Washington was a rancher as well as a farmer. He owned over 600 head of cattle, in addition to 135 horses, and it was as a stockman that he embarked on one of his most novel experiments. Beginning in 1785, when he received a gift of a jackass from the king of Spain, he set out to “stock the Country” with these beasts. Sturdy and long-lived, and inexpensive to maintain when compared to horses and cattle, asses, Washington believed, not only would supplant all other livestock as the principal laboring animal on America’s farms but would take the place of horses in matters of conveyance. His original scheme was to put “Royal Gift,” as he named his new possession, out to stud with his mares. That did not work. The ass could not have been less interested. Evidently he was “too full of Royalty, to have any thing to do with a plebian race,” Washington cracked, as he led him from the horse pen; eventually, he borrowed a jenny from a neighbor and introduced her to Royal Gift. Nature immediately took its course. The jenny acted “like a true female,” Washington reported, for she had been undaunted by the royal ass’s huge personal parts. Lafayette soon thereafter presented Washington with another jack and two jennies, and the great experiment began in earnest. But like so many of his other agricultural endeavors this, too, failed, resulting in nothing more than whatever pride Washington took in owning a few of these striking and still exotic creatures. He undoubtedly put the jacks to work, but there is no evidence that he ever rode to the hounds on the back of an ass, nor did he replace his traditional carriage teams with pairs of jennies.15
Washington also expressed a willingness to experiment when it came to liberating slaves. The institution should be abolished, he admitted shortly after the war. His reasoning, moreover, had taken a new twist since the late 1770s when he had confessed that slavery had become an economic burden. Now he seemed to feel that slavery was a moral wrong. Before leaving Mount Vernon for the war he seemed never to have given the matter any thought, but during the long conflict something changed his outlook. Perhaps it was because thousands of blacks from the North, given the chance to soldier during the late war, had performed as capably as their white counterparts; maybe it was due to the zeal with which southern blacks had denounced slavery by fleeing behind British lines. It could have been the impact of Whig ideology which reverberated about the land, for notions such as the equality of men and mankind’s innate rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were difficult to square with human bondage. In addition, animated discussions on the issue of slavery must have occurred at headquarters, and inasmuch as two of his favorites, Lafayette and John Laurens, were outspoken foes of the institution, Washington must have been moved to reconsider his predispositions.
At best, however, the issue remained an abstract philosophical matter for him, as he would support abolition only if slavery was set aside very, very gradually. Someone should concoct a scheme to abolish the institution, he once said, but he had no intention of being that someone. Nor did he make an effort to aid the struggling young abolitionist movement born during the Revolution. In fact, when he learned that some Philadelphia Quakers had sought by court action to attain a slave’s freedom, he denounced their endeavor. He spoke out for property rights, not human rights, crying that it amounted to “oppression” of the slaveowner when “happy and contented” slaves were “tampered with” by outside agitators.16 And, of course, he took no steps to manumit his own chattel during the 1780s. Indeed, he sold nine slaves in 1786, for which he realized nearly a thousand dollars, and he acquired two additional slaves while he remained at Mount Vernon during that decade.17
After Washington returned to Virginia in 1783 he often lamented his financial plight, sometimes painting a picture of a man on the precipice of economic disaster. He was barely home before a nephew and a brother called with their hands out, each hoping for a loan. Washington refused both men (though he asked George Mason to lend his brother $500). He had not made a cent off Mount Vernon in nearly a decade, he said, adding that he faced the prospect of selling portions of his estate to raise cash. Taxes had to be paid, he went on, and then there was the matter of paying off both Lund and the workmen who had labored on his house; he faced several other encumbrances as well, he might have added, the largest being the retirement of a $6000 loan he had received to purchase the Oriskany lands in upstate New York. In fact, by 1785 he also was in debt to Governor Clinton, who lent him the funds to meet his first note on this tract. Washington confessed that he was “ashamed” of his condition. The “fact is that I am really in want of money,” he claimed.18
The general’s obligations were real, and his concern at his financial situation was both genuine and warranted. But his cries of imminent insolvency appear to have been exaggerated. At first glance he seemed harried. He called in loans (he was due in excess of £4000, mostly in varied settlements of Patsy’s and Jackie’s estates, as well as that of Martha’s first husband), he put some of his land on the market, and he sold almost all the securities he had received from Congress upon submitting his wartime expense account, even maintaining that he was forced to sell those notes for only one-twentieth of their face value. That he resorted to all these expedients might seem to indicate he was in desperate straits. In all likelihood, however, that was not the case. To demand that his debtors meet their obligations was hardly a new ploy for him, and there is no evidence to suggest that he acted any more assiduously in these endeavors in the 1780s than he had during the fifteen years before the Revolution. His land-sale scheme was designed to raise cash so that he could make payments on his New York lands, tracts that he concluded were likely to turn a profit more rapidly than were his western Pennsylvania and western Virginia holdings, as “the Yankees will delay no time” in opening ties between New York and the site of his lands. Confirmation that his Pennsylvania and Virginia lands for the moment were useless came when he was unable to find a buyer for that domain. As for selling his securities, the value of all certificates was depreciating almost by the moment in the 1780s, in itself a powerful inducement for selling immediately. In addition, Washington’s claim to have sold his securities at twenty to one seems unlikely, as the notes never declined to such a low level in Virginia.19 For the most part, in fact, his lamentations of woe were forthcoming when he was approached by acquaintances hoping to dun him of his wealth. Otherwise, his actions were less those of a man faced with the likelihood of ruin than those of a person compelled to substitute a measure of austerity for his customarily acquisitive life style. In fact, within two or three years of returning home he had begun to realize a healthy cash flow, and during the next fifteen years he annually took in anywhere between $4500 and $15,000 from the varied enterprises of Mount Vernon alone; even more wealth rolled in from the vast and profitable Custis properties.20
