You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington

by Alexis Coe

The document, which includes a painstaking inventory of his worldly possessions, reveals him to be one of the richest men in America. He wasn’t lying when he had claimed to be cash poor—though there always seemed to be money for finery, or to hire slave hunters to catch Hercules and Ona Judge—but he wasn’t exactly telling the truth, either. Washington was land rich, incredibly so, far past his own plantation. Washington owned 51,000 acres of land, mostly in what was then Virginia, but also Maryland, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and what became Ohio, along with small tracts in various cities; that included properties in the City of Washington (now Washington, D.C., which is currently, for context, a total of 43,740 acres). Over the years, Washington had tried to sell some of it off, but he rarely succeeded; either there were no takers, or there were, but they didn’t meet his criteria. Had he accepted the offers he received, he might have had enough money to do what he’d been talking about for two decades: emancipate the people he’d enslaved.