What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of George Washington?
- He’s the person whose face is imprinted in the $1 bill
- He’s considered to be the father of the United States
- He was the first president of the U.S.
But do you think of him as an entrepreneur?
Probably not, but in this episode, John Berlau, in his new book George Washington, Entrepreneur, tells us that above everything else, he was an entrepreneur. He became wealthy through entrepreneurship, and he remained an entrepreneur long after his term as the president was over.
Some highlights about the interview
George Washington wasn’t rich. He was part of the gig economy of the time. His first gig was to survey land. H used to measure the boundaries of undeveloped land. While surveying the land, he had first-hand knowledge of great land to purchase and he became a real estate speculator.
He fought the French-Indian war for the British
He married Martha who also had some land. He became a tobacco farmer but noticed that tobacco deteriorated the land and he became one of the first farmers to do rotation planning in his fields and plant different crops different years.
He planted wheat and hemp. He also created a flour mill and branded his flour with the initial GW. This branding exercise made his flour indistinguishable from all the other generic flour in the world.
When he resigned as commander in chief of Britain’s Virginia forces in the French and Indian War in 1758, the 26-year-old George Washington put aside his military ambitions and returned to his Mount Vernon plantation for good. (Or so he thought.)
George Washington started out as a traditional slaveholder Southern tobacco planter like his father and grandfathers before him. Yet in the decades that followed, a remarkable transformation took place. By the time he died in 1799, Washington had turned his back on the whole ethos of Southern agrarianism that was so dear to fellow Virginians like Thomas Jefferson. The planter had become an entrepreneurial proto-capitalist.
Toward the end of his life, George Washington said that, if there were any way to pull it off, he’d sell all his Virginia property and move to a northern city to make his living as an investor. George Washington’s experiences in war and the government had convinced him to embrace investment, commerce, finance, and, entrepreneurship.
Mount Vernon always remained the center of George Washington’s entrepreneurial endeavors. He turned the old plantation into an “industrial village.” The first, essential step was abandoning tobacco, the soil-depleting crop that had been the foundation of the Chesapeake economy since the first English settlers arrived in the early 17th century.
George Washington experimented with as many as 60 different grain crops before fixing on wheat as his new mainstay. Other landowners throughout the region were making this same shift from planter to farmer—grain crops were eclipsing tobacco.
What set George Washington apart was the scale of his operations on the constellation of Mount Vernon farms that he had expanded to 8,000 acres. Guided by the theories and practices of Britain’s new scientific agriculture, George Washington established himself as the most progressive large-scale farmer in America.
Farmer George Washington didn’t limit himself to growing wheat. In an early example of vertical integration, the master of Mount Vernon not only raised quantities of grain but ground it into flour in his own state-of-the-art automated grist mill; packaged it in sacks marked with his “G. Washington” brand; and marketed it throughout North America, the Caribbean, and Britain.
To secure control of the product from seed to sale, George Washington made sure much of the flour left Mount Vernon’s wharf aboard his own oceangoing transports. Buyers soon learned that “G. Washington” assured consistent quality.
The wheat fields also supported another profitable enterprise—a whiskey distillery whose annual production of the intoxicant (about 11,000 gallons) was one of the largest in America.
George Washington harvested the Potomac River—visible from the breezy east porch at Mount Vernon—as well. During the annual spring breeding runs of shad and herring, the two-mile-wide river churned with migrating fish from shore to shore. Washington’s fishing fleet of small boats (crewed by enslaved people) stayed on the water for weeks, laying out nets hundreds of feet long.
Mount Vernon’s own extensive textile industry had woven the nets. In a good year, those nets might ensnare 1.5 million fish. The catch was gutted, salted, and packed into barrels. The fish helped feed the enslaved population at Mount Vernon and found an export market abroad.
George Washington educated himself with a lot of reading. He was in the habit of buying, borrowing, or exchanging books.
George Washington died at age 67. In his will, he gave instructions to liberate all his slaves.
About John Berlau
John Berlau is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. His work focuses on how public policy affects access to capital, entrepreneurship, and investments made by the public and business community alike. In recent years, he has studied the consequences of financial reform efforts passed by Congress like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the government’s response to the 2008 financial crisis, including the Dodd-Frank Act, and the placement of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into conservatorship.
Berlau is a contributing writer for Forbes. His work has been published and cited in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Bloomberg News, The Atlantic, Politico, Daily Caller, Washington Examiner, Investor’s Business Daily, National Journal, National Review, American Spectator, Reason Magazine, and more. He is a frequent guest on radio and television programs, including CNBC’s “The Call,” “Power Lunch” and “Closing Bell,” Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” and “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” and Fox Business’ “Cavuto.”
Berlau has testified on the impact of financial regulation before the House Committee on Financial Services and the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. A recognized expert on the phenomenon of crowdfunding, Berlau has spoken at prominent conferences such as South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, Money 20/20 in Las Vegas, the FinTech Global Expo in San Diego, the CFGE Crowdfund Banking and Lending Summit in San Francisco and the Crowdfund Intermediary Regulatory Advocates (CFIRA) Summit in Washington, D.C. He is also author of the widely cited paper “Declaration of Crowdfunding Independence: Finance of the People, by the People, and for the People.”
Before joining the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Berlau was an award-winning financial and political journalist. He served as Washington correspondent for Investor’s Business Daily and as a staff writer for Insight magazine, published by The Washington Times. In 2002, he received the Sandy Hume Memorial Award for Excellence in Political Journalism from Washington’s National Press Club. He was a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in 2003.
He graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1994 with degrees in journalism and economics.
You can find John Berlau on Twitter.
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