His Excellency: George Washington (10 page)

He also chose to act in a direct and personal fashion to recover his own independence from Cary & Company. Starting in 1766, he abandoned tobacco as his cash crop at Mount Vernon, one of the first of the major Virginia planters to make the change. From now on he would grow wheat, construct his own mill to grind it into flour, and sell the flour in Alexandria and Norfolk. Nor was that all. He built his own schooner—or, rather, had slaves build it for him—to harvest the herring and shad of the Potomac and sell the fish locally or in the Caribbean. He eventually purchased a ship, which he christened
The Farmer,
to carry his flour, fish, and corn to such distant markets as Lisbon. Along the way, he developed a full-scale spinning and weaving operation at Mount Vernon to produce linen and wool fabric for workers’ clothing. He was not completely free of tobacco, since it remained the chief crop in his Custis plantations. Nor was he completely free of Cary & Company, which continued to fill annual orders for Washington until 1774, though usually for smaller shipments. Despite these lingering London dependencies, his preferred course after 1765 made it quite clear that this was a man determined to defy the pattern of indebtedness that swallowed up so much of the Virginia planter class, and hell-bent on freeing himself from the clutches of Robert Cary. If only in retrospect, he was already in personal rebellion against the slavish seductions of the British Empire.
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FACING WEST

