George Washington

by David O. Stewart

  The ancient Greeks, including Xenophon and Plato, connected hunting skills with military prowess. Hunting develops, wrote one enthusiast, “not only physical fitness and courage, but also an ‘eye for the country.’” The hunt, he continued, also offers “the feel of a good horse, knowing what to ask of him and what not to ask, requiring the whole range of cross-country riding skills; and the excitement of galloping and jumping.” A Washington aide in the 1780s observed that hunting provided Washington with “activity and boldness.”5

  Fox hunting required not only good horses but also well-bred hounds. Washington charted the mating of his hounds, bestowing names that would be familiar today, including Mopsey, Jupiter, Lady, Duchess, Vulcan, Searcher, and Rover. Some of the female names, such as Truelove and Sweetlips, mingled affection with whimsy. Washington was a demanding breeder. Bryan Fairfax remarked with exasperation that Washington had been given “many super excellent dogs . . . which have not answered your expectation.”6

  Washington’s hunting dwindled after 1768, whether by choice or because of competing demands on his time. He rode for foxes only thirty days in the following year, then twenty-six the year after, then seventeen in 1771.

  Through the years when his hunting declined, Washington’s diary shows an increase in the number of days when he was “home alone.” That term requires context. He was never alone at Mount Vernon, not with Martha ordinarily around, as well as two children and their tutors, enslaved servants plus overseers and others who brought business to the mansion house. For Washington, “home alone” meant no social guests, an infrequent condition; it happened on only ten days in 1771. Two years later, however, Washington’s “home alone” days had more than tripled, and increased again the following year.

  Dirty weather dictated some home-alone days. The increasing number of days without guests, however, also reflected Washington’s expanding public responsibilities. Political correspondence increased while paperwork relating to Mount Vernon did not slacken. He received more than twice as many letters in 1773 as he had two years before. Washington also devoted considerable time to reading, an activity not always associated with him.

  Mount Vernon

  Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association

  He built his library on the collection assembled by Martha’s first husband, which she brought to Mount Vernon. Washington had a taste for practical writings that could guide his business. Early purchases focused on agricultural handbooks, including a six-volume series with articles on brewing beer, increasing milk production, and dyeing wool. He also ordered a volume with advice on business law, mathematics, and correspondence. By one estimate, nearly half his library consisted of practical books, such as encyclopedias, dictionaries, and volumes on law and legislation.7

  Because much of the political discourse of the era occurred in pamphlets, Washington possessed many of those. He owned John Dickinson’s seminal treatment of British-American relations in Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, as well as the pamphlet reproducing Benjamin Franklin’s testimony on that subject to the House of Commons; he later acquired Thomas Jefferson’s Summary View of the Rights of British America. He adored maps and books describing geography and travel. He had little taste for works of imagination, yet owned both Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle and Fielding’s Tom Jones.8

  Washington’s great love was for theater. From the first production he attended as a teenager in Barbados, Washington seized every opportunity to attend performances, often bringing his family. Though Washington’s surviving diaries cover only about half the years between 1759 and 1775, he recorded attending forty-five plays in Williamsburg, Annapolis, and Alexandria. In June 1770, he saw five performances in seven days in Williamsburg. The performances skewed toward Restoration comedies like The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay and George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer. In 1773, he saw his first Shakespeare drama, catching Hamlet while in New York with his stepson.9

  Late in life, he told an actor that he considered the stage a valuable resource to society. It portrayed manners, he said, served as a school for poetry, and honored noble principles.10 For Washington, shy about his limited education, theater offered lessons. At least part of his enthusiasm for it reflected his intuitive understanding that politics, at its core, is a layered form of performance art.

  A natural leader has not only wit and vision but also commands attention through demeanor, voice, timing, and expression. Actors know how to stand, how to move, how to engage an audience through gestures and vocal variations. They study when to pause and for how long, as well as when to look directly at an audience and when to look away. For a politician, such skills are essential, and Washington mastered them. John Adams later wrote that Washington was “the best actor of presidency we have ever had,” and cited three key moments in Washington’s career as “in a strain of Shakespearean . . . excellence in dramatic exhibitions.”11 Washington honed that talent watching professionals in darkened theaters.

