His Excellency_George Washington

by Joseph J. Ellis

  His avaricious attitude toward land was put on dramatic display in September 1784, when he decided to tour his western holdings and came upon several families who had settled on plots he owned in western Pennsylvania. One can only imagine the disappointment the settlers felt in learning that the land they had been cultivating as their own for many years actually belonged to an absentee owner, and that the owner was none other than George Washington. When they questioned the legality of his title, Washington hired a lawyer to have them evicted if they refused to leave or pay him rent as tenants. “I viewed the defendants as willful and obstinate Sinners,” he explained, “persevering after timely & repeated admonition, in a design to injure me.” He seemed to regard his land as an extension of himself, and therefore its occupation as a personal violation. The court case dragged on for two years, pitting the most powerful figure in the nation against a feisty delegation of impoverished farmers. Though he won the case, his victory did nothing to embellish his reputation for soaring majestically above his own private interests. The episode also exposed another anomaly produced by his insatiable hunger for land. Instead of the Jeffersonian model of independent yeoman farmers, Washington had opted for the Fairfax model of tenants and proprietary control, a choice almost calculated to slow westward migration, since no settler in his right mind would willingly opt to rent rather than own. If part of Washington’s mind was haunted by memories of his landless Virginia youth, it was also stuck in the hierarchical presumptions of that same earlier era.22

  Both his memories and presumptions were called into question in the early months of his retirement, when a political firestorm broke out over his membership in the Society of the Cincinnati. Prior to their disbandment, the officers of the Continental army had formed a fraternal order of that name and quite naturally selected Washington as the first president. While its name announced the intention to avoid meddling in politics, and its constitution emphasized fraternal and philanthropic goals, the Society of the Cincinnati was an avowedly elitist enterprise designed to sustain the aristocratic ethos of superior virtue that officers in the Continental army had been harboring since Valley Forge. Most ominously, membership was defined in hereditary terms, passing exclusively to the eldest male descendant in the next generation. (Ironically, this provision meant that Washington’s line would die with him, since he had no direct heirs, male or female.) The society immediately became the focus of public ridicule, especially in New England, where the Massachusetts legislature condemned it as a vestige of European aristocratic decadence and a conspicuous threat to the republican values the American Revolution had supposedly established forever. Over in Paris, Franklin lampooned the hereditary requirement by calculating that the amount of patriotic blood passed on would be infinitesimally small after two centuries of primogeniture, so why not reverse the hereditary principle by designating ancestors rather than descendants, preferably mothers rather than fathers, who probably were more responsible for instilling patriotism in their sons than anyone else?23

  Washington was initially tone-deaf to these criticisms, in part because he shared the fraternal ethos of its members, whom he believed to be the virtuous few who, more than anyone else, had won American independence, in part because his own version of independence also retained an elitist edge of its own. Which is to say that he believed the American Revolution had destroyed monarchy and British imperial rule, and in that sense was a significant political revolution, but he did not believe that it was also a social revolution that destroyed the world of privilege, rank, and deference in which he had risen to prominence before the war. For him, the Society of the Cincinnati did not defy the best ideals of the American Revolution; it embodied them.

  Washington never changed his thinking about the society, which he described as an “innocent institution” with “immaculate intentions,” but he did change his mind about lending his own prestige to its purposes. Jefferson was apparently the first confidant to warn him that members of the society were widely regarded as an aspiring American nobility, its hereditary requirement “a violation of the natural equality of man,” and that Washington’s continued association with its agenda would do serious harm to his own reputation. In March 1784, he traveled to the first national meeting of the society in Philadelphia, convinced that he needed to resign the presidency, eliminate the hereditary principle, and, if Jefferson’s recollection of a conversation in Annapolis can be believed, call for the abolition of the entire enterprise if halfway measures proved inadequate. “If we cannot convince the people that their fears are ill-founded,” he explained, “we should . . . yield to them and not suffer that which was intended for the best of purposes to produce a bad one.”24

  Accustomed to getting his way, Washington presumed that his warnings would be heeded and the society would die a speedy death. But the younger members, plus a delegation of French applicants, forced another meeting in May in which a few minor modifications of the bylaws, which did not include eliminating the hereditary principle, were approved as sufficient to answer the public criticism. Washington attended the May meeting and released a statement designed to put the best face on the proceedings, though in private he confessed that “we have been most amazingly embarrassed in the business that brought us here.” The Society of the Cincinnati not only remained alive, the members also continued to elect Washington as president, despite his best efforts to maintain a discreet distance from their meetings. Writing from France in 1786, Jefferson reported that the society posed even greater dangers than he had previously recognized, that it was like a cancer growing in the heart of the American republic, and that “a single fibre left of this institution will provide an hereditary aristocracy which will change the form of our governments from the best to the worst in the world.”25

