A short experience as landowner convinced him that slave labor was the least efficient of all.  This conviction led him very early to believe in the emancipation of the slaves.  I do not find that sentiment or abstract ideals moved him to favor emancipation, but his sense of fitness, his aversion to wastefulness and inefficiency made him disapprove of a system which rendered industry on a high plane impossible.  Experience only confirmed these convictions of his, and in his will he ordered that many slaves should be freed after the death of Mrs. Washington.  He was careful to apportion to his slaves the amount of food they needed in order to keep in health and to work the required stint.  He employed a doctor to look after them in sickness.  He provided clothing for them which he deemed sufficient.  I do not gather that he ever regarded the black man as being essentially made of the same clay as the white man, the chief difference being the color of their skin.  To Washington, the Slave System seemed bad, not so much because it represented a debased moral standard, but because it was economically and socially inadequate.  His true character appears in his making the best of a system which he recognized as most faulty.  Under his management, in a few years, his estate at Mount Vernon became the model of that kind of plantation in the South.

Whoever desires to understand Washington’s life as a planter should read his diaries with their brief, and one might almost say brusque, entries from day to day.[1] Washington’s care involved not only bringing the Mount Vernon estate to the highest point of prosperity by improving the productiveness of its various sections, but also by buying and annexing new pieces of land.  To such a planter as he was, the ideal was to raise enough food to supply all the persons who lived or worked on the place, and this he succeeded in doing.  His chief source of income, which provided him with ready money, was the tobacco crop, which proved to be of uncertain value.  By Washington’s time the Virginians had much diminished the amount and delicacy of the tobacco they raised by the careless methods they employed.  They paid little attention to the rotation of crops, or to manuring, with the result that the soil was never properly replenished.  In his earlier days Washington shipped his year’s product to an agent in Glasgow or in London, who sold it at the market price and sent him the proceeds.  The process of transportation was sometimes precarious; a leaky ship might let in enough sea water to damage the tobacco, and there was always the risk of loss by shipwreck or other accident.  Washington sent out to his brokers a list of things which he desired to pay for out of the proceeds of the sale, to be sent to him.  These lists are most interesting, as they show us the sort of household utensils and furniture, the necessaries and the luxuries, and the apparel used in a mansion like Mount Vernon.  We find that he even took care to order a fashionably dressed doll for little Martha Custis to play with.