Did America’s ‘fishing founding father’ go to war over salt?

In anticipation of the observance of Presidents’ Day on Monday, Feb. 17, we’ll revisit some of the “behind-the-scenes occurrences” associated with U.S. presidents over time. Today’s focus is on George Washington of Virginia, the 1st president, who served from 1789-97.

George Washington was born on Feb. 22, 1732, at Popes Creek in Westmoreland County, in the Colony of Virginia. Popes Creek is a tributary of the Potomac River. He was the first of six children of Augustine and Mary Ball Washington. (Augustine fathered four additional children during his first marriage to Jane Butler.)

On Jan. 6, 1759, Washington, at age 26, married Martha Dandridge Custis, a 27-year-old widow of wealthy plantation owner Daniel Parke Custis. George and Martha had no children of their own, but they raised Martha’s four grandchildren at their Mount Vernon estate where Washington cultivated tobacco and wheat.

 

Martha Washington

 

The first U.S. president to wet a line was George Washington. He liked to fish for sport…but he loved to fish for cash.

 

The waters of the Potomac River flowed right past his Mount Vernon estate in Virginia, below Washington, D.C., and they were “teeming with the likes of shad, herring and bass,” said Capt. Sean Williams of Key West, Fla., a charter boat captain and regular contributor to FishingBooker.com.

Washington’s estate occupied in excess of 8,000 acres and contained 10 miles of river shoreline. During the 1750s and ‘60s, George Washington began to realize the “economic potential” of his Potomac fisheries, which contained “incredible stocks of fish and seafood,” Capt. Williams said.

 

The English colonists expressed amazement at having boats swamped by four- to six-foot sturgeon that could leap out of the water…and “fish schools so thick that they were unable to move their boats through them.”

The massive spring spawning runs yielded herring in such numbers that they were “like a large ball of fish.” Writings from this period referenced “the surface of the water sparkling like silver as thousands of fish moved upriver.”

Fishermen used small-inch mesh nets, so that the herring would be trapped, not gillnetted. These herring were the common blueback… about 15 to 18 inches in length.

 

The fish were cleaned and gutted, rinsed in a brine solution and then packed in barrels, about 800 to a barrel with alternating layers of fish and salt. This method of preservation allowed the fish to remain edible a year or longer.

 

Visitors to Mount Vernon are invited to examine the salt building at the manor house.

Washington knew a thing or two about salt. He demanded the highest grade, which came from the region around Lisbon, Portugal. However, because of English law, Virginia and the other southern colonies were unable to import Lisbon salt directly.

If a Virginia ship took a cargo to Lisbon, traded and bought salt, the ship had to sail to England, clear customs and pay duty prior to shipment to Virginia. This added to the time for delivery and substantially increased the cost.

The alternative – salt produced at Liverpool, England – was inferior for preserving the herring and was of little value.

Capt. Williams said: “The entire ordeal would greatly influence Washington’s pre-revolutionary sentiments towards the Crown.”

George Washington was selected by the Second Continental Congress to become the commander of the Continental Army on June 14, 1775, so the responsibility for day-to-day operations at Mount Vernon fell to Lund Washington, a distant and younger cousin.

In April 1775, the British government had severed all trade with the newly forming American government. One of the greatest concerns, was the availability of any kind of salt, a vital commodity throughout the colonies.

Mary V. Thompson of the Journal of the American Revolution said Lund Washington was under “considerable worry about whether there would be enough salt to preserve fish for the support of Mount Vernon…much less to sell.” He was required to “improvise.”

In 1776, Lund reported having a limited quantity of salt “of which we must make the most. I mean to make a brine,” and after dipping (the herring) in the brine for a short time, hanging them up and curing them by smoke, or drying them in the sun.”

Shad…bones and all…is ‘America’s fish’

One of President George Washington’s favorite foods was a delicious heaping of American shad, the largest of the fishes from the herring family. He harvested shad in the Potomac River off shore from his Mount Vernon, Va., estate.

An expert on the shad species is Jim Cummins, who retired in 2016 after a career with the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin. Once the shad left their ocean habitat, he said they would enter the Potomac to spawn.

Cummins said shad is “tasty and sweet, but full of bones” – 769 in all, most of which are small “Y” shaped bones and found in shad where most fish fillets would be bone-free.

No doubt, George Washington knew the technique of “boning – the removal of the tiny ‘Y’ bones. It’s a skill, if not art, and often a family guarded secret,” Cummins said.

In the language of the Native American Algonquin people, the word for shad was “tatamaho,” according to Cummins. The legend tells us “an unhappy porcupine once asked the Great Spirit to change it into another form.”

The Great Spirit obliged, turning the porcupine “inside out” to emerge as a fish (the shad); its prickly quills on the exterior were transformed into fish bones on the interior.

 

Author Timothy Ballard commented in 2016 that “miracles involving fish didn’t just happen in Biblical times; one occurred during the Revolutionary War as well.”

He credits the shad with saving Gen. George Washington’s army at Valley Forge, Pa., in the winter of 1778.

 

Ballard offered: “Washington feared that if food did not arrive soon, his army faced three choices: ‘starve…dissolve…or disperse.’”

 

“Suddenly, in the midst of the winter famine, there was an unexpected warming of the weather, too early to truly be springtime.” Yet, the waters warmed, “tricking the shad into beginning their run up the Delaware River early,” Ballard wrote.

Thousands of shad, described as “prodigious in number” and in “Biblical proportions,” swam up the Delaware River and into its tributaries.

 

One important tributary was the Schuylkill River; its mouth is just below Philadelphia, Pa.

Fortunately, the shad made a left turn and found their way up the Schuylkill, traveling about 18 miles toward Washington’s Valley Forge encampment and congregating there, where the river is only about knee-deep. Soldiers became fishermen.

In 1938, historian Harry Emerson Wildes wrote about the occurrence, saying: “Countless numbers of fat shad, swimming up the Schuylkill, filled the river. Soldiers thronged the riverbank. The cavalry was ordered into the riverbed. The horsemen rode upstream, noisily shouting and beating the water, driving the shad before them into nets spread across the Schuylkill.”

 

“So thick were the shad that when the fish were cornered in the nets, a pole could not be thrust into the water without striking fish,” Wildes wrote. “The netting was continued day after day until the army was thoroughly stuffed with fish. In addition, hundreds of barrels of shad were salted down for future use.”

Wildes added: “Even today, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service gives credence to the claim that shad were responsible for ‘saving George Washington’s troops from starvation as they camped along the Schuylkill River at Valley Forge.’”

This, then, may very well have been one of the most pivotal moments in the American Revolution, fueling Gen. Washington’s troops to fight on.

The surrender of British Gen. Lord Charles Cornwallis to Gen. Washington at the Battle of Yorktown (Va.) on Oct. 19, 1781, marked the end of the war, effectively achieving America’s independence.