  The Society of the Cincinnati thus became a kind of lovable albatross tied permanently around Washington’s neck. It was lovable because he felt deep emotional attachments to most of the society’s prominent members, who were the “band of brothers” with whom he had shared the most intense experience of his life, and theirs. It was an albatross because the society became a convenient symbol of aristocratic attitudes and values, and therefore a lightning rod for the kind of conspiratorial fears that Jefferson, among others, harbored toward any institutionalized expression of social inequality. As his new aide, David Humphreys, put it in 1786: “I am sensible the subject is a very delicate one, that it will be discussed by posterity as well as by the present age, and that you have much to lose and nothing to gain by it.”26

  Looking ahead, the accusations leveled at the society provided a preview of the ideological battles destined to engulf Washington during his second term as president. Looking backward, the charges echoed the arguments directed at the Continental army as a menacing threat to the very values the American Revolution claimed to stand for. Washington was on record as believing the latter charges were at best naive and at worst traitorous. And he confided to friends that he found the accusations against the society to be hyperbolic prejudices, “conjured up by designing men, to work their own purposes upon terrified imaginations.” That said, his association with the Society of the Cincinnati clashed with his chief preoccupation, which was the courting of posterity’s judgment, so throughout the 1780s he chose to keep his criticism of its enemies private and his connections with its public functions limited. Most tellingly, the outcry over the society forced him to realize, probably for the first time, that the American Revolution had released egalitarian ideas that he was at pains to understand, much less find compatible with his own version of an American republic, which was elitist, deferential, virtuous, and honorable—in short, pretty much like him.27

  THIS SPECIES OF PROPERTY

  IN DECEMBER 1785, Washington received a letter calculated to focus his mind on another worrisome association even more damaging to his abiding public image than the Society of the Cincinnati. It came from Robert Pleasants, a Virginia Quaker who had recently emancipated all eigh
ty of his own slaves and minced no words in instructing Washington to do the same: “How strange then it must appear to impartial thinking men, to be informed, that many who were warm advocates for that noble cause during the War, are now sitting down in a state of ease, dissipation and extravigence on the labour of slaves? And most especially that thou . . . should now withold that inestimable blessing from any who are absolutely in thy power, & after the Right of freedom, is acknowledged to be the natural & unalienable Right of all mankind.” Pleasants somewhat gratuitously suggested that Washington had probably been too preoccupied with the inevitable details of his retirement routine to think about “a subject so Noble and interesting,” because once he did think about it, his response must be as self-evident as those truths that Jefferson had enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

  Pleasants did not stop there. He concluded with a little lecture designed to strike Washington, otherwise invulnerable, in his most vulnerable spot. If he acted decisively at this propitious moment by freeing his slaves, it would crown his career and assure his place in the history books. But if he faltered and lost this opportunity, the failure would haunt his reputation forever: “For not withstanding thou art now receiving the tribute of praise from a grateful people, the time is coming when all actions shall be weighed in an equal balance, and undergo an impartial explanation.” How sad it would then be to read that the great hero of American independence, “the destroyer of tyranny and oppression,” had failed the final test by holding “a number of People in absolute slavery, who were by nature equally entitled to freedom as himself.”28

  Washington did not answer Pleasants’s letter. He was not accustomed to being the butt of lectures, especially from strangers dripping with moral superiority, and most especially from Quakers, whose pristine consciences had obliged them to sit out the war as spectators. Nevertheless, the letter could not be summarily dismissed as a mere irritation. It linked the subject Washington cared about most, posterity’s judgment, with the subject he had come to recognize as the central contradiction of the revolutionary era. Which is to say that Pleasants was incorrect in assuming that Washington had given little thought to the question of slavery. To be sure, the subject remained the proverbial ghost at the banquet, so obviously and ominously a violation of all the Revolution stood for that no one felt free to talk about it openly, lest the guests at the table transform the polite conversation into a shouting match. Despite the code of silence and circumspection, there is considerable evidence that slavery was very much on Washington’s mind during his retirement. And the ideas swirling through his head, to the extent that we can draw them out into the open for scrutiny, followed two separate lines of thought.29

  One line of thought was initially prompted by the exigencies of war. Washington had grudgingly accepted free blacks into the Continental army in 1775, then had commanded a racially integrated force for nearly eight years. Characteristically, he made no comment on this development, though it exposed him to a range of racial relationships that he had never encountered as the master of Mount Vernon. The first indication that Washington recognized the disjunction between the purported goals of the War of Independence and the continuation of slavery occurred in 1779, when John Laurens proposed arming three thousand slaves in South Carolina and offering emancipation in return for service to the end of the war. Though clearly a wartime scheme driven by manpower needs, the Laurens proposal broached the possibility of making military service the opening wedge for a more general, if gradual, emancipation. Perhaps Washington was only humoring Laurens, telling a bright young favorite what he wanted to hear, but he endorsed the idea, adding the cautionary note that a partial emancipation could backfire by “rendering Slavery more irksome to those who remain in it” and acknowledging that “this is a subject that has never before employed much of my thoughts.” When the South Carolina legislature rejected the Laurens proposal, as Washington had predicted it would, he described the rejection as a sign that the revolutionary fires, which had burned so brightly early in the conflict, had now subsided, “and every selfish Passion has taken its place.”30

