George Washington was mortified by his failure to produce good tobacco. In his Virginia a planter was judged by the quality of his tobacco. To fail in this endeavor was a blow to a planter’s self-esteem, and to a man who required adulation and attention as much as Washington did such a failure was intolerable. He first sought to overcome his humiliation by offering a financial incentive to an overseer who could provide him with superior tobacco, but that ploy inevitably met with failure. When that and every other expedient proved ineffectual, he alleged that he had been cheated by his factors in Great Britain. He severed his ties with one company, then he carped at the purported wrongdoing of a second. His tobacco was of a superior quality, he exclaimed, yet other planters in the neighborhood netted 12d per pound for their crop and he received only 11½d. Later he railed that some planters in the Northern Neck realized 30 percent more per hogshead than he earned. His poor showing mystified him. “Certain I am no Person in Virginia takes more pains to make their Tobo. fine than I do and tis hard then [to comprehend why] I should not be well rewarded for it.”6
Washington’s greatest yields resulted from his earliest efforts. In both 1760 and 1761 he produced approximately 93,000 pounds of tobacco, but thereafter his harvests declined. A planter in his time normally realized a cash return of about 25 percent on the tobacco that he marketed, the remainder being lost to taxes, shipping and insurance costs, and the commission charged by the overseas agent. In his peak years, therefore, Washington likely made about £1200 from his tobacco crop, although from that he still had to deduct his production costs. Nevertheless, what Washington regarded as a bad showing amounted to an annual income that was perhaps tenfold that earned by an urban-based skilled artisan in the 1760s.
After 1762 Washington despaired that he could ever produce the tobacco crop that he sought. Tobacco farming might be “an Art beyond my skill,” he ruefully acknowledged, and in 1764 he allowed that he might not be able to grow “even tolerable Crops.” Still, he was reluctant to blame himself or Mount Vernon for the evident failures, and the notion lingered in his mind that the agents in Britain favored some Americans over others. Why continue to grow tobacco, he wondered, when the treatment accorded planters in London “only suits the Interests of a few particular Gentlemen.” Thus exculpating himself for his failures, Washington by 1764 had begun to substitute a wheat crop for his tobacco, and within two years he no longer produced any tobacco. His yield in wheat, meanwhile, had leaped from a modest 257 bushels to 2331 bushels by 1766, and by the end of the decade he was reaping over 6000 bushels annually. Washington never returned to tobacco production at Mount Vernon, although his tenants continued to pay their rent with hogsheads of tobacco they had grown, and he insisted that it be planted annually on his and Jackie’s lands on the Pamunkey and the York.7
By the mid-1760s Mount Vernon had taken on the air of a diversified industrial village. While flax and hemp sprouted in adjacent fields, the weavers hired by Washington turned out increasing quantities of homespun cloth. By early in the next decade a flour mill was in operation, permitting him to grind not only his own wheat but that of his neighbors as well. The usual farm crops (corn and turnips, for instance) were sown, but in portions just sufficient to feed the family, the labor force, and the livestock. By 1766 he launched a fishing schooner, which trolled the Potomac for shad and herring, while orchards of fruit trees lined the rolling terrain. He bred and sold horses. In addition to oxen, hogs, and sheep, he raised cattle, and before long a dairy and a smokehouse were functioning. The construction of a still and a cider press added a varied dimension to the yield of his orchards.8
By 1770 Washington had very nearly cut his indebtedness in half. His success as a farmer was not due to happenstance. Agricultural tracts took up a sizable portion of the shelf space in his library. Washington approached husbandry as a scientist might conduct himself in a laboratory. He experimented constantly. He tested new fertilizers, varied his planting times, tried new grasses and new seeds, grafted in the hope of growing more lush fruit, sought larger, sturdier livestock by innovative breeding practices, kept an eye out for novel, labor-saving equipment, and he even invented a more suitable plow. Unwilling to delegate too much authority to an overseer, he seemed to observe each and every occurrence at Mount Vernon. He rose each morning at 4:00 and spent the initial two hours of his day at his desk, reading, handling correspondence, and grappling with his accounts. When the others in the family had awakened, he joined them for a substantial breakfast. Regardless of the weather he was on horseback by 7:00 to make his rounds, riding about fifteen miles each day, dropping in on each section of the estate to scrutinize the previous afternoon’s labor and to issue commands to the foremen for the new day.9
