2
The Agricultural Foundations of Independence
The Stamp Act crisis of 1765 brought a new urgency to Washington’s plan for agricultural improvement and the diversification of his estate. Like so many colonists in British North America, Washington decried the revenue act as unconstitutional and an attack on the colonies’ liberties. He also perceived a threat that was as much commercial as political. He considered the Stamp Act to be part of a larger design by which Parliament and the British ministry, in their demand for more revenue from the American colonies, disregarded and endangered the reciprocal benefits of trade within an empire based on the exchange of colonial agricultural commodities for British manufactures. “The whole produce of our labour hitherto has centred in Great Britain,” he wrote, “what more can they desire?” Washington suspected that, following as it had recent restrictions on colonial trade and other burdensome acts, the stamp tax was one more step toward additional duties on colonial imports from Great Britain. He hesitated to predict the political consequences of the opposition to the Stamp Act, but was confident that further duties on imports would drive trade from Virginia into new markets. He asked his politically influential London merchants to explain “where then lyes the utility of these Measures?”1
In September 1765, just a few weeks before the Stamp Act would require a tax to be paid on publications and routine business and legal documents, Washington warned the Cary & Company merchants that British demands for revenue would accelerate the broader economic shift already beginning to redefine the relationship between Great Britain and the North American colonies. “The Eyes of our People (already beginning to open) will perceive, that many of the Luxuries which we have heretofore lavished our Substance to Great Britain for can well be dispensed with whilst the Necessaries of Life are to be procurd (for the most part) within ourselves,” he predicted. “This consequently will introduce frugality; and be a necessary stimulation to Industry—Great Britain may then load her Exports with as Heavy Taxes as She pleases but where will the consumption be? I am apt to think no Law or usage can compel us to barter our money or Staple Commodities for their Manufacturies, if we can be supplied within ourselve upon the better Terms.” Once freed of their reliance on British-supplied goods, colonists in America would venture into trade outside the empire. Washington took immediate steps to fulfill his own prediction by ordering from Cary & Company the implements required for cloth manufactures at Mount Vernon, and within a year, a weaver he hired had established a workshop capable of manufacturing large quantities of cloth to provision the enslaved laborers on the estate and for sale.2
The steady reduction in tobacco cultivation at Mount Vernon became a hardened and politicized resolution to abandon the crop in 1765. Washington recognized that his own disappointment in the tobacco trade reflected a larger transformation of the commercial relationship that had shaped the plantation system of the colonial Chesapeake. It was now evident to Washington “that it only suits the Interest of a few particular Gentlemen to continue their consignments of this commodity to that place, while others shoud endeavour to substitute some other Article in place of Tobacco, and try their success therewith.” His first reaction was to inquire of several British merchant firms what other commodities, such as hemp and flax, might fill the place of tobacco, but the imperial crisis of 1765 also convinced Washington to focus agricultural production on crops that could be shipped to markets outside of Great Britain.3
Following the repeal of the Stamp Act in March 1766, Washington gratefully acknowledged the political support of London tobacco merchants but advised them to promote new patterns of trade that would be mutually beneficial for planters in Virginia and merchants and manufacturers in Great Britain. When one firm assured him that its partners had done everything in their power to oppose the act and then to seek its repeal, Washington cautioned: “I coud wish it was in my power to congratulate you with success, in having the Commercial System of these Colonies put upon a more enlargd and extensive footing than it is because I am well satisfied that it woud, ultimately, redound to the advantages of the Mother Country so long as the Colonies pursue trade and Agriculture, and woud be an effectual Let to Manufacturing among themselves.” His own vision of that enlarged and extensive colonial commerce would over the next ten years guide his most important choices about what crops to cultivate and where to market them.4
Wheat became the primary focus of farming at Mount Vernon, and the cultivation and processing of the grain determined the seasonal rhythms of work for most of the enslaved laborers on the estate. The transition to wheat as the estate’s principal cash crop required more careful preparation of the fields than the traditional practice of sowing the grain in ground previously cleared for corn, a method Washington admitted to be “slovenly but easy.” Washington directed hired ditchers and enslaved field workers to clear new land and to drain swamps on each of the outlying plantations, a process that continued until, by 1774, wheat was grown on more than a thousand acres of the estate. A three-year rotation of wheat, then corn, then a season of leaving the land fallow was intended to restore the soil. The scale of wheat cultivation also required a new infrastructure on the plantations, and the enslaved carpenters built barns with wooden floors for storing harvested wheat before it was threshed. New fencing protected cultivated fields and penned many of the increasing numbers of livestock. Substantial land was devoted to growing corn for the provisioning of the enslaved and for sale of the surplus. Fodder and other grain crops supported the livestock. Nearly all of this coordinated agricultural work revolved around the increased production of wheat. In mid-1774, Washington explained to tobacco merchants in London that “the whole of my force is, in a manner confind to the growth of Wheat, & Manufacturing of it into Flour.”5
The amount of wheat brought to market rapidly increased after 1765, when the field laborers stopped working on tobacco. As manager, Lund Washington recorded two thousand bushels of wheat produced in 1765, when the final and much reduced tobacco crop was planted. By 1768 the plantations produced more than 4,700 bushels of wheat. The following year, a season in which Washington thought wheat did better than ever, the plantations produced over 6,700 bushels, the highest yield ever under his ownership. With the exceptions of 1771 and 1772, when first weather and then a blight reduced the crop, the Mount Vernon plantations continued to produce between five thousand and six thousand bushels of wheat a year through 1775.6
Across a seven-year span from 1765 to 1772, Washington doubled the amount of wheat sown. The increase in wheat harvests also reflected the higher productivity that came with sowing new lands and improved cultivation. By 1767, the number of bushels of wheat produced per field laborer reached the maximum levels of the best Chesapeake grain producers, and with the transition from tobacco to wheat complete, revenue per laborer doubled between 1764 and 1767. The abandonment of tobacco also allowed Washington to divert labor to the cultivation of various fodder crops, which in turn made possible the use of more draft animals in plowing.7
As wheat became the cash crop of his estate, Washington educated himself about each stage in the process of growing and processing the grain. He made frequent, nearly daily visits to his working plantations at critical stages in the cultivation of wheat, closely observing the progress of the crop and the work of the enslaved field laborers. His understanding of the task of cradling wheat and the specificity of his orders for scythes from London suggest he had handled the implements and conferred with the laborers who carried out the work. He instructed the London scythe maker to make them “exactly three feet 10 Inches in the Cut. pretty strait in the Back for the greater ease in delivering the Grain out of the Cradle—all to have the same bend—the Plate, or Rim at the back to be stout & strong.” He insisted that the ironmonger in London follow his precise specifications so that “if one Scythe gives way in the throng time of Harvest another can be put to the same Cradle immediately, without loss of time.” Washington expected to receive the finest implements crafted for improved wheat culture in Great Britain, and with those tools to achieve the most efficient use of labor.8
Washington relied on agricultural treatises, especially the Practical Treatise on Husbandry based on Duhamel and The Farmer’s Compleat Guide, for information on the latest advances in wheat culture. He read about sequences of plowing and harrowing, which he then compared in the fields. Following the method described in The Farmer’s Compleat Guide, Washington, as an experiment, steeped wheat in brine and alum before sowing in an effort to strengthen the stalks. He compared four types of wheat, and he experimented with harvesting wheat damaged by the rust that was a persistent threat to the crop. He annotated his copy of Duhamel with uniform conversions for the measurements of the results of several dozen experiments with wheat. Washington was particularly attentive in observing the maturation of the grain, and in 1769 he experimented with harvesting wheat at three stages of ripening. His goal was not only to increase the weight and value of the grain, but also to identify varieties that would ripen in succession, allowing for a more efficient allocation of labor in the harvest.9
Fig 2.1 George Washington. A plan of my farm on Little Huntg. Creek & Potomk. R., 1766. After abandoning tobacco cultivation at Mount Vernon in 1765, Washington made this survey of the farm he organized as River Plantation, with three large fields that accommodated a rotation of wheat, corn, and a season of fallow. By 1766, twenty enslaved field laborers worked at this, the largest plantation at Mount Vernon. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/74693204/.