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N THE FIRST
renovation of Mount Vernon, completed in 1759, the main entrance was switched from the east to the west side of the mansion. There were architectural and landscaping reasons for the change, to be sure, but the symbolism of the switch, from an eastward to a westward facing, accurately expressed one of Washington’s deepest convictions; namely, that the future lay in those wild and wooded lands of the Ohio Country that he had explored and fought over as a young man. Gaining control of the vast American interior, after all, had been the central achievement of the French and Indian War, at least as Washington understood it. When John Posey, one of his foxhunting companions, complained about the impoverished condition of his own debt-ridden plantation, Washington urged him to abandon his eastern prejudices and make a fresh start: “there is a large Field before you,” he explained, “an opening prospect in the back Country for Adventurers . . . where an enterprising Man with very little Money may lay the foundation of a Noble Estate in the New Settlements upon Monongahela for himself and posterity.” Even while ensconced on the eastern edge of the continent at Mount Vernon, Washington spent a good deal of his time and energy dreaming and scheming about virgin land over the western horizon.
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The dreaming received considerable inspiration when Washington looked out his back door at the majestic view Mount Vernon afforded of the Potomac. Though it might seem bizarre to modern students of American geography, Washington shared the eighteenth-century version of “Potomac fever” that was especially virulent among Virginians, believing that the very river that flowed past his mansion provided the most direct access to the interior waterways of North America. The illusion probably derived its credibility from the long-standing claim that the western borders of the Old Dominion extended to the Mississippi, or even to the Pacific, producing a habit of mind that regarded Virginia as the gateway to the West. Washington embraced this illusion with passionate intensity—so did Jefferson—and starting in 1762 began joining and leading several organizations for improving navigation on the upstream sections of the river. The Potomac mythology stayed with him all his life. (It even played a significant role in the decision to locate the national capital on the Potomac in 1790.) His strenuous efforts yielded no practical results—the natural water route to the interior did not exist, and the man-made version, the Erie Canal, turned out to be in New York—but they did reveal where his thoughts were flowing.
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In 1763 he briefly turned his attention south to an undeveloped plot of ground rather ominously called the Dismal Swamp, which was a geological anomaly, a kind of Louisiana bayou mistakenly plopped down on the border of Virginia and North Carolina. He joined a group of ten investors, most members of the Virginia Council or House of Burgesses, who used their influence as insiders to purchase forty thousand acres of swampland that they proposed to drain and develop. Each investor also agreed to provide five slaves to do the draining and dredging. As with his Potomac improvements, nothing much came of this venture, though Washington held on to his four thousand acres until 1795. An aberration within his more enduring obsession with western land, the story of the Dismal Swamp Company does expose his voracious appetite for acreage of any and all sorts, along with his willingness to use political connections in Williamsburg to get what he wanted.
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But the big prize lay over the mountains. Washington’s several initiatives to acquire tracts in the Ohio Country crisscrossed in dizzying patterns of speculation, and the jurisdictional problem created by border disputes between Virginia and Pennsylvania, the overlapping claims of different Indian tribes, and the shifting policies of the British government all enhanced the confusion. But at bottom lurked a basic conflict about the future of the Ohio Country: Washington believed it was open to settlement; the British government believed it was closed; and the Indians believed it was theirs.
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In 1763, George III issued a proclamation, in effect making the enormous region from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi to the western slope of the Appalachians an Indian reservation, closed to Anglo-American settlers. From the beginning, Washington regarded the proclamation as a preposterous joke. “I can never look upon that Proclamation in any other light,” he acknowledged, “than as a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians.” He regarded the Indian tribes of the region as a series of holding companies destined to be displaced as the growing wave of white settlers flowed over the Alleghenies. There was nothing right or wrong about this development, as he saw it. It was simply and obviously inevitable. The Indians, understandably and even justifiably, would resist. After all, they had dominated the region for several centuries. But they would lose, not because they were wrong, but because they were, or soon would be, outnumbered. (Later on, during his presidency, he would attempt to guarantee tribal control over Indian enclaves, his effort to make a moral statement amidst a relentlessly realistic diagnosis of the demographic facts.) And if the strategists in London chose to block this manifest destiny, they were either stupid, not understanding what the French and Indian War had won, or sinister, plotting to reserve the bounty of the American interior for themselves, all the while confining the colonists to the Atlantic coastline.
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Washington’s most grandiose western venture, called the Mississippi Land Company, was launched in 1763, the very year of George III’s proclamation. Fifty investors requested proprietary control over 2.5 million acres on both sides of the Ohio River. In 1765 the company retained a London agent to lobby the Privy Council and Parliament on behalf of their proposal, which envisioned nothing less than the creation of a feudal kingdom in the Ohio Valley with the settlers as serfs and the owners as lords. The British ministry not only rejected the proposal, claiming such a grant would violate treaties recently signed with the Iroquois and Cherokee, but then, in 1770, approved a similar request for 2.5 million acres by a group of English investors to create a whole new colony called Vandalia in the same region. Washington wrote off his investment as a loss in 1772, eventually describing the experience as clear evidence of the British government’s “malignant disposition towards Americans.”
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His singular triumph, in fact the result of multiple efforts over thirteen years of complex negotiations, was largely a product of his status as a veteran of the French and Indian War. In 1754, during the darkest days of the war, Governor Dinwiddie had issued a proclamation making available 200,000 acres of “bounty land” on the east side of the Ohio River to Virginians who answered the call. Moreover, the infamous Proclamation of 1763 had included one vaguely worded provision, granting 5,000 acres apiece to former officers who had served the cause. (The location of the land was never made clear.) Washington was relentless in pressing his claims according to these two proclamations. He organized the veterans of the Virginia Regiment and led the political fight in Williamsburg for patents on plots of land bordering the Ohio and Great Kanawha Rivers in what are now southwestern Pennsylvania, southeastern Ohio, and northwestern West Virginia. In the fall of 1770 he personally led an exploratory surveying expedition to the Ohio and Great Kanawha, and the following year commissioned William Crawford, another veteran of the regiment, to complete the survey. He devised a scheme, eventually abandoned, to transport immigrants from Germany as indentured servants who would settle his own plots and thereby deter poachers. When that idea fizzled, he gave orders to purchase ten white servants, four of them convicts in the Baltimore jail, to occupy his land on the Great Kanawha. The total domain he claimed for himself, all choice bottomland, exceeded twenty thousand acres.
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There were two sour notes. The first came from several veterans, who believed that Washington’s land was too choice, meaning that he had reserved the most fertile acreage bordering the rivers for himself and relegated the other claimants to less valuable plots. Washington effectively admitted the accusation was true, later acknowledging that he had taken “the cream of the country.” But when one disgruntled veteran confronted him with the charge, it provoked a thunderous rebuke: “As I am not accustomed to receive such from any Man, nor would have taken the same language from you personally. . . . All my concerns is that I ever engag’d in behalf of so ungrateful & dirty a fellow as you are.” As Washington saw it, he was the senior officer of the regiment who had almost single-handedly managed the entire operation to acquire the land. In effect, he deserved what he took. And everyone who questioned his integrity on any matter involving his own self-interest triggered internal explosions of seismic proportions.
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The other sour note came from Washington himself. As different governors in Virginia and different ministries in London came and went, different interpretations of British policy toward the American interior also came and went. The core issue was the Proclamation of 1763, which in one version rendered all of Washington’s western claims null and void, all his time and energy wasted, because London had declared that the entire Ohio Country was off-limits to settlement. Washington, of course, regarded this version of British policy as a massive delusion that was also wholly unenforceable. The British monarch could proclaim whatever he wished, but the practical reality was that thousands of colonial settlers were swarming across the Alleghenies every year, establishing their claims, not by any legal appeal to colonial or British authority, but by the physical act of occupying and cultivating the land: “What Inducements have Men to explore uninhabited Wilds but the prospect of getting good Lands?” he asked. “Would any Man waste his time, expose his Fortune, nay life, in search of this if he was to share the good and the bad with those that came after him. Surely no!” Washington believed there was a race going on for the bounty of half a continent. If he were to play by British rules, which refused to recognize the race was even occurring, others who ignored the rules would claim the bounty. His solution, elegantly simple, was to regard the restrictive British policies as superfluous and to act on the assumption that, in the end, no one could stop him.
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Several biographers have looked upon this extended episode of land acquisitions as an unseemly and perhaps uncharacteristic display of personal avarice, mostly because they are judging Washington against his later and legendary reputation for self-denial, or against some modern, guilt-driven standard for treatment of Native Americans. In fact, Washington’s avid pursuit of acreage, like his attitude toward slavery, was rather typical of Virginia’s planter class. He was simply more diligent in his quest than most. And his resolutely realistic assessment of the Indians’ eventual fate was part and parcel of his instinctive aversion to sentimentalism and all moralistic brands of idealism, an instinct that deservedly won plaudits in later contexts, as disappointing as it was in this one.

Two more telling and less judgmental points have greater resonance for our understanding of the different ingredients that would shape Washington’s character. The first is that he retained his youthful conviction that careers, fortunes, and the decisive developments in America’s future lay in the West, on a continental stage so large and unexplored that no one fully fathomed its potential. This was a prize worth fighting for. The second is that the interest of the American colonies and the interest of the British Empire, so long presumed to be overlapping, were in fact mutually exclusive on this seminal issue. Constitutional niceties did not concern him. The more elemental reality was that the colonies needed to expand and grow, and the British government was determined to block that expansion and stifle that growth.

Once again there was a personal edge to that conviction. In 1774, Washington learned that Earl Hillsborough, secretary of state for the American colonies, had ruled that land grants to veterans of the French and Indian War promised in the Proclamation of 1763 would be restricted to British regulars. Washington greeted the news with contempt: “I conceive the services of a Provincial officer as worthy of reward as a regular one,” he observed, “and can only be witheld from him with injustice.” And since Hillsborough’s decision was, as he put it, “founded equally in Malice, absurdity, & error,” Washington felt no obligation to obey it. As far as the American West was concerned, he was already declaring his independence.
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