Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (10 page)

The Ohio Valley, with its potential for growth in settlement, attracted people who expected too much from a colonial government with little military power at hand. Power cost money, and the colony looked for the Crown to pay for it rather than dig into its own resources. For Washington this meant chronic underfinancing. He had to defend scattered settlements ranging over several hundred square miles. His enemy in this undeveloped West knew the ground as well as or better than he did. The Ohio Indians proved themselves in the wilderness, using a style of fighting that Virginians, indeed all colonials, never really mastered. “Bush fighting” offered problems to Virginians that did not show up in European manuals, or in the traditional methods favored by Europeans and colonials alike.

The men in the Virginia Regiment commanded by Washington were sometimes trained in the conventional European ways: They knew something about moving in columns, firing on order, and the infantry drill. But most of them were not skilled in any form of combat; many were poor shots, and Washington came to beg for marksmen with genuine ability. The militiamen who came to his regiment when the Indians seemed about to overrun settlements in his first two years of command were especially troublesome. They usually were draftees, sometimes the unemployed, even vagrants, forced into service by counties in a halfhearted response to requirements of the Virginia legislature.

Washington pointed out their inadequacies but had no alternative to using them. He did not receive much help in his efforts—clothing, weapons, and food remained in short supply in these years. Understandably, a good many men deserted, some aided by the farmers along the frontier who pitied them.

By the time the war turned in the colonies’ favor, Washington had become a soldier of considerable skill. He had learned much from the Indian and French enemy and also from the British army and political establishment, which denied him a royal commission. In this educational process, he had become a hardened professional knowledgeable in the military arts and experienced in combat with foes from the New World and the Old. The campaign along the Forbes Road was in a sense the icing on the cake of experience. He held his own with British officers, most notably Forbes and Bouquet. Leading troops in large numbers—his brigade was five or six hundred strong—called for and surely strengthened his organizational sense. He proved equal to all the demands imposed by a campaign with European regulars.

Washington’s political skill was pushed to the limit in these years. Dealing with Dinwiddie found him stumbling on occasion, but most of the time his ability to read his superior served his and the army’s interests. He had also to deal with British authority in the persons of absentee commanders in chief—most notably Shirley and Loudoun. Washington found allies in the House of Burgesses and the Council in John Robinson and William Fairfax. He wrote to them in difficult and dangerous times, but his tone in explaining his problems was not that of a man of fears or desperation. He did not whine or beg but provided a realistic account of what he faced, and his letters conveyed
a sense of his own determination and personal strength even in desperate times.

He was twenty-seven years old when he resigned, a formidable man and a soldier of ability and experience. He was also brave and had much talent in reserve. He did not know it, but he was ready for a major challenge, one that would enrich his life but also transform the world.

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From Planter to Patriot

Washington had married almost immediately after leaving the army. Martha was a widow with two children, twenty-eight years old, pretty rather than beautiful, and extraordinarily wealthy. Her children—Patsy, two years old, and Jack, four—were healthy and much loved by their mother. More than her money made Martha attractive to young men. She was a gentle person, thoughtful, free of pretensions—she once described herself as “a fine, healthy girl”—and apparently charmed by Washington when she first met him, in March 1758.

Although Washington at the time may have been in love with another woman—Sally Fairfax, his neighbor at nearby Belvoir plantation—he found Martha Custis to have attractions of her own. Yet they were not so good as to wash away the feeling he harbored for Sally. Sally Fairfax, the wife of his close friend George William Fairfax, seems to have felt affection for Washington, but she never hinted that she was willing to give up her marriage for him. Nor did he wish to endure the scandal, and the loss of George Fairfax’s friendship, by engaging in an affair with her. They were neighbors, Washington and Sally, but they kept their love, if indeed either one felt passionate affection, at a distance.
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Washington took Martha and the children to Mount Vernon immediately after the wedding. The marriage had made him a wealthy man, and now he turned to the problems of establishing his new family in a setting he loved. Mount Vernon had been in his hands since late 1754, when he leased it from Ann Fairfax Lee, his brother’s widow, recently remarried. (He was to inherit it in 1761, on her death.)

When he took up the life of a tobacco planter, Mount Vernon was in terrible shape, its buildings run down and its fields neglected. An overseer had managed it for Washington during the years he spent in
the army. Washington had lived there for short periods while serving, but he had neither the time nor the energy during these years to make it a productive plantation. In fact, in his longest stays he was sick or recovering from illnesses that in one instance threatened his life.
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Now, in good health and with a wife and two children, he had to transform himself into an estate manager, one part businessman and one part farmer. This assignment seems to have been as different from the soldier’s tasks as anything could be. On the face of things, running a plantation called for skills not ordinarily found in a soldier. War had called for physical and moral courage—qualities he had in abundance. It had taught him much about the organization of men and resources. It had also exposed his less desirable qualities, an ambition for the status that appointment in the British army would bring, and occasionally an impatience so strong as to evoke conduct bordering on immaturity. By themselves, impatience and ambition were not necessarily unfortunate characteristics: the ambition fostered hard work and commitment to military duty, and the impatience could trigger action needed in situations where lethargy and complacency were common. Though his resignation of his command of the Virginia Regiment in 1758 was understandable, a man less driven by his inner compulsions might have seen things through and emerged even stronger as the tide turned in the war.