If Washington worked hard, the hands he supervised worked harder. Most of his workmen were bonded laborers, and most of the bondsmen were enslaved. Before the 1770s many in Washington’s slave labor force had been acquired through purchase. At the beginning of 1759 he held just over a score of slaves. During that year he spent nearly £600 on the purchase of thirteen additional chattel. By the end of the following year his corps of slaves numbered fortynine, many of them having reached Mount Vernon via the auction block. A census taken in 1770 showed that his slave population had risen to eighty-seven persons. Sometimes Washington personally attended the sales to purchase slaves, while on other occasions he retained George William Fairfax’s brother-in-law, an Alexandria merchant, to serve as his agent. To avoid the higher Virginia duties on imported slaves, Washington and his agent often shopped on the Maryland side of the Potomac. Between 1770 and 1775 Washington’s slave population more than doubled, principally the result of natural increase, for he purchased no additional slaves after 1772. By that time, however, he had spent well over £2000 on the procurement of captive labor.10
Washington’s attitude toward blacks was typical of his time. He was a racist. No evidence exists that he was troubled by the existence of slavery at any time before the American Revolution, nor does he seem to have ever questioned the prevailing notion of white supremacy. It would have been extraordinary had he puzzled much over these matters. He had never lived in a society that frowned on slaveholding, no vocal antislavery movements existed in the colonies, and men who were far better educated and more widely read accepted the institution with no misgivings. He apparently bought and sold slaves without a second thought. Purchase “Negroes, if choice ones can be had under Forty pounds Sterl.,” he instructed his agent in the West Indies, but “if not, then [buy] Rum and Sugar . . . or . . . Sugar and Molasses.” On another occasion he told his agent to sell a slave for molasses, rum, limes, tamarinds, and sweetmeats. His diary entries frequently refer to “My Negroes” or to “a Wench of mine,” passages that are devoid of human feelings. He was not moved to express hatred or love or empathy for his chattel. They were simply business propositions, and his comments regarding these unfortunate people were recorded with about as much passion as were his remarks on wheat rust or the efficacy of a new fertilizer.11
Little information exists on the conditions in which Washington’s slaves lived in the period before 1775.12 But there is no reason to suspect that Mount Vernon’s slave habitations were superior to those of neighboring plantations. The quarters must have been cramped and drafty chambers, miserably cold in the winter, frightfully hot in the summer. With their earthen floors, glassless windows, and cheerless, shabby furnishings, these domiciles must have been no more hospitable than the manger in which the estate’s cattle were sheltered.
If the accommodations were meager, so too was the slaves’ clothing allotment. At one estate a slave received only one shirt for an entire year. In the midst of winter one year an overseer informed Washington that the “little negroes” were without clothing, and, incredibly, he inquired whether their owner “intended to give them any thing er not.” On another occasion he mentioned that Washington had provided no blankets for his slaves, though he had found some “negro Cotton” for the pregnant
women and small children. Letters from Washington’s farm managers were filled with accounts of illness among the slaves, including the report on a man who was forced to work even though he had contracted the measles and was beset by a “Violent Pox and Vomiting.” Earlier in the year the same manager had failed to call a physician to assist another ailing subject until it was too late; that child died of the mange. When slaves ran away these overseers were dumbfounded. Coachman Jamey ran off, an overseer told Washington, “without an angry word or a blow from any one.” The runaways were hunted down with dogs and, when captured, were severely flogged.13
Washington employed other laborers in addition to the men and women he owned. He purchased a few indentured servants. Under this century-old system a person sold himself for a specified period (usually five to seven years) in return for free transportation to America. Because of his large unskilled labor force, Washington bought only servants who were skilled artisans; he acquired a joiner in 1759, for instance, and, much later, a gardener. But most of Washington’s skilled artisans were hired hands, some retained on a seasonal basis, some on yearly contracts. He employed carpenters, millers, bricklayers, blacksmiths, weavers, and metal workers, and at harvest time he engaged cradlers. Their contracts stipulated salaries ranging from £25 per year to nearly double that amount. The covenants additionally called for a full measure of work; the artisan was to labor six days each week for a year, but any days lost to illness were to be made up the following year. Washington also hired overseers for his scattered farms. Some were efficient; others were indifferent. He once rode up to Bullskin to find “every thing in the utmost confusion, disorder & backwardness . . . and not half a Crop . . . prepared.” His most trusted managers were John Alton, a white servant who worked for him for more than thirty years, and Lund Washington, a distant cousin whom he hired in 1764 to oversee operations at Mount Vernon.14
If Washington was principally a planter, he also was a businessman and a speculator. He invested in three commercial pursuits on or near his Mount Vernon property. In addition to his flour mill, he constructed a saw mill, and in 1774 he purchased a brigantine in order to expand his fishing enterprise. He contemplated investing in an iron furnace in the Shenandoah, but nothing came of it.15 His real interest, however, was land, and following his marriage he plunged into this uncertain market with almost unbounded zeal.
