His Excellency: George Washington (9 page)

His one concession to the humanity of his slave workers, an attitude shared by Jefferson and many of the wealthier Virginia planters, was that he would not sell them without their consent if it broke up families. He was also solicitous about their health, warning overseers not to overwork them in bad weather and taking personal charge if disease broke out in the slave quarters. But even here his motives were mixed, for if his slaves were incapacitated for an extended period, or died, it hurt the productivity of his plantation. There were trusted slaves who enjoyed considerable freedom of movement and personal discretion, like his servant Billy Lee, and a favorite messenger empowered to make minor business transactions named Mulatto Jack. But these were the exceptions. Most of the slaves who worked his farms he treated as cattle and referred to only by their first names. His instructions concerning the criteria for purchasing new slaves expressed his detached attitude with unintended candor: “Let there be two thirds of them Males, the other third Females. . . . All of them to be straight Limb’d & in every respect strong and likely, with good teeth & good Countenances—to be sufficiently provided with cloathes.”
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If his views on slavery were typical of his time and his class, there was one area in which he proved an exception to the pattern of behavior expected of a prominent Virginia gentleman: he was excessively and conspicuously assiduous in the defense of his own interests, especially when he suspected he was being cheated out of money or land. He took out an indictment against the local iron maker for fraud when he concluded, wrongly as it turned out, that the iron had been improperly weighed. He disputed the terms of a contract to purchase Clifton’s Neck, one of the parcels adjoining Mount Vernon, generating a tangled legal conflict that stayed in the courts for thirty years. He accused his wine dealer of thievery for not filling one cask of Madeira to the top. Ship captains delivering his wheat and flour for sale in the Caribbean never got the price he thought he deserved. When he hired a friend, Valentine Crawford, to assist in the management of his western lands, he drafted the following instructions:

as you are now receiving my Money, your time is not your own; and that every day or hour misapplied, is a loss to me, do not therefore under a belief that, as a friendship has long subsisted between us, many things may be overlooked in you. . . . I shall consider you in no other light than as a Man who has engaged his time and Service to conduct and manage my Interest . . . and shall seek redress if you do not, just as soon from you as an entire stranger.
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Neither Jefferson nor most other members of Virginia’s planter elite could have written such words, for they convey an obsessive concern with his own economic interests that no proper gentleman was supposed to feel, much less express so directly. (Perhaps this is the underlying reason why Jefferson and so many other Virginia planters would die in debt, and Washington would die a very wealthy man.) The picture one conjures up on the basis of this kind of evidence contrasts completely with the Peale portrait of a serenely nonchalant Virginia squire, about to discard his old uniform for his riding clothes, then go off with his horses and hounds. This is not a man “to the manor born,” but a recently arrived aristocrat who, before he married a fortune, was accustomed to scrambling, literally dodging bullets; a man unwilling, indeed unable, to take anything for granted. It is not that he was insecure, quite the opposite; but the security he enjoyed had a sharp edge designed to clear the ground around it of any and all threats to its survival. He is the kind of man who will impose impossibly meticulous expectations on his overseers, even on his hounds, and always come away disappointed in their performance. Finally, this is the kind of man who will regard any failure to meet his exacting standards as a personal affront, and persistent failure as evidence of a conspiracy to deprive him of what is rightfully his. Pity the London merchant who has to deal with him.
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THE EMPIRE’S FACE