But Washington had resigned, and he now was a married man facing the daunting tasks of making a new career as a planter. His powers of organization were soon very much in evidence. Marriage had brought new lands, slaves, and problems. The most prosperous of the Custis plantations now under his control were located eighty miles south on the York River, at a distance that prevented his direct supervision. Whether he would have supervised their operations closely had they been nearer is not clear, for their longtime steward, Joseph Valentine, had managed them well. In any case, he had plenty to do at Mount Vernon and his nearby properties.
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There were mouths to feed. His slaves numbered about fifty when he took up his new duties, and they had to be fed if they were to work. The responsibility for providing food he shared with his slaves. He allowed them to fish, indeed encouraged them to do so by lending them a boat and nets. Such work was not a regularly scheduled activity but was taken up when schools or runs of herring appeared in the
Potomac and nearby rivers and creeks. His slaves also raised chickens for meat and eggs, a practice common on all Virginia plantations. Most of the food for slaves came from systematic production of corn, turnips, fruits, and animals, especially hogs. In the early years after his return he bought hogs from nearby producers. His goal was, however, to produce a number sufficient for his own use.
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Until the middle of the decade, Washington’s chief focus at Mount Vernon was the production of tobacco. It proved a frustrating task. The soil on the plantation was not quite right for tobacco, or for a number of other crops Washington hoped to grow. Several types of clay predominated, each with its own deficiencies—some of it drained too slowly and remained in a form almost marshlike; another type dried out, seemed to pack itself tightly, and resisted efforts to plow it up for planting and cultivation.

Soil—tough, resistant, or fertile—fascinated Washington and stimulated his venturesomeness. His experimental sense grew from his daring, a willingness to try some new expedient if what he had done failed. He began conducting experiments with soils soon after full-time planting became his life. In 1760, he moved “earth” from the field into the garden and mixed several kinds of composts “to try their several Virtues.” This effort soon became a rather intricate trial, with earth, marl, cow bones and sheep dung, riverside sand, mold from the pocosin, and the clay from “just below the garden.” He separated these components into ten separate “apartments” within a box. One of them was reserved for clay without any other mix. Once the soils were mixed, he “planted three Grains of Wheat 3 of Oats & as many of Barley, all at equal distances in Rows & of equal depth (done by a Machine made for the purpose).” Some grains yielded plants over the next few weeks, and on May 1 he tabulated the results in his diary.
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This experiment, carefully planned and executed, was about as intricate an exercise as any he undertook. In conducting it, he was looking for the kind of wheat best suited to Virginia. He began with the English red winter wheat, but he tried many others over the next few years. Awareness of his interest in wheat and his experiments spread over Virginia, and before long he received seed from other planters; when he was satisfied that he had found an outstanding strain, he sent samples to neighbors and to friends as far away as Jefferson’s Monticello.
Altogether he seems to have tried out a dozen varieties, finally concluding that white wheat suited Mount Vernon soil the best.
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There was design in this experiment, repeated in various forms with many plants as he searched for the most productive crops. In these early years he planted clover, alfalfa, and rye; he varied the times of the year in a number of these trials, and resorted to different composts and fertilizers. Whatever he planted received careful scrutiny, and the results of his trials were meticulously recorded. Most of his planting, of course, was not by nature an experiment, but the results were treated as if it were. The results proved enlightening, especially as they concerned tobacco. By 1766 he had concluded that profit lay in wheat, not in sweet-scented or oronoco tobacco. His tenants on several farms and the plantations on the York stayed with tobacco. At Mount Vernon he gave it up.

This result proved the weightiest of all his planting experiments. Throughout his years of focus on tobacco and for years afterwards, he continued his study of soils, seeds, crops, and all that went into agricultural production. Besides testing soil, compost, and seeds, he experimented with plows and fencing (with an eye to restraining hogs, which rooted up his garden) and showed himself willing to try any possibility that promised success in planting. He tried out several kinds of plows—including the “Duck Bill” and the “two Eyed”—soon invented one of his own, and finally ordered one from England.
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Looking to England for a plow was one aspect of his eagerness to learn and to profit from the experience of others. The revolution in agriculture was near its peak when he began his life as a planter, and he explored its findings with eagerness. In these early years, he relied on Jethro Tull’s
Horse-Houghing Husbandry, an Essay on the Principles of Tillage and Vegetation
(1731) more than any other publication. The edition he used, published in 1751, was an American favorite, but few Virginia planters read in the scientific literature as deeply as he did.
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Before he gave up tobacco planting, he thought that he understood the process of its production and sale well, and in certain respects he was right. But it was a more complicated world than he recognized. The actual cultivation of the plant was probably better known to Washington than anything else in the system that had developed in the century and a half of the colony’s existence.

Throughout most of the seventeenth century, Virginians had not completely cleared their fields, preferring instead to cut trees and bushes close to the ground and plant seedlings around them. They avoided much heavy labor in following this procedure, an especially important tactic when most fieldwork had to be done by white indentured servants. Planters also used fields that had been cleared years before by Indians and in most cases had lain fallow. In fact, these seventeenth-century practices constituted a “long fallow” system. The system—leaving fields unplanted—was not always a conscious attempt to allow the land to regain its fertility, though most planters recognized that allowing second-growth trees and bushes to grow would, after an interval of twenty or thirty years, make the once abandoned fields productive.

With the introduction of slavery, these practices changed, and early in the eighteenth century, as population increased and slavery was established, a new pattern appeared, involving better-prepared fields and the use of animal fertilizers. More tobacco-growing fields were put in and population expanded, with most of the new planters moving into woodlands to the north and west. Some of these planters were men who had abandoned their old ground, or, more commonly, men who held on to what they had, even in the face of its infertility, and looked to add to their holdings in the Piedmont.
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