Washington: A Life (22 page)

One reason that Washington and other planters submitted to their London agents was that they offered easy credit unavailable in the colonies. Like many of his affluent neighbors, Washington was land rich and cash poor and spent a lifetime scrounging for money. Historians have often pondered the paradox of why rich Virginia planters later formed a hotbed of revolutionary ferment, and the explanation partly lies in their long, sullen dependence upon London factors. Of four million pounds borrowed by colonists by the outset of the American Revolution, half was owed by the prodigal farmers of Tidewater Virginia.
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As they gorged on credit, their luxurious lives rested on a precarious foundation of debt. Virginia borrowers regularly blamed their London factors for this indebtedness rather than examining their own extravagant consumption. In piling up excessive debt, they repeated a vice then rampant among the spendthrift British upper class.

Almost immediately Washington stumbled into the same quagmire of debt that ensnared many fellow planters. After two years of marriage, he owed a sizable two thousand pounds sterling to Robert Cary. Eager to play the country squire to the hilt, he ordered goods from London with a free hand. In a letter to one of his former officers in April 1763, Washington complained of being hopelessly indebted to Robert Cary. In his defense, he pleaded the disorganized state of Mount Vernon when he returned from the war, the need to buy more land and slaves, and the expenses of a large family: “I had provisions of all kinds to buy for the first two or three years and my plantations to stock.” Before he knew it, the money he spent on buildings and other things had “swallowed up … all the money I got by marriage,
nay
more.”
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The situation deteriorated sharply the following year. Washington was congenitally prickly about money, and Robert Cary aggravated matters by being too quick to dun him for funds. In August 1764 Washington reacted to a call for more money by blaming “mischances rather than misconduct” for the repeated failures of his tobacco crops. He was outraged that Cary would pester him the second he lagged on his payments. “I did not expect that a correspondent so steady and constant as I have proved … would be reminded in the instant it was discovered how necessary it was for him to be expeditious in his payments,” he complained. Unlike some patrician debtors, Washington was uneasy carrying so much debt, reminding his London creditor that “it is but an irksome thing to a free mind to be any ways hampered in debt.”
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In subsequent letters to London, Washington’s fury fairly exploded off the page. When he sent a large shipment of tobacco the following year, he was aghast at the poor prices that Robert Cary fetched for him and accused the firm of securing better deals for other Virginia planters. “That the sales are pitifully low needs no words to demonstrate,” he wrote. “And that they are worse than many of my acquaintance upon this river Potomac have got in the outposts … is a truth equally as certain.” Washington blustered that it might be “absolutely necessary for me to change my correspondence unless I experience an alteration for the better.”
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For the rest of his life, Washington was vehement on the subject of debt and frequently lectured relatives about its dangers. Even though he scapegoated creditors for his own debt, it is clear from later letters that he searched his soul long and hard on the subject. Decades later he admonished one nephew that “there is no practice more dangerous than that of borrowing money … for when money can be had in this way, repayment is seldom thought of in time … Exertions to raise it by dint of industry ceases. It comes easy and is spent freely and many things indulged in that would never be thought of, if to be purchased by the sweat of the brow. In the mean time, the debt is accumulating like a snowball in rolling.”
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Washington spoke knowingly, as only a reformed sinner can do as he reviews past transgressions.

FOR THE FIRST SIX YEARS OF MARRIAGE, as he devoted mounting resources to growing tobacco, George Washington was a hostage to the fortunes of that fickle crop. As noted, he had returned from his military adventures to discover Mount Vernon, under brother Jack’s supervision, in a scandalous state of disrepair. While off in the western hinterlands, he found it impossible to monitor business activities at home, which must have been profoundly distressing for someone of his meticulous work habits. As he worked to remedy matters, restocking the plantation and constructing new buildings, he ended up squandering part of Martha’s fortune.