W
ASHINGTON’S MAN
in London was Robert Cary, head of Cary & Company, one of the city’s largest and most successful mercantile houses. The Cary connection was another legacy of the Custis estate, since the firm had handled the business of Martha’s first husband, as well as her own business during her brief time as a widow. One of Washington’s earliest letters to Cary set the tone and defined the subsequent direction of the relationship. He complained about the price his first tobacco shipment received and about the multiple charges for shipping, insurance, and freight, plus Cary’s own commission. This was not the kind of arrangement that Washington had expected, and from the very start he threatened to take his business elsewhere. “I shall be candid in telling you,” he warned, “that duty to the Charge with which I am entrusted as well as self Interest will incline me to abide by those who gives the greatest proof of their Abilities.”
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His reference to “the Charge with which I am entrusted” did not just mean his patriarchal responsibility for Martha, Jackie, and Patsy. It also meant the Custis estate, three plantations totaling eighteen thousand acres spread out along the York River in the Tidewater region of Virginia, lands that were worked by more than two hundred, eventually nearly three hundred, slaves. His marriage to Martha made Washington the legal owner of one-third of these “dower plantations,” and his status as legal guardian of her children made him responsible for managing the other two-thirds. Mount Vernon may have been his signature statement as a new member of the planter elite, but the Custis plantations in the Tidewater, devoted almost entirely to tobacco, produced the bulk of his cash crop.
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And it was the size of his annual tobacco production that made him eligible for the services of Cary & Company. Smaller growers, and by the middle of the eighteenth century the majority of Virginia planters, sold their crops to domestic buyers and purchased most of their consumer goods locally. But the planters with the largest estates, those at the very top of the social pyramid, preferred the consignment system, whereby they consigned or entrusted sale of their crop to mercantile houses in England. At least theoretically, this arrangement assured the highest price for one’s crop. But the greatest advantage of the consignment system was the access it offered to London’s shops and stores.

A consumer revolution was brewing in England, producing newly affordable commodities like Wedgwood china for a burgeoning middle-class market. By consigning his tobacco crop to Robert Cary, Washington was joining the elite within the Virginia elite, who could wear the latest English fashions and, in their own provincial world, consume just as conspicuously as members of polite society back at the metropolitan center of the empire in London. A letter from Washington to Cary conveys the flavor of the enterprise: “Mrs. Washington would take it as a favor, if you would direct Mrs. Shelby to send her a fashionable Summer Cloak & Hatt, a black silk apron . . . and a pair of French bead Earings and Necklace—and I should be obliged to you for sending me a dozen and a half Water Plates (Pewter) with my Crest engraved.”
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Even more eloquent as testimonials to the spending frenzy going on at Mount Vernon were the invoices of goods that were boxed, crated, and shipped by Cary & Company during the early 1760s, when Washington was furnishing and embellishing the house. A veritable cascade of essentials and fineries came pouring in: dessert glasses by the dozen, a hogskin hunting saddle, a custom-made mahogany case filled with sixteen decanters, a 124-pound cheese, sterling silver knives and forks with ivory handles, satin bonnets, custard cups, snuff, felt hats, engraved stationery, wineglasses by the score, prints of foxhunts in the English countryside, even six bottles of Greenough’s Tincture with accompanying sponge brushes to clean Washington’s notoriously bad teeth. In an average year Washington ordered more than £300 worth of goods from Cary & Company. And this did not include his expenses for new slaves and adjoining land. Modern dollar equivalencies are impossible to calculate with any precision, but a rough estimate would place his spending during five years in the early 1760s in the range of two to three million dollars.
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Gradually, it began to dawn on Washington that he was running through his entire Custis inheritance. In 1763 he rejected a request for a loan from an old army friend, explaining that his Mount Vernon expenses had “swallowed up before I knew where I was, all the money I got by marriage nay more.” But he was truly stunned the following year when Cary apprised him that his account was more than £1,800 in arrears, a debt that was only going to increase once Cary began charging 5 percent interest annually on the principal. Washington was caught in the trap that was snaring so many other Virginia planters and that Thomas Jefferson, another victim, described as the chronic condition of indebtedness, which then became “hereditary from father to son for many generations, so that the planters were a species of property annexed to certain mercantile houses in London.” In Jefferson’s version of the sad syndrome, once a planter crossed the line, it was virtually impossible to recover: “If a debt is once contracted by a farmer, it is never paid but by a sale,” meaning bankruptcy proceedings.
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Washington’s initial reaction to Cary’s horrible news was the farmer’s perennial lament: bad luck and bad weather. Then he began to question Cary about the tobacco market. He understood that markets fluctuated, almost by definition. But why was it that swings in the market always seemed to go against his interest? And why was it that the price he received for his tobacco stayed low while the prices he paid for Cary’s shipments kept going up? He had been complaining about both the quality and the cost of the imported goods from the beginning—the linens wore out in a few months, the nails were brittle, the shoes fell apart after a few wearings, the clothes never fit—but now he accused Cary of deliberately selling him inferior goods and hiking the price by 20 percent because he was a mere American colonist, who presumably was too ignorant to know the difference. He also claimed that Cary and his kind sold him outdated items “that could only be used by our forefathers in the days of yore” instead of the fashionable styles requested. The goods shipped to him, in short, were inferior because Cary regarded him as inferior, a provincial rube, a soft touch, another one of those vapid and vacant Virginia grandees.
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The more Washington thought about it, the more he concluded that no amount of diligence on his part, no spell of excellent weather, no favorable fluctuations in the tobacco market, could combine to pull him out of debt, because the mercantile system itself was a conspiracy designed to assure his dependency on the likes of Cary. When Washington thought of that abstract thing called the “British Empire,” he did not think politically, envisioning the Hanoverian kings and the members of Parliament. He thought economically. The face he saw was Robert Cary’s. And he did not trust him.

