Veteran. And that even ties boo what i will into what i will talk about in a moment about washingtons views of peace and how essential peace is. As a combat veteran, washington understands a number of things about the nature of war and what war does and what its impact is not only on those who are at the front lines, but on those who are at home who are also affected and in their own ways participants in war. What war does to a country and to a people. He also learns, i think, here too the extreme importance of fundamentals, of basics. This is one element of washingtons character that i saw early on and that ive, its taken a while to understand. If you look at this gentlemans fixation on detail, hes often dismissed as a micromanager, but theres a real purpose to that focus on detail which is that detail matters. If youre in the service and particularly if youre in a position of command, you ignore at your peril the basic fact that the men who serve with you must eat, they must have shelter, they must have clothing and, yes, they must be paid. Sounds silly for me even to say that. Well, of course, its obvious. You would be, perhaps, surprised to see how many people in the revolutionary war did not understand that basic reality. Washington understood it. If you do not pay, if you do not maintain the accounts, if you do not finance your force well, he called money the sinews of war. If you dont keep that flowing, the whole thing collapses. That process of, that learning process of management is extremely important. He returns from the the french and indian war in 1758. And he marries martha in january of 1759. I mentioned earlier how, again, martha had a choice of her own. Its frustrating how the narrative often goes. Martha dandridge custis was the wealthiest widow in virginia. George washington comes back from the french and indian war, and he says, aha, the wealthiest widow in virginia is right down the road. I need the money, im going to go get her. And so she swoons, and he sweeps her off her feet and carries her off back to mount vernon. It didnt really work that way. Certainly, he had his choice, she had hers as well. I would emphasize, whatever their motivations would have been and, certainly, money was part of it for george whatever their motivations may have been, the important thing is that they saw each other as partners from the very beginning. They saw each other as partners. We cannot judge now how much love was in, how much love was not in. Theres no question that eventually if not immediately they came to love each other and to rely on each oh completely, but from the very beginning, they saw their marriage as a partnership. He passed away and his daughter died and it came down to george who rented it for a while before he got full control from mount vernon to marthas estates along the york river, they both looked at this task of managing this estate together. Martha did not go off in the corner to knit and to wash dishes while george is managing things. They both looked at the same goal. And the same purpose. Expanding the mount vernon estate and particularly improving the mount vernon estate was among the first orders of business. Mount vernon would eventually the estate would eventually expand to some 8,000 acres by the time of washington res death and thats mount vernon alone in addition to marthas many thousands of acres. But theres a much bigger expansion, not just in termses of size but in terms of the type of estate. Mount vernon is when washington takes management of it focused on, as it has been, for ages, for generations, on the cultivation of tobacco, and i like to imagine riding through mount vernon in, say, 1761. You would have heard the bird kerning, heard the kerning, heard the occasionol work of a spade in the field, heard the enslaved men and women, perhaps singing, talking to each other. The free workers talking to each other, the clop of horses hoofs, the work of the occasion al plow, peaceful surrounding. This would contrast profoundly with your experience of riding through mount vernon, say in 1768 when you would have found a bustling hive of production and industry that it became an enterprise in its own right, with noise and work going on of multiple different types, all at the same time. You would have heard metal clanking on metal, spinning and weaving, you would have heard shoes being cobbled. You would have heard men hauling in nets on the boat would have gone out on the potomac. How did that happen . Well, it was washingtons sense that the tobacco system just was not going to work in the long run. The tobacco system has disadvantages, one being that tobacco drains the soil and is very labor intensative. It requires a lot of human beings working on that production too produce a relatively small amount of tobacco as expired to other crops. But for washington the thing that upset him more than anything else was that to cultivate and sell to back quo tobacco you had to work in the british system. That meant you as a planter, produce the tobacco in essence you turn it over to british agents, who ship it an british ships, to europe, they decide where they think it can and should be sold, they figure out what prices they can fetch and where it will go, and then they tell you how much credit you have earned. You dont get any cash out of it. You get credit. And they say, well, this happened to washington over and over again. Were sorry, we werent able to get quite us a much as we thought we would so we can only give you this much credit. The assumes is from the american side you use the credit to purchase british goods. But theres another dimension to it. The virginia gentry were about conspicuous construction, the quality of your page and how you dress and everything else. The tendencies to buy. Luxury goods. In britain. Things that have no productive value whatsoever, all about appearance. What do you bring back with your credit . You cant invest it in anything. You just waste it. What happens . Debt. Debt. Which washington has learned to fear and to hate above all else. He himself in his own estate, begins to fall in the early 1760s, fairly heavily into debt. George is partly to blame for this. Its interesting in his accounts, if you look up to 1759, he spends a fair amount of money wasting money on cards and billiards. I really, really want some talented artist to paint washington playing poker or playing snooker or Something Like that, and i just got to site, because he spent a lot of time on it. If you look at the accounts in 1759, he marries martha, the expenditures on these on gambling has been like this, suddenly disappears, she lets him play a game of pool from time to time but no more cards. 