We can now report that the governor of Virginia has been using the official powers of the office for personal benefit.
Easy now, we’re not talking about the current occupant. The governor in question is Robert Dinwiddie, and the news here is only about 275 years old.
The reporting of this scandal is occasioned by the movie “Young Washington,” which depicts George Washington in his early 20s at the outset of the French and Indian War, the conflict where he earned the military reputation that later vaulted him into the role as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolution.
In the movie, the Academy Award winner Sir Ben Kingsley portrays Gov. Dinwiddie, the royal governor who sends Washington off to the frontier, where most of the movie takes place. I’ve already written about the movie (which I recommend, by the way, even if it’s not 100% true to what really happened). Instead, let’s have a history lesson on Dinwiddie, who plays a key role in our history — and got a county named after him in the process.
The movie shows Dinwiddie as an imperious administrator who didn’t think much of the colonials he was governing — but was also keen to keep the French out of the lands west of the Alleghenies that Virginia claimed, hence Washington’s mission to tell the French they needed to leave. (Spoiler alert: The French were not impressed, which, short version, is why the French and Indian War happened.)
What the movie doesn’t say — because it’s about Washington and not Dinwiddie — is that the governor had a financial stake in those lands west of the Alleghenies. He owned stock in the Ohio Company, a real estate development that wanted to turn the land beyond the mountains into subdivisions and shopping malls, or, at least, farmsteads and centers of commerce. Gov. Dinwiddie was actively using the power of his office to promote his own investments.
This is one of those places where it’s hard to apply our modern standards about conflicts of interest to historical figures. Today, elected officials have to file financial disclosure forms, and legislators often recuse themselves from votes in which they have a personal stake — which is why some of President Donald Trump’s business dealings have generated headlines. Our forebearers in the mid-1700s would have found all the attendant outrage to be strange. As Encyclopedia Virginia writes in its entry on Dinwiddie: “Eighteenth-century officials viewed public office as a profitable form of personal property.” Put another way, if you weren’t using your office to enrich yourself, you weren’t doing it right.
Dinwiddie did things quite right, by those 18th-century standards.
Dinwiddie was the son of a merchant in Glasgow, Scotland. Many colonial administrators across the British Empire were Scottish. After the 1707 Act of Union that joined England and Scotland into Great Britain, many upwardly mobile Scots sought to advance themselves through government or military careers. In some ways, Scotland was the more advanced society, home to five top-flight universities in that era while England had only Oxford and Cambridge. Dinwiddie went to the University of Glasgow, which marked him as part of the Scottish elite. By his late 20s, he was a bureaucrat in Bermuda, and eventually rose to a seat on the governor’s council there — the equivalent of being a cabinet secretary.
From there, he rose through the ranks of other posts in British administration in the hemisphere, and had responsibility for customs officials from Pennsylvania to Jamaica. Put more plainly, he was a tax collector. For four years, Dinwiddie was based in Norfolk. At one point he investigated customs officials for alleged fraud but found little, causing British officials to note that Dinwiddie acted with “more zeal than prudence.” In an era where money often wound up in the wrong pockets, Dinwiddie’s enthusiasm to root out fraud, even if it was imaginary, marked him as a star administrator. He wound up back in London for what appears to be six more years of government service.
In 1751, an opportunity arose. The governor of Virginia was William Anne (yes, Anne) Keppel, the second earl of Albemarle. As was the custom then, he never went to North America. Instead, lieutenant governors were sent to Virginia to run the colony in his name. This gets confusing, because they were treated as royal governors, styled as royal governors and referred to in history as governors, even though they were, in fact, lieutenant governors. History is not always neat.
Albemarle, and the crown, was in need of a lieutenant governor on the ground in Virginia. The previous occupant, William Gooch, had returned to Britain in 1749, citing poor health. For two years, a series of Virginia-born planters who served in the House of Burgesses had served as acting governor. That would not do. If that kind of thing continued, colonists might get the idea that they could govern themselves. Dinwiddie was sent to be a true agent of the crown. As part of the deal, he had to pay half his salary to the absent Albemarle. This was a different era in many ways.
Dinwiddie arrived in 1751. He was 60 — practically ancient for the times — but historian David O. Stewart calls him “energetic.” He also found colonists skeptical of him. “Powerful Virginians mistrusted Dinwiddie — a Scot who collected taxes had two black marks against him,” writes Stewart in his biography “George Washington: The Political Rise of America’s Founding Father.” Despite those misgivings, the House of Burgesses promptly named a county after Dinwiddie, because that’s how things worked back then. If you were governor, you got a county named after you.
Dinwiddie promptly tanked whatever popularity he had when he imposed a tax on land records. Nobody likes taxes but that one was particularly onerous to Virginians for several reasons. Here’s one: “Receipts from the [land] fee would have gone to Dinwiddie personally, which laid him open to the charge of venality,” historian Virginius Dabney wrote in “Virginia: The New Dominion.” Imagine if a governor today imposed a tax with the revenue going directly into his or her pocket. The rationale, Encylopedia Virginia says, is that Dinwiddie needed money since he had to give part of his salary to the absent Albemarle.
Colonists promply complained, first to Dinwiddie, then to London. This was an early round in the whole “taxation without representation” argument that came up decades later and helped lead to a formal break with the crown. Dinwiddie felt that as governor, he obviously had authority to tax the colonists; they felt quite differently, no matter who the revenue went to. The governor, Dabney wrote, was “naive in imagining that [the land tax] imposition, with approval of the burgesses, would be acceptable.” London eventually intervened. If Kingsley’s portray of Dinwiddie shows the governor as being crabby, it might be because of this early political debacle.
