Washington [516]
THE TWO-TERM PRESIDENCY had taxed Washington in many ways, not least in his personal finances. In March 1795, when his friend Charles Carter, Jr., approached him for a thousand-dollar loan, Washington, always touchy about borrowing, burst into a recitation of his financial stringency: “My friends entertain a very erroneous idea of my pecuniary resources . . . Such has been the management of my estate for many years past, especially since my absence from home, now six years, as barely to support itself.”58 He protested that his government allowance barely covered the extravagant costs of entertaining and that he had resorted to selling western lands to escape debt.
As he meditated on the end of his presidency, he mused about the prospect of “tranquillity with a certain income” and decided to pursue his earlier scheme of selling his western lands and leasing out the four Mount Vernon farms, while retreating to the fifth, the Mansion House, with Martha.59 On February 1, 1796, he posted advertisements for the sale of thirteen tracts along three western rivers—the Ohio, Great Kanawha, and Little Miami—amounting to a whopping 36,000 acres. These ads were posted in Philadelphia papers and well-frequented taverns in western Pennsylvania. The properties dated from the distant period when the young Anglophile officer had received bounty lands for service in the French and Indian War and had cornered aggressively the rights of fellow soldiers. In undertaking these sales, Washington harbored a secret agenda, hoping to use the proceeds to help emancipate his slaves.
In recruiting able farmers to rent the four outlying farms, the Father of His Country had so little faith in American farmers that he placed anonymous ads not only in eastern newspapers but as far afield as England, Scotland, and Ireland. “My wish is to get associations of farmers from the old countries, who know how . . . to keep the land in an improving state rather than the slovenly ones of this [country], who think (generally) of nothing else but to work a field as long as it will bear anything,” he told William Pearce, Mount Vernon’s estate manager.60 He now resolved to introduce the crop-rotation scheme that he had worked out on paper but that his hapless overseers had never been able to put into practice. Having long known that tobacco depleted the soil, he wanted to plant corn, wheat, clover, potatoes, and grass in a scientific sequence.
Conscious that he would someday free his slaves, Washington wanted to avoid doing anything that might interfere with that plan. His letters betray growing disgust with slavery, as when he told Pearce that “opulent” Virginians were made “imperious and dissipated from the habit of commanding slaves and living in a measure without control.”61 However benevolent his intentions were, he remained a largely absentee owner, able to exercise scant control over his overseers’ harsh practices, as shown in one 1795 letter to Pearce: “I am sorry to find by your last reports that there has been two deaths in the [slave] family since I left Mount Vernon, and one of them a young fellow. I hope every necessary care and attention was afforded him. I expect little of this from McCoy, or indeed from most of his class, for they seem to consider a Negro much in the same light as they do the brute beasts on the farms, and often treat them as inhumanly.”62 Washington mentally divided his slaves into productive ones who warranted favor and those unable or unwilling to work. When Pearce distributed linen to slaves, Washington instructed him to provide the good stuff “to the grown people and the most deserving, whilst the more indifferent sort is served to the younger ones and worthless.”63
Whatever his shortcomings as a master, Washington continued to refine his plan to free his slaves someday. So long as he was president, the subject was taboo; Washington told David Stuart that “reasons of a political, indeed of [an] imperious nature” forbade any such action.64 He wrote these words