Washington [94]
The Crown’s postwar policy caused colonists to feel penalized by a victory to which they had contributed. It outlawed the printing of paper money by the colonies—London merchants fretted over their losses from such depreciated paper—making currency scarce in Virginia. George Washington, suddenly unable to collect money from strapped debtors, predicted that the ban on colonial money might “set the whole country in flames.”1 Washington’s first stirrings of anti-British fervor had arisen from his failure to receive a royal commission, but they were now joined by disenchantment over pocketbook issues. Great Britain was simply bad for local business, a fact that would soon foster the historical anomaly of a revolution inaugurated by affluent, conservative leaders. As potentates of vast estates, lords of every acre they saw, George Washington and other planters didn’t care to truckle to a distant, unseen power.
Perhaps the most incendiary colonial resentment related to land policy, the wartime victory having liberated the acquisitive urges of speculators. In May 1763 Washington joined nine other investors in a plan to drain the Great Dismal Swamp in southeastern Virginia and turn it into lucrative farmland. United in a syndicate, Adventurers for Draining the Dismal Swamp, these speculators hoped to bypass royal regulations that restricted grants of Crown lands to one thousand acres per individual. To circumvent this limit, they manufactured 138 bogus names when they submitted their land petition in Williamsburg. Washington, with a fertile mind for development, envisioned that the ditch employed to drain the swamp could also serve as a canal leading to Norfolk, a farsighted plan finally realized in 1828. Like every economic activity in Virginia, the Dismal Swamp project relied on slave labor, and Washington contributed six slaves.
The natural vitality of the Virginia economy, combined with dynamic population growth, ensured unstoppable westward expansion. On September 9, 1763, Washington and nineteen other entrepreneurs banded together to launch the Mississippi Land Company, which hoped to claim 2.5 million acres of land in the Ohio Valley. This gargantuan chunk of real estate would encompass sections of what later became Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The shortsighted British preferred to save the fur trade with the Indians and, by a royal proclamation on October 7, 1763, banned settlers from regions west of the Allegheny Mountains. The Crown rationalized this policy by saying it was easier to defend subjects in seaport cities, but in a colony obsessed with real estate speculation, it was a catastrophic blunder to confine settlers to the eastern seaboard. The end of the war had no sooner disclosed tempting glimpses of riches than colonial masters in London snatched them away. Fearful that his western bonanza might evaporate, Washington condemned the move. “I can never look upon that Proclamation in any other light than as a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians,” he said.2 For Washington, the infamous decree was doubly damaging because it interfered with the bounty claims of veterans from the Virginia Regiment. To nobody’s surprise, settlers from Germany, Ireland, and elsewhere continued to spill into the Ohio Valley in a resistless tide.
As early as May 1764, reports reached Virginia that Parliament was hatching a tax to force colonists to defray wartime costs and pay for future protection. This violated a long-standing tradition of reserving taxing powers to colonial legislatures. Convinced that they were heavily taxed already, a committee of burgesses protested to the king that December, issuing an appeal that grounded their opposition in hallowed English liberties. They pleaded for protection “in the enjoyment of their ancient and inestimable right of being governed by such laws respecting their internal polity