1762, suddenly pool disexpense he is playing cards again, and i just know he was whining to martha, come on, want to go with the guys once in a while and play some cards. He doesnt waste a whole lot of money on this but wastes some but he has trouble developing a mere disciplined lifestyle. When he is experiencing and witnesses this debt he decides to switch over into wheat. Make a long story short. What does changing over from tobacco to wheat do . Its completely transformative. It allows washington to produce, to sell, on his own right. He rennovates the grist mill. Spends quite a lot of money on that to make sure it can produce high quality flour. The sold George Washington or g washington brand flour in the region, and anyone caribbean, g. Washington brand flour is being sold in hard tack, made out of his flour, being chasmed on by sailors and breaking their teeth on it. But also it allows him to reallocate labor. Ill specify. Enslave evidence labor as well as free labor. He allocates them to Different Industries where they can become productive and selfsufficient. You dont need to go to somebody else to get your clothing, to get your tools, to get your shoes, to get your food. You can produce all of it right here and with the surplus you can sell it. Mount vernon is going to be restoring the fishery. Im really excited about that and reconstructioning the boat that washington would have used in seen how the fishery would have worked. The fishery was really important. I it was profitable in its own right but fed the people working on the estate. It becomes mount vern mount vernon become answers enterprise, multidimensional. Multilaird. Its an amazing transformation. Washington sells through alexandria and to theres much i could say about the growing disenchantment with the british, their clamping down on american industry. This was a feeling that americans shared in general. I will simply very briefly say that washington shared with his countrymen a sense that we were on the verge of what would be called in later generations, takeoff. We were about to reach a point where we could really grasp toward prosperity, and there was a sense that it was the british who were holding us down. That sense of frustration, of being prevented from becoming prosperous, is a major incentive toward revolutionary sentiment, as well as taxation without representation, and all the rest of it, but washington believes for a long time, right up to 1775, that armed rebellion is a last resort, but he believes pretty confidently that Economic Warfare is the way to break free of Great Britain, right up to 75. Until blood starts to flee in lexington and concord, he believes that Economic Warfare and boycotts is the way to break free. There was a vision of the future involved in implicit in resistance to the british, and theres a fascinating series of documents called the fairfax resolve in 1774 that washington and george mason worked on to. To make a long story short, let me quote briefly from 14th 14th resolve. The 14th and 15th resolves are interesting because they look toward not just what do we do now but what is our future goal . And the 14th resolve states that every little jarring interest and dispute which has ever happened between these colonies should be buried in the thumb of oblivion. All manner of luxury and extravagance ought immediately to be laid aside as totally inconsistent with the threatening and gloomy prospect before us. Men of fortune should set examples of temperance, fortitude, frugality and industry, and give every encourage independent their power to the improvement of arts and manufacturers in america. That great care and attention should be head to cultivation of flax, cotton, and other materials for manufacturers, and he goes on to talk about husbandry, and wool, and the rest. I think its pretty clear, based on washingtons area of interests and expertise throughout his career, that this these resolves were written by washington. Mason was extremely important but mason tended to look more at the political side. In war, theres a lot more i could say about war but im not a going to go on to it too much. Certainly as commander in chief of the army, washington applies his own Management Experience in rung mount vernon, but there are just a couple of principles i would point out as commanderinchief. Washington saw big picture. He saw this is going to be a difficult war, and a war at that time we have a good chance of losing. Going to strain every nerve, every resource, to win. Is it Worth Winning at all costs . Is it Worth Winning if you burn down your country . N the process . If you destroy your infrastructure, if your economy is ruined, if towns, ports, villages, are destroyed, families are destroyed, and you end up throwing out the british and standing on a heap of ashes and facing a future of impoverishment and suffering. Washington answers a pretty resounding no to that. He views it as a primary obligation of himself, as commanderinchief, to ensure that we emerge from this war with an intact, as much as possible, infrastructure and economy. Another guiding principle of washington is that, as commanderinchief, that the army must not operate in isolation from the people. But the army must be integrated into the national effort, into the civilian population, and part of this goes at the top. Theres no doubt about it. Ive spoken about it before, and others do as well. That part of it has to do with communications, with congress, with governors, with officials, but in researching this book, i saw theres a completely different level here which is really at the ground level. Washington begins to talk during the revolutionary