Though an inexperienced planter, the enterprising Washington was determined to produce high-quality tobacco, and to that end he expanded his acreage and revealed a scientific bent as he dabbled with different varieties. Always receptive to innovation, he pored over agricultural treatises and experimented with oats, wheat, and barley, planted in soil from various corners of his property. Only in retrospect did he perceive the folly of staking his future on tobacco. The soil at Mount Vernon, he duly learned, had “an under stratum of hard clay impervious to water,” washing away the thin topsoil and leaving behind “eyesore gullies.”
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It posed insuperable challenges for a novice planter who had to contend with several seasons of drought and heavy rain, which only compounded the runoff problem. Besides poor topography, Washington also had to contend with fluctuating tobacco prices—under imperial law, all sales went through England—and he never knew what his crops would fetch until he heard back from London. With hindsight, it is easy to fault his emphasis on tobacco, but the crop was so omnipresent in Virginia that planters paid taxes with it and engaged in an intense rivalry to produce superior leaves.

In the 1760s Washington’s letters on his tobacco trade often read like one long jeremiad. He started out with a bumper crop of 147,357 pounds in his first year of marriage, only to be repeatedly victimized by the vagaries of weather. “We have had one of the most severe droughts in these parts that ever was known and without a speedy interposition of providence (in sending us moderate and refreshing rains to mollify and soften the earth), we shall not make one ounce of tobacco this year,” he reported to Robert Cary in 1762.
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The next year his wheat crop was attacked by a fungus known as rust, while his Indian corn and tobacco were choked by weeds and grass spawned by incessant rains. The mediocre quality of his leaves further depressed the price his tobacco drew in London, making it impossible to pare down debt. At melancholy moments Washington sounded as if the elements conspired to punish his crops. In August 1765 he noted that the Mount Vernon soil had been parched since May because of drought, while a mere ten miles away the weather was “perfectly seasonable” and his neighbors had “promising crops of corn and tobacco.”
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Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of tobacco culture was its labor-intensive nature, making it a natural match with slavery. No aspect of his life would so trouble Washington or posterity as his status as a major slave owner. Had he not started with tobacco, he might never have become so enmeshed with a reprehensible system that he learned to loathe. Slaves were ubiquitous in this rich, populous colony, making up 40 percent of Virginia’s population. In fact, slavery had acquired such a firm grip on the colony that one minister maintained in 1757 that “to live in Virginia without slaves is morally impossible.”
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Washington’s opposition to slavery took the form of a gradual awakening over many decades. He seldom uttered the word
slavery,
as if it grated on his conscience, preferring polite euphemisms such as “servants,” “Negroes,” “my people,” or “my family.” Like other slaveholders, the young Washington talked about slaves as simply another form of property. He was cold-blooded in specifying instructions for buying slaves, telling one buyer, as if he were purchasing a racehorse, that he wanted his slaves “to be straight-limbed and in every respect strong and likely, with good teeth and good countenances.”
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He favored adolescent females who could maximize the number of slave children, urging one planter who owed him money to sell some slaves in the fall “when they are fat and lusty and must soon fall of[f] unless well fed.”
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In this savage world, planters posted slaves as collateral for loans, and Washington upbraided one debtor for asking him to rely upon “such hazardous and perishable articles as Negroes, stock, and chattels.”
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With another debtor, he threatened that, without speedy payment, “your Negroes must be immediately exposed to sale for ready money after short notice.” In his diary, he often wrote of being “at home all day alone” when he was surrounded by slaves in the mansion and fields.