A successful harvest depended on the timely coordination of enslaved laborers and hired workers. The harvest brought together field laborers from all the plantations and the enslaved carpenters whom Washington put to work in the fields each year when the wheat was ready and quick work was necessary to protect the crop from rain. He frequently referred to “my Harvest People” or “my whole force” as laborers from across the estate moved from one plantation to the next. The harvest at each plantation began with the cradlers, initially hired white men, who cut the wheat in the field. Following in the cradlers’ path came a succession of enslaved laborers with their own tasks—“Rakers and carryers,” bundlers and stackers, and the driver of the oxcart that took the wheat to a barn. Water carriers and cooks served the field laborers whom Washington kept working throughout the long summer days.10
Washington was intent on moving the harvest along as quickly as possible while minimizing his reliance on hired laborers, especially the cradlers whose wages he found to be too costly. The key was to determine the minimum number of cradlers needed to keep the other laborers fully employed but also able to maintain the pace, and Washington sometimes adjusted the number of cradlers in the middle of a day when he judged the progress to be too slow. After several years of observing the work of harvesting, Washington decided to divide the cradlers and the assisting laborers into three gangs. “The Stops & delays by this means are not so frequent & the Work much better attended to as every Mans Work is distinguishable.”11
Following the harvest of 1769, a season in which Washington had hired nine cradlers, he concluded “it was evidently to my advantage to employ my own hands to Cradle the Wheat rather than to hire white men to do it.” By closely managing the teams of enslaved laborers and by selecting several types of wheat that could be harvested in succession, Washington believed he could dispense with the hired cradlers. By 1771, he reported that the harvest at his largest plantation employed “Ten Cradles 8 of which were my own Negroes.” A year later, Jonathan Palmer, an experienced cradler hired by Washington to work year-round with the carpenters, became an instructor for six young cradlers.12
Cradling was just one of the new skills at which the enslaved became adept following the transition to wheat cultivation. As Washington sought to extract ever-greater labor from the slaves, he made a concerted effort to train individuals in specific skills and trades, as he did with cradling. Plowing and harrowing became routine in the cultivation of corn as well as wheat on all of the plantations. In an agreement with a local blacksmith, Peter Gollatt, Washington in 1770 bound a young enslaved man, Nat, along with another slave owned by John Parke Custis, to learn the trade of blacksmithing. Nat, on whom Washington had paid taxes as a tradesmen since 1763, rejoined the tradesmen at Mount Vernon at the close of his three-year term with Gollatt. When Washington in 1771 signed a ten-month agreement with Benjamin Buckler to work as a carpenter, a shoemaker, and a cradler at harvest time, he also required Buckler to supervise “several Negro carpenters” and “to use his utmost endeavours to hurry & drive them on to the performance of so much work as they ought to render.”13
The emphasis on the pace of work that ought to be rendered was repeated in an agreement with another white carpenter, Caleb Stone, in 1773, among the earliest references to Washington’s notion of an obligation or duty of the enslaved to deliver a certain level of work. To ensure that presumed obligation was met, and in a provision that may have been license for violent coercion, Washington vested in each of the hired carpenters “sufficient power and authority which he is to make use of & exercise with prudence & discretion.” At the same time that he delegated this command over the slaves on his estate, Washington in the written agreement with Buckler noted that the carpenter was a stranger, and he reserved the right to dismiss him if he learned anything disparaging about his character.14
Washington frequently employed the enslaved carpenters to carry out work that was far more varied than their trade designation implied. They were an integral part of the annual harvest teams at the plantations, and they in some years assisted in planting corn. They joined with field laborers in the spring fishing that became one of the most consistently profitable ventures at the estate. The carpenters built roads connecting plantations and worked on repairs to the milldam and millrace. For a number of years, Washington had hired enslaved carpenters out to neighboring plantations, but after 1765 he found more and more ways to use their labor on his estate. The transition to wheat had created a greater demand for coopers to make barrels, and the complexity of farming methods depended on new types of agricultural buildings and additional housing for hired and enslaved laborers. Among the enslaved, the carpenters developed the widest range of skills and carried out the most varied work.15
In 1766, the first agricultural season without any cultivation of tobacco at Mount Vernon, Morris, an enslaved carpenter, became the overseer of Dogue Run Plantation. He would serve as overseer there for nearly twenty-five years, and Washington and his manager frequently referred to the plantation at Dogue Run simply as “Morris’s.” Like many of the slaves given greater responsibilities by Washington in the 1760s, Morris had been enslaved at the Custis estate, and he was among the first group of dower slaves that the Washingtons brought to work at Mount Vernon in 1759. Although slaves had served as overseers on large Virginia estates in the early eighteenth century, the reliance on enslaved overseers had become less common in the middle decades of the century. Morris was the first of several enslaved overseers at Mount Vernon, and he directed the work of twelve to fourteen adult field laborers in the years before the Revolutionary War. Washington, often on Christmas Day, annually paid Morris £2.10.0, “for encouragement.” Enslaved overseers also received a larger share of provisions of food and clothing, and in contrast to most field laborers, lived with their wives. Morris’s wife, Hannah, was transferred from Muddy Hole Plantation to Dogue Run in 1766. The enslaved overseers, unlike their white counterparts, did not receive any share of the profits from the crops produced under their supervision.16
Davy, who had worked as a field laborer at the Mill Plantation since 1765, was after 1770 listed as the first among the field workers at that plantation, where Washington no longer employed a white overseer. Cash payments to Davy, recorded by Washington with those made to Morris, and a special provision of clothing indicate that Davy had assumed the role of overseer for the first time. Davy, later recognized as Davy Gray, would be the longest serving and most experienced enslaved overseer at Mount Vernon, directing the work at several plantations until after Washington’s death. When Washington organized Ferry Plantation on recently purchased land in 1771, he hired no white overseer for three years, relying on Michael, a long-time enslaved carpenter also skilled at cradling wheat, to direct the field laborers. While he was at Ferry Plantation, Michael received an annual cash payment, distributed along with those given to Morris and Davy Gray, as well as the special provision of clothing. After Washington hired a white overseer for Ferry Plantation in 1774, Michael returned to work as a carpenter.17
