Washington [104]
As with all challenges to his integrity, Washington remained touchy on the subject of the bounty lands and whether he had taken unfair advantage of his men. Although he walked off with the finest properties, he also believed that he had devoted enormous time to surveying the area and that the whole operation hinged on his efforts. Suspicions about his conduct he thought unfair and baseless. When one officer, George Muse, accused him of shortchanging him of land, Washington didn’t mince words: “As I am not accustomed to receive such from any man, nor would have taken the same language from you personally, without letting you feel some marks of my resentment, I would advise you to be cautious in writing me a second [letter] of the same tenor. For though I understand you were drunk when you did it, yet give me leave to tell you that drunkenness is no excuse for rudeness.” 46 If Muse read the newspapers, Washington pointed out, he would have seen that he had been allotted the ten thousand acres he claimed, and he concluded by telling his former officer indignantly that he was sorry he had ever “engag[e]d in behalf of so ungrateful and dirty a fellow as you are.”47 While Washington was in the right here, the letter shows how his bottled-up anger could spew forth unexpectedly and why people intuited correctly that he had a terrible temper.
In his eagerness to unlock the riches of the heartland, Washington assigned a premier position to the busy river running by his home. If the Potomac could be improved by locks and other measures, he thought, it would emerge as the main thoroughfare for commerce with the interior, enhancing the value of his western holdings. In 1770 the attorney Thomas Johnson, who owned thousands of acres along the Potomac, tried to enlist Washington’s aid for modest improvements along the river. A short, stocky man of unbounded energy and enthusiasm, he kindled in Washington a lasting enthusiasm for the project. Not to be outdone in Potomac boosterism, Washington espoused a far more ambitious plan that would connect the river with “a rising empire” in the western country.48 Washington clearly foresaw the rich future of this wilderness expanse, if only it could be reached by water. Simple in theory but fiendishly complex in practice, his plan for Potomac commerce required not just endless locks but portages through the mountains of what is now West Virginia. This Potomac scheme would hypnotize his mind much as the vision of a mythical Northwest Passage once entranced transatlantic mariners. If the Potomac never became the grand commercial gateway he had envisioned, it was not for want of trying.
With considerable sophistication about business and politics that already belied his image as a mere planter, Washington told Johnson that they shouldn’t just rely on legislative grants and the uncertain force of “motives of public spirit.”49 Better to rely on self-interest and blatantly appeal to “the monied gentry” who would be drawn by prospective profits.50 To this end, Washington would devise a plan for a joint stock company that would receive charters from Virginia and Maryland and make the river navigable from Tidewater Virginia to the Ohio Country. It would pay back investors by charging tolls on river traffic. Washington himself steered a Potomac navigation bill through the House of Burgesses. Despite his insistence that the project would produce “amazing advantages” to both Virginia and Maryland, it foundered in the Maryland legislature because Baltimore businessmen feared it might divert trade from the Chesapeake Bay.51 When the project stalled