Modern documentary editors pride themselves, and rightly so, on their scrupulous fidelity to the original source text. At the Washington Papers project at the University of Virginia, where I have worked since 1997, editors prepare transcriptions that faithfully reproduce George Washington’s writing with all of its misspellings, abbreviations, contractions, and infelicities of grammar and style. Though he was an intelligent and well-read man, in the liberal arts Washington was largely self-taught rather than formally educated—and this is apparent in his letters (especially those he wrote early in life). His writings also reflected the generally loose and inconsistent nature of eighteenth-century orthography.
Unfortunately, scrupulously literal transcriptions can sometimes appear inscrutable to twenty-first-century eyes and minds. It is enough to interpret eighteenth-century styles of writing and speech without having to wade through inadvertent errors, abbreviations, contractions, and other impediments to understanding. For that reason, in rendering letters to and from Washington I have taken the liberty of silently correcting minor spelling errors and expanding abbreviations and contractions in order to enhance readability.
CURRENCY
Colonial and early-American currency can be bewildering. Colonial governments sought to and often did issue paper currencies in bids to stabilize commerce, but the British imposition of Currency Acts in 1751 and 1764 undermined their ability to do so. As a result, Americans often had to rely on commodity exchange notes, such as tobacco notes, and hard money minted abroad, such as Spanish silver dollars. For their part, British merchants paid American farmers not in cash but in credit.
Increasing the confusion was the fact that colonial governments typically issued their currencies in British denominations, a practice some states continued during the war and in the Confederation period; consequently, in references to pounds, shillings, and pence the distinction between colonial and state currencies or pounds sterling is often unclear. After the war began and before the adoption of the Constitution, the United States was awash in paper and hard currencies (the latter frequently cut into bills) of all imaginable varieties alongside the new but much-battered dollar. Contemporaries struggled to understand the worth of the different currencies, and so commerce typically degenerated into barter or the exchange of commodities in kind. Even after the Constitution was established with a single national currency, that currency remained unstable for some time and other forms of hard and paper currency did not immediately fall out of circulation.
The confusion is to some degree reflected in this book. Symbols for pounds and dollars appear interchangeably because Washington, like his countrymen, used these and other currencies at different times of his life. In this book, references to pounds almost always refer to Virginia currency rather than to pounds sterling, while dollars are Continental and then (after the Constitution) American dollars. Other currencies, though, sometimes appear as well.