war, uses this phrase communities of interest. He talks about selfinterest being a governing principle, which i looked at the first time i thought it was just cynicism. Its really not. He believes that patriots, loyalists, undecided, not fixed categories. Peoples decision to fight is a daily decision, and its a daily decision thats based in part upon your sense of hope and your sense of what is happening to your family and to yourself right now. This war and this soundings like pandering but its not because its true. Had the women of america decided this war lad to end it would have ended. They were making decisions every day based on their experience on the ground, what war was doing to theirs businesses this, families, where was the american army, what was its role . Whether its worthwhile fighting or not. Washington makes a very conscious decision that his army must join together in a shared sense of interest with the American People so whenever he forms a camp, a winter camp or other camps, he deliberately opens a market. The market is tangible but also symbolic in a sense that soldiers and civilians are trading with each other, day by day. Exchanging. That sense of common interests. Very conscious and very deliberate on his part. But also that we never seize supplies, we recognize Property Rights and we are present and visible, and we isolate the british, and push them out. The british were very ineffective. It was one of the reasons they lost the war. In developing that sense of interrelationships of common interests with the people. It was a significant part of washingtons strategy, and again, theres much more that i could say about that, had i more time. Returning from the revolutionary war, and rebuilding mount vernon, two things i would emphasize here. Washington becomes an advocate of the new husbandry, scientific husbandry, scientific agriculture, much of which is imported from Great Britain. Many of the expansions of the estate, primarily, is during this period, as well as the rest of the estate, but its based on knowledge imported mainly from Great Britain which has undergone an cultural revolution and now an industrial revolution. I think of washington as an early advocate of the internet. Had he known about such a thing he would have ban luge advocate because he, and a gentleman named arthur young, agriculturalists and innovator from Great Britain, are advocates of gathering all the information you possibly can, from farmers all over europe and america, classifying that information, publishing it, and disseptember mating it for disseptember mating it for everybody. But theres another lot here which is the problem of slavery. Slavery should not be relegated as the side issue, as something, well, yeah, and there were slaves, too. Slavery was certainly integral to the development of washingtons estate. The laboff on the men and women on the estate were fundamental to creating was are wealth. Washingtons relationship with slavery was problematic, in that he grew up accepting slavery. Its what he knew. He began to turn against slavery because of the fundamental principle of labor and work. This was a New Discovery for me, is a looked at slavery and its problem. People have often speculated, why did he turn against it . I say its because he saw blacks fighting in the revolutionary war and they could do what wild white soldiers did. Ive been skeptical at about that. It comes down seasons that industry and morality go hand in hand so much so there are really two sides of the same thing. An industrious person is a moral person. A moral person is industrious, much of this borrowed from a sense of the work ethic we call the protestant work ethic, from john rock and the ideas of others, but washington is practical about it. If you deny an enslaved human being to enjoy the fruited odd their labor you undercut any motivation they have to work efficiently. Theyll do the minimum possible and they will will resists. He sees it at mount vernon day by day. They will never innovate. They will never work to the limit of their capacity. They will never grow, and they become corrupted by that very process, and those who force themselves and maintain them in that system are also corrupted. And it is ultimately a dead end for himself and his estate and he comes firmly to believe for the country. Economically, as well as morally. Again, the two things going together and that was really the thought process that would turn him away from that, and we can talk more about that in question and answer. The confederation government, and the confederation period, his seasons the weakness of that government, its inability to raise taxes, is fundamentalm to his eventual support for the constitution, which i could talk about more later, but i want to talk for a bit, before we get to question and answer, about the presidency. Washingtons goal as president of the United States, he says, when he becomes president this i right before he becomes president , before his inauguration, he says to develop the National Prosperity shall be my firstmy only aim. To develop the National Prosperity to foster the National Prosperity, my first and my only aim. Thats pretty significant, i think. His vision for the country is focused on building the foundation for prosperity, on establishing the economy. The few main points there, establishing the National Credit. Establishing a Stable Currency. The National Credit being the trust that others have that we will fulfill our financial obligations. The stable and secure government maintained through taxation. A government that will work to build an infrastructure that will tie the nation together by commerce. He believes that commerce is what will unite us. He also believes incidentally with the native americans, thats what will tie to us native americans. Naive . Yes in many ways it was but he did not view as native americans as people to be conquered he thought if we traded with them, they would see the same interests. Bind west to east, north to south. Through commerce. The governments role is to maintain the peace. Peace is essential for the development of prosperity and commerce, domestic and international. Thats wh