The natural vitality of the Virginia economy, combined with dynamic population growth, ensured unstoppable westward expansion. On September 9, 1763, Washington and nineteen other entrepreneurs banded together to launch the Mississippi Land Company, which hoped to claim 2.5 million acres of land in the Ohio Valley. This gargantuan chunk of real estate would encompass sections of what later became Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The shortsighted British preferred to save the fur trade with the Indians and, by a royal proclamation on October 7, 1763, banned settlers from regions west of the Allegheny Mountains. The Crown rationalized this policy by saying it was easier to defend subjects in seaport cities, but in a colony obsessed with real estate speculation, it was a catastrophic blunder to confine settlers to the eastern seaboard. The end of the war had no sooner disclosed tempting glimpses of riches than colonial masters in London snatched them away. Fearful that his western bonanza might evaporate, Washington condemned the move. “I can never look upon that Proclamation in any other light than as a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians,” he said.² For Washington, the infamous decree was doubly damaging because it interfered with the bounty claims of veterans from the Virginia Regiment. To nobody’s surprise, settlers from Germany, Ireland, and elsewhere continued to spill into the Ohio Valley in a resistless tide.

As early as May 1764, reports reached Virginia that Parliament was hatching a tax to force colonists to defray wartime costs and pay for future protection. This violated a long-standing tradition of reserving taxing powers to colonial legislatures. Convinced that they were heavily taxed already, a committee of burgesses protested to the king that December, issuing an appeal that grounded their opposition in hallowed English liberties. They pleaded for protection “in the enjoyment of their ancient and inestimable right of being governed by such laws respecting their internal polity and taxation as are derived from their own consent.”³ Deaf to these earnest pleas, Parliament in 1765 enacted the Stamp Act, which taxed legal documents, newspapers, almanacs, and even playing cards.

The response was immediate and full-throated in its militance. In the House of Burgesses, a young rabble-rouser, Patrick Henry, rose amid the dark wooden benches and brandished fiery resolutions. “Resolved,” he announced, “that the taxation of the people by themselves or by persons chosen by themselves to represent them . . . is the distinguishing characteristic of British freedom.”⁴ For a young law student standing in the rear of the hushed chamber, these words sounded with a thrilling resonance. “He appeared to me to speak as Homer wrote,” Thomas Jefferson remembered.⁵ For some staid burgesses, Henry’s remarks seemed excessively inflammatory. “Tarquin and Caesar each had his Brutus,” Henry roared in response to them, “Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third—” He was interrupted by cries of “treason” from Washington’s longtime patron, Speaker Robinson, who was enthroned in his lofty chair. Legend asserts, although many scholars now dispute, that Henry retorted, “If this be treason, make the most of it.”⁶

In all likelihood, Washington had returned to Mount Vernon by the time these electrifying words shook the chamber. He was about to set out for Williamsburg in late July 1765 when he learned that Governor Fauquier, alarmed that Massachusetts legislators had invited the burgesses to send a delegation to New York to protest the Stamp Act, had summarily terminated the session. Of this decision, Washington surmised, “I am convinced . . . that the Governor had no inclination to meet an Assembly at this juncture.”⁷ For Fauquier, this Stamp Act Congress represented a blatant act of sedition, and he had no intention of allowing burgesses to participate. After he dissolved the assembly and held new elections, Washington used the opportunity to switch his seat from Frederick County to Fairfax County, closer to home. Until this point, Washington had mostly striven to please his royal masters in London, and he still had little patience with radicals who wanted to seize and incinerate the stamps, especially when a Williamsburg mob set upon his colleague George Mercer and burned him in effigy after he returned from England holding the despised post of stamp collector for the colony.

Nevertheless, angry feelings festered inside George Washington, and they erupted that September in a caustic letter to Robert Cary that showed how long-standing personal grievances were being transmuted into burning political causes. For the first eight paragraphs, Washington roundly chastised his London factors for the inferior prices his tobacco fetched and the shoddy, overpriced goods he had to swallow in return. When he turned to the Stamp Act, he wrote with almost gleeful vengeance. Distancing himself from “the speculative part of the colonists,” who regarded “this unconstitutional method of taxation as a direful attack upon their liberties,” he made it plain that he disagreed with their methods, not their opinions.⁸ In threatening terms, he said the eyes of the colonists were beginning to open as they realized they could boycott British luxury goods by devising domestic substitutes, and he forecast that courts would be shut down, since England had starved the colonists of currency with which to pay the stamp tax. With courts closed, he hardly needed to add, British creditors would be unable to collect from their American debtors.

The young man who had worked so hard to ingratiate himself with his superiors in the British Army was suddenly breathing fire. Washington was always reluctant to sign on to any cause, because when he did so, his commitment was total. Just as he predicted, some colonial courts were shut down by the Stamp Act, leaving British creditors enraged. Washington wasn’t the only one who found the Stamp Act a piece of self-destructive folly. In the House of Commons, Benjamin Franklin was asked how British soldiers sent to enforce the new taxes would be received. “They will not find a rebellion,” he replied curtly. “They may indeed make one.”⁹ When the Stamp Act was repealed the following year, Washington told his London agent bluntly that if Parliament had remained mired in this error, the consequences “would have been more direful than is generally apprehended both to the mother country and her colonies.”¹⁰ The repeal had no lasting effect in the colonies, since it coincided with passage of the Declaratory Act, which denied that the emboldened colonies possessed any exclusive right to tax themselves.

Whatever rage Washington felt toward his London factors was contained by their extensive credit and his inability to check his expenditures. Planters needed funds to tide them over until crops were harvested and sold abroad. From the early 1760s till the time of his death, people imagined that George Washington was infinitely more prosperous than he was because they had no conception of his crippling debt. When Robert Stewart asked to borrow four hundred pounds in 1763, Washington declined and volunteered to show him a copy of his accounts at Robert Cary. “I doubt not but you will be surprised at the badness of their condition,” he wrote in embarrassment.¹¹ Washington was not alone: Virginia gazettes were then chock-full of advertisements of large indebted estates for sale.

The following year Washington was mortified to receive a sharply worded reprimand from Robert Cary that he owed eighteen hundred pounds, coupled with a warning of a 5 percent interest charge on unpaid debt. Money was the one area where Washington tended to dodge personal responsibility and blame force majeure. Reacting with outrage to the letter, he protested that bad weather had caused him to fall into arrears. “For it was a misfortune that seasons and chance shou[l]d prevent my making even tolerable crops in this part of the country for three years successively and it was a misfortune likewise when they were made that I shou[l]d get little or nothing for them.”¹² He also objected to the accusatory tone of Cary’s letter.¹³ Nonetheless, having voiced his anger, Washington took the hint and shaved his debt in half by 1770.