For Washington, the episode had a more personal consequence. By dissolving the General Assembly and calling new elections, Governor Fauquier created an opportunity for the burgess for Frederick County to reorient his political career. Washington, eager to advance, would seize that opportunity.
* * *
A political life involves both capitalizing on opportunities and sidestepping hazards. When a scandal around Speaker Robinson presented substantial risks for Washington, he smoothly evaded them. The scandal grew from Robinson’s great power as both Speaker and treasurer. The treasurer was tasked with burning Virginia paper money received as tax payments, to remove it from circulation. For some time before his death in May 1766, Robinson did not burn the bills. Instead, he gave them to high-toned friends who faced bankruptcy. In most instances, he took no collateral; in many, he acquired no written documentation. The sweetheart deals totaled more than £100,000, or roughly 20 percent of Virginia currency issued during the French and Indian War.
The dubious transactions came to light as early as May 1763, when an audit found a £40,000 discrepancy in the treasurer’s records. Robinson blamed it on subordinates, and his word went unchallenged. Two years later, to cover the deficit, Robinson and his allies proposed to create a Public Loan Office that would borrow £240,000 from wealthy Englishmen, which then could be loaned to Robinson’s friends, who then could pay off the secret “loans.” The proposal was a fantasy. Englishmen would not invest in a colonial government that could neither pay its debts nor reveal its financial condition. Patrick Henry’s sarcasm was withering: “Is it proposed then to reclaim the spendthrift from his dissipation and extravagance by filling his pockets with money?”15
When Robinson died in spring 1766—according to a newspaper account, he suffered “with the most excruciating torment of the stone”—the ugly truth stumbled into the light.16 Robinson had passed out public funds to more than one hundred members of the Executive Council, the House of Burgesses, and Virginia’s leading families. The crimes of Virginia’s ruling class scandalized those who had not thrust their snouts into the public trough. At a time when Virginians denounced corrupt British politicians, they found that their own politics included the same larcenous elements.17
Some made excuses for Robinson. Governor Fauquier attributed the late Speaker’s actions to “the sensibility of his too benevolent heart.” Robinson’s benevolence, of course, was reserved for elite men who reinforced his powers while mismanaging their inheritances. Although Robinson was considered the richest Virginian, his assets came nowhere near filling the hole in the colony’s finances. His lawyer, Edmund Pendleton, spent fifteen years chasing repayment by the borrowers on behalf of Robinson’s estate.18
Several who received the largest handouts were ruined. Although Robinson’s protégé, Peyton Randolph, became the new Speaker, he was a transitional figure to a new generation of leaders. He expanded the key committees of the House, sharing power with younger burgesses like Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington, who brought more radical attitudes to the fraying relationship with Britain.19
Washington walked a careful line on the Robinson scandal. No account survives of any comment he made on the matter. His silence is deafening, especially since he dealt repeatedly with the consequences of Robinson’s misconduct. Several of those taking handouts from Robinson also owed money to the Custis estate. When Jacky Custis came of age, he purchased a Robinson plantation that was sold to help cover the Speaker’s debts.20
Although construing silence can be hazardous, Washington’s reticence seems to reflect the calculation that he had little to gain by attacking a dead man with many friends. Moreover, Robinson had supported Washington, an obligation that Washington would not repay by disparaging Robinson after his death.21
Washington’s silence also previewed the caution he was learning, which would characterize his future conduct. He occupied a tricky middle ground in the Robinson scandal: He was part of the emerging generation of Virginia leaders and was uninterested in Robinson-style self-dealing, yet had been an intimate of Robinson’s. Washington’s career would be filled with similar contradictions. He would be an aristocratic revolutionary, a fierce challenger of the British establishment and mainstay of the American establishment, and a slaveholding devotee of liberty. In negotiating such treacherous terrain, silence can be the wisest course.