The enslaved overseers and foremen were the most conspicuous examples of individual slaves whose work and lives were changed by the transition to wheat and by Washington’s efforts to replace hired white laborers with slaves skilled in various tasks related to grain cultivation. The distribution of cash “for encouragement,” no matter how meager the amount, made clear to the overseers their enhanced worth to Washington. Whatever modicum of protection or autonomy that recognition of such worth secured for the enslaved individuals with the skills prized by Washington, their gains rested on his far greater success in applying enslaved labor to a new kind of agriculture. After 1765, Washington found new value in the enslaved labor he controlled, and he was invested ever more deeply in slavery as he became a successful farmer of wheat. The only caution he acknowledged about his reliance on slavery arose from a heightened recognition of the precarious investment in human property. To a friend in financial difficulties, Washington in 1767 stressed the risks of “such hazardous & perishable Articles as Negroes, Stock, & Chattels, which are to be swept of [f] by innumerable distempers, & subject to many accidents & misfortunes.” Earlier that year, he complained, “God knows I have losses enough in Negroes to require something where with to supply their places.” However many slaves died—and he almost never recorded their deaths before the 1780s—Washington steadily increased the size of the enslaved labor force at Mount Vernon through acquisition and transfer from his other plantations, and he gained ownership of still more slaves through his legal right to possess the children born to the enslaved women. The number of enslaved adults on whom Washington paid taxes in Fairfax County grew from 68 in July 1765 to 120 in July 1774.18
After a three-year hiatus during which he attempted to reduce the debt owed his London merchants, Washington in October 1767 resumed the purchase of slaves. He often bought less expensive slaves offered at the settlement of estates, and he purchased others to gain their demonstrated skills. On his way to Williamsburg, he purchased from the recently widowed Mary Ball Lee four slaves, including two brothers: William Lee, who became Washington’s long-time valet, and Frank Lee, who was a servant in the Mansion House at Mount Vernon. The following day, while still in Westmoreland County, Washington bought from another estate a woman named Sarah, whom he sent to work as a field laborer at River Plantation. Over the next eight years, Washington purchased at least fourteen more slaves and authorized an overseer to acquire others. Washington bought field workers, such as Bath, purchased from Carlyle & Adam in 1770, and carpenters, including James and Isaac, purchased in April 1773. He also acquired slaves in settlement of debts owed him, such as the man and boy offered by Thomas Moore in 1770. Several slaves purchased after 1772 were sent to work on land Washington acquired in western Pennsylvania.19
When he instructed a business partner to purchase slaves in the Caribbean, “if choice ones can be had under Forty pounds Sterl.,” Washington offered a rare explanation of what kind of enslaved laborers he sought to acquire. Daniel Jenifer Adams in 1772 carried flour and salted fish from Mount Vernon for sale in Barbados or whatever island offered the best market, and Washington preferred that the proceeds from the sales be “laid out in Negroes,” or in rum and sugar if slaves were not available. “If the Return’s are in Slaves let there be two thirds of them Males, the other third Females—The former not exceeding (at any rate) 20 yrs of age—the latter 16—All of them to be strait Limb’d, & in every respect strong & likely, with good Teeth & good Countenances—to be sufficiently provided with Cloaths.” Washington received neither slaves nor rum from the ill-fated partnership, but he continued to purchase individual slaves as late as the spring of 1775, two months before he assumed command of the Continental Army.20
The largest single addition to the enslaved labor force at Mount Vernon came not through a purchase, but with Washington’s decision to transfer slaves from the dower plantations in Tidewater. In November 1770, the overseer of Washington’s plantation in King William County boarded twenty-one individuals, including six children, on a small ship so tightly loaded with people and their belongings that there “was not Room to put any thing Else a board.” Then the enslaved people waited on the crowded ship through the afternoon and night while the overseer attempted to recapture Perros, who had run away to avoid the relocation to Mount Vernon. The ship left without Perros, who, following his return or recapture, continued to work at the plantation in King William County.21
Of the fifteen adults who arrived at Mount Vernon on board the ship, nine would by the following spring be working as field laborers at the estate’s newest plantation. Washington organized Ferry Plantation in 1771 out of more than four hundred acres that he had recently taken possession of from John West, Jr., and John Posey. Washington wanted to recover the land, much of which had once been owned by his brother, so that he could profitably work enslaved laborers from dower lands that he hoped to lease to a tenant. With both an opportunity to rent the former Custis plantation and a determination to bring all of his farming operations under his direct supervision, Washington needed more land on which to work the additional dower slaves, “there being too many to distribute among my other Quarters.” He explained to Posey that the purchase of the land would provide “a certainty of a place (in this Neighbourhood, where I want to draw all my force to) to put some of the Hands upon.”22
The newly arrived dower slaves joined with the carpenter Michael, a man named Harry, and Lucy from the Mill plantation to prepare the land at Ferry Plantation for the sowing of wheat. Harry, almost certainly the same man who had worked at the Mansion House since at least 1766, ran away from Ferry Plantation in late July 1771, just months after arriving at the new farm. His flight, like that of Perros, underscores the threat to family and community connections inherent in any relocation of slaves from one plantation to another, even within the boundaries of a large estate like Mount Vernon. Within five days, Washington had paid for the recapture of Harry and his return to Ferry Plantation.23
Washington had in 1765 begun to consolidate enslaved laborers under his direct supervision at Mount Vernon. He dispensed with an overseer at his Bullskin Plantation and found tenants to lease parcels of that tract near the Shenandoah River. In the spring of 1766, he listed fourteen new enslaved adults at Mount Vernon, having likely transferred most of them from the Bullskin Plantation. The overseer at Bullskin, after managing a final harvest of wheat and hemp, moved to King William County where he served as an overseer of one of the dower plantations under Washington’s control. Most of the arable land at Bullskin would remain in the hands of tenants, and tenancy became Washington’s preferred way of improving and drawing income from arable land too distant for his direct management of farming.24
When Washington purchased more than 2,600 acres in Fauquier County and Loudoun County in 1767, he surveyed parcels for twelve tenants with whom he signed leases for the lifetime of the tenants and their children. Washington and the other trustees appointed for the sale of the land deemed it well suited for corn, wheat, or tobacco, but rather than farm the land himself or send an overseer and enslaved laborers, Washington relied on the tenants to improve the property and to increase the long-term value of the farmland. Through the leases, Washington sought to protect the fertility of the soil by restricting the number of laborers who could work the land and requiring tenants to preserve a prescribed number of acres of woodland to support subsequent occupants. Tenants were also required to plant large orchards, surrounded by fences, and further obligated by the lease to construct a residence and to build sufficient barns or tobacco houses for the amount of land. With the payment of the first three years’ rent not due until the third year, tenants had the opportunity to make the necessary capital investments.25
