All this display impressed visitors, often wrongly, with the magnitude of the owner’s wealth. When one English merchant toured Mount Vernon in 1785, he stumbled into this understandable error: Washington’s “gardens and pleasure grounds . . . were very extensive . . . He is allowed to be one of the best informed as well as successful planters in America.”7 Washington was indeed well informed, but his success was more problematic. The merchant would have been shocked to hear Washington grumble that year that “to be plain, my coffers are not overflowing with money.”8 Unable to curtail his free-handed spending and with his crops faring poorly, he started out 1786 with a paltry eighty-six pounds in cash.
Although Washington delegated authority to managers and overseers, he never really developed a right-hand man or someone equivalent to him in power. Even after George Augustine Washington succeeded Lund, Washington kept a tightfisted grip on operations, monitoring them through weekly reports, a process so rigorous that some detected a military mentality at work. Senator William Maclay later wrote of Mount Vernon as regimented to the point of madness: “It is under different overseers. Who may be styled generals . . . The Friday of every week is appointed for the overseers, or we will say brigadier generals, to make up their returns. Not a day’s work but is noted what, by whom, and where done; not a cow calves or ewe drops her lamb but is registered . . . Thus the etiquette and arrangement of an army is preserved on his farm.”9
To repair his damaged finances, Washington set out for his western holdings in September 1784, hoping to retrieve lost rents. He was accompanied by Dr. Craik and his son, his nephew Bushrod Washington, and three slaves. He had never ceased to be a prophet of the pristine Ohio Country, declaring during the Revolution that there was “no finer country in the known world than is encircled by the Ohio, Mississippi, and Great Lakes.”10 On the basis of prewar patents, Washington claimed thirty thousand western acres, with survey rights to an additional ten thousand. On an abstract level, Washington portrayed the western lands as a new American Eden, telling the Reverend John Witherspoon, a Presbyterian minister and president of the College of New Jersey, that “it would give me pleasure to see these lands seated by particular societies or religious sectaries with their pastors.”11 When it came to his actual behavior as a landlord, however, Washington never ascended to these giddy rhetorical heights and could sound like a downright skinflint.
The early postwar years witnessed a mad and often lawless scramble for western lands, and many settlers had little regard for eastern landlords who claimed their property. Throughout the Revolution Washington received reports of squatters occupying his land while legitimate tenants fell behind on payments. At first, inclining toward leniency, he said that those squatters who improved the land should be allowed to stay at reasonable rents. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, he said they might have inadvertently settled the land without realizing it was his. By the summer of 1784, however, he had lost all patience. Western rents had become his main source of revenue, and he decided to take matters into his own hands by personally dunning recalcitrant tenants. Less than a year after laying down his commission at Annapolis, the American Cincinnatus, badly strapped for cash, was reduced to a bill collector.
For this rugged journey across the Appalachian Mountains, Washington loaded up the horses with a large tent, camp utensils, a boat, medicine, and hooks and lines for fishing. He retraced the footsteps of earlier journeys into the western country, a landscape rife with youthful memories, including the march with Braddock’s army. Still a fearless traveler, he didn’t shrink from roughing it—at one campsite he slept under nothing but his cloak in a torrential downpour—but his diaries contain more references to fatigue than in earlier years as well as to rain running in rivulets down the trails.
A man of strongly fixed enthusiasms, Washington was also bent on reviving his long-standing but stalled project of improving the Potomac River navigation. He was still bedazzled by the vision of a watery gateway to the Ohio Valley that ran right by his home. When he arrived at Berkeley Springs, he came under the sway of a gifted inventor endowed with glib patter, James Rumsey, who had devised a mechanical boat that could churn upstream against the current. Always open to innovation, Washington was beguiled by Rumsey’s craft. Spying a way to promote Potomac traffic, he did more than pay lip service to this device: he issued a written endorsement for Rumsey, vouching that he had actually seen his ungainly invention move upstream against the current.
When Washington stopped at his property at Great Meadows, scene of the Fort Necessity debacle, he made no reference in his diary to its bloody history. As before the war, he scrutinized the western frontier with the coolly appraising eyes of a landlord. He seemed exclusively concerned with the meadow’s commercial value, commenting that it would make “a very good stand for a tavern. Much hay may be cut here when the ground is laid down in grass and the upland, east of the meadow, is good for grain.”12 Unsentimental about property, he ordered his local agent to rent the tract “for the most you can get for the term of ten years.”13
In this wilderness area, Washington’s fame counted for little and even exposed him to heightened danger. Protecting it as their rightful territory, Indians had engaged in violent confrontations with settlers on the northwest side of the Ohio River. Congress had banned settlers from this region, but speculators were still drawn by visions of colossal land grabs. “Men in these times talk with as much facility of fifty, a hundred, and even 500,000 acres as a gentleman formerly would do of 1,000 acres,” noted Washington, who sounded sympathetic to Indian grievances. 14 Upon hearing stories of murdered settlers, he canceled a scheduled trip down the Ohio. “Had you proceeded on your tour down the river,” one adviser told him, “I believe it would have been attended with the most dreadful consequences.” The Indians had seized General James Wilkinson under the mistaken impression that he was Washington, and only with “much difficulty of persuasion and gifts” had he escaped.15 To Washington’s consternation, the violent clashes with Indians prevented him from visiting his extensive bounty lands on the Ohio and Great Kanawha rivers—lots measured not in feet but in miles—which were being brazenly offered for sale by speculators as far away as Europe.
On September 14 Washington had his first encounter with the families that had allegedly invaded his property Millers Run (not far from today’s Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, southwest of Pittsburgh). While Washington’s deputy, William Crawford, had surveyed the property as early as 1771, squatters contended that they had come upon an empty tract and occupied it before the patent was granted. If Washington expected special deference in these remote mountain hollows, he quickly learned otherwise. On the frontier, he did not enjoy the veneration he did back east, a rowdy new democratic culture having taken root.
As he bargained with poor, defiant settlers, members of a dissenting Presbyterian sect, Washington sounded a different note from his rhapsodic speech to John Witherspoon about seeding the West with religious sects or from his grandiloquent boast to Lafayette that Congress had “opened the fertile plains of the Ohio to the poor, the needy, and the oppressed of the earth.”16 After his first meeting with the Reed family, Washington noted sarcastically their effort “to discover all the flaws they could in my deed and to establish a fair and upright intention in themselves.”17 At their next meeting the tone turned even more confrontational. To settle the controversy, the Reeds offered to buy the land but balked at the steep price quoted by Washington. The standoff ended acrimoniously; the family decided to sue him, and Washington threatened to evict them. Reed family legend contended that a tetchy Washington responded “with dignity and some warmth, asserting that they had been forewarned by his agent, and the nature of his claim fully made known; that there could be no doubt of its validity, and rising from his seat and holding a red silk handkerchief by one corner, he said, ‘Gentlemen, I will have this land just as surely as I now have this handkerchief.’”18 The lawsuit wound bitterly through the courts for two years before Washington emerged victorious. Conciliatory in victory, he permitted the squatters to lease the property instead of evicting them.