The story of George Washington's public career has been many times told in books of varying worth, but there is one important aspect of his private life that has never received the attention it deserves. The present book is an attempt to supply this deficiency. I desire to acknowledge gratefully the assistance I have received from Messrs. Gaillard Hunt and John C. Fitzpatrick of the Library of Congress, Mr. Hubert B. Fuller lately of Washington and now of Cleveland, Colonel Harrison H. Dodge and

One December day in the year 1788 a Virginia gentleman sat before his desk in his mansion beside the Potomac writing a letter. He was a man of fifty-six, evidently tall and of strong figure, but with shoulders a trifle stooped, enormously large hands and feet, sparse grayish-chestnut hair, a countenance somewhat marred by lines of care and marks of smallpox, withal benevolent and honest-looking--the kind of man to whom one could intrust the inheritance of a child with the certainty that it would

Augustine Washington was a planter who owned thousands of acres of land, most of it unimproved, besides an interest in some small iron works, but he had been twice married and at his death left two broods of children to be provided for. George, a younger son--which implied a great deal in those days of entail and primogeniture--received the farm on the Rappahannock on which his father lived, amounting to two hundred and eighty acres, a share of the land lying on Deep Run, three lots in Frederick

The Virginia of George Washington's youth and early manhood was an imperial domain reaching from Atlantic tidewater through a thousand leagues of forests, prairies and mountains "west and northwest" to the South Sea. Only a narrow fringe along the eastern coast was settled by white men; the remainder was a terra incognita into which Knights of the Golden Horseshoe and Indian traders had penetrated a short distance, bringing back stories of endless stretches of wolf-haunted woodland, of shaggy-fr

"No estate in United America," wrote Washington to Arthur Young in 1793, "is more pleasantly situated than this. It lies in a high, dry, and healthy country, 300 miles by water from the sea, and, as you will see by the plan, on one of the finest rivers in the world. Its margin is washed by more than ten miles of tide water; from the beds of which and the innumerable coves, inlets, and small marshes, with which it abounds, an inexhaustible fund of mud may be drawn as a manure, either to be used s

Washington took great pains to inform himself concerning any subject in which he was interested and hardly was he settled down to serious farming before he was ordering from England "the best System now extant of Agriculture," Shortly afterward he expressed a desire for a book "lately published, done by various hands, but chiefly collected from the papers of Mr. Hale. If this is known to be the best, pray send it, but not if any other is in high esteem." Another time he inquires for a small piec

Washington was the most methodical man that ever lived. He had a place for everything and insisted that everything should be kept in its place. There was nothing haphazard about his methods of business. He kept exact accounts of financial dealings. His habit of setting things down on paper was one that developed early. He kept a journal of his surveying experiences beyond the Blue Ridge in 1748, another of his trip to Barbadoes with his brother Lawrence in 1751-52, another of his trip to Fort Le

A detailed account of all of Washington's agricultural experiments would require several hundred pages and would be tedious reading. All that I shall attempt to do is to give some examples and point the way for any enthusiast to the mass of his agricultural papers in the Library of Congress and elsewhere. At the outset it should be stated that he worked under extremely different conditions from those of to-day. Any American farmer of the present who has a problem in his head can have it solved b

The Revolution rudely interrupted Washington's farming experiments, and for eight long years he was so actively engaged in the grim business of checkmating Howe and Clinton and Cornwallis that he could give little time or thought to agriculture. For more than six years, in fact, he did not once set foot upon his beloved fields and heard of his crops, his servants and his live stock only from family visitors to his camps or through the pages of his manager's letters. Peace at last brought him rel

A various times in his career Washington raised deer, turkeys, hogs, cattle, geese, negroes and various other forms of live stock, but his greatest interest seems to have been reserved for horses, sheep and mules. From his diaries and other papers that have come down to us it is easy to see that during his early married life he paid most attention to his horses. In 1760 he kept a stallion both for his own mares and for those of his neighbors, and we find many entries concerning the animal. Succe

Washington's work as a horticulturist prior to the educating influences of the Revolution was mostly utilitarian. That he had a peach orchard as early as 1760 is proven by an entry in his diary for February 22: "Laid in part, the Worm of a fence round the Peach orchard." Just where this orchard stood I am not quite certain, but it was probably on the slope near the old tomb. He learned how to propagate and "wed" his own trees and in 1763 was particularly active. On March 21st he recorded that he

In colonial Virginia, as in most other new countries, one of the greatest problems that confronted the settlers was that of labor. It took human muscle to clear away the forest and tend the crops, and the quantity of human muscle available was small. One solution of the problem was the importation of black slaves, and of this solution as it concerned Washington something will be said in a separate chapter. Another solution was the white indentured servant. Some of these white servants were polit

It is one of the strange inconsistencies of history that one of the foremost champions of liberty of all time should himself have been the absolute owner and master of men, women and children. Visitors at Mount Vernon saw many faces there, but only a few were white faces, the rest were those of black slaves. On each farm stood a village of wooden huts, where turbaned mammies crooned and piccaninnies gamboled in the sunshine. The cooks, the house servants, the coachmen, the stable boys, almost al

Martha Dandridge's first husband was a man much older than herself and her second was almost a year younger. Before she embarked upon her second matrimonial venture she had been the mother of four children, and having lost two of these, her husband, her father and mother, she had known, though only twenty-seven, most of the vital experiences that life can give. Perhaps it was well, for thereby she was better fitted to be the mate of a man sober and sedate in disposition and created by Nature to

No one would ever think of characterizing George Washington as frivolous minded, but from youth to old age he was a believer in the adage that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy--a saying that many an overworked farmer of our own day would do well to take to heart. Like most Virginians he was decidedly a social being and loved to be in the company of his kind. This trait was noticeable in his youth and during his early military career, nor did it disappear after he married and settled do

About thirty miles down the river Potomac, a gentleman, of the name of Grimes, came up to us in his own boat [8] . He had some little time before shot a man who was going across his plantation; and had been tried for so doing, but not punished. He came aboard, and behaved very politely to me: and it being near dinner time, he would have me go ashore and dine with him: which I did. He gave me some grape-juice to drink, which he called Port wine, and entertained me with saying he made it himself:

A biographer whose opinions about Washington are usually sound concludes that the General was a failure as a farmer. With this opinion I am unable to agree and I am inclined to think that in forming it he had in mind temporary financial stringencies and perhaps a comparison between Washington and the scientific farmers of to-day instead of the juster comparison with the farmers of that day. For if Washington was a failure, then nine-tenths of the Southern planters of his day were also failures,

In an age when organized charity was almost unknown the burden of such work fell mainly upon individuals. Being a man of great prominence and known to be wealthy, the proprietor of Mount Vernon was the recipient of many requests for assistance. Ministers wrote to beg money to rebuild churches or to convert the heathen; old soldiers wrote to ask for money to relieve family distresses or to use in business; from all classes and sections poured in requests for aid, financial and otherwise. It was i

Washington looked forward to the end of his presidency as does "the weariest traveler, who sees a resting-place, and is bending his body to lay thereon." "Methought I heard him say, 'Ay.' I am fairly out, and you are fairly in; see which of us is the happiest," wrote John Adams to his wife Abigail. And from Mount Vernon Nelly Custis informed a friend that "grandpapa is very well and much pleased with being once more Farmer Washington." The eight years of toilsome work, which had been rendered al