In 1769, Washington assumed political leadership in organizing the first of several nonimportation associations that he hoped would encourage widespread adoption of the same kind of diversification he had undertaken at Mount Vernon. Following Parliament’s imposition of the Townshend Duties, Washington again recognized that Virginia’s dependence on British trade rendered it particularly vulnerable to parliamentary demands for revenue. He decried the threat to established colonial prerogatives, which he privately declared no one should hesitate to defend with arms, but he believed that, before a last resort to arms, colonists might persuade the British officials “by starving their Trade & manufactures” to recognize American rights as they had following the Stamp Act protests. Washington also looked beyond the immediate political crisis to recognize that with a commercial boycott “there are private, as well as public advantages to result from it.” He expected the plan of nonimportation, which George Mason drafted in collaboration with him, to encourage long-term changes in plantation management throughout the colony. With many families “reduced, almost, if not quite, to penury & want, from the low ebb of their fortunes, and Estates daily selling for the discharge of Debts,” an association to prohibit British imports would “contribute more effectually than any other I can devise to immerge the Country from the distress it at present labours under.”26
Washington was instrumental in gaining approval for the nonimportation association that members of the recently dissolved House of Burgesses adopted in May 1769, and over the following six years he shaped subsequent commercial associations, always with a focus on laying a foundation for greater economic independence. He feared that Parliament’s assertion of authority to tax the colonies, left unchecked, would lead to further legislation that would prohibit colonial manufactures and thereby perpetuate the reliance on British commerce and credit. The associations designed to promote home manufactures and agricultural diversification would protect Virginia planters against the demands of British merchants. In 1774, as he helped to draft the county resolves that would be a model for the Virginia Association, Washington insisted on a delay in the enforcement of any nonexportation provision so that farmers would have time to plan for a permanent transition from tobacco to crops that would support manufactures and independent trade. By that time, he had made significant progress in selling his agricultural produce on markets outside the restrictions of the British Empire.27
In June 1769, as he reorganized his estate to comply with the first nonimportation association, Washington decided to construct a merchant mill that would enable him to produce the high-quality flour in demand in Europe and the Caribbean markets. After consulting with a well-known mill owner and a millwright, Washington decided to build the new mill downstream from the old one to take advantage of a more dependable flow of water and to facilitate access for ships loading flour and for wagons from the nearby road connecting Alexandria and Colchester. To construct the mill and a millrace nearly two miles long required the work of numerous hired white laborers and the assistance of enslaved laborers sent by Washington to the site. A millwright, John Ball, oversaw much of the work, while another hired artisan quarried the stone for the foundation from the nearby estate of George William Fairfax. Washington frequently visited the site, spending long days to ensure the proper level of the ground and to mark the foundations of the mill building. Throughout much of 1770, he recorded the progress of the laborers and encouraged a faster pace of work, offering the ditchers an additional eighteen pence per rod dug “if they woud be brisk and stick to it.” On his return from a two-month trip west, Washington in December 1770 found the mill nearly finished and ready to receive the first flow of water to sharpen the millstones. In early April, after a day supervising work at the milldam, Washington saw the water of Dogue Run enter the race and turn the two sets of millstones, one of them to be constantly used for grinding his own wheat.28
At the older mill, which had operated since 1759 primarily to grind corn and wheat for consumption on the estate, Washington relied on enslaved millers Anthony and George. For the potentially lucrative merchant mill, Washington departed from his practice of training enslaved laborers in new skills, and he hired at considerable expense William Roberts, a skilled millwright and miller from Pennsylvania. In October 1770, Lund Washington signed an agreement with Roberts, who agreed to carry out all of the work necessary for the operation and maintenance of the mill. Roberts and his apprentice would construct flour casks when they were not running the mill. Washington agreed to pay Roberts £80 in Virginia currency a year, twice the next highest yearly wage of any hired worker at Mount Vernon in the 1760s and 1770s. In the summer of 1771, Washington ordered the construction of a house for the miller.29
Within a few months of when the mill began to run, Washington decided to replace the disappointing Virginia millstones with the finest sort imported from Great Britain. Enclosing the specifications provided by William Roberts and another millwright, he ordered a pair of French burr millstones, “an Article of more consequence than all the rest” of the items in his lengthy request for goods from London. Washington stipulated that the millstones were to be produced by John Cooper & Sons, one of London’s leading millwright firms, the partners of which were members of the Society of Arts, an influential group of mechanics and agriculturalists. Washington’s relationship with his London merchants, Robert Cary & Company, again gave him access to the highest-quality agricultural technology in Great Britain. He authorized them to negotiate the cost of the millstones: “I should not Incline to give any extravagent Sum for them on the one hand nor miss of getting a pair of good ones by limiting the price on the other.” Regardless of the price, the sooner he could receive them the better. Washington would use the superior burr millstones for his merchant business.30
With his mill in full operation, Washington gained much greater flexibility in marketing his wheat crop. He could decide to sell his annual crop as flour or as unmilled wheat, as prices would favor, and most of his crop was milled into flour. He could also initiate his own trading ventures. By 1771, he was free of the Carlyle & Adam contract by which he had committed to sell his wheat crop to the Alexandria merchants for seven years. Under that contract, the merchants were responsible for milling and selling the wheat once it was delivered, so for several years after making wheat his principal cash crop, Washington had little direct involvement with markets for the commodity. Washington’s transactions with Carlyle & Adam, however, taught him about the potential hazards of a trade that offered few of the financial services provided by established tobacco merchants in Great Britain.
