GEORGE WASHINGTON, HISTORIANS, AND THE PARADOXES OF AMERICAN EXPANSIONISM

George Washington's thoughts and enterprises are recalled reverently by all those who take a serious look at them. Each person who documents them, however, has been interested in his commitment to one specific goal, and ignored other beliefs or projects. Thus the pregnant contradictions between them have received hardly any attention.

Historians of Washington's period, nearly always writing in a nationalist vein, note in a general way his early advocacy of internal improvements to tie the new nation together. Separately, they stress his opposition to any local, state or private interest. They see this broad-mindedness as leading into his promotion of the Constitutional Convention. They quote his various forebodings about where the new polity was heading in the 1780s, taking them at face value to show what the Constitution saved us from.

A few, including the definitive biographers Freeman and Flexner, have told the story of Washington's heroic struggle with his plantation. He mostly grew tobacco and was constantly in debt to his agents overseas, like most of his neighbors. Like them, he knew the noxious weed was sucking the life from the very soil that gave rise to it. Like them, he had woods which he could clear and burn to provide fertile fields for a few more decades. Unlike them, in the 1760s he chose to try to break out of the debt cycle and grow wheat and other, better crops. This was quite difficult and dangerous, and he was one of few who did so successfully. He became an advocate of scientific agricultural modernization.

Both these biographers usually see in Washington a steady realist, almost a pessimist, who had learned how to deal with defeat and dutifully undertook discouraging tasks. Whether managing his farms or his country, he sacrificed present convenience for long-term strength and recognized unpleasant realities much more readily than other prominent Virginia gentlemen.

However, local and regional historians have an altogether different agenda. While most of the best local historians tell exciting stories, they generally print anything they can find which can be construed as praise for their neighborhood. In the case of well-loved figures like George Washington, the Duke of Windsor or Marilyn Monroe, they may well publish exhaustive accounts of anything they did, or said, in, around or pertaining to the locality. Some lesser historians of the West, especially when their subject was newly popular, have taken a similar approach with Washington, proudly quoting everything hopeful he said about the richness and importance of the West in the future.

Northern Virginia's local historians are a breed apart. Unlike those in more backward areas, they take little notice of non-Virginians passing through and praising the country (after John Smith, anyway). After all, they and their audience know that they inhabit a charming area and don't need any more foreigners moving in. Unlike others, they have no need to prove the importance of their neighborhood, since they have always assumed it to be the most important locality in American history. To the Northern Virginian, local history is national history, so it is documented with the quality and quantity it demands (though perhaps without the skepticism and selectivity necessary for professional history covering larger areas). Obscure, average, possibly representative people of the past get none of the attention they do elsewhere. But all the local actions, houses, and [white] relatives of nationally important Virginians are thoroughly explored.

Thus, Northern Virginians have lovingly documented Washington's efforts to clear the Potomac's navigation and connect its waters with those of the Mississippi and the Great Lakes. His leadership of the Potowmack Canal Company, in which hundreds of local gentry invested, is a favorite topic of his latter-day neighbors. They portray him as a disinterested, benevolent developer; a dreaming, scheming risk-taking businessman; and a no-nonsense hands-on manager who got things done. They are right. They reveal a dreamy quality in him which is elsewhere neglected. In his scheming proclivities they see only open-minded foresight or even naïveté (since of course they come only to praise him).

In the Virginia piedmont, Washington's canals and dams actually worked. However, his entire scheme for binding the West to the East (specifically, the Potomac) hinged on ridiculous, convoluted plans for having boats ascend mountain cataracts, going far out of their way to avoid Pennsylvania, and sending wagons over roads built on swamps in the Appalachians and the upper Ohio. He managed to persuade himself that this was the only feasible way to connect the East and West. Whenever settlers out there told him his plans were ridiculous, he confidently reminded himself (and the readers of his letters or published journals) that they were isolated provincials who did not realize what steamboats, modern munitions and trained engineers could achieve, or who were merely protecting their narrow local interests. Their descendants who write local history are not so skeptical; they are overjoyed that someone so unquestionably wise as Washington has recognized the unparalleled potential of their homeland.

Contradictions should have begun to be evident by this point. One good reason Washington's definitive biographers have not made much of them is that, in all honesty, they are not among the most important or obvious features of Washington as a public man. Obviously, he did much more important things than speculating (mentally or financially) on the future of what was then western land. But in his private life, meaning (in his case) the periods of his life when he was not employed in the government or the military and could manage his own affairs, his activities and writings were mostly directed towards projects and hopes which were rich in paradox. The contradictions do add new sides to the figure of the whole man. They also replicate some of the basic tensions and paradoxes that have remained in general American attitudes towards land, the manipulation of nature, the distinction between the private and public sectors of the economy, white expansion and native Indian policy.

