Washington [75]
CHAPTER TEN
A Certain Species of Property
FOR THE FIRST SIX YEARS OF MARRIAGE, as he devoted mounting resources to growing tobacco, George Washington was a hostage to the fortunes of that fickle crop. As noted, he had returned from his military adventures to discover Mount Vernon, under brother Jack’s supervision, in a scandalous state of disrepair. While off in the western hinterlands, he found it impossible to monitor business activities at home, which must have been profoundly distressing for someone of his meticulous work habits. As he worked to remedy matters, restocking the plantation and constructing new buildings, he ended up squandering part of Martha’s fortune.
Though an inexperienced planter, the enterprising Washington was determined to produce high-quality tobacco, and to that end he expanded his acreage and revealed a scientific bent as he dabbled with different varieties. Always receptive to innovation, he pored over agricultural treatises and experimented with oats, wheat, and barley, planted in soil from various corners of his property. Only in retrospect did he perceive the folly of staking his future on tobacco. The soil at Mount Vernon, he duly learned, had “an under stratum of hard clay impervious to water,” washing away the thin topsoil and leaving behind “eyesore gullies.”1 It posed insuperable challenges for a novice planter who had to contend with several seasons of drought and heavy rain, which only compounded the runoff problem. Besides poor topography, Washington also had to contend with fluctuating tobacco prices—under imperial law, all sales went through England—and he never knew what his crops would fetch until he heard back from London. With hindsight, it is easy to fault his emphasis on tobacco, but the crop was so omnipresent in Virginia that planters paid taxes with it and engaged in an intense rivalry to produce superior leaves.
In the 1760s Washington’s letters on his tobacco trade often read like one long jeremiad. He started out with a bumper crop of 147,357 pounds in his first year of marriage, only to be repeatedly victimized by the vagaries of weather. “We have had one of the most severe droughts in these parts that ever was known and without a speedy interposition of providence (in sending us moderate and refreshing rains to mollify and soften the earth), we shall not make one ounce of tobacco this year,” he reported to Robert Cary in 1762.2 The next year his wheat crop was attacked by a fungus known as rust, while his Indian corn and tobacco were choked by weeds and grass spawned by incessant rains. The mediocre quality of his leaves further depressed the price his tobacco drew in London, making it impossible to pare down debt. At melancholy moments Washington sounded as if the elements conspired to punish his crops. In August 1765 he noted that the Mount Vernon soil had been parched since May because of drought, while a mere ten miles away the weather was “perfectly seasonable” and his neighbors had “promising crops of corn and tobacco.”3
Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of tobacco culture was its labor-intensive nature, making it a natural match with slavery. No aspect of his life would so trouble Washington or posterity as his status as a major slave owner. Had he not started with tobacco, he might never have become so enmeshed with a reprehensible system that he learned to loathe. Slaves were ubiquitous in this rich, populous colony, making up 40 percent of Virginia’s population.