However financially troubled he may have been, Washington never abandoned his materialistic or speculative pursuits. Aside from the costly alterations to his estate, Washington was engaged in three expensive endeavors in the 1780s. He barely was home before his gaze fell again on the Dismal Swamp. The company he had helped to establish two decades earlier to develop that boggy wilderness largely had ceased to function during the war, but with an assist from Washington it cranked up again in the spring of 1784. What Washington hoped to facilitate was the linking via canal of the Virginia-North Carolina backcountry to the Atlantic. The watercourse that he had in mind would shoot out from the swamp to the Elizabeth River in Virginia and the Albemarle in North Carolina, waterways that stretched like craggy fingers from the coast to the piedmont. As usual, Washington’s vision was grandiose. By means of the canal “the whole trade of [the western] Territory . . . is now unfolding to . . . view,” he wrote, proffering a vista of wealth that will “exceed the most sanguine imagination.” At its initial postwar meeting the company’s board rubber-stamped Washington’s views, agreeing to advertise in Europe both for additional investors and for a source of cheap labor. The following year Washington summoned the entrepreneurs to Richmond for another meeting, and th
is time the directors agreed—again at the general’s behest—to seek Virginia’s aid by promising to surrender to the state all profits from the canal’s tolls. But at the end of the decade the canal remained only a project on paper, the beginning of construction repeatedly frustrated by rivalries among Virginia’s varied interest groups, as well as by fears in North Carolina that the channel would only serve to divert its trade to the Old Dominion.21
Washington was even more interested in another canal scheme. Like Lawrence Washington before him, he also long had envisioned the further extension of the Potomac River into the western hinterlands, opening the 287-mile-long river to its headwaters on the North Branch. To accomplish this feat a colossal undertaking would be required. Nearly 175 miles of the river above tidewater would need be cleared, minor rapids at three points would have to be surmounted, and the impediments posed by both the Little Falls and the Great Falls would somehow have to be overcome; moreover, work on these obstructions would have to be performed in the face of episodic summer droughts that reduced the water to uncommonly low levels, and despite seasonal snowmelts that transformed the tranquil river into a rampaging monster. Washington initially ruminated on this scheme during his initial year as commander of the Virginia Regiment, proposing in 1754 that work be undertaken to clear out some of the rock in the river, thus opening channels through which vessels could sail. Such an operation would have facilitated the supply of his army deep in western Virginia. In the 1760s, then as a member of the Virginia assembly, he resurrected the project. By then his motives were more pecuniary, as he realized that a successful Potomac canal would improve his chances of selling his vast frontier holdings. Normally mute inside the halls of the legislature, Washington had pushed hard for provincial funding of the enterprise. He almost succeeded. Virginia agreed to the project, and to a similar undertaking on the James River. But Maryland, which under Lord Baltimore’s colonial charter had sole possession of the river, refused to sanction the plan.22
Washington hardly had laid down his sword in 1783 before he resumed his dream. Much as he had seen a symbiosis between private gain and public weal in the affairs of the Ohio Company three decades before, he now squared personal profit and patriotism in this scheme. Washington acknowledged that he was “not . . . disinterested” economically in his plans to make the Potomac into the West’s highway to the Chesapeake, and he confided that the value of his “Lands in that Country . . . would be enhanced, by the adoption of such a Scheme.” But a nationalistic impetus also guided the general. He feared that if the West was not linked economically to the East, separatist sentiments would burgeon in the transmontane region. Again, typically, the vision he beheld was grandiose. Work on a Potomac canal was to begin at the falls above Georgetown, an undertaking designed to tame the raging stream and render it navigable. Further west, additional canals and other improvements would elongate the river, and at its western terminus wilderness roads would be blazed to other rivers that flowed still further to the west. These, in turn, would be adjoined to the Ohio, which would be tied by still more roads and canals to the Great Lakes. The inhabitants of the West would be bound to the East by economic connections, the new American union would be solidified, and every western commodity would flow through Virginia en route to market, creating a metropolis within the state—almost certainly at nearby Alexandria, where the goods would have to be shifted from river craft to ocean vessels—that someday would dwarf Philadelphia and New York.23
Throughout 1784 Washington and like-minded nationalists and investors in Virginia worked behind the scenes to secure a public commitment for their grand scheme. At the end of the year their tireless labor was rewarded. That autumn the Virginia assembly asked the general and his old rival Horatio Gates to meet with a delegation from Maryland to plan the venture, and almost simultaneously in December the two states enacted legislation based on the recommendations of Washington and his fellow panelists. Virginia and Maryland chartered the Potomac Company. Each state, moreover, subscribed fifty shares and voted money to cut roads from the Potomac to the Cheat and the Monongahela rivers. The states’ funding amounted to one-third of the company’s operating capital. Stockholders provided the rest. Washington invested over $2200 and agreed to serve as the company’s president.
