Washington [96]
Whatever rage Washington felt toward his London factors was contained by their extensive credit and his inability to check his expenditures. Planters needed funds to tide them over until crops were harvested and sold abroad. From the early 1760s till the time of his death, people imagined that George Washington was infinitely more prosperous than he was because they had no conception of his crippling debt. When Robert Stewart asked to borrow four hundred pounds in 1763, Washington declined and volunteered to show him a copy of his accounts at Robert Cary. “I doubt not but you will be surprised at the badness of their condition,” he wrote in embarrassment.11 Washington was not alone: Virginia gazettes were then chock-full of advertisements of large indebted estates for sale.
The following year Washington was mortified to receive a sharply worded reprimand from Robert Cary that he owed eighteen hundred pounds, coupled with a warning of a 5 percent interest charge on unpaid debt. Money was the one area where Washington tended to dodge personal responsibility and blame force majeure. Reacting with outrage to the letter, he protested that bad weather had caused him to fall into arrears. “For it was a misfortune that seasons and chance shou[l]d prevent my making even tolerable crops in this part of the country for three years successively and it was a misfortune likewise when they were made that I shou[l]d get little or nothing for them.”12 He also objected to the accusatory tone of Cary’s letter.13 Nonetheless, having voiced his anger, Washington took the hint and shaved his debt in half by 1770.
It is striking how moody and snappish Washington could be about money. This man who was generally so polite and courteous tended to shed all tact in business matters, the one dimension of his career unimproved by the passage of time. He adopted a blistering style whenever he thought someone had cheated him. Some of this anger reflected continuing financial travails, and some the troubling legacy of his insecure, fatherless childhood. For a man who loved control as much as Washington, it must have been trying to depend upon far-off brokers in London, known to him only by name.
The reliance upon foreign vendors fostered constant tension. To fill Washington’s orders for goods, Robert Cary and Company drew upon a network of forty London shops. An invoice from April 1763 shows a small army of suppliers to Mount Vernon that included a linen merchant, woolen merchant, grocer, spice maker, shot maker (gunshot), pipe maker, pickler, rope maker, porter (beverage supplier), apothecary, toolmaker, haberdasher, cheesemonger, stationer, milliner, hosier, tin maker, plate maker, iron maker, wine merchant, turner (potter), and shoemaker.14 However much Washington emphasized, for political reasons, the potential self-sufficiency of the colonies, he could never curtail his taste for luxury goods from London. With a superb eye for fashion, he was the first American to scrap white stoneware dishes, and in 1769 he ordered 250 pieces of the tony new cream-colored earthenware produced by Josiah Wedgwood. Not satisfied with bone or wooden handles for flatware, he purchased cutlery with silver handles, his griffin crest emblazoned on every implement. Everything from his gold-headed cane to his bookplates to his horse harnesses bore this proud crest.
The perils of transatlantic shopping grew apparent when Washington ordered a new four-horse coach in 1768. With his slavish regard