Washington [74]
One reason that Washington and other planters submitted to their London agents was that they offered easy credit unavailable in the colonies. Like many of his affluent neighbors, Washington was land rich and cash poor and spent a lifetime scrounging for money. Historians have often pondered the paradox of why rich Virginia planters later formed a hotbed of revolutionary ferment, and the explanation partly lies in their long, sullen dependence upon London factors. Of four million pounds borrowed by colonists by the outset of the American Revolution, half was owed by the prodigal farmers of Tidewater Virginia.44 As they gorged on credit, their luxurious lives rested on a precarious foundation of debt. Virginia borrowers regularly blamed their London factors for this indebtedness rather than examining their own extravagant consumption. In piling up excessive debt, they repeated a vice then rampant among the spendthrift British upper class.
Almost immediately Washington stumbled into the same quagmire of debt that ensnared many fellow planters. After two years of marriage, he owed a sizable two thousand pounds sterling to Robert Cary. Eager to play the country squire to the hilt, he ordered goods from London with a free hand. In a letter to one of his former officers in April 1763, Washington complained of being hopelessly indebted to Robert Cary. In his defense, he pleaded the disorganized state of Mount Vernon when he returned from the war, the need to buy more land and slaves, and the expenses of a large family: “I had provisions of all kinds to buy for the first two or three years and my plantations to stock.” Before he knew it, the money he spent on buildings and other things had “swallowed up . . . all the money I got by marriage, nay more.”45
The situation deteriorated sharply the following year. Washington was congenitally prickly about money, and Robert Cary aggravated matters by being too quick to dun him for funds. In August 1764 Washington reacted to a call for more money by blaming “mischances rather than misconduct” for the repeated failures of his tobacco crops. He was outraged that Cary would pester him the second he lagged on his payments. “I did not expect that a correspondent so steady and constant as I have proved . . . would be reminded in the instant it was discovered how necessary it was for him to be expeditious in his payments,” he complained. Unlike some patrician debtors, Washington was uneasy carrying so much debt, reminding his London creditor that “it is but an irksome thing to a free mind to be any ways hampered in debt.”46 In subsequent letters to London, Washington’s fury fairly exploded off the page. When he sent a large shipment of tobacco the following year, he was aghast at the poor prices that Robert Cary fetched for him and accused the firm of securing better deals for other Virginia planters. “That the sales are pitifully low needs no words to demonstrate,” he wrote. “And that they are worse than many of my acquaintance upon this river Potomac have got in the outposts . . . is a truth equally as certain.” Washington blustered that it might be “absolutely necessary for me to change my correspondence unless I experience an alteration for the better.”47
For the rest of his life, Washington was vehement on the subject of debt and frequently lectured relatives about its dangers. Even though he scapegoated creditors for his own debt, it is clear from later letters that he searched his