George Washington on Farming and Internal Improvements

Washington was still a teenager when his elder brother died and he inherited a run-down, middling-sized tobacco plantation called Mount Vernon. He began managing it energetically, since it was all he had, but he still found time to hunt and to explore Western Virginia as a surveyor. Because of his rare knowledge of the West, his horsemanship and leadership qualities, at the age of 21 he was made a major in the militia and sent to Pittsburgh to negotiate with the French and Indians. As his biographer James Flexner sees it, he inadvertently started the Seven-Years war, a world war which lasted nine years and was the most expensive war ever. After several more Western campaigns, he returned home as a war hero and married a young widow who had huge tracts of land. With her wealth and his speculations in Western land, he would soon surpass Tidewater aristocrats as Virginia's biggest landholder.

Nonetheless, he remained thrifty, prudent, acquisitive, conservative and usually pessimistic about his long-term financial success. This was mainly because the land which gave Virginians status also saddled them with obligations, and usually with debt. Most tobacco planters, though rich in credit, lacked cash and owed their future crops to British merchants. They were unable to escape from tobacco monoculture, though they could tell it was exhausting their soil. It was also causing fields to erode, and the rivers they shipped their tobacco from were already silting up. As Washington soon realized, his wife's vast acreage was mostly of poor quality, and her overabundant slaves were tied to particular plantations by entail, so they could not be sold or moved west. On his other holdings, he found it was hard to collect rent and keep squatters off. Seeing some of his wealthiest neighbors sink into debt, he sought more security and continued to drive hard bargains.

In the mid-1760s, he resolved to break the tobacco habit and stop importing luxuries and tools from abroad. He began growing wheat, built a mill, and hired black and white craftsmen and weavers to make the plantation self-sufficient. He just barely succeeded at first, and in the long run he broke even, which was much better than his neighbors did. After the revolution, the plantation's gains were absorbed by his program of not selling slaves and of educating and training them to prepare for emancipation. By rationalizing his farm, he became the only founder who could afford to free his slaves.

Washington also spent a lot of time on projects to boost the local economy, notably his plan for a convoluted system of canals, roads, dams and demolition which would connect the Potomac River to the Ohio and the Great Lakes. While pushing this project as vital for national unity in the 1780s and '90s, he deplored the short-sighted localism of people from other states who favored their own pet projects. He retained an incurable optimism about the promise of the West in general, which he often exhibited when pushing this plan, though he was realistic or pessimistic about particular pieces of land, especially the ones he owned.

Among other things, I am wondering:

1) Are their ways in which his pessimism and optimism can be reconciled? Is their some consistent thread running through them?
2) Is there any place where he transcends his localism to become a nationalist, or do the two sentiments coexist, or what?
3) In his policies towards the Indians and their land, is there anything consistent or revealing?
4) Does he have any sustained idea of what land is and what it's for? He seems pretty far removed from the "yeoman" ideas of Jefferson and Crevocoeur, who were not even yeomen themselves. But is there some connection between his practices and hopes and the "yeoman" idea?

READINGS TO BE DISCUSSED IN SEMINAR AND IN MY FORTHCOMING ARTICLE:

From George Washington by Douglas Southall Freeman, Vol. III p. 184.

[Washington told an indebted neighbor to sell his property and buy Western land, instead of asking him for a loan.] Washington renewed his profession of faith in the development of the West: "look to Frederick, and see what fortunes were made by the Hites and first takers up of those lands: Nay how the greatest estates we have in this colony were made. Was it not by taking up and purchasing at very low rates the righ back lands which were thought nothing of in those days, but are now the most valuable lands that we possess?" It was one of the oldest and most exciting questions men had asked in Virginia.

Extract from:
"Laboring Hands and the Transformation of Mount Vernon Plantation, 1783-1799." Copyright Jean Butenhoff Lee, 1990. Delivered at the John Carter Brown Library, May 5, 1990, and at U.Va. May 31, 1990.

In Washington's mind, Mount Vernon was to be an example to the citizens of the new nation-as example of order, efficiency, industriousness, and productivity. Partly his plans for Mount Vernon fit within his much larger vision of the Potomac River valley. If the river were made navigable almost to the headwaters of the Ohio River system, then the Potomac-Ohio route would become the most vital artery into the interior of the Continent. Millions of bushels of wheat and other agricultural products would be carried from the fresh lands and neat farms of the transmontane West to the market towns of Alexandria and Georgetown. A capital city befitting the Republic would rise along the Maryland shore.

Transforming Washington's ancestral lands into an agriculturally advanced, aesthetically pleasing plantation would require an enormous amount of manual labor. Washington wanted from the men and women who inhabited Mount Vernon a level of industriousness that matched his own. Not surprisingly, the laboring hands did not necessarily embrace his work ethic or his plans, and ultimately Washington did not achieve the model plantation or labor force that he envisioned.

Washington returned home from the army determined to be the Cincinnatus of Mount Vernon. "Under the shadow of my own Vine & my own Fig tree," he would find solace in "tranquil enjoyments." Now, with guidance from [Arthur] Young and other enlightened agronomists, Mount Vernon would have perfectly ordered fields and grounds, seeded with everything from timothy to burnet, from South Carolina palmetto plants and Georgia peaches to Russian wheat. Carefully conceived rotation of crops, plus application of manure and compost, would restore rather than exhaust the soil. Washington was consciously renouncing what he labeled the "ruinous" and "unproductive" practices of Chesapeake planters, "whose knowledge, [or] practice at least, centre in the destruction of the land, and very little beyond it."

[Washington proudly records in his diary how his slaves, at his insistence, cleared and levelled fields, dragged outbuildings around, and transplanted trees in midwinter.]

To keep track of these and the other, unending tasks he assigned, Washington required the overseer of each of the farms to report to him once a week, even during his presidency. He wanted to know, in detail, what the domestic servants, seamstresses, spinners, gardeners, millers, coopers, carpenters, masons, waggoners, livestock handlers, drivers, and field hands had accomplished. It was as if-having spent eight years organizing and commanding an army-he could not break the habit

Washington knew what he wanted from the people under his command and in his employ. His correspondence is replete with the qualities he desired. One was frugality: quoting adages like "a penny saved is a penny got" and "many mickles make a muckle," he cautioned that "nothing should be bot. that can be made, or done without." A second attribute was diligence: "I expect my people will work from day-breaking until it is dusk in the evening" To bring workers to perform their "duty," as he called it, their superiors had to set an example, beginning with himself. [At the age of 65] he boasted that "I begin my diurnal course with the Sun; if my hirelings are not in their places at that time I send them messages expressive of my sorrow for their indisposition"

Ironically, Washington hoped to extract exemplary labor without resorting to the most potent incentives any slaveowner had: the whip, dividing families, and selling unruly blacks to the West Indies or other dreaded realms.

[ Lee goes on to illustrate the drunken fecklessness of some of Washington's white craftsmen, the cunning thievery of the slaves, and the slackness of most everyone.]

Just as the laboring hands fell short of his expectations, so did the land itself. Drought ruined crops and agricultural experiments, insects invaded the fields, rains opened gullies, and even an attempt to renew a field with silt dredged from the Potomac River bottom ended in disaster. Laced with toxic chemicals washed down from the Appalachian Mountains, the silt poisoned the field for more than 100 years