Washington as Bookkeeper

Washington not only practiced what Mair preached, but he also placed at least one copy of his book in the hands of another, younger Virginia planter. In 1762, he ordered it from London for his stepson, John Parke Custis, apparently at the request of the eight-year-old boy’s Scottish tutor. Unfortunately, young Jacky was not much of a student; he had trouble with all things economic and certainly never mastered compound interest.

To record his numerous and diverse business activities, George Washington, like his contemporaries, used a set of documents. To understand the contrasting and complementary roles played by each type of business record, it is useful to follow an individual businessman or woman in the 18th century through a day in his or her life. The starting point of such records was, necessarily, a makeshift one—called variously waste books, pocketbooks, day books or memorandum books, all such terms for these rough records underscoring their ephemeral nature. Following the advice of Mair, George Washington appears never to have left home without a day book in his pocket, and many examples of his remain in the Library of Congress’s collection. Sometime later, the owners of such waste books (or their secretary) copied these notes into a more formal, fuller, more-detailed documentation of what had transpired. Organized hour by hour, day by day, this more robust record of each day’s business was known as a “journal of accounts.” While a simple farmer or the owner of a small business could satisfy herself or himself with day books and a journal or two, larger and more complex businesses created a third record book that utilized double entry accounting, the ledgers of accounts. Usually the product of a wide-ranging business, such a grander enterprise might be kept by a trained clerk of accounts—an accountant— whose more polished penmanship made it a work of beauty.

These four fundamental accounting documents of George Washington’s business life each had its own character. The journal of accounts was based in the day book and became the parent of the ledger of accounts and the grandparent of the statement of account. In addition, business correspondence, either copies of outgoing letters sent that were preserved by the sender or original letters retained by the recipient, form an important counterpart to these records. Some business owners kept separate bound copybooks of letters sent to business associates; many bundled and archived the letters they received. Some organized letters sent and letters received by business activity. All too many individuals bunched and blended all the letters they sent into one continuous set of volumes or packets tied up in red tape, just as they—and, reciprocally, their correspondents—combined news about business affairs and personal matters in the same letter. Thus, however helpful and rich in information such documents are, modern readers must remember that bundles of letters were not account books. They simply complemented each other.

George Washington’s business records are remarkable not only for their thoroughness—more than 900 items are known to exist outside the key collections of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon and the Library of Congress—but also for their survival. The digitization of business records like those of the General opens tremendous possibilities for researchers. Thus, for instance: every one of the individual letters with its enclosed list of requested items sent to Washington’s London factor and all the responses and invoices of cargoes sent that were gathered and recorded in his order book for 1755–1766 could, theoretically, be matched with records of items purchased in his journal of accounts, and vice versa.

Certainly this is what George Washington had as his purpose when he collected and compiled his business records. What all this means for historians is that we should be able to reconstruct, in a forensic fashion, records that might otherwise have gone missing. In other words, working in reverse from the ledger of accounts, we should be able to reconstitute George Washington’s journal of accounts, though probably in less detail. The surviving business records of many other business owners are much less complete than Washington’s, if they survive at all. The probate records of a South Carolina merchant who died in 1767 lists four ledgers of accounts totaling some 1,400 pages, plus thousands more pages of journals and waste books—none of which have survived. But the possibility of re-creating missing records by working backward and employing such techniques is as exciting a prospect for those interested in using business records to identify commodity prices and foreign exchange rates as it is for those interested in genealogy or social history.

The digitization of Washington’s business records makes possible the establishment and expansion of linkages among every aspect of Washington’s business records and into his broader papers, correcting a once-fashionable but abominable practice of separation and sorting by type of document, what one scholar has called an “archival crime.” This reintegration enhances our understanding of both sets of materials and restores the integrity of the entire corpus of George Washington’s business papers.

In digitizing, and thereby making feasible the reassembly of the totality of George Washington’s business archives, we allow for the fuller understanding of his entrepreneurial expertise. Washington’s meticulous attention to his accounts—which sharpens our own appreciation of what he left for modern historians—is nowhere better confirmed than by his own words from his deathbed in the late hours of December 14, 1799. Tobias Lear, his secretary, noted that, as the end neared, the General stirred, spoke up, and reminded Lear to “arrange my accounts & settle my books.”