  In his world, the most important play was Addison’s Cato, which celebrated the Roman patriot who remained true to republican virtues by resisting Julius Caesar’s power grab. Cato appears on the list of volumes in Washington’s library. He attended numerous performances of the play, including stagings for his troops during the Revolutionary War. He alluded to the drama or quoted it in multiple letters through his life.12

  For relaxation, he always enjoyed gambling, especially cards. After a round of fox hunting and a good dinner, cards extended the day’s social pleasures. If the weather was harsh and congenial companions were at hand, Washington might play cards all day. Washington’s sporting instincts also took him to horse races.

  Washington’s meticulous records show him roughly breaking even as a gambler. A tally of card playing from 1772 to 1774 recorded a loss of a bit over £6, a modest sum for three years of entertainment.13

  * * *

  Family, too, demanded attention. That Martha and George had not conceived a child likely was a surprise to both; during Martha’s marriage to Daniel Parke Custis, her pregnancies were regular, and a virile figure like Washington would expect to father children. Family tradition suggested that Martha’s last pregnancy left her unable to conceive, but that is undocumented. Whatever the reason, no babies came.

  Martha’s daughter, Patsy, was a constant source of anxiety. Her epilepsy spurred a continuing search for a cure, or a better physician, or some ameliorating therapy, but eighteenth-century medicine had nothing to offer. When the Washingtons took Patsy to the waters of Berkeley Springs for several weeks in 1769, she did not improve.14

  Less dire but equally intractable was the challenge of educating Jacky Custis. His schoolmaster led the hand-wringing, describing the young man as “exceedingly indolent [and] surprisingly voluptuous. One would suppose nature had intended him for some Asiatic prince.” The schoolmaster concocted a plan to conduct young Custis on a tour of Europe, arguing that exposure to sophisticated Europeans would embarrass Jacky into learning. Washington rejected the proposal because of the expense and because Jacky’s educational attainments were too thin for him to gain much advantage from travel.15

  Washington also had to resettle his mother. In 1761, Washington’s brother-in-law, Fielding Lewis, built Mary Washington a small house in Fredericksburg, close to where he and her daughter Betty lived. Mary, however, then declined to leave Ferry Farm.16

  Ten years later, nearly sixty-three, Mary was ready to give up the farm that Washington had inherited nearly three decades earlier. He performed surveys of the land and a nearby parcel, the Little Falls Quarter, that Mary inherited, and agreed to buy her livestock and also rent her slaves and the Little Falls Quarter. The prices were set by his brother Charles and brother-in-law Lewis, sparing mother and son from having to haggle with each other. He placed a down payment on a Fredericksburg house for Mary.17

  Taking possession of his boyhood h
ome surely triggered memories of his young years there with his mother, sisters, and brothers. His new survey of Ferry Farm reflected a sentimental connection that he never recorded elsewhere. Exercising the surveyor’s discretion to choose any physical characteristic as his stopping place, he ended the survey at the burial site of his little sister, Mildred. She was three when she died; Washington was eight.18

  By spring 1772, Mary was in her new home, steps away from the Lewis mansion. Washington sold Ferry Farm two years later. Until then, as she always had, his mother took its output to support her, her servants, and her horses.19

  Chapter 24

  Never Enough Land

  Washington’s craving for land marked him, in one contemporary’s eyes, as “avaricious.” No matter how deep his financial distress of the moment, a possible land deal always intrigued him. Before the Revolutionary War, he pursued multiple strategies for acquiring land. Five of them targeted massive tracts, four of which were in the west. Although land transactions could take years to ripen in that era, Washington rarely walked away from a deal, nor did he shy from employing subterfuge or political connections.1

  Washington repeatedly advised friends and relatives to acquire land. Many Virginia fortunes had been built, he insisted, by “taking up and purchasing at very low rates the rich back lands which were thought nothing of in those days.”2 That Indian tribes dwelled on tracts he coveted was no deterrent. More than most Americans, Washington appreciated how many Indians there were, how established their cultures were, and what dangerous enemies they were. Yet for many years he sought their lands with little worry over the weight of their claims, or where they might live if he succeeded in acquiring their land. This nearly magical thinking was common among whites who chose to imagine the west without Indians. After all, Indians once occupied the Atlantic coast, but no longer did. Surely this pattern would repeat itself.

