half before the scheduled date of the wedding, but he could use the time. He and his fiancee had not seen one another for more than six months, since long before he had rendezvoused the Virginia regiments with Forbes’s army at Raystown. They had much to plan, from the details of the wedding ceremony to the transfer of Martha’s estate and chattel to his control, the latter mandated by Virginia law, which did not permit a married woman to exercise control over property. Besides, the couple wanted to get to know one another a little better. After all, since Washington first had ridden to the White House near the end of 1757, the couple had spent only about fifteen days together. In all likelihood, too, Washington wished to become better acquainted with Martha’s children, Jackie and Patsy, as everyone now called little Martha.
Nearly forty guests, friends from throughout Virginia, attended the ceremony. Weddings always were popular occasions, not just for the infectious joy communicated by the happy couple, but because in a rural society opportunities for fellowship between friends were infrequent at best. On the evening before the wedding, a bitterly cold night, winter winds nipped at the barren trees and frosted the warm, candle-lit panes of the mansion’s windows, while inside partners danced far into the late hours. The next morning the guests, mostly farmers accustomed to rising early, slept late, tired from the unusual night of partying that had gone before. When the guests did slip out of their beds that morning, they must have scurried about their chilly rooms, dressing hurriedly in a mood of blithe exhilaration.
A bit after 1:00 P.M. that day, January 6, 1759, George Washington and Martha Dandridge Custis slowly, nervously, entered the drawing room of the White House, each walking to the front of the chamber, each stopping beneath a chandelier ablaze with four white candles. Martha wore a wedding gown recently ordered from London, a “grave ... suit of clothes,” as she put it. Actually, her dress was voguish though not extravagant, a gown fashioned from yellow grosgrain silk, and including both ribbons of a high-sheen pink silk as well as an aigrette of white and deep red. If she hoped to appear sedate, Washington apparently sought to strike a more celebrative chord. He, too, wore clothing ordered from London, “a coat, waistcoat and breeches” made of the “best superfine blue cotton velvet,” all bedizened with silk buttons.
The ceremony was brief. An Anglican priest presided, while the many guests, among them the governor of Virginia, and a dozen or so curious servants watched, tightly packed together in the stuffy room.
Following the ceremony the guests sat down to a feast, a long banquet of epicurean delights prepared by the servants, for whom the festivities simply meant a hard day’s work. Hours later, after everyone had rested and talked, another evening of dancing ensued. Not until three days later did the last visitor depart, regretfully bidding farewell and commencing the long, cold, bumpy ride home.1
When the last guest had departed, Washington and his bride must have tried to unwind after days of anxiety, of whirlwind entertaining. During the next six weeks the formality between the two began to lose its edge, and the outlines of a relaxed family routine took shape. Washington used the time to make arrangements for the family’s move to Mount Vernon, a jaunt scheduled immediately following the adjournment of
the new legislator’s first session in the Burgesses; a thousand decisions had to be made, but chiefly they had to decide which possessions—including servants and slaves—would be relocated.
In mid-February the family repaired to the capital in Martha’s carriage, where they lived for the next ten weeks in the house built by Martha’s first husband. The Washingtons joined in the customary round of festivities, attending balls and hosting dinner parties for other legislators and their wives, including George William and Sally Fairfax.
