Алистер Смит - The Spoils of War - Greed, Power, and the Conflicts That Made Our Greatest Presidents

John Mercer was a prominent, highly influential Virginia lawyer, as well, of course, as an investor in land. He was, by marriage, George Mason’s uncle. Mason, a wealthy and influential Virginia revolutionary, was a neighbor and friend of Washington’s in later years. Mercer himself grew close to George Washington, serving later as his lawyer and investment partner. The relationship was apparently not only about business. Mercer’s second son, John Fenton Mercer (1735–1756), was commissioned as a captain in 1755 under George Washington. Sadly, John Fenton died in battle in 1756.

Like fellow founding member Thomas Lee, Lawrence Washington was a member of the House of Burgesses. Their two families were more than close. Remember that Lee managed the Fairfax estate and Lawrence was married to Anne Fairfax. When Lawrence died of tuberculosis in 1752, Anne remarried into the Lee family, eventually leaving Mount Vernon, which she had inherited from Lawrence, to George who had rented it from her for many years after she remarried and moved elsewhere. So, the founders of the Ohio Company were powerful figures in Virginia’s government who were as well interlinked to one another by close family ties and shared business interests.

The interlocking ties of the Ohio Company did not end with its three primary founders. Virginia’s lieutenant governor, Robert Dinwiddie, was another shareholder in the Ohio Company. It was Dinwiddie who gave twenty-one-year-old George Washington an exceptional opportunity to play a part in the unfolding tensions between France and England, thereby launching Washington’s career. Dinwiddie, with the backing of the King’s Council, was the person who recommended and appointed Washington as the king’s emissary to confront the French and “require of them peaceably to depart”; and failing that, George II stated that “[we] do strictly command and charge you to drive them out by force of arms.”12

Robert Dinwiddie had two critical interests in that mission. He was lieutenant governor of Virginia; that is, the operational government manager of the Virginia Colony. And he also was one of the wealthy, influential shareholders in the Ohio Company, concerned with advancing the firm’s value through land acquisition in the very area to which Washington was sent to stop the advance of the French. By making George Washington into Major Washington, Dinwiddie advanced his own governmental and business interests, as well as those of Lee, Mercer, and L. Washington. He gave the king a totally inexperienced, but well connected, officer as his emissary, but one who happened to have two great virtues—Washington knew how to survey land as well as pick and register ( patenting , in the vernacular of the times) desirable property, and he was a means for the lieutenant governor to curry favor with the founders of the Ohio Company, in which Dinwiddie was an investor. Hence, the seemingly well-grounded charge against George Washington on publication of his report following his encounter at Fort Leboeuf in the winter of 1753: “a scheme to promote the interest of a private company.”

The investors in the Ohio Company were never reluctant to use their influential political connections in Virginia to advance government policies that were beneficial to their personal investment interests. Today we might see that as a scandalous conflict of interests; then, it was how business was done. Consider, for instance, how Lawrence Washington and his associates used their political clout to advance personal and company interests in the commercial development of the Potomac River (on which, as an aside, we noted Lawrence’s—later George’s—Mount Vernon sits). This development proved later in life to be of the greatest importance to George Washington. The investors who started the Ohio Company hoped to acquire vast amounts of land and hoped to link those lands to a port on the Potomac River from which they could then ship goods, especially tobacco, to London. The company—that is, Lee, Mercer, L. Washington, and Dinwiddie—sought control over a facility known as Hugh West’s tobacco warehouse on the Potomac. That part of the river was well suited to the accommodation of commercial ships from England and so it was a perfect location for an entrepôt (a shipping center) from which export and import trade would flow. Lawrence Washington led the effort in the Virginia House of Burgesses to secure the desired site. The successful effort resulted in the creation of the then new town of Alexandria, Virginia, advancing the company’s interests at the expense of local farmers who had opposed the plan. Even today, a stroll through Alexandria brings tourists to sign after sign reminding them—benignly—that they are traversing land that belonged to George (and earlier, Lawrence) Washington.

Few tourists today, passing the historic remains of canal locks designed to make the river navigable in the eighteenth century, are likely to know that George Washington later exploited the successful imposition of Ohio Company interests in Alexandria in 1785—long after that firm was defunct—when he became a founder, shareholder, and president of the Potomac Company. The latter built several canals along the Potomac to circumvent its waterfalls and to make it into a major gateway for the shipment of goods not only abroad but also to the rest of the country. The goods, in turn, were in many cases to come from lands that, as it happened, were owned by and leased out to farmers by George Washington. Although the canal company was to fail in the nineteenth century, well after Washington had died, under the pressures of the Erie Canal (an interest of Alexander Hamilton) and the emergence of railroads, Washington, a mere two years before becoming president of the United States, saw this as his most important investment. Indeed, this remained true through the rest of his life. In his will, written in 1799, Washington instructed his executors as follows:

I recommend it to my Executors not to be precipitate in disposing of the landed property (herein directed to be sold) if from temporary causes the Sale thereof should be dull; experience having fully evinced, that the price of land (especially above the Falls of the Rivers, & on the Western Waters) have been progressively rising, and cannot be long checked in its increasing value.—And I particularly recommend it to such of the Legatees (under this clause of my Will) as can make it convenient, to take each a share of my Stock in the Potomac Company in preference to the amount of what it might sell for; being thoroughly convinced myself, that no uses to which the money can be applied will be so productive as the Tolls arising from this navigation when in full operation (and this from the nature of things it must be ‘ere long) and more especially if that of the Shenandoah is added thereto.

Although the Ohio Company opened the door to Washington’s military career and to his own later acquisition of vast amounts of land, he was not himself an investor in the company. Hence, he did not stand to gain directly from its success, or to suffer directly from its failure. For Washington, however, all future paths, whether as a landowner, a canal builder, or a military hero, lead back to the benefits he derived from his personal ties to the Ohio Company. It was the catalyst for his success. As Willard Rouse Jillson has noted of Washington, “he had occasion to observe and philosophize upon the lands on the western waters as was the privilege of no other landed gentleman in America.”13

The Ohio Company’s prospects were in awful shape in 1763 when King George III restricted colonists from settling in the Ohio Valley. Any remaining prospects for the company were shattered by 1767 when the British government announced that all the land to the west of the Alleghenies belonged to the king, a command to be countered directly in the Declaration of Independence. The economic implications of the 1767 declaration were, in fact, a crucial casus belli; that is, a justification for going to war in 1776.