  Washington’s passion for land had a dimension beyond profit. He saw immense resources that could bring prosperity to a brawny nation. A builder at heart, whose improvements to Mount Vernon never ended, he dreamt of expansion and an American empire. He had a taste for large ideas and outsized ambitions, so America’s potential fired his imagination.3

  No land rush, by definition, is orderly. Beginning as early as 1743, land-hungry whites lodged overlapping western claims based on shoddy or fraudulent surveys. Twenty years later, when British officials asked for a listing of Virginia’s western land grants, the Executive Council threw up its hands. “Insuperable difficulties,” it reported, made such a listing impossible. Four American syndicates secured grants of hundreds of thousands of acres, and enlisted powerful Englishmen to support them. “One-half of England,” an American observed, was “land mad and everybody there has their eyes fixed on this country.” The confusion rendered the Ohio valley a snake pit where the strongest and craftiest succeeded.4

  Washington’s first major land quest sprang from Governor Dinwiddie’s 1754 promise of 200,000 acres to Virginia’s first volunteers in the fight against France. Having commanded the regiment, Washington sought a large share of that grant. Fellow officers joined the clamor.5 Washington also formed the Mississippi Land Company with his brother Jack and four of the Lee brothers of Westmoreland County, to seek 2.5 million acres in the Ohio valley, a proposed barony that would reach to the Mississippi River.6

  The scramble for land guaranteed conflict with Indians, so in the early 1760s, the British sought to keep the peace by blocking new land grants. King George III’s proclamation in October 1763 halted the distribution of western lands, including those pledged by Dinwiddie’s proclamation.7 For the colonists, the king’s new Proclamation Line, beyond which new settlement was banned, incinerated a central promise of America: land. The British policy also had the unintended effect of favoring the poor and landless over the rich and well-connected. Speculators needed title to land so they could sell or lease it to others, but squatters cared nothing for such formalities, so speculators watched in frustration as the squatters spread.8

  With his western plans stalled, Washington leapt at a proposal to drain the Great Dismal Swamp of southeastern Virginia. Drained swampland was prized for its fertility, while the Dismal was close to ports at Norfolk and Hampton. After exploring the region in 1763, Washington joined the Dismal Swamp Company; each of ten founders agreed to provide ten slaves to dig drainage ditches and canals.9 To secure 148,000 acres, the company had to evade the thousand-acre limit on land grants to any single applicant. The ten founders prepared claims in their own names and in the names of 138 brothers, cousins, neighbors, and servants. The government ignored the fraud. Washington installed Lund Washington’s brother as overseer of the drainage work.

  In 1767, Washington turned to Pennsylvania lands east of the Proclamation Line, where settlement was permitted. He authorized William Crawford, a surveyor, to find sites for him. Explaining that the Proclamation Line “must fall, of course, in a few years,” Washington urged Crawford to employ deception. He should treat his mission as “a profound secret,” proceeding “by silent management” and adopting “the pretense of hunting other game.” To evade Pennsylvania’s limits on the size of individual claims, Crawford should apply the dummy name device used at the Dismal Swamp. After six years of effort, Washington acquired several thousand Pennsylvania acres through Crawford.10

  When good land became available close to home, Washington pounced. In late 1767, he acquired nearly 3,000 acres in Fauquier and Loudoun counties, which he later leased to tenants in hundred-acre lots.11 Washington always aimed to make his home estate larger, more impressive, and more productive, so snapped up adjacent tracts from George Mason, from George William Fairfax, and from another neighbor.12