The Robinson scandal offered political lessons, beginning with the spectacle of a man’s legacy thrown in the mud despite years of service, because of a profound misjudgment. The lesson was a hard one for many Virginia aristocrats, long accustomed to the reciprocal favors they had regularly granted one another. On both sides of the Atlantic, political power had always brought economic benefits. The Robinson scandal signaled, however, that standards were changing.
Though Washington cannily avoided the Robinson troubles, he took his time applying the broader lesson about the risks of seeking advantage from political connections. So long as others applied private influence to seek land grants, he continued to play that game. Yet over the years he would become more cautious and deliberate about seeking public advantages. Moreover, the Robinson scandal demonstrated that friends could damage a politician at least as much as his enemies could. Washington learned to resist his friends’ pleadings, an attitude that led some to think of him as chilly and aloof, but one that would protect his reputation. Washington came to believe that his reputation could not survive any whiff of self-dealing in conducting public business. The Robinson scandal proved that.
Chapter 22
Pivot to Fairfax County
In the election of 1765, Washington took a large step toward greater political prominence. He could have chosen to coast to a third win in Frederick County. He had finished first in two elections there, and rival Adam Stephen’s reputation was blackened by the action of the House of Burgesses in his case. But representing Frederick County was inconvenient. Winchester lay eighty miles of hard travel northwest of Mount Vernon. Moreover, burgesses from Frederick, a thinly settled frontier county, commanded less regard in the House than did Tidewater legislators who represented the wealthy and influential.
Washington coveted a seat from Fairfax County, where he lived. Campaigning there and staying abreast of constituents’ concerns would be far easier. And he would gain stature if his constituents numbered the Fairfaxes, George Mason, and other notables, people who could not be dismissed as yahoos in buckskins. In 1765, a seat for Fairfax opened up, and no one named Fairfax entered the race. Washington, already prominent in the county due to his large estate and military record, took the plunge.1
The election poll went smoothly. Washington led three candidates, winning 201 votes. John West, an incumbent, won the other seat with 148. Since a recent law banned candidates from providing liquor on polling day, Washington spent less than £10 on cakes for the voters. He called it “an easy and a creditable poll.”2 Now Fairfax County’s worthies would look to him when they had problems. He would carry no more bills about the running of hogs in a frontier settlement.
Washington was already involved in Fairfax public events through his service on the vestry board that governed the local Truro church. Virginia’s Anglican churches performed many public functions: confirming land boundaries and posting laws relating to servants, slaves, and morals, plus notices about stray animals, lost property, and runaway slaves. The vestry also made support payments to poor residents; during Washington’s service, the Truro vestry paid nearly a dozen residents a year.3
Before Sunday services, Virginia’s churchyards buzzed with talk. When the starting time arrived, the gentry marched in together to their front pews, ahead of the women and the humbler folk. Services ended within forty-five minutes (“prayers read over in haste,” according to a disapproving Englishman), followed by more socializing while gentlemen extended and accepted dinner invitations. Those churchyard encounters kept Washington abreast of local
attitudes, while his vestry service exposed him to the nuts and bolts of governing.4
Washington took his vestry service seriously, attending three-quarters of its meetings through more than a decade. For the year beginning October 1763, he and George William Fairfax served as the church wardens, managing all church business, including planning a new building and redrawing the parish boundary line.5
In 1768, Washington enlarged his local standing by joining the Fairfax County Court as a justice, a position he held for the next six years. Many county justices, like Washington, had no legal training, but brought practical experience and their sense of right and wrong. Most acquired legal handbooks to help with technical questions. As a member of the House of Burgesses, which wrote the laws, Washington had learned some colonial law.6
The court consisted of up to twelve part-time justices who sat in panels of at least four judges. A senior justice, usually a lawyer, presided over each panel. One handbook specified that justices should be men “of the best reputation, good governance, and courage for the truth,” who would, as “lovers of justice, judg[e] the people equally and impartially.”7 In Fairfax County, the court ordinarily met on the third Monday of the month, and thereafter for as many days as the docket required. Because the judges had other jobs, they did not sit on every court day, or even for that many.
