George Washington: Land Property in Washington's Will

In the last blog entry, I detailed the elements of George Washington’s will that had to do with manumitting his slaves. This entry presents Washington’s disposal of his investments in land. A warning: there are a plethora of Washingtons in this entry, and it can be hard to keep them all straight. For disambiguation, I use the common name for George Washington: The General.

The General has the reputation of being enormously land hungry. I can’t tell you how many people have spontaneously said to me, on hearing that I was writing a novel about the General, “Oh, the land grabber” or something of the sort. It seems to be the thing most people remember about him other than that he was the first President or that he had wooden teeth (he didn’t, but that’s another blog entry). Or that he owned slaves.

The General’s will gives us great insight into just how much land he owned. It doesn’t take into account land he sold before he died except for the sold lands for which he had not yet received compensation. The will also tells us a lot about how the General thought about both his land and his legacies to his heirs and to the country he had helped to create.

There is a Schedule of Property attached to the will that lists all of the General’s property subject to probate as of July 1799, six months before he died. The Founders Online version of this Schedule of Property details the acquisition of lands in some detail and gives you a complete view of how the General went about becoming one of the largest landholders in Virginia. It is also important to realize that the rents from these lands comprised a great part of the General’s income during the last 10 years of his life.

Here is the set of lands listed in the Schedule of Property:

Tract	State	Acreage	Value
Difficult Run	VA	300	$ 6,666.00
Ashbys Bent	VA	2,481	$ 24,810.00
Chattins Run	VA	885	$ 7,080.00
Bullskin	VA	2,236	$ 44,720.00
Mercer	VA	571	$ 11,420.00
Potick River	VA	240	$ 3,600.00
Gloucester	VA	400	$ 3,600.00
Nansemond	VA	373	$ 2,984.00
Great Dismal Swamp	VA	shares	$ 20,000.00
Ohio River	WV	9,744	$ 97,440.00
Great Kanahwah	WV	23,341	$ 200,000.00
Charles County	MD	600	$ 3,600.00
Mongomery County	MD	519	$ 6,228.00
Great Meadows	PA	234	$ 1,404.00
Mohawk River	NY	1,000	$ 6,000.00
Little Miami	OH	3,051	$ 15,251.00
Rough Creek	KY	5,000	$ 10,000.00
Washington	DC	lots	$ 19,132.00
Alexandria	VA	lots	$ 4,000.00
Winchester	VA	lots	$ 400.00
Warm Springs	VA	lots	$ 800.00
1799 $ Total		50,975	$ 489,135.00
2019 $ Total			$10,184,029.30

See below for the Great Dismal Swamp Company setup. The “lots” were various lots in Alexandria, the District of Columbia, Winchester, and Warm Springs. The main thing you should take away from this table is that most of the General’s assets in 1799 were land, and that he was worth about $10-15 million when he died. Note that the above list does not include the Mount Vernon properties.

The first item in the will that relates to land is to a bit of land that had been a problem for some time. The General sold 180 acres of land in Frederick County to a man named Philip Pendleton, whose father promised to pay the General £400 for the land. He never did, but instead Philip Pendleton gave the land to Samuel Washington, the General’s younger brother, in 1773, along with the debt. Samuel in turn gave the land to his son Thornton some time before his death of tuberculosis in 1781. Unfortunately, brother Samuel’s estate was a mess. A man named James Nourse was appointed executor along with the General and handled much of the executorial duties, as The General had his hands full with his own estate right after the Revolution. The General informed Nourse in a letter dated January 22^nd, 1784, that he had never seen a penny of the money for the land. What to do with it, he did not say. Eventually, Nourse spoke to Thornton about the land. Thornton, taken unawares, wrote to the General in a panic in August 1784.

Once you get past the really bad spelling, he told the General that he had renovated the house, put up a lot of fencing, and was about to build a barn for his tobacco crop, and wanted to know what the General wanted to do before he put any more effort into the land. Although there is no record of what happened, Thornton did retain the land. He then wrote another letter in June 1786 reporting that a suit in Chancery had emerged that claimed all or part of the land as part of a very messy and long-running land dispute in the Northern Neck of Virginia involving the Fairfax and Hite families. The General wrote back in June 1786 with reassurances about the claim to the land. Thornton Washington then tragically died at the age of 27 in 1787, presumably leaving the land to his heirs. In his will, the General forgave the debt entirely, which he had apparently intended for some time, according to a note on one of the above letters. This all illustrates the difficulty associated with land titles and the law in 18^th century Virginia, but it also illustrates the General’s desire to help his immediate family. He also helped to pay for the education of Samuel Washington’s orphaned children in the 1780s and 1790s and forgave these debts in his will.

The next land-related item deals with lands the General had sold but for which he had not received “consideration”: Difficult Run in Loudon County, New York State lands owned with George Clinton, lands in the Great Dismal Swamp, and land in Gloucester County.

