Washington criticized overseer Henry McCoy for failing to plow after the late October rains, jeopardizing his spring oat crop: “How durst you disobey this order and, instead of bringing the whole force of your plows to this, you employ them now and then only, or one or two a week, as if it were for amusement, thereby doing everything which was in your power to derange my whole plan for the next year.”34 If McCoy remained inattentive to business, Washington threatened to banish him “at any season of the year without paying you a shilling . . . If I suffer by your neglect, you shall not benefit by the money of one who wishes to be your friend.”35 Overseer William Stuart suffered a similar drubbing for his failure to plow as soon as the October rains had ceased.

Washington chastised overseer Thomas Green for failing to perform work at the Dogue Run barn. “I know full well,” Washington told him, “that to speak to you is of no more avail than to speak to a bird that is flying over one’s head; first, because you are lost to all sense of shame and to every feeling that ought to govern an honest man, who sets any store by his character; and, secondly, because you have no more command of the people over whom you are placed than I have over the beasts of the forests.” If Green did not shape up, Washington threatened to “discharge you that mom[en]t and to dispossess your family of the house they are in, for I cannot, nor will not, submit to such infamous treatment as I meet with from you.”36

After instructing overseer John Christian Ehlers on how to graft fruit and plant trees properly, Washington administered a stern lecture on the evils of alcohol: “I shall not close this letter without exhorting you to refrain from spirituous liquors. They will prove your ruin if you do not. Consider how little a drunken man differs from a beast; the latter is not endowed with reason, the former deprives himself of it; and when that is the case acts like a brute, annoying and disturbing everyone around him . . . Don’t let this be your case.” Then, punning harshly on Ehlers’s middle name, Washington concluded, “Show yourself more of a man and a Christian than to yield to so intolerable a vice.”37

The stress of managing Mount Vernon had finally become so draining for Washington that he wanted to free himself of the burden of supervising overseers and slaves. Since he contemplated stepping down as president in a year, his mind already dwelt on retirement, and he felt oppressed by a surplus of both slaves and white indentured servants. So he concocted an ambitious plan to rent out four of the Mount Vernon farms to four capable English farmers, retaining only the Mansion House farm for himself. In expounding this rental scheme to Tobias Lear, Washington admitted candidly that his motive was “that the remainder of my days may thereby be more tranquil and freer from cares; and that I may be enabled . . . to do as much good with it as the resource will admit. For although in the estimation of the world I possess a good and clear estate, yet, so unproductive is it, that I am oftentimes ashamed to refuse aids which I cannot afford, unless I was to sell part of it to answer the purpose.”38

The cash-strapped Washington knew that the world reckoned him a much richer man than he really was. Mount Vernon’s glorified facade of wealth and grandeur covered up an operation that was, at best, only marginally profitable. Running the estate forced Washington to keep up appearances and act with the openhanded largesse of an affluent planter. He still felt hounded by visitors stopping by Mount Vernon and partaking liberally of his food and drink. (In one letter, he expressed exasperation with Fanny for giving away dozens of bottles of expensive wine to voyeuristic travelers and listed only three classes of people who deserved those coveted bottles: close friends, foreign dignitaries, and members of Congress and other politicos.) Part of Washington’s plan called for raising cash by selling more than thirty thousand acres of western land at a time when prices were appreciating sharply.

To help find suitable English farmers, Washington turned to the English agronomist Arthur Young, summarizing for him the riches of the four farms in question, which then had 3,260 acres of arable land, 54 draft horses, 12 working mules, 317 head of black cattle, and hogs that “run pretty much at large in the woodland.”39 Washington had no qualms about touting the proximity of the farms to the federal capital rising nearby. “The federal city in the year 1800 will become the seat of the general government of the United States. It is increasing fast in buildings and rising into consequence and will, I have no doubt . . . become the emporium of the United States.”40 Washington’s rental plan gave him yet another economic incentive to accelerate the dilatory pace of construction of the new capital.

The most momentous aspect of the plan concerned the destiny of the 170 to 180 slaves confined on the four farms. It was Washington’s fervent hope that the new owner would free the slaves and then rehire them “as he would do any other laborers which his necessity w[oul]d require him to employ.”41 Emancipating slaves was a startling innovation for any major Virginia planter to contemplate, especially if he was president of the United States. The scheme harked back to the plan that Lafayette had proposed for his experimental farm in French Guiana. In disclosing the idea to Lear, Washington explained that he had a motive “more powerful than all the rest, namely to liberate a certain species of property which I possess, very repugnantly to my own feelings, but which imperious necessity compels.”42

From the timing of his decision, one suspects that Washington’s disgust with slavery owed something to pure principle but also much to the pure fatigue of trying to wrest profits from an intractable workforce held in bondage. The realistic and idealistic sides of George Washington both conspired to rebel against the peculiar institution. Interestingly enough, when he mentioned possible obstacles to his plan, he talked of the difficulty of mingling white workers with black, but he never mentioned a far more glaring problem: a political backlash in the South against such a courageous move by the country’s foremost citizen.

As always, Washington had manifold reasons for his actions, and his response to slavery was shaped by a complex blend of impulses. On November 23, 1794, he wrote a revealing letter to his nephew Alexander Spotswood that dealt with his views on slavery—a subject, Washington admitted, that “I do not like to even think, much less talk of.”43 Washington suggested that the main hindrance to emancipating his slaves related to his fear of auctioning them off indiscriminately and breaking up families: “Were it not, then, that I am principled ag[ains]t selling Negroes, as you would cattle in the market, I would not, in twelve months from this date, be possessed of one as a slave.”44 He went on to say that he feared trouble might be brewing with the slave population and that a day of reckoning might soon be at hand: “I shall be happily mistaken if they are not found to be a very troublesome species of property ’ere many years pass over our heads.”45

The anxious foreboding about slave revolts was immeasurably heightened by the massive slave revolt in the French colony of St. Domingue (modern-day Haiti), led by Toussaint Louverture starting in August 1791. This, the largest slave revolt in history, had led to thousands of deaths among rebel slaves and white masters, fomenting hysterical fears among American planters. When Charles Pinckney worried about the impact of these events on southern slaves, Washington shared his alarm: “I feel sincerely those sentiments of sympathy which you so properly express for the distresses of our suffering brethren [the slave owners] in that quarter and deplore their causes.”46 It seemed a terrifyingly vivid realization of the nightmares of slaveholders who feared the hatred that simmered deep inside their slaves. In response, Virginia enacted more stringent rules against slave gatherings as well as an “act against divulgers of false news.”47