However horrifying it seems to later generations, abominable behavior toward dark-skinned people was considered an acceptable way of life. In 1767, when four slaves were executed in Fairfax County for supposedly colluding to poison their overseers, their decapitated heads were posted on chimneys at the local courthouse to act as a grim warning to others. Nobody protested this patent atrocity. At the same time, slave masters in the eighteenth century seldom rationalized or romanticized slavery as a divinely sanctioned system, as happened before the Civil War. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and other Virginia planters acknowledged the immorality of slavery, while confessing perplexity as to how to abolish it without producing mayhem and financial ruin. When denouncing British behavior on the eve of the American Revolution, Washington made clear the degrading nature of the system when he said that, if the colonists tolerated abuses, the British “will make us as tame and abject slaves as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.”
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The black population at Mount Vernon grew apace after Washington’s marriage as he purchased slaves aggressively to keep pace with his widening economic activities. During the first year of his marriage, he acquired 13 slaves, then another 42 between 1761 and 1773. Since he paid taxes on slaves older than twelve years of age, we know that he personally owned 56 slaves of working age in 1761, 62 in 1762, 78 in 1765, and 87 in 1770.

Whether from humane considerations or merely from regard for property, Washington was tireless in his medical treatment of slaves; his diaries are loaded with references to doctors, and even to Washington himself, tending sick slaves. During the frosty first winter of his marriage, he grew alarmed by the death of four slaves by late January, three of them dower slaves from the Custis estate. As in the army, whenever trouble struck, Washington didn’t shirk personal involvement. His direct management style became manifest that spring when smallpox cropped up at his western plantation on Bullskin Creek. At once he hastened off to Frederick County and was startled to find that two slaves, Harry and Kit, had already died, and that everything lay “in the utmost confusion, disorder and backwardness.”
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He rushed off to nearby Winchester to secure blankets and medical supplies, summoned a nurse, and instructed his overseer to quarantine slaves with smallpox. By the Revolutionary War, Washington made a regular practice of inoculating slaves against smallpox. The standard method was to scrape contaminated matter from the pustules of a victim with a mild case of smallpox, then slip it on a thread under the skin of the inoculated person. This produced a mild case of the disease, which prevented the more virulent form.

In written agreements with new overseers, Washington exhorted them to treat ailing slaves with a modicum of kindness. In 1762 a new overseer, Nelson Kelly, had to agree “that he will take all necessary and proper care of the Negroes committed to his management, treating them with humanity and tenderness when sick.”
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There seems little doubt that Washington was motivated by human sympathy as well as profit in caring for sick slaves. During his first term as president, he urged his estate manager to have overseers pay special heed to sick slaves, “for I am sorry to observe that the generality of them view these poor creatures in scarcely any other light than they do a draft horse or ox, neglecting them as much when they are unable to work, instead of comforting and nursing them when they lie on a sick-bed.”
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Possibly because of his scrupulous care of sick slaves, Washington frequently complained about those who feigned illness. When he thought a slave named Sam was faking illness, he ordered his estate manager to “examine his case … but not by the doctor, for he has had doctors enough already of all colors and sexes and to no effect. Laziness is, I believe, his principal ailment.”
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Another area of plantation life where Washington’s behavior was comparatively humane, within the overall context of an inhumane system, was in his studious refusal to break up slave families. Although slave marriages were not sanctioned by law, Washington treated them as binding and sacrosanct. In time, he refused to sell slaves if it meant separating families. Slaves who wished to marry slaves from other plantations needed Washington’s permission, but we have no evidence he ever denied it. That he felt a paternalistic responsibility toward his slaves was shown dramatically in his final years when a slave named Fanny was bedridden for a week after being beaten by her husband Ben, a slave on another plantation. Washington, livid, forbade Ben to set foot at Mount Vernon on pain of whipping. Four years later Fanny married another slave.
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When Washington contemplated selling off slaves during the Revolution, he expressed reluctance to do so, then told his manager that “if these poor wretches are to be held in a state of slavery, I do not see that a change of masters will render it more irksome, provided husband and wife and parents and children are not separated from each other, which is not my intention to do.”
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Although he stopped buying slaves in 1772, his slave population swelled from natural increase so that he owned 135 able-bodied slaves when tapped to head the Continental Army. Ironically, his growing scruples about slavery and his refusal to break up families by selling them off saddled him with a fast-growing slave community.