The court’s duties extended well beyond deciding cases, reaching deep into everyday life and giving Washington a graduate course on civil administration. The judges oversaw tax collection—the function that Washington considered the lifeblood of any government—and managed elections. They determined when residents had to work on local roads and bridges, for how long, and where. The court enforced Virginia’s blizzard of economic regulations, supervising the public tobacco warehouses used by planters until their crops were loaded onto ships that would carry the leaf to market. Inspectors judged and graded export tobacco to ensure consistent quality. Similar inspections applied to flour, hemp, tar, and five other products. The court licensed tavernkeepers. If a landowner wished to build a mill, the justices reviewed the plans to ensure that no change in flowing waters would injure neighbors. They regulated lawyers’ conduct, fixed the rates for blacksmiths working on militia weapons, implemented (or chose not to implement) tariff laws like the Stamp Act, inspected the books of county surveyors, and paid bounties for wolf carcasses. The justices also nominated the candidates for public jobs like inspectors of export goods and revenue collectors, the county clerk, the sheriff, the coroner, and militia officers below the rank of brigadier general. Although the governor formally made those appointments, he ordinarily followed the recommendations from the county courts.8
In the courtroom, Washington presided over less serious criminal cases and civil disputes with no more than 25 shillings or two hundred pounds of tobacco at stake. Litigious neighbors swamped the docket. Some visitors concluded that Virginians did not consider a debt payable until the lender sued. On one day, a panel including Washington entered orders in forty-nine cases. Some were uncontested or settled by the parties, but on that day two different juries decided twelve cases. On another day, Washington’s panel resolved seventy-five matters.9
Washington was on the bench for twenty-five days over a thirty-nine-month period for which records survive. He tended to sit when other business brought him into Alexandria. He heard a horse-stealing case and appointed tobacco and flour inspectors. He approved innumerable settlements of debts. He empaneled a grand jury and granted peace bonds against people who threatened their neighbors. He supervised jury trials and decided damage claims.
Washington and his colleagues appointed men to lay out and build new roads and others to prepare the county tax rolls. They ordered repairs and improvements to public warehouses as well as the construction of a “necessary” (outhouse) and “stocks and whipping post” at the courthouse itself. They supervised the county’s budget and spending. Washington’s surveying experience was a perfect fit for the resolution of boundary disputes, when the justices walked the disputed fields alongside a surveyor and quarreling neighbors.10
The criminal caseload covered all crimes committed by slaves, which were punished brutally. He and the other justices received numerous grand jury charges against tax cheats. The court enforced morality-based laws, including bans on profane swearing, drunkenness, illegal gambling, adultery, bastardy, and cursing. In 1770, the Fairfax court heard ten cases against women accused of bastardy; it heard a single case of fornication in 1771, two more in 1772, and another in 1773. If a child’s unwed mother named the father under oath, he could be jailed until agreeing to support the child. If the mother was a slave, her master had the support obligation, but also owned the child. The court supervised the care of orphans. Those with no resources were placed in apprenticeships; the court appointed guardians for those whose parents left assets for their benefit.11
When the colony’s morality-based laws were applied to enslaved and indentured workers, the results could be heartless. In one case, the Fairfax court fined an unwed, indentured mother for the crime of having a child; when she could not pay, she received twenty-five lashes. After five years, the woman had two illegitimate children, so the court ordered both infants bound to her master as servants. In a case with Justice Washington on the panel, the court bound as servants the five-year-old and three-year-old children of an unmarried, indentured mother.12 Crossing race lines brought even more callous rulings. In another Fairfax case with Justice Washington on the bench, a white servant woman was to be sold for having a “base born mulatto child.” Her white, twelve-year-old son by a previous liaison was bound out as an apprentice.13
Court service involved collegial deliberation with Washington’s fellow justices, since all cases were decided collectively by panel. Washington often sat with his fellow burgess John West, and John Carlyle, the Alexandria merchant who had married a Fairfax. Other colleagues were Robert Adam and Hector Ross, who marketed Mount Vernon’s flour and fish. On only one occasion did Washington sit with George Mason, the Fairfax County judge who showed up least often.14
Washington commented little about his judicial work, nor did he complain about it. It was another step in his transition from the bumptious commander of the Virginia Regiment to the inspiring leader of the Continental Army. Like his vestry duties, the court work immersed him in the world of Virginia’s common people, seasoning his judgment and his understanding of how government touches people and changes their lives, for good and for ill.
