Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (11 page)

George Washington had long seemed to harbor a lust for land—he bought land whenever he could, and he took part in several ventures with other planters to claim lands in the West. One of these ventures saw him join a group of officials in Britain and big planters in Virginia; another, in which he took the lead, sought to bring into cultivation the Great Dismal Swamp, along the North Carolina border. In both efforts, he and his partners believed that there was money to be made; in both, planters acted as speculators. Claiming large bodies of land that could be broken up and sold to those easterners eager for their own plantations and farms was by this time an old story in the English colonies. This drive for owning land resembled a natural force, with its own history and rationale. The ownership of land had for centuries provided a measure for status and class, and animated the English as few things ever had.

There were other reasons for the strivings of Virginians to gather more acres for themselves. For all who planted tobacco suffered from
the same disability: Fields in which tobacco was grown began to lose their fertility after two or three years of the crop. Over a long period, the loss of good plants became markedly serious.
¹⁰

If tobacco drove the desire for land, so also did it affect the routine of day-to-day life. Growing tobacco taxed planters’ patience, a feeling that often gave way to a realization that the whole process was beyond anyone’s control. Resignation followed when, as frequently happened, nature failed to cooperate with planters’ efforts. Little could be done in the face of drought that shriveled up a once promising field; nor could the effects of a sustained rain that virtually drowned the crop be avoided. Tobacco required a large labor force, careful planning in putting it in, and shrewd timing in its harvest. Early in the year, once the cold gave way to warmer temperatures, slaves under close supervision inserted seeds into planting beds. The sites for these plantings called for good soil and nearby water; hence, the banks of runs or small streams were favored places. The seedlings appeared a couple of weeks later, if the weather had warmed; they were then transplanted into small hills, usually knee-high, and carefully located. Once they reached a foot or two in height, they were topped, and excess leaves removed. Over the course of the next few months, slaves picked off worms and suckers and small limbs that yielded no leaves. Harvesting the crop required experience and judgment from the planter and his overseers. If timing was not everything in harvesting tobacco, it must have seemed so to those who had to gauge when stems must be cut. The color of leaves gave some direction—the right shade of green was decisive. Plants that remained in the ground too long often proved to be brittle and the leaf in danger of flaking off; plants taken too early might suffer mildew.

Once cut, the stems, leaves attached, were stacked in bunches and then hung from rope for curing in a tobacco house. Some time later—from a few days to weeks—they would be pushed into hogsheads and shipped to warehouses to be inspected by colonial authorities. Shipping from the coastal areas—the Tidewater—found the hogsheads transported in drays pulled by horses. Planters in the Piedmont sometimes improvised by driving pegs into the ends of hogsheads and then rolling them to the houses of storage and inspection.

The difficulties in cultivating tobacco were well known, and most of them—the doubtful gifts of nature, excessive rain, drought, the
infestations of insects—were inevitable. Slaves did most of the work involving these problems, as well as the ordinary labor of cultivation, and handled the transport of hogsheads to the points of exportation. Most of the time, they did these tasks well, though some slaves shirked, feigning ignorance when they were ordered to do some tasks. And inevitably some fell sick or died, and still others ran away. On the whole, however, tobacco planters declared themselves satisfied with their slaves and after slavery was well established showed no desire to find another system of labor. As for the burdens an unreliable natural world imposed upon them, these planters remained steady in the knowledge that there was little they could do but carry on. Man and nature in Virginia may have been troublesome, but most planters thought they could bring them under control most of the time.
¹¹

There was no such assurance in the cycle that began with harvesting and ended with selling. That part of the world of tobacco, the marketing of the crop, offered obstacles that often could not be avoided. The market, after all, was overseas in Britain, and by the middle of the century primarily on the European continent. Under the terms of the Navigation Acts, tobacco had to be shipped to a British port; it was an enumerated commodity under a parliamentary statute. Planters new to the business found it intractable in one major respect: They had no sure way to control prices.

For much of the seventeenth century and during the first decades of the eighteenth, most planters relied on British firms to sell their crop under a consignment system. Merchants they never laid eyes on sent ships to the Chesapeake to transport the tobacco to Europe, where they sold it. Under the consignment system, the planters owned the tobacco until it was finally sold by these British firms to whom it was consigned. The British merchants assumed none of the risk in this process, and if a ship went down or in times of war was captured by the enemy—almost always the French—or was damaged in transit, the planter took the loss of cargo. As for the price received when it was sold, the far-off merchant firms decided on when to sell, and to whom, and collected a commission as the planters’ agents. Planters bore all of the costs of the system—insurance, duties imposed by the English state under the law, and, when the merchant provided additional services, paying bills on planters’ accounts (when in effect they acted as bankers). The English firms frequently served as suppliers as well, buying
on planters’ accounts a large variety of goods, clothing, medicines, tools, leather goods, and much more.

In performing these services, they made life easier for planters. The English firms knew the retailers in London and elsewhere who sold the goods the planters wanted. Some planters developed close relations with merchants, but they were always at a disadvantage in dealing with them. Relying on a consignment house may have cut through their ignorance of English markets and prices and saved them the inconvenience of writing many letters with orders for a vast array of goods. But in placing orders with British firms, planters rarely knew what prices they would pay, and if they spent more on goods than their tobacco brought in, they incurred horrific debts. It was the rare planter entangled in the webs of the consignment world who did not find himself in debt.

