Just finishing Washington At The Plow!

Very fascinating insight into George Washington, as a thinker and as a human being. It really reinforces that his true love was agriculture, and, specifically, trying to find a more ‘modern’ and scientific form of agriculture of the sort that was cutting-edge in Great Britain at the time. It’s very fascinating just how primitive agriculture in the American colonies was at the time, and how Washington hoped to approach a more rational and sustainable mode of cultivating the land. His interest is also wide-ranging and nearly autarkic, or at least vertically-integrated, seeking to process as much of the supply chain on his own as he could. His position seems nearly feudal at points, so totally integrated is his estate - running his own mills, distilleries, clothiers, etc.

A few non-agricultural revelations in particular stood out to me - such as Washington’s use of white indentured servants and convicts, and his constant conflicts with white hired labor for failing to live up to his (exacting, excessive) personal standards. He seems to operate with the mindset that everyone should be as much as a workaholic as him, and seems nearly confused when people fail to be so. While new material to me, it certainly fits the image I had developed of Washington’s personality while previously reading of Washington’s wartime conduct, where his strictness inspired his men to see in him a real military leader and a man confident of victory, but also ran up against the realities of running a rag-tag rebellion and was at times counterproductive. Very much a patrician and an aristocrat with an intensely paternalist streak.

Washington consistently rejects direct leadership positions even in areas outside of governance, giving more context to his reputation as a ‘Cincinnatus’. While part of this is certainly that Washington was always a man very concerned with his reputation, he often eschews the opportunity for direct influence in preference of a ‘leadership by example’ sort of thinking. It may seem contradictory to his perfectionist streak, but I think it’s honestly very fitting - Washington ultimately does not want to be the one in charge, he wants everyone running like clockwork on their own initiative - and is consistently and constantly disappointed when they do not end up doing so.

The book, thankfully, does not shy away from the issue of slavery and how core it was to Washington’s operations. Washington writes extensively on how violence against the enslaved only ‘corrects’ behavior as long as someone’s eye is on them, and that reasoning with people is far more effective. He’s recorded as often bypassing his overseers to speak with the slaves personally, taking into account not only their advice on farming operations, but also complaints of their conditions, including personal recriminations against Washington’s behavior and the overseers.

On numerous occasions, Washington sacrifices the prospect of monetary gain for humanitarian concerns, choosing to refuse individual sales because one of his slaves does not wish to be parted from family at Mount Vernon, or buying slaves from other plantations that he professedly does not need and cannot really afford considering the meager profits of Mount Vernon simply to reunite them with families at Mount Vernon. Yet despite this, he still signs off on intermittent whippings and sales of ‘troublesome’ slaves.

It reinforces, for me, that the core of it is that slavery itself is an irredeemable system, and that even the ‘best’ slaver, by the very nature of the system, cannot continue to be a slaver and treat people with anything approaching decency, no matter how hard they feel they may try. When you hold people in bondage in such a system, there are only a limited number of ways you can practically deal with them - and not realizing that that is the core and fundamental fault of slavery, not simply a lack of a sufficiently enlightened autocrat-slaver, is a dire failing on a person’s part. There is no way to treat them as human beings, fundamentally, without not treating them as slaves and thus dissolving the system itself. It is particularly hypocritical considering Washington’s own core role in the struggle against a distant, professedly-benevolent-but-unrepresentative authority in Britain.

In a way, Washington’s lack of expressed ideological racism - never seeming to regard the issue of race in anything more than passing, unlike later American slavers and some of his contemporaries (like Jefferson) who regarded Black people as explicitly inferior, and treating his white servants in much the same way as the enslaved - makes this all the more hypocritical. In the context of government, he could see that a failure to offer a people a say in their own conditions was a fundamental failing. In the context of ordinary social relations, he remained a patrician who seemed confused that subordinates were so reluctant to be instruments of his ‘enlightened’ will. The man seriously bitches about the way his white employees on a fucking farm dress, for Christ’s sake. That’s not even getting into the absurd expectations of work and record-keeping he had.

We, as human beings, are creatures of habit more than originality, as General Sherman once noted; the vast majority of us absorb the morals and standards of our time more than any fundamentally coherent worldview.

Washington, for his part, seems to regard his overseers as brutal, lazy, or both, and there is a constant turnover of overseers at Mount Vernon for displeasing Washington’s constant and failed injunctions to act with restraint or take proper care of the enslaved - yet it does not occur to Washington until after the Revolutionary War, when abolitionism in the US began to pick up steam and Washington was exposed to many early idealist abolitionists, like the celebrated French officer Lafayette, that the core of the problem may not be the overseers but the system itself.

By the 1790s, as Washington was finishing with his presidency and returning to the agricultural life, he became more interested in the prospect of emancipating his slaves, but ran into both practical and personal issues. Personally, he was reluctant to dissolve the lifelong project of his farm to the ‘slovenly’ practice of ordinary American farmers, and desperately sought a buyer or renter for the land who would not simply ruin it like other American plantation owners, after a lifetime of developing advanced techniques and investing in cutting-edge practices and infrastructure. Practically, he could not afford to free both the slaves he owned and the ‘dower’ slaves who he did not formally own but did have on his estate who had formed families together, without selling or leasing his land.

He corresponded with several abolitionist figures at this time, discussing the prospect of legislative abolition or making financial schemes for the abolition of the slaves at Mount Vernon if he could not make the sale or lease he needed to.

Ultimately, a very sudden infection took his life, and only the slaves he, personally, owned were able to freed in his will, though his will laments his inability to legally free the dower slaves. His will dedicates much of his remaining estate that does not go to his wife (who unfortunately was very much a dedicated Southern slaver) to the education and welfare of those newly freedmen and women.

A complex and fascinating portrait.