His court work also bolstered his habits of acting cooperatively with peers, listening to differing views, and reconciling his ideas with those of others. By presenting both sides of a dispute, a court proceeding can lead an open-minded person to question assumptions and appreciate new perspectives. That exercise would benefit Washington’s growth as a public figure who aimed to act justly.
Finally, his judicial duties further enhanced his stature. Court days drew litigants and observers. Presiding over case after case, Washington built his reputation as a man worthy of public trust. It may seem insincere to applaud a judge for fairly enforcing laws that now appear unfair, even cruel—laws like Virginia’s treatment of the mothers of illegitimate children. Yet Virginia’s county court judges, as their handbook instructed, were to apply the laws “equally and impartially”; they had no power to question the wisdom or decency of those laws. Washington met that standard.
By 1770, Washington—as burgess, vestryman, judge, farmer, and businessman—could credibly claim to be the leading figure in Fairfax County. Not yet forty, he had built a solid political base. His ambitions, however, would leap beyond the county’s borders.
Chapter 23
The Master of Mount Vernon
For seven years after the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766, Washington happily filled the role he sought when he left the Virginia Regiment: master of Mount Vernon, prosperous and public-spirited, with time for his family and for a gentl
eman’s pastimes.
Mount Vernon supported this era of private contentment. Tenants paid him rent from their tobacco crops, while Washington concentrated on wheat and Indian corn. By 1770, his farms produced 7,000 bushels of wheat a year, or approximately 210 tons. He built a large mill with interchangeable millstones to grind flour of different grades. By 1772, Mount Vernon flour was branded, “G. Washington.”1 Wheat and flour sales, combined with revenue from the fish pulled from the river each spring, produced regular income, a welcome improvement from tobacco-growing days.2
Yet Washington had not entirely escaped the British merchants, and purchasing from distant sellers still infuriated him. In June 1768, he ordered an elegant carriage “in the newest taste, handsome, genteel, and light,” made from “the best seasoned wood, and by a celebrated workman.” He identified the decorations he wanted for every inch of the vehicle, plus every interior feature. The carriage that arrived, Washington wrote, was “made of wood so exceedingly green that the panels slipped out of the moldings before it was two months in use—split from one end to the other.” The joints separated so drastically that he scrapped it.
Washington’s focus on wheat and corn, which required less effort than tobacco, bestowed the gift of free time, as did having his cousin Lund as farm manager. Washington and Martha rented a house in Berkeley Springs for a four-week vacation in late summer 1767, bringing a cook with them. George William and Sally Fairfax came along. They could take the waters, fish, ride, and be convivial. Washington, though, was not built for total relaxation; meeting an old military comrade, he questioned him closely about Pennsylvania land policies.3
Washington embraced fox hunting, an avocation learned at Belvoir. In 1768, Washington rode after foxes on fifty days, with the frequency higher in the winter when farm cares receded. He hunted on fifteen days in January. The hunt might be a social event with neighbors and guests, but more than a third of his hunting days were solitary: just him, the dogs, and the fox. Plainly, Washington loved to pound over the countryside on horseback, matching wits with shrewd animals with a special talent for evasion. His devotion to the sport thrived despite the regularity with which foxes eluded him, or perhaps because of it.4
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