Washington [102]
The many contradictions of Washington’s world were on display in Williamsburg that spring. He attended the opening night of The Beggar’s Opera and a luxurious ball to honor the king’s birthday. Yet this same George Washington was dismayed that his fellow Virginians couldn’t curb their appetite for imported goods. He was disappointed in June when a new nonimportation agreement relaxed many restrictions, allowing imports of barley and pork, pewter and gold, boots and saddles. Eminently realistic, already equipped with fine political instincts, Washington recognized that this watered-down agreement was “the best that the friends to the cause cou[l]d obtain here.” At the same time he wished it were “ten times as strict” and frowned on it as “too much relaxed from the spirit with which a measure of this sort ought to be conducted.”38 Nevertheless that July Washington had no qualms about ordering from Robert Cary a pigskin saddle, gold jewelry, and other luxury items only recently proscribed.
GEORGE WASHINGTON BELIEVED FERVENTLY in the potential wealth of the western lands, a faith he touted in almost messianic tones. He had long maintained that the foremost Virginia estates were created “by taking up and purchasing at very low rates the rich back lands, which were thought nothing of in those days, but are now the most valuable lands we possess.”39 For Washington, land speculation was the ideal vehicle for amassing riches, a way to invest in his own future and that of the country, mingling idealism with profit. He continued to deplore the 1763 proclamation barring settlement beyond the Allegheny Mountains as both myopic and unworkable. When Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon completed their survey of the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, he foresaw that it would trigger a mad scramble for prime frontier acreage.
Washington didn’t shrink from secrecy and even sharp dealings in real estate, as can be seen in his strenuous efforts to expand his western holdings in the late 1760s. Hoping to purchase up to two thousand acres, he turned to an old ally from the Forbes campaign, Captain William Crawford, who lived in the Ohio Country. Washington wanted to scout out forbidden lands beyond the so-called Proclamation Line and didn’t think he could afford to wait, advising Crawford that anyone “who neglects the present opportunity of hunting out good lands and in some measure marking and distinguishing them for their own . . . will never regain it.” Crawford agreed to search out large parcels in partnership with Washington, who urged him to “keep this whole matter a profound secret,” lest other speculators discover their designs before they laid “a proper foundation for success.”40
In late 1768 the British negotiated two treaties with the Indians that reopened the Ohio Country to settlers, ushering in frenzied competition among real estate speculators. At this point Washington renewed his clamor for 200,000 acres of bounty lands promised by Dinwiddie to veterans of the Fort Necessity campaign in 1754, a pledge he considered a sacred public trust. In the conciliatory mood temporarily existing in Williamsburg in late 1769, Washington prevailed upon Lord Botetourt to honor this commitment. The governor and council identified the confluence of the Ohio and Great Kanawha rivers as the site of these bounty lands. Washington proved a natural manager of this enterprise and undertook the necessary surveying work, but his situation was fraught with conflicts of interest, and the entire episode would be shadowed by accusations of sharp dealing from his former men. Washington