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By Root 25699 0

As Washington informed a British friend, the Potomac was “one of the finest rivers in the world—a river well stock[ed] with various kinds of fish at all seasons of the year and in the spring with shad, herring, bass, carp, sturgeon, and in great abundance.”19 Visitors to Mount Vernon shared his fascination with the teeming schools of fish, which created a churning turbulence in the river. “I have seen for several hours together in a summer’s evening, hundreds, perhaps I might say thousands of sturgeon, at a great height from the water at the same instant, so that the quantity in the river must have been inconceivably great,” proclaimed one Frenchman. 20 Washington was often astounded by the rich harvests of fish pulled up in his bulging seines. “The whitefish ran plentifully at my seine landing, having catched ab[ou]t 300 at one haul,” he reported in his diary.21 This number paled beside the stupendous herring runs caught each spring as they swam to upstream spawning grounds. “They fish for them in April,” said one Polish visitor. “They have caught as many as 100 thousand of them with a single draw of the net.”22 By 1772 Mount Vernon’s fishery netted almost a million herring per year.

At first the fishing operation supplied food for Mount Vernon’s slaves, but Washington soon spied the potential profit and began to have the fish salted and packed in barrels for export to the West Indies. To facilitate this trade, he assembled a small fleet of boats, including a whaleboat and a schooner. Much of his yield he sold to Carlyle & Adam in Alexandria, and a single ledger entry for May 1771 shows that he delivered 679,200 herring and 7,760 shad at one shot. Even with his fishery, Washington felt hampered by senseless imperial policies. For instance, the finest salt for curing fish came from Lisbon, but England’s mercantilist policies forced him to import inferior salt from Liverpool. He constantly felt snarled in a tangled web of perverse economic regulations drawn up by London bureaucrats.

As Washington switched from tobacco to other crops, the move had profound repercussions for his slaves. Since tobacco was more labor intensive than wheat or corn, its elimination led to a surplus of field hands. For the rest of his life, Washington grappled with the dilemma of having too many slaves, whose numbers only increased through normal population growth. At the same time he increasingly trained his slaves to perform a multitude of skilled tasks, producing a workforce of artisans proficient in diverse crafts. One Scottish visitor observed that Washington “has everything within himself—carpenters, bricklayers, brewers, blacksmiths, bakers, etc. etc.—and even has a well-assorted store for the use of his family and servants.”23 The skills possessed by his enslaved craftsmen were extremely impressive. According to Washington’s editors, one slave named Isaac “constructed carts, wheels, plows, harrows, rakes, wheelbarrows, and other implements,” while another slave, Tom Davis, was a “skilled bricklayer, who also harvested grain, painted exteriors, hung wallpaper, cut grass, and worked at Washington’s fishery.”24

To instruct his slaves, Washington imported indentured servants from Europe, many of them former convicts, who labored for a period of years, and their employment contracts obligated them to teach their trade to slaves they supervised. So pervasive were these arrangements that a full quarter of Mount Vernon’s slaves qualified as skilled workers, and Washington farmed them out to other planters for extra income. While indentured servants weren’t subject to the same punishing regimen as slaves, they felt their bondage strongly, and many ran away before their term expired. Just as he did with runaway slaves, Washington advertised for their return, and his notices show a minute knowledge of these hired hands. When William Orre escaped in 1774, Washington described him as “a well-made man about 5 foot 10 inches high and about 24 years of age. He was born in Scotland and talks that dialect pretty much. He is of a red complexion and very