You Never Forget Your First

by Alexis Coe

  He spent the 1760s and early 1770s attempting to break the cycle, which was only possible because his marriage to Martha had brought with it hundreds of enslaved people. Washington purchased additional slaves and indentured servants, and leased others from nearby plantations. While they worked, the man they called “Master” holed up in the mansion house, inhaling books and pamphlets on agriculture and manufacturing. He hoped to diversify his crops and maybe produce some artisanal goods.

  Mount Vernon’s large enslaved community, of whom more than half originally belonged to the Custis estate, labored from sunup to sundown, six days a week, under the careful watch of overseers. Although estates like Mount Vernon are called “plantations,” it’s a word inflected with genteel romanticism. If we look at what actually occurred there, we see them for what they were: forced-labor camps.9

  “Keep everyone in their places, and to their duty,” Washington instructed an overseer in 1789. To do so, these white men (and, on occasion, enslaved black men) carried whips, and when they deemed it necessary, used them. “I am determined to lower [Charlotte’s] Spirit or skin her Back,” Anthony Whitting wrote in 1793 to Washington, who found the farm manager’s use of a hickory stick “very proper.”10

  Washington did not just give others permission to physically abuse people he held in bondage; he sometimes assaulted them himself. Decades after his death, his nephew Lawrence Lewis recounted a story that had been told to him by an enslaved carpenter named Isaac. Washington had ordered Isaac to roll over a large log in order to cut it; he was strong, but not strong enough to lift it himself, so the cut was imperfect. When Washington saw, he “gave me such a slap on the side of my head that I Whirled round like a top & before I knew where I was Master was gone.” It was not an isolated incident.11

  Washington urged his overseers to use physical punishment sparingly—not for the enslaved person’s well-being, but because an injured slave was less productive. He expected a lot from people who were motivated by nothing but the will to survive. They planted fields of barley, corn, and wheat; they pruned the orchards and vineyards; they bred horses; they operated a textile factory, a cider press, a flour mill, a sawmill, and a distillery. To supplement their lean diets, they were allowed to fish from the Potomac on Sundays, their only day off. When Washington learned of their impressive yield, he added that commodity to Mount Vernon’s portfolio, too. He shipped goods to England, the West Indies, and Portugal, though whenever possible he attempted to sell and trade within the colonies.12

  But the British Parliament was constantly frustrating Washington. A month after he joined the Mississippi Land Company, hoping to expand the colonies west from Ohio to Tennessee, the crown banned colonists from the area, citing the importance of fur trading with the Indians. In 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, which placed a tax on paper and printed material; practically everything Washington touched, from newspapers to playing cards, had a brand-new premium.

  SLAVE QUARTERS

  By Washington’s death in 1799, there were 317 slaves and about 25 hired or indentured white servants living at Mount Vernon. They were housed in “small villages,” as his presidential home calls them today, across Washington’s five farms. In 1797, a visitor “entered one of the huts of the Blacks” and described what he saw: “the husband and wife sleep on a mean pallet, the children on the ground; a very bad fireplace, some utensils for cooking, but in the middle of this poverty some cups and a teapot.”8

  LOCATION

  SIZE (ACRES)

  ESTIMATED POPULATION

  HOUSING TYPE

  Mansion House Farm

  500

  90

  The slave quarters closest to Washington’s mansion were reserved for house servants and skilled workers. The two-story building had a chimney on each end and glazed windows. It was torn down in the 1790s, and most of the slaves were relocated into four 600-square-foot rooms in the Greenhouse’s brick wings. The housing was better here than on the outlying farms, but the privacy was far worse; slaves lived alongside many other families, whereas in the farther-flung cabins no more than two shared a dwelling.

  Dogue Run Farm

  650

  45

  The standard slave cabins, on this farm and the four below, were made of wood daubed with mud. Each had a chimney, and consisted of one room or two. They were leaky and poorly constructed.

  Muddy Hole Farm

  476

  41

  Same as above.

  River Farm

  1,207

  57

  Same as above.

  Union Farm

  928

  76

  Same as above.

  The colonists were livid. They complained to the royal governor and sent letters to Parliament; on the ground, the situation turned violent. In Williamsburg, the townspeople burned their tax collector in effigy. Washington would never act out in such a manner, but he began to rebel in his own ways. He became convinced that a meaningful effort to curtail the colonists’ addiction to European luxury goods would stimulate local industry—including, conveniently, Mount Vernon. But before he could realize any meaningful profit, Parliament abandoned the wildly unpopular Stamp Act.

  The colonists, an ocean away from the seat of power, blamed greedy nobles and lords in Parliament and thanked good and fair King George III for intervening. It would take years for them to realize their mistake.

