Even before Pontiac was subdued, the British government issued the Proclamation of 1763, forbidding English colonists from settling west of the Appalachians, which included the land that the Ohio Company had spent £10,000 trying to develop. Although those with existing claims were specifically exempt, the Ohio Company had yet to settle any pioneers or establish formal title. Worse for the Virginians, as part of the terms of surrender in 1764, the tribes that had supported Pontiac were forced to cede some tribal lands as reparations to the "suffering traders," as they were called, whose goods and property had been allegedly destroyed. Pennsylvania, whose western boundary had always been a matter of conjecture, insisted that its traders had been more ill-used than those of Virginia and therefore the forfeited territory should be theirs. If the crown agreed, Pennsylvania would extend its boundaries well past the Alleghenies and swallow up the Ohio Company's one hundred thousand acres.
In 1768, a group of Pennsylvania speculators, including Benjamin Franklin's son William, formed a land consortium and put in a claim for an even larger stretch of territory, eventually three million acres, on both sides of the Ohio. Originally calling it the Traders Company (for the "suffering traders"), then the Indiana Company, the Pennsylvanians ultimately settled on Vandalia Company and, availing themselves of Benjamin Franklin's influence in London, claimed that the land was for a fourteenth colony, to be called Vandalia, in honor of Queen Charlotte's German lineage.
The Virginians were livid, none more so than George Mason. The Proclamation of 1763 had radicalized him—he wrote his first political paper in response to the decision—and he spent the next years furiously but fruitlessly trying to persuade or goad London into reversing its decision. But the Virginians were so inept in London that their own representative, James Mercer, ended up being bought off with Vandalia Company shares. With Benjamin Franklin making Pennsylvania's case while Mason fumed in Virginia, the crown ruled in Vandalia's favor in 1770, thus formally terminating the Ohio Company's claim.14
Although Virginia did not relinquish its claims north of the Ohio—and in fact maintained a titular claim to the entire territory up to what is now Wisconsin until 1781—with the 1770 decision, Virginia's northern boundary was effectively limited by the Ohio River.15 Even worse for the frustrated Virginians, the Proclamation of 1763 was roundly ignored and more than thirty thousand new settlers poured over the mountains in the next five years. Fort Duquesne became Fort Pitt, the West was open, and the land that Christopher Gist had recommended became every bit as valuable as he thought it would, with the investors in the Ohio Company receiving not one shilling for their foresight.
*New Orleans was ceded to Spain, which eventually led to the Jay Gardoqui affair.
PART II
* * *
Four Architects
5. SORCERER'S APPRENTICE: VIRGINIA AND THE UPPER SOUTH
virgnia was pivotal for any plan of union. The state split the country geographically, was the home of the most important political figures of the day, and provided political and economic transition between northern commercial interests and the Carolina rice planters. And, if Virginia was the fulcrum of the United States, George Mason IV was very much the fulcrum of Virginia.
From the early 1750s, while he was still in his twenties, Mason had wielded vast power and influence in almost every aspect of Virginia life. One of Washington's closest friends and confidants, George Mason was among the wealthiest men in the state, sought after socially and politically, and universally respected for his democratic vision and as a champion of individual rights.
Mason was both comfortable in this role and believed it was warranted by birth and lineage. A product of the unique development of the Upper South, he never doubted his identity as an aristocrat. He spent much of his adult life working, writing, philosophizing, dispensing largesse to the community and wisdom to his fellows, all while rarely venturing from his baronial estate, Gunston Hall. Other than some youthful visits across the Potomac to neighboring Maryland, his journey to the convention in Philadelphia was his first trip out of Virginia.
The Virginia tobacco nobility was a product of the plantation economy, which in Virginia was originally created not through slavery, but by the convergence of a number of other factors, including unrest in England, the promise of America, disease, and opportunistic second marriages.
While the early settlers in Virginia had to contend with hostile terrain and sometimes hostile tribes, by the middle of the seventeenth century a thriving colony had developed. The coastline had been cleared and pacified, permanent settlements were expanding, and fortunes were being made growing staple crops, especially tobacco. As a result, by the 1650s, Virginia had come to look substantially more appealing to many royalists than an England dominated by Oliver Cromwell, his puritans, and the tyranny of republican government. There was also a chance to stand out. "Englishmen with spare cash came to Virginia also because the prestige and power that a man could expect in Virginia was comparatively much greater than he was likely to attain in England, where men of landed wealth and gentle birth abounded."1 Two such men, Gerard Fowke and George Mason I, both of George Mason IV's great-grandfathers, arrived from the midlands in England sometime around 1650.
Once in America, the new pioneers, having taken advantage of the cheap and plentiful land, had to cultivate a labor source to work their estates. They naturally looked to the mother country to supply their needs and were pleased to discover a surfeit of willing recruits. America was already acquiring a reputation as a place to get rich, and the only way that Englishmen without spare cash could avail themselves of those opportunities was to indenture themselves for a term of years to one of the wealthier planters in exchange for passage from England. When their term expired, they would hopefully have saved enough to buy land of their own. Plantations were thus initially staffed almost exclusively by white servants.