The Difficult Run land illustrates an interesting practice: selling lands conditional on some complicated scheme of payment because the buyer didn’t have the funds to pay for the land. For example, the Difficult Run land was sold to John Gill, who would pay it off in installments paid as rent over 10 years, or sooner if Gill was able to save the money. Gill failed to pay after 2 years and requested cancellation of the agreement in October, 1799, after the entry in the Schedule of Property, and the General complied. Thus, he actually owned this property outright at the time of his death, so it was presumably sold with the rest of the residual properties.

The New York property was a speculation engineered by George Clinton, the Governor of New York, who bought the land in 1784. The General paid for his half by 1787. Clinton in turn sold the property over time and paid the General his half (a “moiety” in legal language) over time. At the time of the General’s death, there was some money owing, but I can’t find any exact number.

The Great Dismal Swamp land was also a speculation, this one done as a property company, the Great Dismal Swamp Company organized in 1763. The General was a founder and manager in this company for several years. In 1795, Governor Henry Lee bought out the General (“in a frenzy of land speculation” according to a note) for $20,000, to be paid in 3 annual payments. Lee failed to make the payments by 1798, so the sale was conditionally outstanding at the time of the General’s death.

The General acquired the Gloucester County land as payment for a debt by relatives of his wife Martha. He sold the land to George Ball, a young lawyer, in 1797, but never received the money. His letter to Ball in March 1799 is worth quoting in its entirety as an example of his approach to debt collection:

Sir

It is somewhat singular, that instead of receiving Three hundred and three pounds in April of the last year, as per agreement for the land I sold you (lying in Gloucester County of this State) that I should never have seen, nor heard a tittle from you, respecting this payment, at the time it became due, nor since for near a year.

The first Instalment of the residue will become due the 10th of next month, & I beg you to be assured that I am in real want of the money; and that it was the want of money alone, which had induced me to part with this, and other landed property, which I have always considered as the most secure, and ultimately the most valuable, of any in this Country.I shall expect to see, or hear from you to good effect, by the day abovementioned.

I am—Sir Your Hble Servant

Go: Washington

The General later followed up with a threat: “I must no longer be trifled with in the payment of what is due from you to me; for this will compel me to resort to means which cannot fail to be disagreeable to us both.” As far as I can tell, Ball never paid for the land.

The General willed the primary Mount Vernon lands to his nephew Bushrod Washington. The General had intended to leave Mount Vernon to his favorite nephew, George Augustine Washington, but George Augustine died of tuberculosis in 1792. The General’s brother John Augustine had been the General’s favorite companion in his youth and had taken care of Mount Vernon during the French and Indian War, so the General decided his son Bushrod deserved to inherit it. Bushrod Washington (the name comes from the family name of his mother’s family) was an associate justice of the Supreme Court at the time of the General’s death. The General willed the River Farm across Little Hunting Creek from Mount Vernon to two nephews of his wife (through Fanny Bassett, the deceased wife of Tobias Lear, his secretary).

The General willed the residue of the Mount Vernon estate to his nephew Lawrence Lewis and his wife Nelly (Martha Washington’s granddaughter who the Washingtons had raised at Mount Vernon).

Martha Washington’s grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, was raised from a young age at Mount Vernon by the Washingtons along with his sister Nelly; they called him “Wash.” The General left a piece of land along the Potomac across from Georgetown to Wash. Wash, being a primary Custis family heir, inherited much of Martha Washington’s estate through the dower inheritance, including many of the slaves of Mount Vernon. The land the General willed to Wash became the hub of the latter’s plantation on the Potomac across from the new District of Columbia, called Arlington. After Wash’s death in 1857, a little-known general named Robert E. Lee moved in with his Custis bride Mary. Due to a slight misunderstanding, the Union confiscated the estate at the outbreak of the Civil War, but the estate was restored to its rightful heirs by the Supreme Court in 1882 (United States v. Lee Kaufman, 106 US 196). The heirs then sold it back to the United States for $180,000. It is now Arlington National Cemetery and the Robert E. Lee memorial.

The final item relating to land in the will directs that the remaining lands be sold and the proceeds divided into 23 equal parts going to various family members. He also included a paragraph of advice to the executors and legatees:

And by way of advice, 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 Shanondoah is added thereto.

The General retained his optimism on the value of land, and on the value of the Potomac River to commerce, to the end of his life. It is probably just as well that the executors and legatees ignored the advice on the Potomac Company shares, which were eventually lost by the succeeding company; the canals in question were never built. As to the remaining estate, the executors left its settlement to Bushrod Washington and Lawrence Lewis (nephews of the General). The last note to the will states that by the time all the executors had died in 1846, no final settlement of the estate had been reached. I’m sure it would be a good PhD dissertation to research exactly what became of Washington’s land legacy, and I will leave that to future generations of scholars.

Eugene E. Prussing’s great 1927 book, The Estate of George Washington, Deceased, contains a lot of detail on the General’s estate and its disposition.

Tuesday, June 25, 2019

Land Property in Washington's Will