As early as 1766 Washington had veered from the staple-crop system based on tobacco production, which he had so eagerly embraced less than a decade before. Instead he turned to cultivating cereal grains, redoubled his efforts at achieving self-sufficiency and increased his commitment to commercial enterprises. Washington’s decision stemmed from his dissatisfaction with the tobacco consignment system, the declining international market for Virginia tobacco and his alarming descent into debt to his London factor. Characteristically, Washington took a series of bold measures to stem the tide of debt and place his plantation on a firmer financial footing. With the shift from tobacco to more diversified grain production, with wheat as his cash crop, new methods of cultivation could be used that had a dramatic effect on Washington’s labor needs. Gone were the many labor-intensive tasks related to growing tobacco: the numerous intermediate steps required to prepare seeds and soil; hand planting, processing, curing and transporting the crop; plus the backbreaking toil of hoe agriculture. Grain farming was a much less intensive occupation that could take advantage of animal power and a growing battery of implements and methods calculated to further reduce the human labor required.

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Through time Washington succeeded in hoisting himself out of debt by more closely attending to his affairs, mastering the new art of wheat production, working to make Mount Vernon a more self-sufficient operation, and, not least of all, by benefiting from an additional influx of cash from the Custis estate. But even as he did so he found that, try as he might to develop new industries and occupations to employ all his slaves, he possessed many more unskilled black laborers than he would ever need. Although his close attention to his financial ledgers meant that Mount Vernon would remain a profitable venture for decades to come, it was clear to Washington that unless he was willing to divest himself of a significant portion of his workers, they would constitute an ever-increasing drain on his resources. Late in life, Washington summed up his predicament with his usual insight and precision:

It is demonstratively clear, that on this Estate [Mount Vernon] I have more working Negroes by a full moiety, than can be employed to any advantage in the farming system….To sell the overplus I cannot, because I am principled against this kind of traffic in the human species. To hire them out, is almost as bad, because they could not be disposed of in families to any advantage, and to disperse the families I have an aversion.

Just as George Washington’s eight years of fighting for American independence served as a catalyst for his conviction that a strong central government would be critical to the success of the new nation, it was during this period that his growing doubts about slavery seem to have received a significant boost. Washington’s general attitudes toward slavery already may have begun to change by the time he left Philadelphia in the summer of 1775 to take command of the Continental Army camped outside Boston. Even so, there is no question that he assumed that blacks would play little or no part in the prosecution of the war, other than in their traditional role of providing labor to support the American troops. The British had other ideas, however, and Washington was soon forced to reconsider his army’s policies in the matter.

Washington’s initial objection to using blacks as soldiers was manifested in a general order that excluded ‘Negroes’ from service, along with ‘Boys unable to bear Arms…and old men unfit to endure the fatigues of the campaign.’ Shortly afterward, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia who had embarked on a campaign to harass the American home front and disrupt the war effort, offered slaves their freedom in exchange for enlisting in the king’s service. In response to Dunmore’s actions, and at least partly because of the continuing shortage of fighting men willing to enlist in his army, Washington and Congress soon changed the policy to allow ‘free Negroes’ to join the Continental forces.

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