By 1767, Washington was so displeased with the business practices of Carlyle & Adam that he threatened to end all communications with that firm. In one of the longest letters he ever wrote, filled with indignation and sarcasm, Washington rebuked the merchants for their perceived mistreatment and disrespect. It was only a more extreme demonstration of the kind of anger Washington had directed at his London tobacco merchants when he believed they had mistreated him. He was offended that Carlyle and Adam “seem to squint at my veracity” and that they dismissed the meticulous care he took in the preparation of his wheat. Beneath Washington’s personal umbrage were more substantive complaints about the merchants’ failure to pay on the delivery of the wheat and their unwillingness or inability to pay interest on what they owed Washington. The merchants’ most disturbing conduct had been their casual disregard of the “solemn contract” in which Washington had carefully defined the acceptable quality of wheat and agreed to a price that “the most judicious People of this County” thought too low. To the merchants’ admission that they had signed the agreement without closely examining it, Washington replied that he could not use such excuses to avoid paying interest or penalties to his correspondents in England and Madeira when they expected his timely remittances. At issue were not just fairness and trust, but the reliable flow of payments in a complicated commercial network on which the operation of Washington’s estate depended.31
If the merchants could not pay him on delivery of his crop, he implored them to explain, “How then am I to make remittances for Goods to Cloath a numerous Family, Supply a House in various necessaries, & support it in all its various expences?” Washington reminded them that most of the goods he imported were necessary supplies, such as clothing for the enslaved and basic implements for farming and carpentry. For all of the disadvantages and excessive charges of the tobacco trade, the exchange of Virginia crops for finished goods had efficiently supplied large estates like Mount Vernon. As he shifted to wheat production, Washington enjoyed an advantage over other large planters engaged in grain production because he was able to supply his estate with British goods, as long as he continued to ship tobacco to Robert Cary & Company on his account from the dower plantations in Tidewater. As he explained in 1769, “I only grow Tobacco to Supply my Family with Goods.” The transition to wheat at Mount Vernon would remain incomplete until Washington found other sources for consumer goods and plantation supplies, or until the traders in grain enabled him to make more reliable payments to the merchants who shipped him finished goods.32
The steady supply of flour encouraged Washington to take advantage of rising demand in the Caribbean and Europe. As he had explained to Carlyle and Adam, it behooved the producers of large quantities of wheat to find more distant markets. Through his network of mercantile correspondents, Washington followed reports of prices in markets as far-flung as Barbados, Lisbon, and London as well as in Philadelphia and Norfolk. Much of the wheat delivered to Carlyle & Adam and the salted fish from Mount Vernon had sold in the Caribbean, where there was demand for these two most valuable commodities produced at the estate. Washington merged cargoes of flour and fish in his own first venture to the Caribbean, made in partnership with Daniel Jenifer Adams of Maryland in 1772. The partnership with the unscrupulous Adams proved disastrous, but in its quick collapse Washington formed a further connection with a Jamaican merchant, Robert McMickan, who managed the sale of several shipments of flour, corn, and fish from Mount Vernon.33
Washington found himself the reluctant owner of Daniel Jenifer Adams’s ship, which provided an unexpected opportunity to venture into new markets. Rather than sell the ship at a certain loss and in spite of having no interest in becoming a shipper, Washington refitted the brigantine in Alexandria and “in the opinion of Many People, made a good Vessel of it.” Washington renamed the ship Farmer to make clear his true ambitions, and he sent it to Jamaica, filled with flour and fish. In the fall of 1774, Farmer sailed for Lisbon with four thousand bushels of corn, and returned with salt after stopping in Turks Island. The voyages entailed numerous expenses unrelated to the commodities trade and burdened Washington with the persistent problems of hiring seamen in Virginia. After the Continental Association restricted imports, Washington sold the ship in the spring of 1775 to a Maryland merchant.34
In April 1772, Washington served on a committee of the House of Burgesses that presented a bill to prevent fraud by providing for the more stringent inspection of all flour milled for export from Virginia. The enacted statute described flour as a valuable article of commerce and provided the same kind of government regulation that had long protected confidence in Virginia’s tobacco trade. In compliance with the act, Washington in December 1772 registered the “G. Washington” brand that would be marked on every cask he exported. He first ventured into European markets for flour in 1773 with a shipment to Madeira of eighty barrels of his highest quality flour, which he proposed to consign to his wine merchants as payment for his order of four pipes of wine for his own consumption. Through the Norfolk merchant Thomas Newton, Jr., Washington shipped the same Madeira firm ninety barrels of a lesser quality flour, for which European buyers were paying higher prices than could be gained on the Norfolk market. The proceeds of that flour were also to be applied to the purchase of wine, to be shipped directly to Washington’s wharf. For many years, Washington had ordered his Madeira wine through Robert Cary & Company in London, paying with tobacco receipts or buying on credit, with the additional costs entailed in either form of payment. Flour gave him the means to trade directly with the wine merchants, even as he relied on the Cary company to cover any possible costs in excess of the sale of his flour.35
Thomas Newton, who served in the House of Burgesses with Washington, was a dependable source of information about flour and wheat prices on both sides of the Atlantic, and beginning in 1773 he became the most important trader of Washington’s flour. Washington sent him large quantities of superfine flour, as well as the lower grades known as middlings and “ship stuff,” which were regular products of the milling process. The superfine flour, which carried the inspectors’ certificate of quality, was sold by Newton for more than Washington could have received at the mill. Newton thought Washington would be best served by steady buyers among Norfolk bakers, who needed a dependable supply of the high-quality flour that Washington’s mill was capable of producing. Newton sold some of Washington’s flour to a baker who “has all flying to him for bread.” While his largest shipments of flour went to Norfolk in 1773 and 1774, Washington thought flour might be the basis of a new and more advantageous trade between the colonies and Great Britain. In June 1774, at which time he admitted that commerce between Great Britain and Virginia would likely be suspended because of the worsening imperial crisis, Washington inquired of Robert Cary & Company how his highest quality flour would sell in London and whether the firm would accept his regular commission of up to two hundred barrels.36
For several seasons after 1765, Washington had explored British markets for the hemp and flax grown at Mount Vernon, but received scant encouragement from merchants. The Hanburys were reluctant to enter the trade, and James Gildart in Liverpool found what little American hemp came to British markets to be poorly prepared and disparaged by British ropemakers. Washington planted hemp crops at two Mount Vernon plantations in 1766, and as late as 1770 sold slightly more than two hundred pounds to Alexandria merchant Robert Adam, for which he received the bounty for hemp, but the fibers from hemp never became a viable export crop for him. Wheat and fish brought the surest revenue, and it was wheat above all that defined the estate, from determining the work of the enslaved field laborers to shaping the reconfiguration of the agricultural landscape.37
Beginning in 1769, Washington resumed his purchase of nearby land and soon added more than a thousand acres to his estate, which by 1772 extended to over sixty-five hundred acres. In addition to the four hundred acres that Washington organized as Ferry Plantation, he added several parcels to expand the boundaries of the estate and others to consolidate his farmlands. While surveying one of the new parcels, Washington discovered twenty acres of land that had never been patented, and he quickly gained title from the Fairfax proprietary. The continuing financial problems of his neighbor John Posey gave Washington the opportunity to purchase a narrow strip of land with a value far greater than its six acres would suggest. He acquired Posey’s valuable ferry landing and fishery, as well as control of the entire riverfront along Ferry Plantation.38