But for all its opportunity, Virginia was still the frontier, and the dual hazards of violence and disease took the lives of master and servant alike.
Men, who did the fighting and the clearing, were more susceptible to these perils than women, and Virginia soon became the home of a good many widows, some of them quite wealthy. A few of these women returned to England, but the prospects for remarriage there were less favorable than in America, where fresh crops of eager young unmarried men of good birth arrived every year.
Mergers, both of the heart and the pocketbook, were the natural result.
"The fortunes gathered by those early immigrants during the deadly first half century were not necessarily lost or dispersed. Capital still accumulated in the hands of widows and joined in profitable wedlock the sums that well-heeled immigrants brought with them. [The wealthy families] not only shared the spoils of office among themselves, but also by well-planned marriages shared the savings gathered by their predecessors . . ."2 Wealthy widows thereby became a key factor in centralizing wealth, a consolidation that caused plantations to grow and introduced economies of scale, which in turn accentuated the need for a different kind of labor.
That slaves became those laborers was due largely to the elimination of dis- ease and violence. African slaves had been in Virginia since the 1620s, but, since one owned a slave for life instead of for only four or five years, they were about twice the price of white servants. Given the high mortality rate of those early years, Africans were thus initially seen as an uneconomic investment for field work. As conditions improved, the economics changed, but only if one had the money—or the credit—to pay. Slaves still cost substantially more than servants, two or three times as much for a "seasoned man or woman." African slaves were thus a luxury item at first, available only to a man who could avail himself of economies of scale. Only after Africans began to supplant the white workforce, since they could be made to work harder and longer, did they become the labor of choice for any planter who could scrape together the cash.3
Large plantations manned with slave labor soon overpowered smaller ones
staffed by whites, which gave the slaveowner the wherewithal to buy more and more of the surrounding land and squeeze out smaller farmers. Unable to compete, the farmers were often forced either to become tenants of plantation owners or to migrate westward and attempt to establish some independence from the plantation system by reverting to subsistence farming.
This further increased the stranglehold of the plantation on all but the frontier regions and intensified the animosity between coastal planters and back-country farmers that was present throughout the South. In addition, since slaves were property, any of their children legally belonged to the owner, thus turning slaves into much more of a self-perpetuating investment than term-servants.
There was one more advantage. Once slavery was entrenched, it "offered incomparable advantages in keeping labor docile,"4 since the punishments regularly inflicted on African slaves would never have been allowed for white servants. Robert "King" Carter, for example, one of the early land barons, successfully petitioned a court to be allowed to chop off the toes of one of his slaves who had tried to run off.
Brutality was not an aspect of the slave system that Virginians publicized.
They worked hard at perpetuating the notion that slavery was, at its core, a benign institution. Robert Beverley in his History and Present State of Virginia, published in 1705, went so far as to assert, "Slaves are not worked near so hard, nor so many Hours in a Day, as the Husbandmen and Day-Labourers in England."5 What Beverley failed to mention was that, unlike day laborers in England, slaves who were deemed difficult could be lashed to death or dismembered, all with in the bounds of both the law and accepted rules of proper behavior.
Slaves on a tobacco plantation
Virginia planters put such effort into propagandizing slavery because it had become the foundation of the social structure. "Along the Potomac and Rappahannock, and the lesser rivers and creeks that emptied into them, most of the riparian lands consolidated into major plantations. The larger owners supplied both the county leadership and the ranking personalities of the colony. On this basis, the English class society reproduced itself."6
Thus, for Virginians, in the early eighteenth century, the plantation became the American version of the sprawling English estate. The planter who owned it evolved into a self-appointed manor lord, dispensing justice and munificence to his subjects, which included not only his slaves, but also the poorer tenant farmers around him, and anyone else less wealthy who happened by. A Virginia clergyman named Devereux Jarratt wrote in the 1780s, "We were accustomed to look upon gentle folks as beings of a superior order.
For my part I was quite shy of them, and kept off at a humble distance. A periwig in those days was a distinguishing badge of gentlefolk, and when I saw a man riding the road, near our house with a wig on, it would so alarm my fears and give me such a disagreeable feeling, that I daresay I would run off as if for my life."7
As the slave system took hold, so did the indebtedness that would haunt Virginia. "The planters in Virginia were more eager to buy slaves than to pay for them . . . By 1705 the Virginia Assembly was so disturbed by the rising indebtedness that it tried to slow down the traffic . . . but by then the conversion to slave labor had already been made . . . Between 1708 and 1750 Virginia recorded the entry of 38,418 slaves into the colony."8 The surprising cost of slave upkeep, however, did little to discourage Virginians from increasing their holdings. Slaves were property, property was wealth, and a man was judged by how much he owned. As such, slaves, at least at first, were encouraged to breed, like cattle, sheep, or hogs. By the time of the Philadelphia convention, Virginians had been so successful in breeding their human property that the slave population had overtaken that of whites.9 While not yet in the majority, slave populations in the other tobacco states, Maryland and North Carolina, were also approaching critical levels. These states imposed tariffs and temporary bans, and sometimes resorted to desperate measures to stop further importation of Africans.10
The lords in England did not mind the Virginians' pretensions to aristocracy as long as they continued to ship tobacco eastward and used the proceeds to buy English goods for the return voyage. They even enhanced the aristocratic mood by bestowing honors and titles on the Virginia gentry, one of which was an appointment as county lieutenant. Named by the royal governor, the recipient was granted the title "colonel," a title and position equivalent to those that existed in English shires. George Mason I was so named in the 1670s. He passed it down to his son, George Mason II, in the 1680s, who in turn passed it to his son, George Mason III, in 1709.11 The office seems to have become an anachronism before George Mason IV could claim it, but he nonetheless insisted on being addressed as "Colonel Mason" for most of his life.