Let’s skip ahead to the matter at hand. Dinwiddie did have one thing going for him: he knew something about Virginia from his previous colonial work. He also was an investor in the Ohio Company. You may think certain companies today exercise outsized influence on Virginia policybut they are political weaklings compared to the Ohio Company.
The Ohio Company was a land company that had been set up in 1748 with the goal of colonizing “the Ohio country,” as the land west of the Ohio River was called. Here’s how ambitious that was: Not until 1744 did indigenous people formally cede the Shenandoah Valley to British colonists in the Treaty of Lancaster. As late as 1753 — two years after Dinwiddie’s arrival — the Shawnee still insisted on meeting at today’s Cross Junction in Frederick County, which had been one of their historic meeting places. In those days, the Great Valley west of the Blue Ridge was still very much the frontier, but some Virginians were already looking further west, coveting lands many mountains away.
Who were these farsighted investors who thought it was possible to colonize land west of the Ohio River when they could barely control land along the Shenandoah River? Two of the three men who helped start the Ohio Company were named Washington — George Washington’s older half-brothers Lawrence Washington and Austin Washington — along with Thomas Lee, a prominent landholder from Westmoreland County who had served a stint as acting governor. In time, other prominent Virginians invested as well, including the new governor, Dinwiddie.
When we see the Dinwiddie and Washington characters interacting in “Young Washington,” keep in mind that they were well-acquainted by then. In fact, the actual young Washington was one of the first people the new governor met. He’d been in office just two months when the 19-year-old Washington appeared in Williamsburg in January 1752. At the time, he’d just returned from Barbados, where Lawrence was trying to recover from tuberculosis. Stewart describes George Washington presenting the governor with letters from Lawrence, which then led to a dinner. “They were an unlikely pair: a tall, lanky teenager and a stout man who might have been his grandfather, linked by their mutual interest in the west and by mutual friends, the Fairfaxes,” Stewart writes. “Dinwiddie surely asked after Lawrence, the colony’s senior military official, whose health mattered if the governor’s policies provoked a frontier war. Washington combined a gentleman’s manner with a toughness earned surveying. Accustomed to responsibility — as a surveyor and while caring for his brother — he had a quiet confidence. Dinwiddie might have uses for him.”
Indeed, he did, and the movie shows how that played out.
What matters for us today is that Dinwiddie’s policy was to expand Virginia colonization to the west — that may have benefited Virginia as a whole, but it definitely benefited him as an investor. That was considered quite appropriate at the time. Indeed, many of Virginia’s leaders were investors in the Ohio Company, or otherwise had financial interests in western lands, even as they pursued policies to expand Virginia’s control westward. When Dinwiddie learned that the French had established a fort in what today we consider western Pennsylvania (but which then was considered part of Virginia’s western claim), that wasn’t just a geopolitical threat to Britain’s seaboard colonies; it was a personal financial threat. At the time, all those interests overlapped so completely it’s hard to separate the two. What today would be considered a scandal and abuse of power was then simply routine policy: Of course, it was in everybody’s interest to push the French out of the Ohio country. And, naturally, the leaders were going to profit from it. That wasn’t really questioned then.
Ultimately, this outlook led to war — no lobbyist in Richmond has ever persuaded Virginia to go to war, but you can make the case that the Ohio Company helped persuade Virginia in the 1750s to go to war.
That’s a bit simplistic: The French and Indian War was simply one theater in the wider military struggle between Britain and France called the Seven Years’ War — but the Virginia gentry’s financial interests in the Ohio country certainly served as an inspiration for many of them to support the war. It wasn’t just the gentry, though. Many ordinary colonists also pined for some of that western land. Broadly speaking, all the white colonists in Virginia expected to profit from the Ohio country somehow, either directly or indirectly. Whether Dinwiddie actually profited from his investment in the Ohio Company, though, is doubtful. He returned to England in 1758, while the French and Indian War was still underway. Nobody was developing what was then a war zone.
What united Virginians against the prospect of the French taking control of the Ohio country during the war also wound up uniting them against Britain after the war. Britain ran up debts during the war; its national debt nearly doubled. After a peace treaty was signed that formally conveyed the Ohio country to Britain, the British response was to ban settlement — it didn’t want to run up more debt from the inevitable warfare between colonists and Native American tribes. That Proclamation of 1763 seemed perfectly logical to the British; it outraged colonists who felt they were entitled to that land. After all, what was the war for if not to win control of it? Furthermore, many war veterans had been paid with promises of land — land that now they could not access.
By this point, many Virginia leaders owned land claims to land west of the proclamation line, if not west of the Ohio River itself — Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and many others were eager land speculators. Washington, in particular, set about buying up some of those land bounties in the Ohio country that some veterans were despairing of ever being able to use. In his book “Forced Founder,” the award-winning historian Woody Holton (son of former Gov. Linwood Holton), writes about Washington: “He advised his brother Charles to approach veterans ‘in a joking way, rather than in earnest at first’ in order to ‘see what value they seem to set upon their lands.’ If Charles Washington could obtain the veterans’ grants for seven pounds or less per thousand acres, he was directed to do so.”
As wily as Washington was, Jefferson might have been more so. Virginia had issued an order in 1754 that prohibited any single person from taking more than 1,000 acres of Native American land. Jefferson simply invested in two different companies, taking a 1,000-acre share in each.
There were many causes to the American Revolution, and some of them were quite high-minded, things like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But let’s not forget that Jefferson borrowed that phrase from the philosopher John Locke, who had written of “life, liberty and property.” For many Virginia leaders of that era, property was the pursuit of happiness.
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