The job cut into his time. He attended board meetings, lobbied politicians in Richmond and Annapolis, importuned wealthy acquaintances to buy into the endeavor, solicited workers, and made inspection trips along the great river. He seemed to be racing against time. Not only was New York likely to pursue a similar goal, Pennsylvania and Maryland already had designs on the Susquehanna River for a comparable venture. Like others, Washington was optimistic. After all, a company report issued in 1783 characterized the Great Falls, the most considerable obstacle to navigation on the river, as a “trifling impediment.” Within five years, the report continued, the project would be completed. At Washington’s behest the firm hired an engineer—an inventor, really, a man from Berkeley Springs who once had contrived a steam-propelled river boat, but who had no experience in the construction of canals. Within two years the company appeared to be headed for success. Before the end of 1785 the Potomac Company had raised forty thousand dollars. Work was proceeding. Washington began to sound like a cheerleader. He had “no doubt” of success. The “work will not prove more arduous than we had conceived,” he predicted. The difficulties rather vanish than increase as we proceed,” he told those who would listen.24
However, it soon was obvious that neither Washington’s optimism nor the air of haste would produce success. Two teams of fifty laborers had been put to work on the first phase of the project, clearing the river near Georgetown. That work was supposed to be completed by the end of 1787, but by then barely a dent had been made in taming the falls. An overabundance of rain from late 1785 to the end of 1786 often left the river too swollen to work, and, besides, the company provided too few hands for the amount of labor required. In addition, the engineer hired by Washington soon proved to be ignorant of hydrodynamics. In a few years he had departed, to be followed by a succession of engineers—the company hired seven such technicians in a span of fifteen years—none of whom possessed the skills to surmount the adversities posed by the Potomac. In 1787 Virginia and Maryland extended the deadline for the fulfillment of the first phase of the undertaking to 1790, leading Washington to continue to paint a rosy picture of the company’s prospects. But in private he had grown more skeptical, though even there he tried to sound upbeat, claiming that overcoming that first great obstacle would be “the most doubtful part of our Work.” In reality, the entire scheme was beginning to look doubtful. Stockholders had begun to default on their assessments, and the company’s attempt to auction off their shares yielded little capital. Toward the end of the decade, moreover, it became apparent that the adversities posed by this river might be too great for that generation’s engineering know-how, and as with his Dismal Swamp venture Washington did not realize a single cent from this speculative gambit during the 1780s.25
Washington’s third major enterprise in these years was the oldest and closest to his heart: land speculation. He purchased 376 acres on Hunting Creek, a tract adjacent to Mount Vernon, and he contracted to pay an annual sum of £136 in rent for the use of lands and slaves belonging to a widowed neighbor. In addition, he purchased the lease to a plantation in the Clifton Neck region of Fairfax County, and he acquired a modest tract in Maryland.26
Mostly, however, the frontier lands he had gained before the Revolution were his chief concern. Now that independence was won and Lord Dunmore, the royal governor who had cast doubts on the legitimacy of Washington’s frontier claims, was long gone, there was nothing to dispute the general’s right to nearly sixty thousand acres in the West. But for all his frenetic scrambling to secure this domain, he had yet to realize any profit from these holdings. With peace, however, settlers were expected to push west as never before, so Washington hardly had made himself at home at Mount Vernon
before he began to plan a trip into the wilderness. The trek would have many objectives, not all of which were related to business, for Washington soon was so plain bored by his new, more sedentary life style that he appeared to look with relish on an arduous, perhaps even dangerous, journey. In fact, even before he resigned from the army he had concocted plans for an expedition from Virginia north to Canada, thence west to the Mississippi, down that artery to the Gulf of Mexico, across to Pensacola, and home via Georgia and the Carolinas. However, the “deranged state” of his finances compelled him to forego that jaunt, while encouraging him to look in on his trans-Appalachian properties. He wished to survey and stake out his lands, and he also planned to look in on the squatters who allegedly were roosting on his realty. Then, too, he was more than anxious to see Gilbert Simpson, the settler in whose trust he had left the expensive grist mill he had built on the Youghiogheny in 1774. “I ought to have a good deal of wealth in your hands, arising from the produce” of the mill, Washington had written him at the end of the war, for he had been told that his was the best and busiest mill operating west of the mountains. Strangely, though, he had seen none of the profit turned up by the mill. “I expect something very handsome therefore from that quarter,” Washington told Simpson, unless, as rumor had it, he was something other than the “honest, industrious and frugal man” the general had taken him to be. Whatever he thought of Simpson, Washington already had decided to sell the mill; he published notices of his intention to conduct a public auction at the site of the mill, a vendue he planned to attend just to be certain that everything was run on the up and up.27
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