At each of the outlying plantations, the ground cleared for grain cultivation and the new meadows and pastures for livestock offered broad vistas across a rolling countryside. Despite the persistence of “rough & stumpy ground” in some wheat fields and the numerous crude dwelling houses provided for enslaved families, the agricultural landscape at Mount Vernon more nearly approached the georgic ideal of English estates, and Washington was eager to display his improved plantations to family and guests. During harvests, Martha and her daughter, Patsy, accompanied Washington to watch the work that brought together large gangs of laborers. Washington invited guests to accompany him on his daily inspection of the plantations, and the new mill became the special destination for visitors. When a group of women and their daughters stayed at Mount Vernon in November 1771, Washington “Rid to the Mill with the Ladies & back again.” With another house party, Washington guided the guests to the mill and the fishery during the April run of herring. The artist Charles Willson Peale, after three days working on the first life portrait of Washington, spent an afternoon visiting the mill with his sitter.39
The farmland designed for wheat cultivation at Mount Vernon opened spaces for the foxhunting that became the favorite sport of Washington. Often in the company of members of the Fairfax family and other neighbors, Washington, beginning in 1768, hunted several times a week, especially during the winter months. The chases could go on for six, even seven hours, taking Washington and his party to every part of the estate. At Muddy Hole Plantation, he supervised the cutting of new paths for fox hunting. Washington became just as avid a breeder of foxhounds, often in collaboration with his hunting companions. The style of foxhunting that he adopted had developed in Great Britain in the early eighteenth century, often in close association with the kind of agricultural improvements that he sought to emulate in Virginia. It was a sport that depended on consolidated estates and access to great expanses of land. Washington commonly mixed foxhunting with his own supervision of work at the farms, taking the hounds with him on his inspection of the plantations. Washington continued to hunt regularly until late winter 1775, and resumed the sport with less frequency when he returned to his estate in the 1780s. The enslaved laborers on the outlying plantations regularly saw Washington on horseback in pursuit of the fox and heard the dogs as well as the English hunting horn that Washington specified be “large & loud.”40
The commitment to agricultural improvement and wheat cultivation framed Washington’s renewed expectations for the West, which had so long been a focus of his interest and speculation. At the same time that he organized nonimportation associations in Virginia, Washington became an ardent advocate of opening the upper reaches of the Potomac River to commercial navigation. He served on the House of Burgesses committee that in December 1769 prepared a bill to clear the river for navigation, and after the failure of that bill, he and other supporters won approval for an act in 1772 by which the Virginia Assembly established two private companies for the construction of canals on the Potomac and James Rivers. In urging support for the Potomac project, Washington spoke of the promise of a new path of commerce between Great Britain and “that immense Tract of Country which is unfolding to our view.” The success of that trade was predicated on the simultaneous expansion of commercial farming into western lands possessed by Indian nations. The trade in agricultural produce would support independent mercantile establishments in the Chesapeake and be the first step toward an anticipated colony on the Ohio, thus setting the foundation of what Washington anticipated would be “a rising Empire,” his oft-repeated phrase, first evoked in advocacy of his dream of a Potomac waterway.41
The prospect of extending commercial agriculture beyond the mountains was so enticing that Washington set aside his resolution to consolidate enslaved labor and agricultural resources under his own supervision at Mount Vernon. He would invest in the labor needed to confirm his title to new lands and to initiate the kind of farming he thought would maximize the value of that land. Even while restrictions on settlement beyond the Appalachians remained in place, Washington asked William Crawford, an associate from surveying and military expeditions, to identify land he could purchase in western Pennsylvania once the British relaxed or rescinded the Proclamation of 1763. Washington considered the proclamation to be merely “a temporary expedien[t] to quiet the Minds of the Indians,” and he urged Crawford to proceed in secret to mark out lands so as to keep others from settling there. Washington insisted that the Pennsylvania land be suitable for productive farming. “Ordinary, or even middling Land woud never answer my purpose or expectation,” Washington instructed Crawford, “No: A Tract to please me must be rich.”42
Crawford obtained for Washington warrants for the survey of over sixteen hundred acres in Pennsylvania, in five separate parcels to circumvent the colony’s restriction on the amount of land granted one person. When Washington in October 1770 first visited his Pennsylvania tract at the Redstone settlement along the Youghiogheny River, he found “as fine Land as ever I saw—a great deal of Rich Meadow.” From there, Washington continued with Crawford into the Ohio country and along the Great Kanawha River. There they passed through vast areas of land that Washington and other veterans hoped to claim under a grant fulfilling Governor Dinwiddie’s 1754 proclamation, a promise made to encourage enlistment in the Virginia Regiment.43
Throughout the journey, Washington observed the country with the eyes of an experienced farmer who instinctively recognized which still-wooded lands would be best for meadows and which best for the cultivation of grain. He recorded the predominant types of trees on different areas of land, searching for the stands of cherry and walnut that grew in the richest soil, or the sugar trees and ash that indicated the next richest. His notes on locations suitable for gristmills and on the navigability of the rivers reflect his intention to establish ties between western farmers and eastern markets. When he met with Guyasuta, the Six Nations chief who had accompanied him on his first journey to the West in 1753, Washington assured him of the peaceful intentions of the Virginians and of their interest in the kind of trade the Indians welcomed, but their extended conversation about land and even the path of Washington’s journey surely exposed Washington’s design to settle large numbers of white farmers on the lands of Indian nations in the Ohio country. Washington recognized that despite the recent concessions of the Six Nations, other Indians in the region, including the Shawnees and Delawares, “view the Settlement of the People upon this River with an uneasy & jealous Eye.”44
His acquisition of western land revealed Washington at his most avaricious and competitive, but he anticipated no quick profits from the lands, the settlement of which he believed would determine the political order of the region as well as add to his fortune. Washington wanted large tracts to be organized under the direction of wealthy Virginia planters who had the resources and influence to introduce a particular model of commercial farming. He wanted to keep the lands out of the possession of officers who lacked the means to establish farms on their smaller grants, and he worked quietly and often anonymously to purchase the land rights of other veterans, aiming to claim so large a tract that it would be worth his expense of settling.45
To secure his claim to the Pennsylvania land, Washington entered into partnership with Gilbert Simpson, a former tenant at Mount Vernon, who in October 1772 proposed to settle the property with three or four laborers and a small number of horses and cows. Since the land was so well suited for corn and for meadows, Simpson thought the partnership would in a few years add something to Washington’s fortune and provide a good living for himself. Washington, somewhat uncharacteristically, agreed to the proposal, and Simpson moved to the land, known as Washington’s Bottom, along with an enslaved man, Orson, for whom Washington paid Simpson £55. Washington also sent two slaves from Mount Vernon to work the land, and he advised Simpson to plan for the long term in establishing a system of farming.46
