In placing orders for goods from London, Washington often employed two adjectives that nicely sum up his taste: neat and fashionable. In the eighteenth century, the word neat differed subtly from its usage today. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, neat then meant “characterized by elegance of form without unnecessary embellishment; of agreeable but simple appearance; nicely made or proportioned.” In other words, Washington preferred things that were stylish but subdued, denoting his worldly status without showily advertising it. Although he never lived to see England (he told one correspondent in 1760 that he “ardently desired” to go), this young provincial yearned to resemble the better class of London people. ³³ In a typical order to his London agents, he wrote, “I have no doubt but you will choose a fashionable colored cloth as well as a good one and make it in the best taste.”³⁴ The Virginia planter trusted blindly to the sartorial judgment of his London tailors. When he ordered “two pair of work[e]d ruffles at a guinea each pair,” he added that “if work[e]d ruffles should be out of fashion, send such as are not.”³⁵ After years of a rough soldierly life, Washington ordered breeches of black silk and crimson velvet. He was careful, however, to warn against lace or embroidery or anything that might stereotype him as a fop. Many of his clothing orders stressed practicality. When ordering a blue hooded greatcoat, he requested that it be made “of such cloth as will turn [away] a good shower of rain.”³⁶

Because he constantly sent his measurements to faraway artisans, Washington left many precise descriptions of his physique, but his somewhat oddly shaped body made him the bane of his tailors. His wide hips and powerful thighs caused the most trouble. In one of many letters about his ill-fitting clothes, he reproached the tailor in caustic terms: “I desire you to make me a pair of breeches of the same cloth as my former pair, but more accurately fitting. These breeches must be roomy in the seat, the buttons firmly sewn on . . . These breeches must be made exactly to these measurements, not to those to which you imagine that they may stretch after a period of use.”³⁷

Like her husband, Martha Washington went on a buying binge after their marriage and ordered a cornucopia of luxury goods, with George drafting the itemized list to London. She ordered silk stockings, white satin shoes, gold shoe buckles, beaver hats, and later on, purple kid gloves. She must have been proud of her hair, for she dressed it with “2 fine ivory combs” and “2 large tortoiseshell combs” as well as gauze caps and “2 pounds of fine perfumed powder.”³⁸ Indeed, portraits of Martha Washington show that she often ornamented her brown hair with white beads or pearls.

As Colonel Washington evolved from regimental commander to tobacco planter, he felt pangs of envy as he watched a succession of British victories in the French and Indian War. Seventeen fifty-nine was the year, in Horace Walpole’s words, that British bells were “worn threadbare with ringing of victories.”³⁹ For Washington, those bells tolled with a somewhat mournful sound. “The scale of fortune in America is turned greatly in our favor and success is become the boon companion of our fortunate generals,” he told Richard Washington, sounding a bit wistful.⁴⁰ That Washington still identified with the military life and retained some hope of future battlefield glory is evident in his ordering from Robert Cary six busts of great military figures in history: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charles XII of Sweden, Frederick II of Prussia, Prince Eugene of Savoy, and the Duke of Marlborough. When his London agents couldn’t fill the order, they came up with an alternate proposal to supply busts of writers ranging from Homer to Shakespeare to Milton. For the young planter, these literary heroes didn’t quite measure up to famous generals, and he vetoed the suggestion.

As time passed, a petulant tone crept into Washington’s communications to his London factors, and he began to rant about the shoddy, overpriced goods fobbed off on him. The London factors had North American planters at their mercy and exploited the situation, reminding these consumers that, in the last analysis, they were powerless colonials. Washington wasn’t the only Virginian grandee to feel resentful toward arrogant British merchants. Buying in London was a slow, tedious way to do business, hobbled by endless waits for deliveries. When Washington ordered plows from Robert Cary, for example, he found some essential parts missing and bemoaned that the parts already shipped were “entirely useless and lie upon my hands a dead charge.”⁴¹ Sometimes shipments from London wound up at the wrong river or arrived damaged. Even the wealthiest Virginians were simply captive customers.

By nature suspicious of people, Washington experienced a keen sense of injustice. He fretted that Robert Cary was padding his bills and charging exorbitant prices. Of one early shipment, he grumbled that the “woollens, linens, nails etc. are mean in quality but not in price, for in this they excel indeed far above any I have ever had.”⁴² By the second year of his marriage, his letters to London dripped with barefaced sarcasm, and he didn’t bother to disguise his belief that he was being fleeced, telling Robert Cary that “you may believe me when I tell you that instead of getting things good and fashionable in their several kind, we often have articles sent us that could only have been us[e]d by our forefathers in the days of yore. ’Tis a custom . . . with many shopkeepers and tradesmen in London, when they know goods are bespoke for exportation, to palm sometimes old and sometimes very slight and indifferent goods upon us, taking care at the same time to advance 10, 15, or 20 p[e]rc[en]t upon them.”⁴³ When the London factors blithely advised him to return unsatisfactory goods, Washington scoffed that nobody could go a full year without the required articles. His dealings with Robert Cary opened yet another chapter of disillusionment with the British whom he had once so admired.

One reason that Washington and other planters submitted to their London agents was that they offered easy credit unavailable in the colonies. Like many of his affluent neighbors, Washington was land rich and cash poor and spent a lifetime scrounging for money. Historians have often pondered the paradox of why rich Virginia planters later formed a hotbed of revolutionary ferment, and the explanation partly lies in their long, sullen dependence upon London factors. Of four million pounds borrowed by colonists by the outset of the American Revolution, half was owed by the prodigal farmers of Tidewater Virginia.⁴⁴ As they gorged on credit, their luxurious lives rested on a precarious foundation of debt. Virginia borrowers regularly blamed their London factors for this indebtedness rather than examining their own extravagant consumption. In piling up excessive debt, they repeated a vice then rampant among the spendthrift British upper class.

Almost immediately Washington stumbled into the same quagmire of debt that ensnared many fellow planters. After two years of marriage, he owed a sizable two thousand pounds sterling to Robert Cary. Eager to play the country squire to the hilt, he ordered goods from London with a free hand. In a letter to one of his former officers in April 1763, Washington complained of being hopelessly indebted to Robert Cary. In his defense, he pleaded the disorganized state of Mount Vernon when he returned from the war, the need to buy more land and slaves, and the expenses of a large family: “I had provisions of all kinds to buy for the first two or three years and my plantations to stock.” Before he knew it, the money he spent on buildings and other things had “swallowed up . . . all the money I got by marriage, nay more.”⁴⁵