  * * *

  The Virginia elite returned to their old spendthrift ways, amassing even more debt and crippling interest. Advertisements for insolvent estates in the New World filled the gazettes. Then, just two years later, Parliament came back for more with the Townshend Acts, which taxed not just paper but also paint, glass, and tea.

  This time, all of the Burgesses demanded a full repeal, and they weren’t alone; New Yorkers and Philadelphians were just as outraged. Bloodshed “should be the last resource,” Washington wrote, but if it came to that, no colonist should “hesitate a moment.”13 Thoroughly committed to the belief that King George was being misled by his advisers and Parliament, the Burgesses attempted to cut out the middlemen and wrote to him directly, “praying the royal interposition in favor of the violated rights of America.”14

  Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, was infuriated; in order to remind them of his power, he dissolved the House of Burgesses. But he couldn’t stop them from meeting elsewhere. They decamped to nearby Raleigh Tavern and agreed, with surprising enthusiasm, to boycott British goods. Although Washington wished the proposal were “ten times as strict,” he was happy they were moving forward with a punitive plan of their own.15

  The boycott didn’t last long. Even Washington had trouble curtailing his spending, or perhaps getting Martha to. But as always, when the goods they ordered arrived from England, he was disappointed, and there was nothing he could do about it. He was beginning to realize that the only way to rid himself of the rigged system was to drive it out entirely.

  Events in Boston in 1773 accelerated his thinking. Massachusetts colonists dressed as Indians boarded three ships moored in Boston Harbor and cast hundreds of crates of tea into the water. (Although the Townshend Acts had by then been repealed, a tax remained on tea.) Washington was uneasy with the Boston Tea Party’s destructive methods, but smiled on their rejection of the tea tax.

  It was Parliament’s response—the Intolerable Acts (also known as the Coercive Acts)—to the protests that he found unforgivable. They
shut down the port of Boston, followed by the democratic town meetings, where desperate colonists gathered to address the onslaught of starvation. British officials were exempted from criminal prosecution. Colonists were told they must house troops in their homes. London policymakers expected them to shrink back in terror, but the blatant misrule had the opposite effect. It mobilized them, and it radicalized Washington.

  “I think the Parliament of Great Britain hath no more Right to put their hands into my Pocket, without my consent, than I have to put my hands into your’s, for money,” he lectured a friend. “And this being already urged to them in a firm, but decent manner by all the Colonies, what reason is there to expect any thing from their justice?”16

  CHAPTER 8

  “The Shackles of Slavery”

  In September 1775, Washington once again put on his old military uniform. He was done posing. He was done writing “humble and dutiful” letters to London, as he had done for years in the House of Burgesses; it hadn’t made a difference then, and it made no difference in 1774, after the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia.1 He was done watching and waiting. It was time to make a move.

  Washington rode to Philadelphia, along with Peyton Randolph and Patrick Henry, to represent Virginia at the Second Continental Congress. When he arrived, after four days of travel, he seemed to be everywhere. He visited with like-minded colonists in their regal homes—thirty-one regal homes, to be exact. He made an appearance in nearly every church, from Anglican to Quaker. He drank in the local taverns. Wherever he went, people took notice of his “soldier like air and gesture.”2 It was hard to miss, in that uniform, but Dr. Benjamin Rush, who would later sign the Declaration of Independence, wrote, “He has so much martial dignity in his deportment that you would distinguish him to be a general and a soldier from among ten thousand people.”

  Washington was quietly campaigning before there was anything to officially campaign for, and it worked. His charisma—that rarest of gifts—charmed and fascinated everyone around him. Delegates found him to be “discreet and virtuous,” and when he spoke they listened.

  Parliament was using “despotism to fix the Shackles of Slavery upon us,” Washington said. It was the American colonists’ duty to resist such oppression on behalf of “mankind”—a category he understood to exclude mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters, along with millions of slaves.3 It was an ironic choice of words considering Somerset v Stewart, a 1772 decision from the Court of the King’s Bench in London, which held that chattel slavery was neither supported in common law nor authorized by statute in England and Wales—a clear victory for abolitionists, which terrified Southern colonists. If slavery was outlawed in America, their profits would plummet, as would the power they derived from bondage—including the luxury of rebellion.

  In London, writer Samuel Johnson railed against the hypocrisy of “these demigods of independence” in a forty-page pamphlet asking, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”4

  * * *

  When hostilities broke out in the spring of 1775, only one side had an army—and a man to lead it. “Oh that I was a soldier!” bemoaned John Adams, a lawyer from Massachusetts, in a letter to Abigail Adams. “I will be. I am reading military books. Everyone must and will, and shall be a soldier.”5 But he wasn’t, and he wouldn’t be. Adams, like many of the intellectual and landed men who gathered in Philadelphia, had no experience in the field; the coming war would not change that.

