Washington didn’t shrink from secrecy and even sharp dealings in real estate, as can be seen in his strenuous efforts to expand his western holdings in the late 1760s. Hoping to purchase up to two thousand acres, he turned to an old ally from the Forbes campaign, Captain William Crawford, who lived in the Ohio Country. Washington wanted to scout out forbidden lands beyond the so-called Proclamation Line and didn’t think he could afford to wait, advising Crawford that anyone “who neglects the present opportunity of hunting out good lands and in some measure marking and distinguishing them for their own . . . will never regain it.” Crawford agreed to search out large parcels in partnership with Washington, who urged him to “keep this whole matter a profound secret,” lest other speculators discover their designs before they laid “a proper foundation for success.”⁴⁰

In late 1768 the British negotiated two treaties with the Indians that reopened the Ohio Country to settlers, ushering in frenzied competition among real estate speculators. At this point Washington renewed his clamor for 200,000 acres of bounty lands promised by Dinwiddie to veterans of the Fort Necessity campaign in 1754, a pledge he considered a sacred public trust. In the conciliatory mood temporarily existing in Williamsburg in late 1769, Washington prevailed upon Lord Botetourt to honor this commitment. The governor and council identified the confluence of the Ohio and Great Kanawha rivers as the site of these bounty lands. Washington proved a natural manager of this enterprise and undertook the necessary surveying work, but his situation was fraught with conflicts of interest, and the entire episode would be shadowed by accusations of sharp dealing from his former men. Washington summoned meetings of veterans and induced them to select William Crawford as surveyor of the bounty lands. Not only did Washington exploit his position to pin down prime real estate for himself, but he bought up rights surreptitiously from needy veterans to enlarge his holdings.

Washington also claimed land under a 1763 royal proclamation that promised land to veterans of the French and Indian War. He had his brother Charles buy up veterans’ claims under his own name, even though Washington was their undisclosed owner; on another occasion, he effected such a purchase under Lund Washington’s name. Washington also wanted to circumvent a regulation that limited land grants to officers who had remained with the Virginia Regiment until it dissolved in 1762. Since he had resigned before then, he had Charles buy up claims from those who had served until the end, instructing his brother to operate stealthily and “not let it be known that I have any concern therein.”⁴¹ When he purchased one property stretching more than forty miles along the Great Kanawha, he flouted a law prohibiting riverfront properties from being more than three times as long as they were deep, a way to prevent monopolies of choice riverine acreage. Most officers had a mile and a half of riverfront on their narrow properties, which then extended five miles back into the countryside. Even as Washington developed a wider political vision, he remained extremely aggressive in his real estate dealings. As the biographer James T. Flexner concluded: “In no other direction did Washington demonstrate such acquisitiveness as in his quest for the ownership of land.”⁴² He was far from alone: hoarding cheap land was a universal madness in Virginia and the other colonies.

In early October 1770, accompanied by Dr. Craik, three slaves, and a packhorse, Washington began a tour of the Ohio Country to inspect properties for himself and his men. He had grown accustomed to having Billy Lee along on these long, rugged journeys, but the young mulatto slave fell ill and stayed behind. On this nine-week expedition, Washington felt an acute sense of urgency, since settlers were already flocking to the Ohio and Great Kanawha rivers, and he feared they might preempt the most productive soil. He also got wind of a huge scheme by English investors to obtain 2.5 million acres and inaugurate a new colony, Vandalia, whose borders might further curtail the bounty lands. When the British ministry approved this scheme, rebuffing a petition from Washington’s Mississippi Land Company, he darkly decried London’s “malignant disposition towards Americans,” adding yet another grievance to his lengthening litany of complaints against Crown policies.⁴³

During one leg of the journey, Washington was staying about four miles from present-day Pittsburgh when an Indian chief called the White Mingo and other chiefs of the Six Nations requested a meeting. The White Mingo bestowed upon Washington a ceremonial string of wampum, then stunned him with a vivid recollection dating back to the French and Indian conflict. Washington noted the gist of this speech in his diary: “that as I was a person who some of them remember to have seen when I was sent on an embassy to the French and most of them had heard of, they were come to bid me welcome to the country and to desire that the people of Virginia wou[l]d consider them as friends and brothers linked together in one chain.”⁴⁴

As he rode or paddled by canoe, Washington remained attentive to the commercial prospects of this sparsely populated region. In negotiating leases with western farmers, he retained timber and mineral rights and even visited a coal mine. “The coal seemed to be of the very best kind, burning freely and abundance of it,” he remarked in his diary.⁴⁵ While he negotiated forest paths and mountain passes that he knew from the French and Indian War, he appraised these wild places with a cool business eye. Even though he bought two hundred acres of the Great Meadows in December 1770, he included no mention of its history in his diary. Of the site where hundreds had been brutally slaughtered under General Braddock, Washington merely observed that it wasn’t level enough for agriculture. Not until 1772 did Washington and his veterans receive the land distributions they had long awaited. Washington was allotted more than twenty thousand acres on the Ohio and Great Kanawha rivers, augmented by another eleven thousand acres the following year, making him a major western landlord on the eve of the American Revolution.

As with all challenges to his integrity, Washington remained touchy on the subject of the bounty lands and whether he had taken unfair advantage of his men. Although he walked off with the finest properties, he also believed that he had devoted enormous time to surveying the area and that the whole operation hinged on his efforts. Suspicions about his conduct he thought unfair and baseless. When one officer, George Muse, accused him of shortchanging him of land, Washington didn’t mince words: “As I am not accustomed to receive such from any man, nor would have taken the same language from you personally, without letting you feel some marks of my resentment, I would advise you to be cautious in writing me a second [letter] of the same tenor. For though I understand you were drunk when you did it, yet give me leave to tell you that drunkenness is no excuse for rudeness.” ⁴⁶ If Muse read the newspapers, Washington pointed out, he would have seen that he had been allotted the ten thousand acres he claimed, and he concluded by telling his former officer indignantly that he was sorry he had ever “engag[e]d in behalf of so ungrateful and dirty a fellow as you are.”⁴⁷ While Washington was in the right here, the letter shows how his bottled-up anger could spew forth unexpectedly and why people intuited correctly that he had a terrible temper.

In his eagerness to unlock the riches of the heartland, Washington assigned a premier position to the busy river running by his home. If the Potomac could be improved by locks and other measures, he thought, it would emerge as the main thoroughfare for commerce with the interior, enhancing the value of his western holdings. In 1770 the attorney Thomas Johnson, who owned thousands of acres along the Potomac, tried to enlist Washington’s aid for modest improvements along the river. A short, stocky man of unbounded energy and enthusiasm, he kindled in Washington a lasting enthusiasm for the project. Not to be outdone in Potomac boosterism, Washington espoused a far more ambitious plan that would connect the river with “a rising empire” in the western country.⁴⁸ Washington clearly foresaw the rich future of this wilderness expanse, if only it could be reached by water. Simple in theory but fiendishly complex in practice, his plan for Potomac commerce required not just endless locks but portages through the mountains of what is now West Virginia. This Potomac scheme would hypnotize his mind much as the vision of a mythical Northwest Passage once entranced transatlantic mariners. If the Potomac never became the grand commercial gateway he had envisioned, it was not for want of trying.