Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader by Robert Middlekauff Page A

struggled to maintain royal authority. They did not exactly lose the struggle, but as the years passed they had to concede that theirpower had slipped gradually into the hands of men who considered themselves an elite, a group that had amassed land and slaves and in the process set the tone of society.
    Compared with Virginian society of the previous century, that of the eighteenth was stable. It was stratified, with a landed group providing most of the government and fashioning a society indebted in several ways to English institutions and attitudes. It was also a slave-owning society, with Africans providing the bottom of the social order and almost all of the manual labor.
    There were no conflicts within white society that led to large-scale violence during the years of Washington’s youth, but there were fears of a slave uprising. Many plantation masters may have recognized the injustice of holding men in slavery, but few felt guilt, and almost none felt compelled to explain their conduct. Indeed, they seemed to feel little uneasiness in resorting to whipping and chaining their slaves when discipline was called for.
    Despite the lack of open conflict, there was a latent tension in the social system, which owed only a part of its nature to slavery. It arose from the system of plantation agriculture itself. One of the assumptions of planters held that the social order in Virginia should remain unchanged, because it expressed the natural order of things. The planter class owned the land and the labor force, and it welcomed new members to its number only if they met well-understood rules and conduct. Standards of behavior and life were to be found in the preferences of this class. The economy underlying this system centered on tobacco.
    Growing tobacco had implications that went unrecognized during much of Washington’s early years. Seemingly a simple agrarian activity, managing a plantation and producing a crop (later, grains and other commodities began to supplant tobacco) led to activity not ordinarily associated with agrarianism or pastoralism: The crops had to be sold abroad, both in England and on the European continent, involving arrangements with British firms—no small matter when the market lay across the Atlantic Ocean and when no currency was readily available. Then there were the local problems, the management of a slave labor force, and replacing lands quickly worn out by the destructive force of tobacco. To sustain such a system was not a small affair for a class sometimes pictured as a leisured group.
    Behind such a system, there had to be a propelling force, and therewas—an ethic that valued leisure but also demanded effort and saving. It was a commitment primarily to acquisition and work—in a real sense the Protestant ethic. Planters sometimes fancied that their plantations were simply large families governed by a patriarch, but in fact the life of the average planter was often made up of transactions, not of the contemplation of flocks grazing on green fields. Indeed, there was much hurly-burly in a planter’s daily existence.
    Their dealings with British merchants brought home to planters that their rights—indeed, their welfare—depended in part on circumstances far removed from the province. In this broad setting—Virginia and western Europe—they learned of their vulnerability, an awakening not always welcomed. In a sense, their business dealings taught them what it meant to live in an empire. Much of the time, that awareness provided reassurance as they saw British power used in ways that served their interests. But at times the lessons of imperial life were different—as they discovered in the 1760s.
    The plantation system had taken firm hold of the colony when Washington was young. He took to it almost instinctively, though in his twenties he looked to a career in the British army—not in the cultivation of tobacco. The French and the Indians were the enemies of these years, and he made