Was Washington’s diagnosis of his predicament correct? As far as Robert Cary is concerned, all the evidence suggests that he was an honest merchant who provided his Virginia clients with fair market value for their tobacco, charged them appropriately for their purchases, and did not smuggle excessive charges into his invoices. What’s more, historians of the planter class in Virginia have documented the inherent difficulties of growing tobacco as a cash crop. From the very origins of the colony, skeptical observers were troubled by an economy built on smoke and a plant that seemed to possess a unique capacity to deplete the fertility of the soil. More recently, economic historians have called attention to the vagaries of the tobacco market in Europe, chiefly because of Spanish production of cheap tobacco which drove down prices. And most recently, social historians have targeted the lavish lifestyles of the Virginia planters, which combined a blissful obliviousness to the proverbial bottom line with an apparently irresistible urge to imitate the styles and consumption levels of the English gentry.
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On the other hand, the consignment system, by its very definition,
did
place Washington’s economic fate entirely in Cary’s hands, providing him with total control over the price Washington got for his tobacco, the cost and quality of all the goods he received in return, and the debits and credits to Washington’s account, as well as the separate accounts kept for Jackie and Patsy based on their Custis inheritance. All the risks of weather, spoilage, market fluctuations, and shipping mishaps fell on Washington’s side of the ledger. All the leverage lay with Cary. Every time one of the invoices from Cary & Company arrived at Mount Vernon, it served as a stark statement of Washington’s dependence on invisible men in faraway places for virtually his entire way of life. If the core economic problem was tobacco, the core psychological problem was control, the highest emotional priority for Washington, which, once threatened, set off internal alarms that never stopped ringing.

By sheer coincidence, in the fall of 1765, just as Washington was grappling with the bad news from Cary and his own response to it, the much-despised Stamp Act was scheduled to go into effect in Virginia. This provocative piece of legislation, Parliament’s first effort to impose a direct tax on the colonies in order to help defray the costs of managing its expanding empire, generated widespread opposition throughout Virginia and all the American colonies. Washington was not an active participant in the debate, but he was a strongly supportive witness for the opposition. “The Stamp Act Imposed on the Colonies by the Parliament of Great Britain engrosses the conversation of the Speculative part of the Colonists,” he observed, “who look upon this unconstitutional method of Taxation as a doleful Attack upon their Liberties & loudly exclaim against the Violation.” But while most outspoken opponents of the Stamp Act, those whom Washington called “the Speculative part,” emphasized the constitutional argument, his response more directly reflected his personal experience with Cary & Company. Such “ill judged Measures” as the Stamp Act, he suggested, were likely to have the ironic but salutary effect of reducing American dependence on British imports: “And the Eyes of our People—already beginning to open—will perceive that many Luxuries which we lavish our substance to Great Britain for, can well be dispens’d with while the necessaries of Life are mostly to be had within ourselves.” Others could make the legal arguments about taxation and representation. Washington’s thinking, conditioned by his personal experience with the practical operation of the British Empire, moved instinctively to the much more palpable issue of economic independence.
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