ONCE WASHINGTON AGREED to serve a second term, the decision only fueled his apprehension about the state of his business affairs at Mount Vernon. There had been some improvements during his presidency, most notably the innovative, sixteen-sided threshing barn that Washington had designed. But in his absence, despite such scientific strides, Mount Vernon was overtaken by general decay, and his letters are replete with long-running complaints about dilapidated buildings, fences, hedges, barns, gates, and stables needing repair.

Having lost the services of George Augustine and Anthony Whitting, Mount Vernon lacked a guiding hand, and it was all Washington could do to keep the place running from afar. He never overcame his chronic financial anxieties, which only worsened with the distractions of his political career, and he remained a notably relentless, hard-driving boss. His incomparable success in life seemed not to soften his views or lighten his touch with employees, as if his economic insecurity were too deeply rooted ever to be extirpated. It never seemed to dawn on him to apply the same courtesy to his employees that he did to colleagues in Philadelphia, where he was such an exquisitely tactful politician. In December 1792 he badgered Anthony Whitting to keep a slave named Gunner hard at work, even though Gunner was probably around eighty-three years old. “It may be proper for Gunner to continue throwing up brick earth,” the president wrote.²⁰ Despite his theoretical opposition to slavery, he cautioned his overseers against the “idleness and deceit” of slaves if not treated with a firm hand.²¹

Washington’s business letters home have an unpleasantly caustic tone, as if he felt himself at the mercy of so many dunces and knaves. He was constantly on guard against inept overseers, whom he thought too lax in dealing with slaves. If overseers weren’t up with the sun, he warned, slaves would sleep late, loaf, and cost him money. In essence, the overseers became slaves to the long hours of the slaves they supervised. In petulant weekly letters to the consumptive Whitting in 1792 and 1793, Washington scarcely ever offered an encouraging syllable. With painful consistency, he faulted Whitting’s work, loaded him with advice, and seemed to accuse everyone of malingering.

In mid-March 1793, as Whitting was spitting up blood, Washington informed Fanny Bassett Washington that the doctors had pronounced his tuberculosis “critical and dangerous.”²² Whitting himself wrote pathetically to the president: “I am just now able to walk a little. Am very much reduced and very weak.”²³ Nonetheless that spring, as he grappled with neutrality and Citizen Genet, Washington continually lambasted Whitting and talked to him as if he were a fool or a child. When he thought Whitting did not respond adequately to his questions, he told him to take a slip of paper, jot down all the instructions, then cross off each item on the checklist as it was accomplished. At the time Whitting was so weak that he could scarcely mount a horse; a month later he lay in critical condition. Bedridden, barely able to speak, he nonetheless fretted about his failure to file weekly reports with Washington. As Tobias Lear reported from the scene: “Mr. Whitting was much concerned at your not having received the reports of last week, but observed that he had directed [James] Butler [the Mansion House overseer] to take them, as he was unable to do it himself.” ²⁴ A few days later the estate manager was dead.

Preoccupied with political problems, Washington was thrown into turmoil by Whitting’s death and promptly launched a search for a successor, looking for an honest, sober bachelor between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five. Only after Whitting’s death did Washington learn to appreciate his virtues, telling one correspondent, “If I could get a man as well qualified for my purposes as the late Mr. Whitting . . . I sh[oul]d esteem myself very fortunate.”²⁵ Even so, Washington continued to defame Whitting, claiming that he “drank freely, kept bad company at my house and in Alexandria, and was a very debauched person.”²⁶

In late September, Washington hired William Pearce as the new estate manager and quickly trained him in his own exacting style, telling him how he liked everything in tip-top shape, humming smoothly along. As with Whitting, he told Pearce to keep a checklist of his instructions and review them often, “because I expect to have them complied with or reasons assigned for not doing it.”²⁷

By this point Washington was convinced that Mount Vernon was veering toward chaos and that he had to crack down on overseers and slaves alike. In the same language he had long used with his military and political associates, he coached Pearce on how to handle recalcitrant overseers: “To treat them civilly is no more than what all men are entitled to, but my advice to you is to keep them at a proper distance; for they will grow upon familiarity in proportion as you will sink in authority, if you do not.”²⁸ He gave Pearce scathing character sketches of the five overseers, calling one “a sickly, slothful, and stupid fellow,” and urging him to correct the abuses that had crept into the daily workings of Mount Vernon.²⁹ Ironically, the only one of the five overseers for whom he spared a kind word was the one black: “Davy at Muddy Hole carries on his business as well as the white overseers and with more quietness than any of them. With proper directions, he will do very well.”³⁰

Priding himself on being a progressive farmer, Washington was frustrated by his inability to introduce modern methods. When Henry Lee told him about a new threshing machine, Washington responded that “the utility of it among careless Negroes and ignorant overseers will depend absolutely upon the simplicity of the construction, for if there is anything complex in the machinery, it will be no longer in use than a mushroom is in existence.”³¹ His letters teem with regrets that his overseers refused to apply the crop-rotation system that had been his will-o’-the-wisp for many years.

Finally, on December 23, 1793, right before Christmas, Washington devoted a large portion of the day to writing five consecutive letters to his five overseers, blaming them for ruining his hopes for crop rotation and for the general decline of his business. In terms of pure, unadulterated rage, these five letters have no equal in Washington’s papers: they suggest a daylong temper tantrum and show just how sharp-tongued and frustrated he could be. Their jeering tone is almost willfully cruel, as if Washington wanted to say things with brutal clarity and telegraph a tough new regimen. They show how exceedingly anxious he was about his financial position and the economic situation at Mount Vernon. They may also express some displaced anger from the violent attacks being made on him in the Jeffersonian press and by the Democratic-Republican Societies. Not mincing words, Washington wrote to overseer Hiland Crow that he had been

so much disturbed at your insufferable neglect [of plowing] that it is with difficulty I have been restrained from ordering you instantly off the plantation. My whole place for next year is ruined by your conduct. And look ye, Mr. Crow, I have too good reasons to believe that your running about and entertaining company at home . . . is the cause of this now irremediable evil in the progress of my business . . . I am very willing and desirous to be your friend, but if your conduct does not merit it, you must abide the consequences from Y[ou]rs.³²

Crow was a savage overseer in flogging slaves, Washington describing him to Pearce as “swayed more by passion than by judgment in all his corrections.”³³