George Washington

by David O. Stewart

  To Washington, a life of languorous opulence was a life wasted. He spent years trying to usher Jacky down the path of self-improvement. He confessed to one of Jacky’s teachers an “anxiety to make [Jacky] fit for more useful purposes than as a horse racer.” Yet Washington had to tread lightly. More than twenty years later, when dealing with the equally low educational energy of Jacky’s son, an aide explained Washington’s indulgent attitude. “Mrs. W’s happiness is bound up in the boy,” the aide wrote, so “he is unwilling to take such measures as might reclaim him, [as] rigidity used toward him might be productive of serious effects on her.” One historian neatly captured Washington’s conundrum, and its resolution: “In short, Washington preferred spoiled youngsters to an unhappy wife.”20

  After Jacky spent eight years at home with a tutor, his schoolmaster found the boy “far from being a brilliant genius.” Following a school holiday, Washington despaired that Jacky’s mind was “more than ever turned to dogs, horses, and guns.” When the stepson turned eighteen, Washington lamented that Jacky’s knowledge of classical languages was “trifling,” as was his understanding of arithmetic.21

  * * *

  In the summer of 1759, two immediate challenges demanded Washington’s attention. First, the expanded Mount Vernon had to be furnished in a way that matched its new dimensions. Every summer, Virginia planters prepared meticulous invoices describing the goods they wished to buy from Britain. The invoices traveled by ship to British merchants, who acquired the requested items—or something like them—for the return trip. If all went well, the correct goods at reasonable prices arrived within a year of being ordered. Matters, however, rarely went well.

  When he retrieved his spring shipment, Washington usually fumed over shoddy or broken items. One shipment, he wrote to the merchant, included goods “mean in quality but not in price, for in this they excel.” Always eager for objects reflecting current tastes, he complained that “instead of getting things good and fashionable,” the articles “could only have been used by our forefathers in days of yore.”22

  Payment for the Washingtons’ 1759 orders came from Martha’s share of the Custis estate. The shopping list that summer covered three separate invoices.23 It was a binge. They ordered fire screens, a couch, two large mattresses, and a new marriage bed with matching linens. For the dining table, they ordered dessert glasses, china, carving knives, and forks. One invoice detailed hardware items, exotic foods, wines, and medicines, including laudanum. Washington also ordered six dozen metal plates stamped with the Washington crest, an image he displayed proudly.24

  Finally, Washington requested “the newest and most approved treatise of agriculture,” plus three specific titles on that subject. He pored over those volumes, writing notes in the margins, and would order agriculture texts throughout his life.25

  His thirst for farming treatises reflected his determination to make Mount Vernon the foundation of a fortune. The Northern Neck was not known for its tobacco. Higher quality leaf came from farther south, where the Custis lands were. But if Washington was to be a Virginia planter, he must raise tobacco. He had little experience with it. Ferry Farm was small, not a major producer of anything, much less of a crop as devilish as tobacco. Because the crop exhausted the soil, and because Washington always craved land, he acquired neighboring farms whenever he could. By the time of the Revolutionary War, he had more than doubled the estate’s acreage.26

  Since leaving Ferry Farm, he had been a surveyor and a soldier, not a farmer. He needed to learn about tobacco, and he needed workers, lots of them. Tobacco was a labor-intensive crop, while the mansion house required a staff of thirteen. To meet these needs, Washington shifted twelve slaves from Custis lands to Mount Vernon, then acquired five more in a delayed bequest from Lawrence. He spent £1,500—a large share of Martha’s remaining cash—to buy thirty more slaves over the next three years. With the natural increase in the slave population, the number of enslaved people at Mount Vernon nearly tripled from 1759 to 1765. It doubled again by 1775.27

  Washington later looked back with regret on this spending. To his friend Stewart, he bemoaned that moving into Mount Vernon had required purchases that “swallowed up . . . all the money I got by marriage, nay more, brought me in debt.”28 To dig out of debt, he had to make the best possible use of his land, which would require two skills: managing a plantation and serving as a slave master.