  Hunting the big score, Washington rarely abandoned any land scheme, no matter how bleak its prospects. In 1770, he was still pressing for grants to the Mississippi Land Company. The ditching in the Dismal Swamp was not completed until nearly three decades after his death. And he never gave up on the bounty lands promised by Dinwiddie in 1754: 100,000 acres near the Forks of the Ohio and another 100,000 acres on or near the Ohio River.13

  As Washington predicted, the Proclamation Line evaporated in 1768, inspiring him to revive the soldiers’ petition. In 1769, he explained it to the current governor, then submitted his case in writing, portraying the soldiers of 1754 as heroic defenders of Virginia, and the Dinwiddie Proclamation as a firm contract. Because the west was filling up quickly, Washington fretted that “none but barren hills and rugged mountains, will be left to those who have toiled and bled for the country.” He did not ask that squatters be ousted, which he called a “work of great difficulty, perhaps of equal cruelty, as most of these people are poor,” but urged speedy action before more squatters could arrive.14

  A week later, the Executive Council awarded Washington’s petition for 200,000 acres in the valleys of the Ohio River and the Great Kanawha River. The lands had to be identified within five years in twenty separate surveys, a condition that loomed as a major obstacle. Twenty surveys of contiguous parcels would necessarily include less desirable land, which Washington always disdained. Undeterred, he advertised in the Virginia Gazette to receive the claims from soldiers who had enlisted before the Battle of Fort Necessity. Washington also started a new effort to purchase land claims from those who were in uniform when a 1763 royal proclamation awarded western lands to those soldiers. Washington described all his efforts as “a kind of lottery.” The difficult question, he added, was “whether the chance of a prize” justified the expense. Usually his answer was yes.15

  Washington pressed hard against the twenty-survey limit on the 1754 claims while directing Crawford, his agent and surveyor, to perform the surveys as best he could. When selecting land, however, Washington trusted only his own eyes. In the autumn of 1770, he journeyed through the frontier for nine weeks accompanied by Crawford, his friend Dr. Craik, and three servants.16

  In his
diary, Washington described traveling through a world of wondrous abundance. Descending the Ohio River by canoe, he saw “innumerable numbers of turkeys and many deer,” huge river catfish, and bison. He was wary of “the unsettled state of this country,” fearing that some Indians viewed his party “with an uneasy and jealous eye.” Always, he judged the land’s features, its water access, and its soil. As they canoed up the Kanawha, his enthusiasm grew. The land was “In many places very rich . . . upon the whole exceeding valuable.” He marked trees to indicate the soldiers’ claims, which ultimately covered eighty square miles.17

  When surveyor Crawford produced the first ten surveys, they covered barely 61,000 acres, which meant that twenty surveys of good land could never encompass the promised 200,000 acres. In submissions to the governor and the Executive Council in November 1771, Washington again challenged the twenty-survey ceiling, but to no avail. Retaining the ceiling, the council members authorized grants of 400 acres for each private, and then up the chain of command to 15,000 acres for Washington. To a former colleague in the regiment, Washington despaired of the council’s “lukewarmness” and the twenty-survey ceiling.18

  With a new governor, Washington kept pressing for the final land grants. He feared competition from the well-connected Walpole Company, the Philadelphia-based enterprise that included Ben Franklin, which was angling for “every foot of land to the westward of the Allegheny Mountains” and ultimately sought 20 million acres for a new colony named Vandalia. In late 1772, Washington was still agitating over the twenty-survey ceiling, joining the governor on one day for breakfast, dinner, and supper, then submitting a renewed petition to the Executive Council. The ceiling remained in place, but it barely slowed Washington’s accumulation of western land.19 In 1773, he acquired 5,000 acres under the 1763 proclamation, pressing claims he had purchased from former soldiers.20 He sent an agent to scout land in far-off West Florida on the Gulf of Mexico. In 1773, Washington won another 100,000 acres for the ex-soldiers claiming under the 1754 proclamation, with 20,000 going to him (his 15,000 acres as commanding officer plus claims purchased from other veterans). A final ruling brought his total award under the Dinwiddie Proclamation to 32,000 acres.21