Simpson proved incapable of any such planning, and within weeks of reaching the Pennsylvania lands in the spring of 1773, he threatened to abandon the project. He complained that one of the slaves sent by Washington was “a worthless hand” and the other “knew nothing of work.” Yet when Simpson returned to Loudoun County, he left the new farm in the charge of one of the enslaved laborers, who, he now assured Washington, was “as trusty I believe as most white men.” Simpson eventually returned to the Youghiogheny after Washington agreed to send two more enslaved young men from Mount Vernon, and work began on the mill that Washington considered essential for the success of the settlement. The partnership with Simpson, however, was a continuing frustration to Washington, who complained that he could never hear of the mill under the direction of “that confounded fellow” Simpson “without a degree of warmth & vexation at his extreame stupidity.” The outbreak of war with Indians drove away many of the surrounding white settlers who would have provided business for the mill, and Simpson’s continued mismanagement left Washington with little reason to believe that his reliance on a distant farm manager would succeed.47
In 1774 and 1775, the farm under Simpson’s supervision became the staging ground for an even more ambitious effort to settle farms on thousands of acres that Washington claimed as part of the bounties offered soldiers during the French and Indian War. After treaties with Indian nations removed some of the restrictions imposed by the Proclamation of 1763, Washington successfully petitioned the Virginia governor and council to authorize veterans of the Virginia Regiment to claim two hundred thousand acres south and east of the Ohio River. Again with the assistance of William Crawford, Washington gained control of an eventual thirty-three thousand acres. A grant of nearly eleven thousand acres along the Great Kanawha was the object of Washington’s first effort to establish farms and homesteads within the three years required by Virginia statute.48
Washington’s long-term objective was to lease the land to tenants, and he estimated that the tract would support up to three hundred families. In a broadside published in Virginia and Maryland newspapers, Washington offered prospective tenants generous time to clear and till the land before they would need to pay the moderate rents. He boasted of a “luxuriency of soil” and meadows “almost fit for the scythe.” Washington also investigated the possibility of recruiting German immigrants, so as “to settle my lands with Industrious people,” and he met with representatives of a large group of Scottish farmers looking for land in America. Neither of those ventures proved feasible in 1774, nor had the advertisements for tenants attracted settlers. In the meantime, Washington relied on his own resources and laborers to establish the first farms. In preparation, he purchased indentured servants and convicts in Baltimore and Alexandria. He also purchased at least two slaves to work on the lands in the Ohio country and sent others from Mount Vernon.49
After the outbreak of hostilities with Indians in the region delayed an initial expedition, Washington in January 1775 sent a skilled farmer, James Cleveland, who had worked as overseer of Mount Vernon’s River Plantation, to lead the effort to clear and fence five acres on each lot to be rented. Washington also sent two hired white laborers from Mount Vernon, William Stevens and William Skilling, to oversee the initial work. In written agreements with the several managers of the expedition to settle the claimed lands in the Ohio country, Washington attempted to ensure strict supervision of the indentured servants and slaves. He was particularly worried about controlling the white servants. Indeed, so sure was he that they would attempt to run away that he prepared descriptions to be placed in newspaper advertisements for their recovery. He advised William Stevens to pull all of the canoes out of the water once they reached the tract, without telling the servants the reason for it, and he authorized Cleveland to sell any of the white servants who proved difficult to manage. Washington’s concerns were justified. Four of the servants with Cleveland sought refuge with nearby Indians, and Cleveland spent more money on the recovery of runaway servants than the sale of their indentures would bring.50
The priority of the expedition was to meet the minimal requirements for the claim, but Washington also emphasized his desire to ensure the long-term productivity of the land. He urged the managers to build gristmills, to plant orchards, and to raise cattle. He also hoped to increase his own stock of draft animals and instructed Cleveland to “buy me all the Buffaloe Calves you can get and make them as gentle as possible,” so that he could raise a breeding line. By the fall of 1775, Cleveland had finished all the work required by Washington and secured upwards of fifteen thousand acres for his claim, but soon after the Indians’ defense of their land forced Cleveland to abandon the project. When one of Washington’s hired workers returned to the Great Kanawha site to retrieve the lone slave who had continued to work there, he discovered that Indians had burned the newly constructed buildings. Before he returned to Virginia, Cleveland sold some of the remaining servants and left the slaves owned by Washington with William Crawford in Pennsylvania. By that time, Washington had turned his attention almost entirely to his command of the Continental Army. Any new, significant work on his western lands would have to wait until after the Revolutionary War. Nothing about these first efforts to secure title to the Ohio lands undermined Washington’s belief in the lucrative value of western lands or weakened his determination to push agricultural settlement into territory possessed by Indians, but the experience further dissuaded him from directing his own agricultural initiatives from afar.51
On the eve of the Revolutionary War, Washington explained to a prominent English correspondent the perils of not closely managing a large Virginia estate, the nature of which was such “that without close application, it never fails bringing the proprietors in Debt annually, as Negroes must be clothed & fed, taxes paid, &c. &c. whether anything is made or not.” The efforts to settle western lands had taught Washington anew about the importance of that “close application” to the management of an agricultural estate and the need for personal supervision, especially of bound labor, if a planter was to extract the maximum gain from that labor and maintain authority over the laborers. He barely needed to add “that Stewards (in this Country at least) far removed from the inspection of a Superior, are scarce ever to be entrusted.” He pointed to the “melancholy proofs” in Virginia newspapers, which regularly advertised the sale of distressed estates. Washington knew the fate of those estates firsthand from his ongoing efforts to recover substantial debts owed by several families to him or to the Custis heirs, and his engagement in the business of those families further convinced him that the owners of extensive plantations must manage their own estates or suffer a similar fate.52
Washington offered these observations in a report on his administration of the court-directed sale of George Mercer’s valuable estates in Loudoun and Frederick Counties, which together included ten thousand acres of land, ninety slaves, and large herds of livestock. While the slaves attracted buyers, the land sold for less than anyone expected. “That Colo. Mercer has been a considerable loser in the management of his Estate here, nobody will deny,” noted Washington. Mercer, who with his brother owed more than £3,200 to the Custis estate in bonds now held by Washington, had moved to England and left his estates in the hands of overseers, one of whom Washington described as “a consummate rascal.” Washington’s efforts to recover debts owed by the brothers Bernard and Thomas Moore, both of whom had borrowed large sums from Martha Custis before her marriage to Washington, offered further evidence of how quickly loans not based on a reasonable assessment of agricultural capacity, compounded by the burden of five percent annual interest charges, could doom a once prosperous estate. As Washington told his neighbor John Posey, who owed him £700 and wanted to borrow £500 more, interest “woud be such a Moth in your Estate as woud inevitably destroy it.”53
