At the age of twenty-seven he married Martha Custis, a
rich widow with children, though her marriage with Washington was
childless. His estate on the Potomac River, three hundred miles
from the open sea, recently named Mount Vernon, had been in the
family for nearly a hundred years. There were twenty-five hundred
acres at Mount Vernon with ten miles of frontage on the tidal
river. The Virginia planters were a landowning gentry; when
Washington died he had more than sixty thousand acres. The
growing of tobacco, the one vital industry of the Virginia of the
time, with its half million people, was connected with the
ownership of land. On their great estates the planters lived
remote, with a mail perhaps every fortnight. There were no large
towns, no great factories. Nearly half of the population
consisted of negro slaves. It is one of the ironies of history
that the chief leader in a war marked by a passion for liberty
was a member of a society in which, as another of its members,
Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, said,
there was on the one hand the most insulting despotism and on the
other the most degrading submission. The Virginian landowners
were more absolute masters than the proudest lords of medieval
England.
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