  Lafayette, even more than Laurens, also prompted Washington to acknowledge that ending slavery was a logical outcome of the American Revolution. Just before the end of the war, in 1783, Lafayette urged an experiment in emancipation whereby a group of Virginia slaves would be freed and resettled as tenant farmers in some unspecified western region of the state. Washington embraced the plan without reservation: “The scheme, my dear Marquis, which you propose as a precedent to encourage the emancipation of the black people of this Country from that state of Bondage in which they are held, is a striking evidence of the benevolence of your Heart. I shall be happy to join you in so laudable a work.”31

  Nothing came of Lafayette’s proposal. And perhaps, as with Laurens, Washington was indulging a dear friend whose visionary scheme, so symptomatic of Lafayette’s romantic temperament, could be safely endorsed precisely because Washington knew that it would never happen. At any rate, Washington’s public behavior at the end of the war cut in the opposite direction. In the aftermath of Yorktown, then again during the British evacuation of New York, he insisted on the return of all escaped slaves in British custody to their respective owners. (Four of his own slaves were included in the contingent of about three thousand carried from New York to freedom by the British navy.) By the start of his retirement, then, any picture of Washington’s mind on the slavery question would be blurry; but there would be a picture, because he now recognized that slavery was a massive American anomaly. Before the war the picture would have been completely blank.32

  The picture became more focused three years into his retirement. Lafayette made two extended visits to Mount Vernon in 1784–85, and subsequent correspondence between them as well as the commentary of other visitors confirm that Lafayette prodded Washington to take a more outspoken position on slavery. The Virginia legislature was then debating the right of freed slaves to remain in the state, so the question of emancipation was in the political air. In April 1786, Washington wrote Robert Morris: “I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it [slavery]—but there is only one proper and effectual mode by which it can be accomplished, & that is by Legislative authority: and this, as far as my suffrage will go, shall never be wanting.” He wrote a similar letter to Lafayette the following month, also endorsing gradual emancipation. Then in September he wrote John Francis Mercer, who owed him money, saying that he could not accept slaves as payment: “I never mean (unless some particular circumstances should compel me to it) to possess another slave by purchase; it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted, by the legislature by which slavery in this Country may be abolished by slow, sure, & imperceptible degrees.” Whether Lafayette’s affectionate prodding, Pleasants’s lecturish warning, or the natural drift of his own thinking was most influential cannot be known. Whether his motives were purely moral, or mainly a fixation on his future reputation, or some seamless mixture of the two, is equally unknowable. But he was now on record, at least in private, endorsing slavery’s eventual end.33

  A second line of thought focused, not on slavery as a national institution, but on slavery at Mount Vernon. During the early months of the war Washington had presumed that his estate would become a target of British or Loyalist recriminations. By 1779, when Mount Vernon still remained miraculously intact, he began to think anew about his labor force. He told his manager, Lund Washington, that he had decided to abandon slave labor if and when the war ended favorably. (If the war ended badly, all plans were meaningless.) The question was not whether he should sell his slaves, he told Lund, but “where, and in what manner it will be best to sell.” The currency inflation mitigated against an immediate sale, and his own convictions precluded any sale that split up families. But he had decided to replace slaves at Mount Vernon with hired workers.34

  The correspondence about slav
ery at Mount Vernon and that with Laurens about emancipating South Carolina slaves in return for service occurred at the same time, the winter of 1779, so it is possible that the two lines of thought crossed. But the language Washington used about slavery at Mount Vernon made no mention of moral or ideological motives. It was a hardheaded business decision rooted in his conviction that slave labor was more inefficient and costly than free labor. And he was thinking about selling his slaves into bondage to others, not freeing them. His train of thought about slavery at Mount Vernon was apparently not driven by idealistic considerations but by realistic calculations about profit and loss.

  His voluminous correspondence about the management of Mount Vernon during his wartime absence is filled with detailed instructions about which hogs to slaughter, which fields to manure and cultivate with specific kinds of wheat, where to dig irrigation ditches and plant locust trees, but says precious little about the larger contours of his thinking about the operation as a whole. In the absence of conclusive evidence, the most plausible speculation is that the decision to abandon slaves as a labor force followed logically from his earlier decision to abandon tobacco as a cash crop in favor of wheat. Once he made that decision, his Mount Vernon farms resembled the diversified farms of Pennsylvania more than the plantations of the Tidewater or Carolinas. In that altered agrarian scheme, he gradually concluded that the cost of maintaining a slave labor force became prohibitively expensive. In fact, he owned more slaves than he could productively employ. And the surplus was costing him dearly.