  Chapter 19

  Man of Business, Master of Slaves

  Washington in 1759 was a hardworking man of regular habits, as he would be through life. He rose before dawn, saw to paperwork, then checked on the horses and other livestock. He breakfasted on Indian cakes (cornbread), honey, and tea. One story from the Revolutionary War, possibly apocryphal, recounts a subordinate marveling to his commander “at the vast amount of work that you accomplish.” Washington’s reported reply was, “Sir, I rise at four o’clock and a great deal of my work is done while others are asleep.”1

  After breakfast, except in nasty weather, he reviewed Mount Vernon’s farms on horseback, directing workers, planning with overseers, spending extra time at new projects. Because his fair skin burned easily, he sometimes shaded his face with an umbrella. Dinner came at midafternoon with sweet Madeira wine, followed by more time in his office. He joined the company—overnight guests were frequent—for evening tea. Sometimes he read aloud from the newspaper. Most nights he retired by nine.2

  During those first years at Mount Vernon, Washington aimed to learn tobacco cultivation, a skill that Virginia planters prized. Plantation owners named strains of the plant after themselves, and won renown if their leaf commanded the best prices.3

  Most crops alternate busy times of sowing and harvesting with quieter stretches during winter or when the plants are growing. Tobacco left no idle times. Planting began in midwinter, with seedbeds covered against frost. Because so many plants died, planters started ten times as many as they wished to harvest. In spring, the seedlings were transferred to larger fields that had to be weeded through the summer. Then came “topping,” so the plants would not flower, and trimming off “suckers,” extra leaves that drained vitality. The harvest came before end-of-the-year frost, when leaves reached full growth. After curing in dry barns (but not too dry), workers stripped the leaves, removed stems, and packed hogsheads of about a thousand pounds each. With luck, the process ended before new planting began.

  The workers’ labor never ended, nor did the planters’ anxiety. Too much rain or too little, a new weed or a spell of pests, an early frost, humidity in the drying barns—all could sabotage a year’s work. Every day the planter evaluated how soon to move to the next step, how best to give the leaf size and flavor. Because a crop was always in the ground or the barns, tobacco country had no harvest festivals. The plant was a demanding mistress.4

  Washington farmed only a portion of Mount Vernon’s land, reserving the rest for firewood and future expansion. Tenants occupied several parcels, paying rent in the form of tobacco. Washington employed an overseer for each of Mount Vernon’s three farms.

  But his tobacco proved undistinguished and commanded weak prices, which baffled him. “Certain I am,” he wrote in 1761, that “no person in Virginia takes more pains to make their tobacco fine than I do.” The following year, Washington changed tobacco strains and packing methods. He began to wonder if tobacco was “an art beyond my skill.” A poor harvest followed. Then oversupply drove prices to their lowest levels in thirty years. The plants struggled in Mount Vernon’s soil, which sat on hard clay that eroded easily. By 1764, Washington’s debt to his British agent stood at £1,800. He absorbed the lesson that the marketplace was teaching. Tobacco was not the answer. He considered other cash crops. When flax and hemp did not flourish on his land, he moved to wheat and Indian corn.5

  Other Chesapeake Bay farmers were also abandoning tobacco. The standard of success became solvency, not high-quality leaf. Grain mills replaced tobacc
o sheds at Mount Vernon. An Alexandria firm sold Washington’s flour in the West Indies and other American colonies. By the end of the 1760s, Mount Vernon produced 7,000 bushels of wheat a year. Washington started paying down his debts.6

  The shift to wheat involved integrating plantation activities to support each other. Wheat, unlike tobacco, was planted in plowed fields, so Washington needed horses and oxen to pull plows, and Indian corn to feed the animals, whose manure was returned to the fields. Because wheat required less labor, Washington could experiment with other crops too.7