In 1725, George Mason IV was therefore born into a mature aristocracy and was groomed from the start to take his place among the Virginia elite. Mason's father died when he was a boy, drowning in a ferry mishap on the Potomac, when his son was only ten. Young Mason fell under the guardianship of a pragmatic uncle, John Mercer, a graduate of Trinity College in Dublin, who had come to the colonies to make a success of himself in business, then married a planter's daughter, Catherine Mason, George IV's aunt. Mercer was an astute businessman and multiplied his wife's already impressive holdings.
As he grew more successful, Mercer developed an interest in the law. Although he became a highly successful attorney, he was not so much interested in practical applications but rather in history and philosophy. Mercer amassed one of the finest private libraries in the colony, more than 1,500 volumes, mostly history, classical studies, and legal theory. In true Virginia tradition, he went into debt to do it.
As George Mason IV approached manhood, his uncle's library was an immense resource. It was in no way obligatory for well-born Virginia youth to be sent to England for an education. Most received early instruction from private tutors and then were sent either to the College of William and Mary, like Jefferson and Edmund Randolph, or, like Madison, to Princeton, then called the College of New Jersey. Mason did not attend college at all, but was instead tutored exclusively by Mercer, who provided him with a classical education equal or superior to that of most of his peers.
When he reached his majority, Mason set himself to expanding his assets. After buying up property in the newly incorporated city of Alexandria and joining the Ohio Company, he married sixteen-year-old Ann Eilbeck, the daughter of a prosperous Maryland planter with extensive holdings on the Virginia side of the Potomac. Soon after his marriage in 1750, Mason and his bride moved to one of the family's estates, located on a peninsula called Dogue's Neck. One of the couple's neighbors was eighteen year-old George Washington, who had just inherited a plantation after the death of his half-brother Lawrence. Washington and Mason became friends, the self-assured Mason also becoming something of a mentor to the younger man.
Almost immediately, Mason imported a master builder and architect named William Buckland to complete a palatial mansion on 550 acres in Dogue's Neck, about twenty miles south of Washington, D.C., that would become known as Gunston Hall. Buckland, who arrived from England on a four-year indenture, combined the styles of the great English architects Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones with a modernist vision to create a classical plantation home, notable for its intricate interior carvings, five-sided entranceway, arches, porches, and series of gardens. While the wealthiest planters often lived in palatial homes, for one of them to undertake the building of such a home while still in his mid-twenties was highly unusual.12
Gunston Hall took more than five years to complete, but once it was built, it became the center of Mason's world for the rest of his life. Except for reluctant trips to the capital at Williamsburg, Mason almost never left Dogue's Neck. He had little need to do so. With Mason's hundreds of slaves seeing to every chore and need, Gunston Hall was completely self-sufficient.
Mason's son John described life at his father's plantation: "It was very much the practice with gentlemen of landed and slave estates . . .
to so organize them as to have considerable resources with in themselves; to employ and pay but few tradesmen and to buy little or none of the coarse stuffs and materials used by them, and this practice became stronger and more general during the long period of the Revolutionary War which in great measure cut off the means of supply from elsewhere. Thus my father had among his slaves carpenters, coopers, sawyers, blacksmiths, tanners, curriers, shoemakers, spinners, weavers and knitters, and even a distiller."13 Luxury goods, however, had to be purchased from England. "The master's wines and broadcloth were imported from abroad with the silk dresses and jewels of the mistress."14 Furniture, fabric, books, and other finery came from the continent as well, brought across the Atlantic, more often than not, by New England shippers.
The result was not surprising. "The gentlefolk in their wigs, with their humble white neighbors bowing down before them, their white indentured servants and negro slaves, had every temptation to pride and arrogance."15
Through most of the 1750s, with the exception of his activities with the Ohio Company, Mason's involvement in political affairs was casual, restricted to the types of immediate local issues in which every man of great means was expected to participate. He was elected to the House of Burgesses in 1759, and during the French and Indian War was charged with providing logistical assistance in obtaining supplies for Virginia's troops.16 At about this time he began to insist on being addressed as "Colonel," although he would never don a uniform or participate in a single battle.17
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