Washington’s ledgers, bills account for a founder’s life

“Anodyne Pills for Breachy . . . Laxative Pills for Ruth . . . syphilic Pills for Maria . . . oz 1 Antiphlogistie Anodyne Tincture . . . Bleeding Charlotte . . . oz 4 Powdered Rhubarb . . . Extracting one of your Negroes tooth . . . a Mercurial Purge for Cook Jack.’’

This glimpse of life in the 18th century is contained in what historians say is a vast and underappreciated cache of financial documents from the life of the first president. Washington’s diaries and letters, many composed with an eye on history, have been carefully transcribed, annotated, and bound in stately volumes. But his financial records have been treated as scraps.

Documenting the lives of ordinary people, these records are scattered at multiple institutions. In most cases, they have never been transcribed or published in accessible form.

That archival dilemma lured 25 scholars, some of them forensic accountants, to Mount Vernon recently for a workshop on how to get the records online, with links to already published letters and diaries.

“It is going to be a treasure trove,’’ said Ted Crackel, editor in chief of the Papers of George Washington, a project based at the University of Virginia. He said publishing the financial papers would probably cost about $1 million.

“We’re hoping that there will be interest in the accounting world for picking up the check for this,’’ he said.

Washington’s first record dates to when he was 15, a list of books he has bought. In the years thereafter, Washington seems to have noted every bag of seed he ever bought. He documented his gambling losses.

There are chilling passages for the modern reader: In February 1773, for example, he recorded buying, at a public auction, “Ned,’’ “a girl Murria,’’ “Old Abner,’’ and “a Wench Dinah’’ and her four children.

Scholars hope that with links in online records, some of the more than 300 African-Americans who lived at Mount Vernon can be tracked as they reappear in other documents, letters, and diaries.

Washington’s career as a warrior and statesman has largely overshadowed his entrepreneurial history. He was chief executive, in effect, of a farming, manufacturing, and real estate operation that by the end of his life encompassed more than 50,000 acres of field and forest. Farms, fisheries, weavers, smithies, a grist mill, a distillery were just part of his empire.

By the end of his life, Washington was one of the richest men in the nation he had helped create. But he knew the frustrations of doing business in a land lacking banks, roads, and industry, where there was little capital and where he had to depend on transatlantic commerce using information moving at the speed of a sailing ship.

He detailed business matters with double-entry bookkeeping in ledgers of 100 pages or more.