George Washington always seemed in quiet revolt against the licentious Virginia culture of his upbringing. Many fellow planters, addicted to pleasure, thrived on a constant round of parties, dances, horse races, cockfights, boat races, and card playing. Washington was a far more driven and disciplined man than most of his neighbors, and his hardworking existence stood in stark contrast to their indolent ways. He was guided by a code of conduct that was crystal clear to him and that he frequently enunciated to young relatives. A man with a powerful conscience, he always feared that he was being watched from afar and made sure his conduct could stand up to the most severe critical standards.
Washington was moralistic about several vices ubiquitous in Tidewater Virginia: excessive drinking (he enjoyed drinking in moderation), gambling, smoking, and profanity. It is revealing that this famous Virginian later considered sending his adopted grandson to Harvard rather than to a Virginia college, because “the greater attention of the people [there] generally to morals and a more regular course of life [makes them] less prone to dissipation and debauchery than they are at the colleges south of it.”34 One of his duties as a Truro Parish churchwarden was to dispatch to the county court those guilty of gambling, drinking, profanity, breaking the Sabbath, and “certain other offences against decency and morality.”35 It would have suited Washington’s moralistic nature to pack off these offenders to condign punishment. The control of disruptive urges, for himself and others, always formed a central theme of his life.
Later on Washington developed a strong aversion to gambling, but it was likely the vice that most tempted his proper, upstanding nature. He had grown up in a raffish world where men gambled constantly at cards and billiards in smoky taverns and bet on races and cockfights. “Gambling is amazingly prevalent in Williamsburg,” one northern visitor exclaimed.36 Right before his marriage, Washington ordered from London a mahogany card table, two dozen packs of playing cards, and two sets of counters for quadrille, a popular card game. He enjoyed playing loo and whist for money and recorded small sums won and lost at cards and billiards, down to the last pence. His papers contain a fascinating list showing his card-playing expenses for 1772-74, revealing frequent indulgence. In Williamsburg, in the single month of May 1772, he gambled a dozen times, winning four times and losing eight. The following month he played six times and lost on five occasions—perhaps why his subsequent entries grew more infrequent. Washington even gambled once during the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, walking away with seven pounds.
One wonders whether this detailed list simply reflected Washington’s compulsive record keeping or whether it was a way to monitor a perceived moral failing. In 1783 he wrote to his nephew Bushrod and inveighed against gambling as one of many snares that trip up unsuspecting youths, his florid language suggesting that he knew about gambling from personal experience or close observation. “It is the child of avarice, the brother of inequity, and father of mischief. It has been the ruin of many worthy families, the loss of many a man’s honor, and the cause of suicide. To all those who enter the list, it is equally fascinating. The successful gamester pushes his good fortune till it is overtaken by a reverse. The losing gamester, in hopes of retrieving past misfortunes, goes on from bad to worse.”37
Washington had a far better record in controlling other urges. After a period in which he smoked his own tobacco in long-stemmed clay pipes, he seems to have forsworn the habit altogether. His swearing was so infrequent that people commented on it when it happened. Even though he took several glasses of wine with dinner, this was considered acceptable in an age of immoderate alcohol consumption. He once complained that Williamsburg’s social life was a continual round of dinners and that “it was not possible for a man to retire sober.”38 After the Revolutionary War, he told one visitor with evident relief that Virginians were “less given to intoxication; . . . it is no longer fashionable for a man to force his guests to drink and to make it an honor to send them home drunk.”39
Whether hiring overseers or appointing army officers, Washington insisted upon sobriety and saw no greater sign of weakness than a man’s inability to control his drinking. Alcoholism was a chronic problem that he had to combat among the hired help at Mount Vernon. On one occasion he capitulated to the drinking of a talented gardener whose sprees he agreed to tolerate so long as the man confined them to certain holidays. In his employment contract, Washington stated that he would be given “four dollars at Christmas with which to be drunk four days and four nights; two dollars at Easter, to effect the same purpose; two dollars at Whitsuntide to be drunk for two days; a dram in the morning and a drink of grog at dinner at noon.”40 It was typical of Washington’s thoroughness to pin down such an agreement in writing.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A World of His Own
IN 1763 the end of the French and Indian War appeared to foreshadow a halcyon season of peace and prosperity for the colonies, but the troubled aftermath sowed the seeds of conflict twelve years later. The national debt of Great Britain, inflated by military spending, had swollen to a stupendous 130 million pounds, with annual interest payments of 4.5 million pounds engrossing more than half the national budget. To shift this tax burden to its North American subjects, the British government introduced a stamp tax and other hated measures that ignited an insurrection in the colonies. At the same time, having banished the French from Canada, the war eliminated the colonists’ need for imperial protection to the north.
The Crown’s postwar policy caused colonists to feel penalized by a victory to which they had contributed. It outlawed the printing of paper money by the colonies—London merchants fretted over their losses from such depreciated paper—making currency scarce in Virginia. George Washington, suddenly unable to collect money from strapped debtors, predicted that the ban on colonial money might “set the whole country in flames.”1 Washington’s first stirrings of anti-British fervor had arisen from his failure to receive a royal commission, but they were now joined by disenchantment over pocketbook issues. Great Britain was simply bad for local business, a fact that would soon foster the historical anomaly of a revolution inaugurated by affluent, conservative leaders. As potentates of vast estates, lords of every acre they saw, George Washington and other planters didn’t care to truckle to a distant, unseen power.
Perhaps the most incendiary colonial resentment related to land policy, the wartime victory having liberated the acquisitive urges of speculators. In May 1763 Washington joined nine other investors in a plan to drain the Great Dismal Swamp in southeastern Virginia and turn it into lucrative farmland. United in a syndicate, Adventurers for Draining the Dismal Swamp, these speculators hoped to bypass royal regulations that restricted grants of Crown lands to one thousand acres per individual. To circumvent this limit, they manufactured 138 bogus names when they submitted their land petition in Williamsburg. Washington, with a fertile mind for development, envisioned that the ditch employed to drain the swamp could also serve as a canal leading to Norfolk, a farsighted plan finally realized in 1828. Like every economic activity in Virginia, the Dismal Swamp project relied on slave labor, and Washington contributed six slaves.