It is striking how moody and snappish Washington could be about money. This man who was generally so polite and courteous tended to shed all tact in business matters, the one dimension of his career unimproved by the passage of time. He adopted a blistering style whenever he thought someone had cheated him. Some of this anger reflected continuing financial travails, and some the troubling legacy of his insecure, fatherless childhood. For a man who loved control as much as Washington, it must have been trying to depend upon far-off brokers in London, known to him only by name.

The reliance upon foreign vendors fostered constant tension. To fill Washington’s orders for goods, Robert Cary and Company drew upon a network of forty London shops. An invoice from April 1763 shows a small army of suppliers to Mount Vernon that included a linen merchant, woolen merchant, grocer, spice maker, shot maker (gunshot), pipe maker, pickler, rope maker, porter (beverage supplier), apothecary, toolmaker, haberdasher, cheesemonger, stationer, milliner, hosier, tin maker, plate maker, iron maker, wine merchant, turner (potter), and shoemaker.¹⁴ However much Washington emphasized, for political reasons, the potential self-sufficiency of the colonies, he could never curtail his taste for luxury goods from London. With a superb eye for fashion, he was the first American to scrap white stoneware dishes, and in 1769 he ordered 250 pieces of the tony new cream-colored earthenware produced by Josiah Wedgwood. Not satisfied with bone or wooden handles for flatware, he purchased cutlery with silver handles, his griffin crest emblazoned on every implement. Everything from his gold-headed cane to his bookplates to his horse harnesses bore this proud crest.

The perils of transatlantic shopping grew apparent when Washington ordered a new four-horse coach in 1768. With his slavish regard for London style, he suggested gingerly that the coach be painted green “unless any other color more in vogue and equally lasting is entitled to precedency. In that case, I would be governed by fashion.” ¹⁵ Washington sketched other desired features of this princely vehicle, including a sumptuous blue or green Moroccan leather lining and light gilding around the side panels to spotlight his coat of arms. Washington must have had a premonition that this coach, which cost three hundred pounds, would be flawed, for he warned that it should be “made of the best seasoned wood and by a celebrated workman.”¹⁶ As Washington suspected, the coach turned into an expensive fiasco. Instead of seasoned wood, Washington protested two years later, “it was made of wood so exceedingly green that the panels slip[pe]d out of the moldings before it was two months in use.”¹⁷ It says something about the predicament of Virginia planters that, despite his countless complaints about their service, Washington still handed over his business to Robert Cary and Company.

As a highly analytical, self-critical businessman, Washington decided to do something about his ruinous dependence on tobacco, which brought little money, depleted the soil, and furthered his reliance on London. In 1765 he began paring back on tobacco and the next year abandoned it altogether in favor of wheat, Indian corn, and other grains. With his experimental bent, Washington tested hemp, flax, and sixty different crops. His wheat, in particular, began to flourish and became his main cash crop, which he could sell locally in Alexandria. Tobacco had been demanding to grow, and as he phased it out, he started to derive more real pleasure from agriculture, which became his chief source of recreation. Free of labor-intensive tobacco farming, he was also able to transfer more of the workload to others. In 1765 he hired his distant cousin, twenty-eight-year-old Lund Washington, to manage the estate, and he treated the able Lund as a friend as well as an employee, socializing and even foxhunting with him.

Once Washington diversified his crops, he began to preside over something more akin to a small village than a mere plantation. He was a fantastically creative businessman and Mount Vernon evolved into a miniature polity, a self-contained economic universe. “When I reached his place, I thought I was entering a rather large village, but later was told that all of it belonged to him,” said an impressed visitor. ¹⁸ Just as Washington agitated for autonomous colonies, he established a similar ideal for his personal domain, as his economic interests fused with his budding political awareness. In the late 1760s he began laying out roads to unite the five far-flung farms of Mount Vernon and eventually brought three thousand of their eight thousand acres under cultivation. The sheer scope of Mount Vernon’s business operations, with the accompanying need to feed and clothe a sizable number of slaves and servants, endowed Washington with extensive managerial experience that later assisted him with the Continental Army. His zeal for businesses beyond agriculture also gave him an expansive economic vision that would predispose him to support the audacious manufacturing schemes of Alexander Hamilton.

In 1771 Washington started to supplement his farming income with proceeds from a gristmill he built at his Dogue Run farm. Housed in a three-story stone mill set astride a stream, this successful operation packed cornmeal and refined flour into big barrels and small casks for export to England, the West Indies, and even Portugal. To enhance profits further, Washington ground the corn and wheat of neighboring farmers. He also launched a weaving operation that produced homespun clothing for slaves and made textiles for general sale. Similarly Washington took the blacksmith shop at Mount Vernon and began marketing its services to neighbors.

Posterity doesn’t associate George Washington with fishing, but the pristine Potomac River had a plentiful supply of fish from which to forge a thriving enterprise. As Washington informed a British friend, the Potomac was “one of the finest rivers in the world—a river well stock[ed] with various kinds of fish at all seasons of the year and in the spring with shad, herring, bass, carp, sturgeon, and in great abundance.”¹⁹ Visitors to Mount Vernon shared his fascination with the teeming schools of fish, which created a churning turbulence in the river. “I have seen for several hours together in a summer’s evening, hundreds, perhaps I might say thousands of sturgeon, at a great height from the water at the same instant, so that the quantity in the river must have been inconceivably great,” proclaimed one Frenchman. ²⁰ Washington was often astounded by the rich harvests of fish pulled up in his bulging seines. “The whitefish ran plentifully at my seine landing, having catched ab[ou]t 300 at one haul,” he reported in his diary.²¹ This number paled beside the stupendous herring runs caught each spring as they swam to upstream spawning grounds. “They fish for them in April,” said one Polish visitor. “They have caught as many as 100 thousand of them with a single draw of the net.”²² By 1772 Mount Vernon’s fishery netted almost a million herring per year.

At first the fishing operation supplied food for Mount Vernon’s slaves, but Washington soon spied the potential profit and began to have the fish salted and packed in barrels for export to the West Indies. To facilitate this trade, he assembled a small fleet of boats, including a whaleboat and a schooner. Much of his yield he sold to Carlyle & Adam in Alexandria, and a single ledger entry for May 1771 shows that he delivered 679,200 herring and 7,760 shad at one shot. Even with his fishery, Washington felt hampered by senseless imperial policies. For instance, the finest salt for curing fish came from Lisbon, but England’s mercantilist policies forced him to import inferior salt from Liverpool. He constantly felt snarled in a tangled web of perverse economic regulations drawn up by London bureaucrats.