The Burgesses convened on Washington’s birthday. Just twenty-seven years old, the inexperienced, somewhat shy and uncertain young lawmaker played an inconspicuous role in these sessions. Aside from pushing for the enactment of a few purely local bills, Washington sat back, listening and learning. Accustomed as he was to giving orders he must have felt like a fish out of water during the frequent tedious committee meetings and the tiresome, legalistic parliamentary debates. By early April his impatience to return to Mount Vernon overcame his sense of obligation to his legislative duties. He supervised the loading of crates of furniture and clothing, tools and toys, then, like the baggage train of a small army, the family with its servants set out for Washington’s estate. It was a long trek, more than a hundred miles from the first blossoms of spring in the everpresent forests about the capital back to the late winter dreariness that still clasped the landscape to the north. The day before their arrival at Mount Vernon, Washington sent along instructions to a servant to clean and air the house, and to procure poultry and eggs for the family’s first meal on the Potomac. Late the next morning the carriage rumbled over the last mile of the journey, softly squishing through the muddy road, on and on through the unending forest, until finally the faint outlines of the white farmhouse could be seen.2
Washington was proud of his plantation. It was home. During the last few months he had arranged for some repairs and additional construction, and he also had purchased new furnishings in anticipation of this moment. No record has survived of Martha’s initial response to her new home, but chances are it was mixed. The mansion was small and rustic compared to the White House, and the grounds were rather unkempt; moreover, the estate sat in a sparsely settled region, a district that bore the imprint of unrefined frontier coarseness. On the other hand, important people—like the Fairfaxes—lived in the neighborhood. The view, too, could be breathtaking, particularly at this time of the year when, except for the purplish-scarlet of an occasional flowering redbud or the newborn white of a fruit tree, one’s gaze was unobstructed by the foliage. The terrain was more rolling than on the Pamunkey, and in the rear of the house the land sloped gently down to the wide, green-blue river that flowed past placidly.
The house that Martha first saw was little more than a country farmhouse. George had inherited a one-and-a-half-story house. The bottom floor, which covered a space of thirty-three by forty-seven feet, included four rooms, two on each side of a long central hallway; four bedrooms sat atop this space. The clapboard structure had been built about great hand-hewn oak beams, each joined by oak pins instead of nails. The living quarters stood above a cellar, whose outer walls were fashioned from sandstone while its inner partition walls consisted of brick held by oyster shell mortar. Only the previous year, as soon as he and Martha were engaged, had Washington commenced his first extensive remodeling of the house, a project that he planned without the advice of an architect. He wished not only to have the work completed quickly, but in such a manner that the essence of the structure—and its memories—would be preserved. He rebuilt the foundation (using fifteen thousand bricks made in Mount Vernon’s own kiln), raised the roof so as to add a full second story, added new clapboard, which of course was freshly painted (actually, slits were cut at intervals in the board so as to resemble stone, and sand was mixed with the paint in order to give the surface a rough, granite-like texture), reglazed all the windows, built additional closets, and replaced the old staircase to the second floor with a new, but quite simple, stairway. Workmen also hurriedly replastered some rooms, then they installed a rich paneling and a new marble mantel in the west parlor. Four outbuildings, meanwhile, were connected to the house by palisades mounted on brick walls.3
Whatever Martha’s reaction to her new home, no substantive alterations were made to the structure for fourteen years. In 1773 work began on a three-story addition; the Washingtons planned to add wings to each end of the house, but the Revolution interrupted construction after only the western side had been completed. That wing had been added for pragmatic reasons. Inundated by overnight guests, the family had sought escape. This new wing consisted of a large library on the ground floor, a bedroom (connected to the lower floor by a hidden stairway) and adjoining dressing rooms on the second level, and another room, either Patsy’s or Jackie’s chamber, on the third floor. But if Martha displayed little interest in redesigning the structure of the mansion, she made her presence felt in refurnishing the interior. The largely barren house soon groaned with the furniture she had brought from the Pamunkey, and to this she gradually added beds, tables, chairs, and miscellaneous objects d’art that she ordered from London.4
To build and furnish Mount Vernon as he wished required that Washington have considerable financial resources. His land holdings were vast. Mount Vernon consisted of about forty-five hundred acres, so divided that it really amounted to five separate farms, some of which had (or soon would have) their own overseer’s house, barns, and slave cabins. Washington also owned title to Martha’s Tidewater acreage, he managed Jackie’s lands on the Pamunkey, and he still possessed the Bullskin tracts that he had acquired with his initial earnings as a surveyor. Before Washington could put the land to effective use, however, he had to learn something about agriculture. Although he had grown up on Ferry Farm, he had never directed its operations, and he had done precious little work in its fields. At age sixteen he had left those jaded lands, and for the past dozen years surveying and soldiering had preoccupied him. Now he would have to learn the ropes of his new vocation as he had learned his other pursuits—by observation, by reading, and by trial and error.
