Washington [487]
Washington chastised overseer Thomas Green for failing to perform work at the Dogue Run barn. “I know full well,” Washington told him, “that to speak to you is of no more avail than to speak to a bird that is flying over one’s head; first, because you are lost to all sense of shame and to every feeling that ought to govern an honest man, who sets any store by his character; and, secondly, because you have no more command of the people over whom you are placed than I have over the beasts of the forests.” If Green did not shape up, Washington threatened to “discharge you that mom[en]t and to dispossess your family of the house they are in, for I cannot, nor will not, submit to such infamous treatment as I meet with from you.”36
After instructing overseer John Christian Ehlers on how to graft fruit and plant trees properly, Washington administered a stern lecture on the evils of alcohol: “I shall not close this letter without exhorting you to refrain from spirituous liquors. They will prove your ruin if you do not. Consider how little a drunken man differs from a beast; the latter is not endowed with reason, the former deprives himself of it; and when that is the case acts like a brute, annoying and disturbing everyone around him . . . Don’t let this be your case.” Then, punning harshly on Ehlers’s middle name, Washington concluded, “Show yourself more of a man and a Christian than to yield to so intolerable a vice.”37
The stress of managing Mount Vernon had finally become so draining for Washington that he wanted to free himself of the burden of supervising overseers and slaves. Since he contemplated stepping down as president in a year, his mind already dwelt on retirement, and he felt oppressed by a surplus of both slaves and white indentured servants. So he concocted an ambitious plan to rent out four of the Mount Vernon farms to four capable English farmers, retaining only the Mansion House farm for himself. In expounding this rental scheme to Tobias Lear, Washington admitted candidly that his motive was “that the remainder of my days may thereby be more tranquil and freer from cares; and that I may be enabled . . . to do as much good with it as the resource will admit. For although in the estimation of the world I possess a good and clear estate, yet, so unproductive is it, that I am oftentimes ashamed to refuse aids which I cannot afford, unless I was to sell part of it to answer the purpose.”38
The cash-strapped Washington knew that the world reckoned him a much richer man than he really was. Mount Vernon’s glorified facade of wealth and grandeur covered up an operation that was, at best, only marginally profitable. Running the estate forced Washington to keep up appearances and act with the openhanded largesse of an affluent planter. He still felt hounded by visitors stopping by Mount Vernon and partaking liberally of his food and drink. (In one letter, he expressed exasperation with Fanny for giving away dozens of bottles of expensive wine to voyeuristic travelers and listed only three classes of people who deserved those coveted bottles: close friends, foreign dignitaries, and members of Congress and other politicos.) Part of Washington’s plan called for raising cash by selling more than thirty thousand acres of western land at a time when prices were appreciating sharply.
To help find suitable English farmers, Washington turned to the English agronomist Arthur Young, summarizing for him the riches of the four farms in question, which then had 3,260 acres of arable land, 54 draft horses, 12 working mules, 317 head of black cattle, and hogs that “run pretty much at large in the woodland.”39 Washington had no qualms about touting the proximity of the farms to the federal capital rising nearby. “The federal city in the year 1800 will become the seat