Washington's interest in navigational improvements is seen on one hand as hard-headed, prudent nationalism, and on the other as proof of his affectionate, activist benevolence towards his neighborhood. In plainer terms, though, it seems mostly like localism thinly disguised as nationalism, and nationalism as an excuse to restrain other regions. "Thinly disguised" should not suggest that he was consciously dissimulating-- any purposeful hypocrite would have been more subtle. Did he really, as some say, grow in vocation from a localist to a complete nationalist at some point? And did he lose anything by such a change?

Washington's unending enthusiasm, though it reflects his contemporaries' attitudes, must modify his image as the consummate realist who kept his own counsel and used his individual stature to restrain the destructive tides of localistic, Jeffersonian expansionism. He is portrayed as performing this indispensable function along with such associates as Hamilton and Knox (with them providing the brains and the dirty tricks and Washington providing all the respectability). I do not wish to dilute the importance of his realism and prudence. His denunciations of farming practices and of resistance to change in the Upper South are portentous, and I will explore them. But foresight, even in Washington, was a product of human, not divine, reason. It was two-edged. It sometimes led him astray and got him stuck betting on losers, as well as giving him what we now call a "vision thing" and inspiring him to look to the whole nation's long-term strength. My article will explore what made these myths of the American land's future so appealing even to a strong, wise, discerning person who was so resistant to ungrounded optimism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources 1745-1799. John C. Fitzpatrick, ed. Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1932. In forty-some volumes, nearly all letters. This is the ultimate primary source, the aquifer. The index and references from other books provide decent inroads, and it is not that hard to trace themes through the compendium. There were times, though, when he was so enthusiastic that he told everyone he wrote to about his plans for the West, regardless of what the letter was supposed to be about. Perhaps journals of travelers who visited him at those times will tell if he also talked constantly on the subject to everyone in earshot. Most of his writing on the land is concentrated in these periods, since he eventually had even bigger projects to occupy him. Some good letters:

9-7-83, on how to treat Indians in the new U.S.

9-23-83, alerts Knox that "Land Jobbers and a lawless Banditti" are taking land veterans should get.

6-18-85, expects that most "fur and peltry of the lakes" will be portaged to the Ohio's waters and thence to the Potomac.

6-22-85, deplores local politics, and discourages "fixing the Seat of Empire" on the Delaware, for the sake of "the Widow, the Orphan and the suffering soldier." "Time, too powerful for sophistry" will place capital where it belongs.

6-29-85, agrees with Patrick Henry that the "Sunken Lands" in Albemarle Sound "will in time become the most valuable property in this country." Reclamation will be expensive, but worthwhile. He won't send money, though. Perhaps trying to strengthen downstate relations, says nice things about this and canals from the Elizabeth to the Pasquotank and the James to the Kanahwa. Says a Baltimore-Philadelphia canal can never happen until we link the Potomac and Ohio to get a stronger federal government.

7-19-85, tells new Agricultural Society that Virginia's farmers "are pursuing an unprofitable course of crops, to the utter destruction of their lands."

7-25-85, tells Lafayette that if Americans get free navigation of the Mississippi before it is linked to the Potomac, "a separation would inevitably take place."

7-28-85, recommends that Europe's "needy and oprest resort to the fertile plains of our western country, the second land of promise, and fulfill the first commandment, to 'be fruitful and multiply'." But dissatisfied that even under the new Northwest Ordinance, land prices are too high for the poor and speculators are benefitting. Blames Congress for giving its few powers back to the states.

8-6-86, writes Arthur Young deploring self-destructive "pertinacity" of Virginian farmers.

A Fairfax Friendship, letters between him and his neighbors the Fairfaxes. Don't have, will get.

George Washington, a Collection. Douglass Allen, ed. 1988. A one-volume selection of his letters, well-indexed.

The Journal of Major George Washington, written on his first diplomatic mission to the Indians and French when he was 21, in 1753-4. Even then, he was a very good writer when writing about the exciting things he tended to do. Once, when things were progressing too slowly, he set off alone on foot in midwinter across hundreds of miles of Pennsylvanian wilderness, with a gun and compass but no tent. Perceptive about how Indians and French related. Especially germane to my purposes is an Indian speech which he wrote down and had printed in England, eloquently saying why the French and English must not settle Indian country, though they might send traders. This served Imperial policy, but has troublesome implications considering what Washington and other Americans did after the revolution.

Journal of a Voyage through Western Pennsylvania in 1784. A 1905 annotated version of Washington's journal. The editor retraced his every step and told the mountaineers what Washington had said about them. The trip was primarily to deal with squatters, who did not appear too impressed with the father of his country. Most of Washington's on-site visualization of the East-West water route is in here. He also eyeballs all the land he comes across. He sees problems with every tract in particular, but in general is optimistic.