  Washington, on the other hand, knew how the Royal Army operated. What’s more, he had never served under any other flag. The same could not be said for Charles Lee, his main competitor for commander in chief; Lee had served in the British Army during the French and Indian War and, more recently, for the Polish in the Russo-Turkish War. He returned to America in 1773—minus two fingers he lost in a duel—and promptly took himself out of the running by demanding that he be compensated, in advance, for the property the British would confiscate should the revolution fail. (Lee’s obsession with his Pomeranian, Mr. Spada, his foul language, and his sloppy presentation may not have helped matters.) Meanwhile, it was rumored, correctly, that Washington would serve without pay, as he had during the end of his service in the British military. “He is a complete gentleman,” Massachusetts delegate Thomas Cushing wrote. “He is sensible, amiable, virtuous, modest, and brave.”6

  And rich. Washington was rich enough to pay his own way, and perhaps support others, too, but devoted enough to the cause to risk it all. That was the kind of man that colonists, no matter where they were from, wanted to lead them into a seemingly unwinnable war.

  With the exception, that is, of John Hancock, a politician and mercantile heir from Boston. He thought himself so likely to be a contender for commander in chief, despite a bad case of gout and no military experience, that he sat expectantly during nominations. But the Continental Army could not be led by a New Englander; that region had already mobilized. The southerners, with their money and potential enlistments, would best respond to one of their own. Washington was a Virginian, the most famous among a long list of rising stars. (Future presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had already earned reputations as great thinkers.) Divisions between the delegates over how aggressively the colonists should move toward independence had already sprung up and created tensions among the men, but Washington, as Connecticut delegate Silas Deane wrote, “remove[d] all jealousies, and that is the main point.”7

  In the aftermath of the battles at Lexington and Concord the previous spring—during which Massachusetts militias had defeated the British—there was an urgent need to move quickly. “[T]he once happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched with Blood, or Inhabited by Slaves. Sad alternative! But can a virtuous Man hesitate in his choice?” Washington had written from Mount Vernon, and in London, the British were asking the same thing.8

  Votes were taken. In Philadelphia, miraculously, the delegates reached a unanimous decision on June 15, 1775: They would raise an army, and George Washington would lead it.

  Parliament took a vote, too, later that summer, but they were not united. Only 78 members voted for conciliation; 270 nobles and lords were eager to teach the rebellious colonists a brutal lesson.

  Washington, forty-three years old, accepted the position but spoke as if he were signing his own death warrant. Few letters between Washington and Martha (whom he apparently called “Patcy” in private) survive, but one of the most dramatic speaks to his state of mind on June 18, 1775.

  My Dearest,

  I am now set down to write to you on a subject which fills me with inexpressable concern—and this concern is greatly aggravated and Increased when I reflect on the uneasiness I know it will give you—It has been determined in Congress, that the whole Army raised for the defence of the American Cause shall be put under my care, and that it is necessary for me to proceed immediately to Boston to take upon me the Command of it. You may beleive me my dear Patcy, when I assure you, in the most solemn manner, that, so far from seeking this appointment I have used every endeavour in my power to avoid it, not only from my unwillingness to part with you and the Family, but from a consciousness of its being a trust too great for my Capacity. . . . it was utterly out of my power to refuse this appointment without exposing my Character to such censures as would have reflected dishonour upon myself, and given pain to my friends—this I am sure could not, and ought not to be pleasing to you, & must have lessend me considerably in my own esteem. I shall rely therefore, confidently, on that Providence which has heretofore preservd, & been bountiful to me, not doubting but that I shall return safe to you in the fall.9

  It would be, in reality, more than seven years before Washington would “return safe.” And though he would repeat these humble sentiments for the rest of his life, the uniform he had at the ready for Philadelphia—and the busts of Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and other military heroes he ha
d ordered after he retired over a decade earlier—suggested that he yearned for a military triumph. This time, there would be no Englishman above him.

  For all Washington’s talk of the “American Union and Patriotism,” his arsenal of personal grievances cannot be underestimated. He had grown and changed over the previous sixteen years, but at his core, he was still a man eager to be recognized. As commander in chief of the Continental Army, he would be at the center of his country’s story. It was the ultimate way to right past wrongs, to distinguish himself not by where he came from or whom he married but by what he had achieved. And there could not be a more auspicious start than a unanimous election.

  Only Washington could deny himself the opportunity to drive the British out. Only the British could deny him victory. These were the odds he had always wanted, and he wasn’t about to sit this one out.

  PART II

  General George Washington’s American Revolution—Off the Battlefield

  GENERALS of the AMERICAN REVOLUTION

  “An American planter was chosen by us to Command our Troops and continued during the whole War,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, taunting an English friend. “This Man sent home to you, one after another, five of your best Generals, baffled, their heads bare of Laurels, disgraced even in the opinion of their employers.”1

  YEAR

  AMERICAN GENERAL

  BRITISH GENERAL