  He saw opportunity in the seasonal runs of herring and shad in the Potomac. Initially, his slaves fished by casting nets from the shore. Then he built a schooner to spread the nets farther into the river. In 1770, Washington sold 473,000 herring and 4,600 shad; a year later, the numbers were 679,000 herring and 7,760 shad.8 To produce another revenue stream, he turned Mount Vernon’s fruit into cider and brandy.9

  Washington measured work obsessively, searching for better ways to organize it. His aphorisms could fill an almanac. “System in all things should be aimed at,” he instructed Martha’s grandson, “for in execution, it renders everything more easy.” An overseer received similar counsel: “To establish good rules, and a regular system, is the life and soul of every kind of business.”10 “Every hour misspent,” he advised a nephew, “is lost forever.” And to an overseer: “Lost labor can never be regained.” He always urged planning—his term was “forethought and arrangement”—to apply labor wisely. To avoid multiple trips, only full cartloads should be dispatched and then only when necessary. Work should not be performed during mild weather that could be equally well performed in foul weather, to ensure that workers would have tasks to address on bad days.11

  Washington lived by these maxims, constantly reconsidering his farming methods. He calculated the time required to plow different fields under different conditions. He compared how long it took to harvest a field using slaves rather than hired laborers. He gauged the weight of livestock before slaughter against the meat and other products they yielded. He burned tallow candles and candles made from whale oil to see which was more cost-effective. He tested ten different combinations of compost to establish which better nourished the crops.12

  His analyses were not academic exercises but informed how Washington managed his farms. In early 1760, he grew frustrated that four carpenters hewed only 120 feet of timber in a day. The following day, he observed them; they were much more productive with the boss watching. From those observations, he calculated that two carpenters should hew 250 feet per day while the other two sawed 180 feet of planks. A dedicated empiricist, he acknowledged that those results might vary when the carpenters worked different types of wood. Eight years later, he evaluated the cost of importing linen from Britain compared to the cost of having enslaved women spin and weave the material.13

  A year after that, Washington examined wheat harvesting, noting that harvesters crossed a field in a single line, forcing the entire line to halt whenever a worker stumbled or his equipment fouled. By dividing the workers into three gangs, a disruption halted only one gang’s progress, allowing the other two to advance unimpeded.14

  Washington’s devotion to time-and-motion studies paid off. By one calculation, productivity at Mount Vernon rose from fourteen bushels of wheat per worker to more than fifty, and the revenue generated per worker doubled.15

  Washington also benefitted from the arrival in 1765 of an experienced farm manager, cousin Lund Washington. Although no one could meet Washington’s expectations all the time, Lund performed a broad range of responsibilities: managing the crops and supervising the flour mill, livestock, fishing, and distillery. He also secured tools, provisions, and clothes, while keeping records that satisfied Washington.

  Washington trusted Lund for the next twenty years. Occupying a room at the mansion house, Lund sometimes joined Washington on fox hunts and family occasions. A measure of his trustworthiness came when Washington and Martha went to Berkeley Springs for a holiday. Martha left the children in the care of Lund and his wife.16

  Washington’s aggressive farm management highlighted a core contradiction inherent to eighteenth-century Virginia. This devotee of hard work and system, of disciplined planning and cost analysis, directed laborers who had no incentive to work.17

  * * *

  African slavery was always part of Washington’s life, as familiar as breathing. His family owned slaves as he grew up, as did virtually all Virginians of means. Nearly half the population of Virginia was enslaved. At age eleven, he inherited slaves, though his mother managed them. Slavery was legal in all the British colonies he had visited: Barbados, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts.