Changes involving the marketing of tobacco and the buying of European goods came not so much from a concern about the precariousness of planters’ financial lives as from business conditions in Britain and the Continent. The European market grew in importance in the eighteenth century, and as it did, fresh ways of tapping Chesapeake production appeared, or more accurately were strengthened. For, from seventeenth-century beginnings, British firms came to acquire tobacco by a second method: A factor who lived in Virginia bought the planter’s tobacco and sold him British goods in his store. Initially the factors were English, or occasionally Americans with ties to English houses, but by the middle of the eighteenth century they commonly were Scots, as Glasgow entered the business, purchasing the crop in the Chesapeake and reexporting it to the Continent, usually to France.
¹²

Although Washington had given up the planting of tobacco in his Mount Vernon fields by 1766, he remained deeply interested in all aspects of the business, from planting to selling the crop; for his tobacco plantations in York and neighboring counties continued in the old way. They had always brought greater profits than his own efforts, even after Joseph Valentine, the skillful manager of his York plantations, died. James Hill, Valentine’s successor, seemed capable of carrying on much as Valentine had, and he suggested to Washington that tobacco grown in the York River plantations should not be abandoned. There was a second reason to stay with tobacco there: Washington
was responsible for the estate Martha Washington’s children would inherit, and their fortunes were tied to tobacco. He had no intention of taking chances with their property or their futures.

Yet the business of tobacco often turned Washington’s eyes away from the York plantations to the British merchant firms in London and also, at times, to merchants in Liverpool, Glasgow, and—in the half-dozen years before the Revolution—the West Indies and the Chesapeake. For most of the period before the Revolution, Robert Cary and Company, a London consignment house, took most of his tobacco. In a sense, he inherited his ties to Robert Cary’s firm, for it had handled the tobacco shipped from the York River plantations that came to him when he married. Joseph Valentine was accustomed to dealing with the captains of the ships sent out by Robert Cary, and Washington, though he seems not to have solicited Valentine’s advice, slipped easily into the groove running from Virginia to Cary’s London.
¹³

Enough of Robert Cary’s communications to Washington survive to justify the conclusion that Robert Cary and Company was better at selling English goods to Washington than it was at selling his tobacco. Washington did not hesitate to sound his complaints to the firm, and he continued to express them until the Revolutionary War broke the connection. It did not take him long to discover that at times his tobacco was sold by Cary for lesser prices than others received. He compared prices with George William Fairfax, his friend and neighbor, finding in this case that he was the loser. More commonly, he relied on what he learned from the English market itself. The subject drew the interest of planters in Virginia, and he had a variety of sources of information—ship captains, for example—who sailed up the Chesapeake and into the Potomac. Williamsburg, which he visited several times every year, was an even better source. Planters held most of the seats in the Burgesses, and Virginia merchants also congregated in the town several times a year to discuss business. Robert Cary and Company itself gave him the most exact information about the sale of his own crop, information that provoked responses ranging from patient disappointment to bitter comments, including threats to find a British house that commanded higher prices.

The longer Washington shipped to Robert Cary and Company, the longer his list of complaints about the price paid for his tobacco became; and with every justification Cary offered, Washington’s response grew
harsher. At one point in their correspondence, Cary asked that the stem be removed from the leaf before it was packed into Washington’s hogsheads. Removing the stem reduced the weight and, perhaps as important, took more labor. Washington insisted that he should not be required to prepare his tobacco in such a way—many others did not—and implied that Cary’s request was one more example of the unfair treatment meted out to him. He clearly felt that there had been unfairness in their business relations, and he drove home the point by saying that his loyalty to the firm had cost him money. Part of his dissatisfaction arose from the fact that ships from England—at least Cary’s ships—were sent only to the lower bay, where they loaded York River tobacco but did not venture to the Potomac. What could a planter such as himself do if the ships did not come up the bay? The answer, usually not given by Robert Cary, was that Potomac River tobacco should be shipped down to the York or wait, sometimes for months, until ships sailed up to collect it. The uncertainty spurred Washington’s anger; as he reminded Cary on one occasion, “I have refused such of my Potomac Tobacco as was intended for you, to other Ships upon Liberty by which means I shall miss the Convoy, & enhance the Insurance I fear.”
¹⁴

Managing an estate filled Washington’s days with work of surprising scope, as did buying and selling, and it tied him into local and British networks. He bought land all over Virginia and in the West, but the needs of consumption found him looking overseas more, trying to obtain the best price for his tobacco and, soon after his beginning in business, his wheat, corn, and fish. It also found him buying and buying—seemingly everything a wealthy planter wanted: clothing, household goods, plantation equipment, wine, fine foods, and much more.

To meet these requirements of the planter’s life, he was frequently in the saddle riding in his fields, or in his coach on his way to Williamsburg or the York River plantations that marriage to Martha Custis had brought him. Judging from the extent and size of his correspondence, he sat at his desk as often as on a horse. For most communication, if not face-to-face, happened through the post, and he wrote and heard from neighbors as well as merchants and others across the Atlantic.

This short summary only hints at the levels of activity in his daily existence. There were other occupations. His family—his wife, Martha,
and her children, his wards—gave him his greatest satisfaction and happiness.
¹⁵

John Parke Custis, usually called Jack, absorbed more of Washington’s time than Patsy did, and in the course of his short life worried him in ways that his sister did not. Martha Washington loved both children with a passion marked by fear that she might lose one or both. It was a common feeling among parents in Virginia, in Martha’s case perhaps more than usual because she was a widow.

Jack was a boy of five years when his mother married Washington. His formal education began in earnest a few years later. Who taught him to read and write is not known, but not long after coming to Mount Vernon, he was put under the tutelage of Walter Magowan, who lived on the plantation. Magowan, a Scot, introduced Jack to Latin and seems to have begun to open up Greek for him as well. Magowan left Mount Vernon in 1761, creating an opening for a new tutor.