Washington as Bookkeeper

By John J. McCusker

 

In 2017, a fully searchable digital edition of the most important of George Washington's carefully organized business records—preserved in disparate collections—was made public, opening a remarkable trove of information to modern researchers.

Almost all of us need to keep records of our business affairs, some more so, some less. Ancient societies, even those dating to before the advent of written languages, organized such records on clay tablets. In complex modern societies, as the time approaches every year for us to address our tax obligations, many simply resort to the proverbial shoe box stuffed with a year’s worth of bills and receipts, credit card statements, the reports of our checking accounts, and the like. The more complicated our business interests, the more elaborate our record-keeping systems become. The largest enterprises have recourse to teams of professional accountants to deal with all their documents.

George Washington, a private man with extensive business interests, behaving in similar fashion, organized and preserved the same sorts of records. He did it by himself. To the long list of attributes that describe our first president, we must add that the General was a careful keeper of his business records, neither baked in clay nor tucked away but personally scratched by pen on paper.

Pride of place on the desk in Washington’s study at Mount Vernon, resorted to almost every day he was in residence, were the sine qua non of 18th-century commercial record keeping, documents so significant that furniture makers designed and fabricated combined desks and bookcases to accommodate them. These grand “ledgers of accounts” were, for “almost any 18th-century American merchant...the epicenter of his enterprise.” In these cumbersome volumes, George Washington tracked every farthing he earned and every penny he spent—writing entries in his own hand at the end of nearly every day. He did so because the success of his business enterprises depended on the information painstakingly assembled on his ledgers’ pages.

The easiest way for us to understand the ledgers of accounts that George Washington created is to view them as an amalgam of our modern checkbooks and credit card statements, a unified listing of all his business transactions. All income and all expenditures are combined in one long set of pages, details set out, not chronologically, but organized by the names of people with whom he did business. Listed under each individual’s name is everything that Washington owed to him or her—day by day, week by week—entered as a debit on the left-hand page of the book. Across the open ledger on the right-hand page, he entered what that same individual owed him, a stream of credits. Just as our banks and our credit card companies keep track of what we owe them and what we have paid to them in coterminous lists of debits and credits, so too did George Washington maintain the same kinds of records of his business enterprises.

To accomplish all this, Washington adopted the most up-to-date modes for business accounting in the same way that he pursued what worked best for much else in his life. We know him as a citizen of the Age of Reason, the Era of Enlightenment, as a gentleman farmer, an “improving farmer.” A gentleman farmer kept good books. George Washington’s status as such is confirmed in his assiduous bookkeeping, which followed the best accounting methods taught and practiced in Great Britain. His guide was the preeminent English-language accounting textbook of the 18th century, John Mair’s Book-Keeping Methodiz’d, which was issued and re-issued in more than two dozen editions between 1736 and 1810. From the third edition on, Mair’s book included a section on the tobacco colonies and how their merchants and storekeepers kept their accounts. Later editions offered specifics on commerce for the sugar colonies and on accounting for wharf managers and plantation owners.