His initial foray into large-scale speculation had been fruitless. The Ohio Company was to get its lands only if it had placed one hundred settlers in its allotted domain within seven years; when the deadline was reached the French and Indian War was blazing and there were no settlers on the company’s lands. In 1760 Washington cooperated in an endeavor to revive the moribund company, and three years later, at the end of the war, the resuscitated Ohio Company dispatched an agent—in fact, it was Colonel Washington’s former aide, George Mercer—to implore the British government to renew its grant. Mercer remained in London for five years, but ultimately he failed. In 1767 the English secretary of state announced that all of the transmontane West belonged to the king. Twenty years after its inception the Ohio Company was dead. Not one investor had made one cent off the enterprise.
Washington was not the sort to put all his eggs in one basket, however. Not when he believed that stupendous fortunes could be reaped from western land. Indeed, he told a friend that he expected wilderness investments to yield a 500 percent profit in twenty years. He bought into the Mississippi Company in 1763, an enterprise that applied to the Crown for four thousand square miles between the Wabash and the Mississippi rivers; later he employed an old military comrade, frontiersman William Crawford, to search out tracts of “rich . . . and level” land for him in western Pennsylvania, and still later he retained an agent to look for promising river land in West Florida.
But Washington’s problem was not in locating good land, it was in securing clear title to such tracts. His major obstacle arose from the absence of an effective, omnipotent government capable of devising and implementing a comprehensive, unambiguous, central policy toward the newly acquired western territory. Britain commenced its control of the region with the Proclamation of 1763, a decree that prohibited settlement west of the Appalachians. That was about the only unequivocal statement that London made in regard to the West, and it was not taken too seriously in the colonies. Washington, for instance, was not in the least disturbed by the edict, passing it off as a temporary expedient to mollify the Indians; he ruminated that anyone who “neglects the present oppertunity of hunting out good Lands . . . will never again regain it.” Washington was correct that this was not London’s final word. What followed was an object lesson in a government’s inability to formulate a coherent policy. It could not decide whether it wanted settlers pouring into the transmontane West. Some secretaries to whom responsibility for such matters fell endeavored to facilitate expansion, while others feared that western settlements would be beyond the reach of England’s mercantile houses, and still other ministers preferred to settle newly acquired Canada and Florida first, then worry about the West. The result of all this was chaos. One ministry contradicted another. Royal officials in America disregarded and suppressed royal orders. Colonies accepted some treaties by which Indians ceded their hunting grounds, while they ignored other, less favorable pacts. Britain’s rule was so muddled it was unable to adjudicate the complexities of the colonists’ rival western claims, such as those between Pennsylvanians and Virginians over the same prized real estate. Indeed, the British government could not even determine the western boundary of Pennsylvania.
