particular, will try at first what lengths he may go.”  Particularizing as to the members of his staff, Washington described their several characteristics:  Stuart was intelligent and apparently honest and attentive, but vain and talkative, and usually backward in his schedule; Crow would be efficient if kept strictly at his duty, but seemed prone to visiting and receiving visits.  “This of course leaves his people too much to themselves, which produces idleness or slight work on the one side and flogging on the other, the last of which, besides the dissatisfaction which it creates, has in one or two instances been productive of serious consequences.”  McKay was a “sickly, slothful and stupid sort of fellow,” too much disposed to brutality in the treatment of the slaves in his charge; Butler seemed to have “no more authority over the negroes ... than an old woman would have”; and Green, the overseer of the carpenters, was too much on a level with the slaves for the exertion of control.  Davy, the negro foreman at Muddy Hole, was rated in his master’s esteem higher than some of his white colleagues, though Washington had suspicions concerning the fate of certain lambs which had vanished while in his care.  Indeed the overseers all and several were suspected from time to time of drunkenness, waste, theft and miscellaneous rascality.  In the last of these categories Washington seems to have included their efforts to secure higher wages.

[Footnote 26:  Voluminous plantation data are preserved in the Washington MSS. in the Library of Congress.  Those here used are drawn from the letters of Washington published in the Long Island Historical Society Memoirs, vol.  IV; entitled George Washington and Mount Vernon.  A map of the Mount Vernon estate is printed in Washington’s Writings (W.C.  Ford ed.), XII, 358.]

The slaves in their turn were suspected of ruining horses by riding them at night, and of embezzling grain issued for planting, as well as of lying and malingering in general.  The carpenters, Washington said, were notorious piddlers; and not a slave about the mansion house was worthy of trust.  Pretences of illness as excuses for idleness were especially annoying.  “Is there anything particular in the cases of Ruth, Hannah and Pegg,” he enquired, “that they have been returned as sick for several weeks together?...  If they are not made to do what their age and strength will enable them, it will be a very bad example to others, none of whom would work if by pretexts they can avoid it.”  And again:  “By the reports I perceive that for every day Betty Davis works she is laid up two.  If she is indulged in this idleness she will grow worse and worse, for she has a disposition to be one of the most idle creatures on earth, and is besides one of the most deceitful.”  Pearce seems to have replied that he was at a loss to tell the false from the true.  Washington rejoined:  “I never found so much difficulty as you seem