Washington [486]
By this point Washington was convinced that Mount Vernon was veering toward chaos and that he had to crack down on overseers and slaves alike. In the same language he had long used with his military and political associates, he coached Pearce on how to handle recalcitrant overseers: “To treat them civilly is no more than what all men are entitled to, but my advice to you is to keep them at a proper distance; for they will grow upon familiarity in proportion as you will sink in authority, if you do not.”28 He gave Pearce scathing character sketches of the five overseers, calling one “a sickly, slothful, and stupid fellow,” and urging him to correct the abuses that had crept into the daily workings of Mount Vernon.29 Ironically, the only one of the five overseers for whom he spared a kind word was the one black: “Davy at Muddy Hole carries on his business as well as the white overseers and with more quietness than any of them. With proper directions, he will do very well.”30
Priding himself on being a progressive farmer, Washington was frustrated by his inability to introduce modern methods. When Henry Lee told him about a new threshing machine, Washington responded that “the utility of it among careless Negroes and ignorant overseers will depend absolutely upon the simplicity of the construction, for if there is anything complex in the machinery, it will be no longer in use than a mushroom is in existence.”31 His letters teem with regrets that his overseers refused to apply the crop-rotation system that had been his will-o’-the-wisp for many years.
Finally, on December 23, 1793, right before Christmas, Washington devoted a large portion of the day to writing five consecutive letters to his five overseers, blaming them for ruining his hopes for crop rotation and for the general decline of his business. In terms of pure, unadulterated rage, these five letters have no equal in Washington’s papers: they suggest a daylong temper tantrum and show just how sharp-tongued and frustrated he could be. Their jeering tone is almost willfully cruel, as if Washington wanted to say things with brutal clarity and telegraph a tough new regimen. They show how exceedingly anxious he was about his financial position and the economic situation at Mount Vernon. They may also express some displaced anger from the violent attacks being made on him in the Jeffersonian press and by the Democratic-Republican Societies. Not mincing words, Washington wrote to overseer Hiland Crow that he had been
so much disturbed at your insufferable neglect [of plowing] that it is with difficulty I have been restrained from ordering you instantly off the plantation. My whole place for next year is ruined by your conduct. And look ye, Mr. Crow, I have too good reasons to believe that your running about and entertaining company at home . . . is the cause of this now irremediable evil in the progress of my business . . . I am very willing and desirous to be your friend, but if your conduct does not merit it, you must abide the consequences from Y[ou]rs.32
Crow was a savage overseer in flogging slaves, Washington describing him to Pearce as “swayed more by passion than by judgment in all his corrections.”33
Washington criticized overseer Henry McCoy for failing to plow after the late October rains, jeopardizing his spring oat crop: “How durst you disobey this order and, instead of bringing the whole force of your plows to this, you employ them now and then only, or one or two a week, as if it were for amusement, thereby doing everything which was in your power to derange my whole plan for the next year.”34 If McCoy remained inattentive to business, Washington threatened to banish him “at any season of