By 1773, ten years after the French and Indian War ended, Great Britain still had not decided where—or even whether—to create a new colony across the mountains. Late in the 1760s reports began to circulate that London was about to create a new colony that would encompass the general region of present-day western West Virginia and Kentucky. Yet that was the very region in which Virginia’s veterans of the late war hoped to attain the bounty lands promised by Governor Dinwiddie. Alarmed, Washington warned his governor that the rumored colony would be a “fatal blow” to Virginia, meaning, of course, to himself. Typically, the issue dragged on unresolved for years, until in 1773 the Board of Trade, and then the king, granted the domain to a group of English speculators and ordered preparations to commence for the establishment of a proprietary colony. Typically, too, nothing else occurred in regard to this colony, leaving Washington in the dark as to Britain’s intentions.16 What he did know was that in the years he had watched Britain vacillate in indecision over its western policies he had grown from adolescence to middle age, and in that time his pertinacious, sometimes dangerous, pursuit of a fortune in that realm had gone largely unrewarded.
Of course he had acquired some land, although even where a clear title seemed to exist surprises had an uncanny way of occurring. Crawford had acquired some property for him in Pennsylvania, and he had purchased nearly twenty-seven hundred acres of the George Carter estate in Virginia. Moreover, during the 1760s he had become intrigued by the possibility of developing a hitherto inaccessible region known as the Great Dismal Swamp, a mélange of thickets and trees, bogs and coves, that sprawled inland from south of the Chesapeake, lapping over the Virginia border into North Carolina. Since much of the peripheral land had been cultivated with considerable success, several speculators concluded that beneath the forbidding morass of the swamp itself good, flat land suitable for farming and timbering—and within reach of the Atlantic sealanes—lay waiting to be exploited. The hitch was that the region would have to be drained before it could be of any use. Washington first visited the area early in 1763, a factfinding excursion to determine whether investment was warranted. He concluded that the area had abundant assets. He discovered that much of the soil was rich and black, that the rivers that darted through these marshes could accommodate ocean-going vessels, and that the area had plentiful stands of timber. Pleased with the possibilities, Washington, together with several other planters, includi
ng his brothers-in-law Fielding Lewis (husband of his sister Betty) and Burwell Bassett (spouse of Martha’s youngest sister), invested in a company simply named the “Adventurers for Draining the Dismal Swamp.” Under its charter each member was to receive title to one thousand acres, and each was obligated to furnish cash and ten able-bodied laborers for the work force. Washington eventually made four additional trips to the site during the decade to scout for good land, and, after one trip, he and Lewis purchased over eleven hundred acres on the southern perimeter of the swamp. But the company failed to open any lands before the Revolution, although as early as 1768 Washington succeeded in marketing cypress shingles that he procured from the area.17
If Washington worked tirelessly to develop the swamp, he was like a man possessed in his efforts to secure the bounty land he believed he had been promised. In 1754, when Virginia raised its army to drive the French from the Ohio country, Governor Dinwiddie had proposed to divide 200,000 acres among the men who enlisted. Fifteen years after he had first donned his uniform, however, Washington had not received an acre of the land. First, the war had been unexpectedly protracted; then, the Proclamation of 1763 had prevented the fulfillment of the governor’s pledge. But late in 1768 Britain and several western tribes negotiated treaties under which much of the eastern Ohio Valley was opened for colonial settlement. Washington knew the time to act had come. In fact, he realized that he had to act quickly, for not only were Virginians and Pennsylvanians certain to vie for the land, but should that be the region in which Britain chose to establish its long-rumored new colony good land would be even more difficult to attain. And Washington knew that he faced one other sticky problem. It was not at all clear that Dinwiddie had intended to give any land to the officers. The language of his proclamation, though vague, seemed to suggest that he proffered the land as an inducement for men to enlist, not for officers who accepted commissions. Washington began his quest by gathering enough of the surviving officers to draft a petition to the government requesting that the land grant at last be made, that lands be extended to officers as well as to enlisted men, and that the lands be on one or all of the following bodies of water: the Monongahela, the New River, the Great Kanawha, and Sandy Creek. A friendly aristocratic governor, Baron de Botetourt (who had arrived in Virginia only the previous year) and his council readily concurred with each point, stipulating that they hoped one satisfactory tract of 200,000 acres might be located, but agreeing to as many as twenty separate blocks. Typically, too, the government ultimately allotted 15,000 acres for each general officer, but only 400 acres per private. The government directed William and Mary College to appoint a surveyor.18
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