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securing the bottle for a cool $100,000. It was by far the highest price anyone had ever paid for an American whiskey.
    At the time of Shanken’s winning bid, most Americans were blithely unaware that the first president had been involved in the whiskey industry at all, let alone that he was the nation’s biggest distiller. Washington’s distillery burned down a decade after his death in 1799, and a blanket of weeds soon covered the rubble. After that, it was effectively wiped from the nation’s collective memory. A few anti-Prohibition advocates tried to resurrect the memory of Washington’s distillery a century later, but were shouted down by a powerful temperance movement claiming the first president’s ties to whiskey would tarnish his reputation, although it was probably more worried that the connection would undermine its own cause.
    Thus the distillery sat dormant until archaeologists stumbled upon the old site in 1995. By then, Prohibition was a faded memory and whiskey was starting to enjoy renewed popularity. Its cultural cachet restored, Americans no longer had qualms about linking whiskey to the most famous founding father, who personally helped engineer the nation’s transformation from a country of rum drinkers into whiskey drinkers. The whiskey industry’s chief lobbying group, no doubt sensing the powerful appeal of reestablishing a deep connection to George Washington, quickly made plans to rebuild the distillery as a working museum and tourist attraction.
    The rebuilt distillery at Mount Vernon sits a couple of miles away from Washington’s main home so its gristmill can utilize the passing currents of a nearby stream. The entire operation was originally part of an eight-thousand-acre working plantation that made the first president one of the wealthiest men in Virginia. Construction of the mainhouse began in 1757, shortly after Washington suffered his second major defeat for election to the Virginia House of Burgesses. Sizing up his losses and pondering his next steps, he blamed the defeat on his failure to effectively accomplish what many called “swilling the planters with bumbo.”
    What this meant was that he had failed to ply voters with alcohol, a common if illegal practice that politicians from the era referred to as “treating.” The colonies inherited the habit from England, and it became an essential part of the American political process well into the nineteenth century. James Madison, who lost an election in 1777 to a candidate who gave out more free alcohol to voters, would later write that voters traveling long distances to polling stations expected their trips to be rewarded with more than just democracy. Washington was savvier when he ran again in 1758. He swilled the planters with enough booze to win Frederick County with 310 votes to his opponent’s 45.
    “Bumbo” wasn’t a nickname for whiskey or even a generalized term for alcohol. It was a rum-based drink made with sugar and spices such as nutmeg or cinnamon. Rum dominated the colonial drinkscape before it was usurped by whiskey following the Revolution, and tavern records from the time regularly show it outselling all other drinks combined. It was both the colonists’ favorite drink and a perfect symbol of colonial economics and politics. Made from sugarcane and molasses shipped from British-controlled parts of the Caribbean to commercial distilleries popping up in rapidly industrializing parts of New England, rum provided a mechanism for the Crown to integrate its empire by pairing the distinct talents of its far-flung points—New England had the customer base and distilleries, the Caribbean had an abundance of cheap molasses. By 1763, Boston brimmed with more than thirty rum distilleries, and nearly a thousand ships each year brought the drink in and out of its harbor. Rum and molasses composed 20 percent of the city’s imports, making it the region’s leading industry.
    The brisk trade, however, was plagued by