Like most Virginia farmers Washington planted tobacco that first year. He also rented separate portions of Mount Vernon to nine tenant families, directing each to raise the plant. Management of the crop had changed but little since early in the previous century. Nor had the uncertainties associated with this mercurial and vexatious plant vanished. At every step in the protracted cycle of producing a tobacco crop the planter faced dangers. His success depended both on good fortune and on making a series of correct decisions.
The planting process began early in the year, ideally twelve days following Christmas. At that time seeds were planted in enriched beds, manured, and covered by oak leaves or straw to protect them from the frost. Because the odds were long against a plant’s survival, large planters sometimes set out a crop ten times as large as they could use. In May the burgeoning young plants were transplanted into mounds that resembled molehills, each dome situated about three feet from its nearest neighbor. A week or so later hoeing commenced, a monotonous chore, but one that each mound required every five or six days. When leaves appeared, normally about six weeks after transplanting, the plants were topped. In this operation the top of the plant literally was pinched off, leaving five to nine leaves on the stalk. Now the plant could not flower, and the vegetation’s energy was free to surge into the leaves. Thereafter, the plant grew no taller, but the leaves grew larger and heavier. For the course of the growing season—about six or eight additional weeks—tobacco farmers were required to look after both the weeding and the removal of suckers, or useless sprouts that inevitably burst out.
In September the tobacco was cut. This was perhaps the most risky step in the routine. To cut too early meant the destruction of a not yet fully ripe crop, but to wait too long was to run the risk of ruination at the hands of an early frost. Once cut, the leaves were left exposed on the ground for several hours so they would wit
her and be less brittle. When ready, they were gathered and hung in a barn to be air-cured. Curing required several weeks, terminating with still another crucial decision by the planter, for leaves that remained too moist would rot before reaching market in Great Britain, while leaves that had been allowed to become too dry would crumble to dust during the Atlantic passage. Once cured, the leaves were stripped from the stalk, and workers began “prizing” the crop. This was the final stage, the actual layering of the leaves into large hogsheads, forty-eight by thirty inch barrels that had been constructed by coopers on the plantation. When packed, each hogshead customarily weighed close to a thousand pounds. At that point, usually in the spring about fifteen months after the cycle had begun, the tobacco at last was ready for shipment. In George Washington’s case this meant that the hogsheads, secured by iron or hickory staves, were drawn by horse or oxen to the Fairfax County warehouse, where the tobacco was inspected, graded, and stored until a vessel arrived to carry it to market in Great Britain.
Washington exuberantly put in his first crop, confident of a booming trade in the plant. Prices generally had been high in the 1740s, but the market had fluctuated wildly in the 1750s, reflecting the dislocations imposed by the French and Indian War, as well as the vicissitudes of the weather. With scarcity likely because of the persistence of the war, Washington expected high prices if the weather was advantageous. He expanded his tobacco production in 1760, although, as was true with every planter, he had not yet learned how his previous year’s crop had fared at market in England. In the summer of 1760 he received the bad news. The price for his first crop had been low. By the time he learned of his misfortune, he also suspected that his current crop was doomed by an overabundance of rain. Yet, the destruction of that season’s yield led him to conclude that scarcity would drive prices through the roof on his 1761 crop. That was not to be the case, however, and by the end of that summer he was nearly £1900 in debt to his British factor. His problems continued. Capricious weather, damages incurred during shipping, and oversupplies in Britain’s emporiums all seemed to conspire against him. So, too, did a swarm of bugs and worms, prompting him to wonder why Noah ever “suffer[ed] such a brood of vermin to get a berth in the ark.” His biggest problem, however, and one that he could neither understand nor acknowledge, was that the soil at Mount Vernon simply was incapable of yielding either substantial quantities of tobacco or the best quality leaf.5
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