Although he declined to extend more money to Posey, Washington understood that he was enmeshed in a complicated web of loans that connected him with many indebted gentry families and that the failure of one endangered many others. He offered Posey the only favor in his power, which was to delay pressing for repayment as long as he could without endangering his own financial well-being. Like Posey, James Mercer and Bernard Moore begged for Washington’s indulgence as they waited to receive payments from their own debtors and as they held onto sufficient land and slaves to produce crops that might help them reduce their debts. Washington as often as not relented, whether out of sympathy with the frequent appeals to long-standing family ties or out of recognition that foreclosure seldom delivered him the full amount owed. He was willing to loan money or delay collection as long as there was some possibility his patience would prevent the dispersal of an estate. If it became necessary to sell off an estate’s assets, he advised starting “with the Sales of such things as can be best spared, & so raising to Negroes, & even Land if requisite.”54
In the recovery of large debts and as executor of less troubled estates, Washington repeatedly participated in the sale of slaves, and he became invested in enslaved laborers in ways that extended far beyond the ownership of those whose labor he controlled at Mount Vernon. Washington had seldom sold slaves he owned, and then only as punishment for individuals he wanted to remove from his estate. For indebted Virginia planters, however, slaves were often the most easily liquidated property they owned, and the Mercers, the Moores, and John Posey all offered Washington slaves as security on loans or as payments on their debts to him. Thomas Moore offered to transfer ownership of slaves rather than force Washington to wait until he had the money to reduce his debt to the Custis heirs. James Mercer assured Washington that “the Slaves included in your mortgage are equal to any in the Colony, for which I wou’d not take double the Sum they are engaged for.” Washington reluctantly accepted the mortgage from Mercer despite his concern that slaves were “a very uncertain & precarious Security.” After Bernard Moore sold nearly all of his estate, he asked Washington and other friends to loan him money without interest for the purchase of slaves to work what land he had left. Washington gave Moore £100 “to be laid out in Negroes for his use, and Wifes; after the decease of whom, to be sold for the benifit of myself & other’s.”55
Almost inevitably, the acceptance of property in slaves as security for debts led to the sale and forced relocation of some of those enslaved individuals, and Washington often participated in such transactions. When Thomas Moore offered his entire King William County estate for sale in 1770, Washington purchased a man, Frank, and a boy, James, along with a bay mare, and credited Moore’s account for the combined prices. Washington was one of twenty managers of a lottery by which much of Bernard Moore’s estate, including more than fifty slaves, was sold in December 1769, although the four tickets Washington purchased did not win him either slaves or land. Washington had been more directly involved in the recent sale of much of John Posey’s estate, which included “about twenty-five choice SLAVES, consisting of men, women, and children,” as well as valuable land in Fairfax County.56
The eccentric and unstable Posey had let his estate fall into such disrepair that Washington pressured him to sell his assets in October 1769 before a court ordered him to liquidate them. Washington urged another of Posey’s creditors to support an immediate sale, arguing “it is a fact very well known that his Negroes & stock never can be disposed of at a more favourable juncture than in the Fall when they are fat and lusty and must soon fall of [f] unless well fed which I am sure cannot happen in the present case for very good reasons too obvious to mention.” Posey, for once, was “perfectly Sober” when he agreed to the sale on the condition that Washington would attend. A widely distributed notice announced “the money arising from the sales to be paid into the hands of George Washington.” At the sale, Washington secured for himself two hundred acres adjacent to Mount Vernon. He purchased none of Posey’s slaves, but the proceeds from their sale helped to pay off the debt to Washington, just as Posey’s sale of slaves in 1767 had provided an initial payment to Washington.57
Washington also managed the public sale of slaves when he served as executor of estates, such as that of Thomas Colvill. Soon after Colvill’s death, Washington placed an advertisement in the Virginia Gazette for the “Sale of Colo. Colvills Negroes,” and he attended the sale in February 1767. After the death of Colvill’s wife, Frances, Washington managed the public sale of the several remaining slaves bequeathed to her. At that sale at Fairfax County courthouse in February 1773, Washington purchased two slaves: Ned, whom he sent to work with the field laborers at River Plantation, and Murria, a young girl.58
In November 1774, Washington was the sole manager of the public auction of an exceptionally large number of slaves owned by George Mercer. Upon arriving at Mercer’s lands in Frederick County, Washington was disappointed to find only ninety slaves for auction when a hundred and ten had been promised, but he soon reported, “The Negros, Horses, and Stock, have all sold exceeding high.” Washington and John Tayloe, who also held Mercer’s power of attorney but did not participate in the auction, had placed in the Virginia Gazette notice of the sale with a description of the fertile lands and the large number of livestock to be auctioned in addition to the slaves. “Among the slaves are two good Blacksmiths, two Carpenters, and an exceeding trusty and skilful waggoner.” Years later, Mercer’s overseer boasted that he had made the slaves “all Look well from the greatest to the Least young and old according to their ages.” It was probably the largest slave sale in which Washington had participated since he had bought slaves from the ships of traders from Africa in 1759 and 1761, and it was certainly the largest sale he ever directed.59
Washington was by 1775 more deeply invested in slavery than ever before. Enslaved laborers carried out most of the work on his estate, including the range of tasks required for wheat cultivation and processing. Their labor made possible various initiatives to achieve some measure of commercial independence for his estate. Washington engaged in and gained from a range of financial transactions in which Virginia planters used slaves as commodities and securities. In his purchase and relocation of slaves to help settle his western land claims, and in his support for the hire of enslaved laborers to construct canals around the falls of the Potomac, Washington pointed to the territorial expansion of slavery.60
Only once in the years before the Revolutionary War, at the height of the imperial crisis in 1774, did Washington obliquely acknowledge any fundamental injustice of race-based slavery, when he warned that British assertions of political authority over the colonies threatened to “make us as tame, & abject Slaves, as the Blacks we Rule over with such arbitrary Sway.” The analogy between British policy and enslavement was a common, even clichéd, element of patriot rhetoric, often displayed without irony and without reference to the slavery found throughout the British colonies. What set Washington’s comment apart was its reference to his own unchecked authority over the slaves at his estate. Still, this recognition of his arbitrary sway had no discernible impact on his investment in enslaved labor in the years before the Revolutionary War.61
By the early months of 1775, Washington had reason to believe that he had protected his estate and his investments in land and labor against the impact of an increasingly likely rupture with Great Britain. He had effectively removed his estate from the narrow limits of a colonial, staple economy and reoriented it toward growing markets throughout the Atlantic. He proved to be skilled at agricultural innovation and at exercising authority over enslaved laborers as they carried out the varied tasks of grain cultivation and domestic manufactures. Aside from his efforts to settle his claimed land to the west, Washington heeded his own advice about the indispensable need for a landowner’s direct management and supervision of a Virginia estate. His success in the transition to wheat and in the adoption of the New Husbandry methods of cultivation persuaded him that the improvements in farming demonstrated at Mount Vernon would promote the establishment of an ordered agricultural society and secure commercial opportunities for the “rising empire” he imagined for Virginia and the other colonies joined in a Continental Congress.