  Washington used the euphemistic language that slavery bred. In polite company, slaves were servants, or workers, or “my people.” Beatings, the cornerstone of a slave system, were “correction.” Until the Revolutionary War, Washington betrayed no discomfort with slavery, either its concept or its reality. Slavery for him, in those years, was not something to like or dislike. It simply was, unquestioned, to be managed as well as possible.18

  When he moved his new family to Mount Vernon, Washington became more extensively involved with slavery. Not every worker at Mount Vernon was enslaved. Washington contracted with white indentured servants and with convicts transported from Britain. Both arrangements tended to last for three or four years. When he needed a special skill or had a crop to bring in, he hired white workers for wages. But enslaved Africans and their enslaved descendants performed the great majority of Mount Vernon’s work, and all of the most grueling, least pleasant tasks. Slaves were critical assets in his drive for prosperity. Washington, no longer a mere slaveowner, became a large-scale slave master.19

  Washington organized Mount Vernon into separate labor units. The slaves working in the mansion house and its outbuildings, including gardeners, bricklayers, and stable men, lived in a dormitory-like structure not far from the house. Field hands lived in raw cabins next to each farm on the property, along with the overseer for each farm. Coopers lived near their workshop, while millers slept above the mill. Washington wanted each laborer near the worksite to avoid “losing much time in marching and counter-marching.” To minimize “night walking” visits between farms, he tried to group members of a family at each location. Those two policies often conflicted, so many families were split between locations.20

  The enslaved people labored six days a week, from sunrise to sunset. More than half the field slaves were women, assigned low-skill chores like gathering and spreading manure, grubbing out tree stumps, cleaning grain, building fences, and cleaning stables. Men did the plowing, harrowing, drovering, sowing, harvesting, and ditching. Sundays could be spent hunting or fishing, working on garden plots or on dwellings, playing “prisoner’s base” and other games. Night might bring impromptu dances.21

  Each year, a slave received two shirts, two skirts or pairs of pants, and a blanket, all from coarse fabric. Their food was more varied than at many plantations, with Indian corn supplemented by fish from the river, vegetables and fruit from garden plots, and game they shot in the woods. Most slept on beds and had implements like teakettles and cups. Washington provided doctors for the sick, a prudent step to protect valuable assets. Upon discovering smallpox at his Bullskin farms, he hired a nurse to care for the afflicted. All recovered.22

  Holding people in bondage and compelling them to work efficiently was no simple challenge. Hard work had little value for the enslaved. For a slave, a day of light labor was a good day. Escape would be the best day, and some at Mount Vernon tried it.

  Each participant in the master-slave relationship had techniques for achieving his purposes. A discontented slave might work slowly or ineptly. A favored ploy was to feign illness. Some female slaves pretended pregnancy. Washington complained that his slaves would “lay up a month, at the end of which
no visible change in their countenance, nor the loss of an ounce of flesh, is discoverable,” while they ate “as if nothing ailed them.” One enslaved woman, he insisted, “has a disposition to be one of the most idle creatures on earth, and is besides one of the most deceitful.”23

  For the slave master, the challenge was to maintain his authority without so abusing it that he further sapped workers’ efforts. As Washington instructed one manager, treating slaves “civilly is no more than what all men are entitled to,” but he recommended “keep[ing] them at a proper distance; for they will grow upon familiarity, in proportion as you will sink in authority.”24

  The balance was not easy. On one occasion, Washington worried that an employee directing the house staff was “not accustomed to Negroes” who were in “no sort of awe of him—of course they do as they please.” After years of military command, conveying authority was natural for him. When Washington addressed his slaves, one visitor recalled, “he spoke as differently as if he had been quite another man, or had been in anger.” Washington was equally unhappy, however, with overseers who “seem to consider a Negro much as they do the brute beasts on the farms; and oftentimes treat them inhumanely.”25

  Washington understood that force compelled Mount Vernon’s labor, and that only unceasing vigilance would get the work done. “There are few Negroes,” he wrote to a nephew, “who will work unless there be a constant eye on them.” On another occasion he grumbled about “many workmen and little work.” His peers shared this view. One major slaveowner confided to his diary, “I find it is almost impossible to make a negro do his work well. No orders can engage it, no encouragement persuade it, nor no punishment oblige it.”26