His role as commander in chief kept Washington for most of eight years in the North, away from slavery. He was at first shocked to find free blacks in the New England army, but he was soon urging desegregation for the large number of Negroes in the Rhode Island forces. As the war proceeded, he reached the point of urging that, even in the Deep South, slaves be enlisted with the promise of freedom at the war’s end.
He came to regard his dependence at Mount Vernon on slave labor as a “misfortune.” The economic education he was forced to give himself because of the plight of the army taught him not only the importance of manufacturing and financial credit, but also that a business economy was a viable alternative to the slavery society which was the only economy he had previously known. When in Philadelphia during the winter of 1778–1779, he had seriously considered disentangling himself from what he could no longer justify, by selling his slaves and using the proceeds as investment capital. But such sales would have bothered his conscience, and he was buoyed up through his innumerable difficulties by his hope of returning to Mount Vernon. The plantation could not operate without slaves, since free farm labor was unprocurable in Virginia.
The Revolution won, Washington hoped that the American experiment would reveal to the world that kings and aristocracies were unnecessary, that populations were capable of ruling themselves. This required national unity, and no issue was more divisive than slavery. Putting first what he considered the more comprehensive battle for freedom, Washington limited himself to stating that, if an authentic movement towards emancipation could be started in Virginia (none could), he would come to its support. Had Washington been more audacious, he would undoubtedly have failed to achieve the end of slavery, and he would certainly have made impossible the role he played in the Constitutional Convention and the Presidency.
The best summary of Washington’s attitude towards slavery between the Revolution and the Presidency is found in a statement quoted by his intimate friend Humphreys: “The unfortunate condition of the persons whose labors I in part employed has been the only unavoidable subject of regret. To make the adults among them as easy and comfortable as their actual state of ignorance and improvidence would admit, and to lay a foundation to prepare the rising generation for a destiny different from that in which they were born, affords some satisfaction to my mind, and could not, I hoped, be displeasing to the justice of the creator.”
Washington remained, in fact, far from clear in his own mind concerning what he should, could, and would do concerning his slaves. On one thing he was determined: he refused to let anyone push him around. Already unsympathetic to the Quakers, whose pacifism had made him trouble during the Revolution, he was outraged by their efforts to separate Virginia slaves from their masters. Such extralegal intervention, he insisted, by “begetting discontent on one side and resentment on the other” induced “more evils than it could cure.” Although there was no glimmer that any southern state would legislate to abolish slavery, Washington felt that emancipation could come only through legislative enactment. He wished to see some plan adopted that would free the blacks “by slow, sure, and imperceptible degrees.”
During 1791, Washington spirited a group of his Negroes back to Mount Vernon from the Presidential Mansion in Philadelphia lest his possession be undermined by a law that automatically freed slaves kept in Pennsylvania for a period of time. But all the while, his mind was seething. Between September 1 and December 12, 1793, probably at Mount Vernon while the yellow fever raged in Philadelphia, he reached a revolutionary conclusion.
In a letter of December 12 to the British agricultural reformer Arthur Young, Washington stated that “the thoughts I am now about to disclose to you” were not “even in embryo” when he had written Young on September 1. He “entertained serious thoughts,” Washington explained, of renting, if he could secure as tenants expert English farmers, all the Mount Vernon plantation except the mansion house farm, which he would retain “for my own residence, occupation, and amusement in agriculture.”
Describing his intentions to his intimate Lear, Washington explained in a paragraph headed “private” that his motive, “more powerful than all the rest” was “to liberate a certain species of property which I possess very repugnantly to my feelings, but which imperious necessity compels, and until I can substitute some other expedient by which expenses not in my power to avoid (however well disposed I may be to do it) can be defrayed.” Washington omitted from the copy of this letter he kept in his files the sentences which revealed his wish to free his slaves.
His intention, as he later revealed, was to have the renters of his farms hire, “as they would do any other laborers,” the blacks who had previously worked on the same farms as slaves.
Although he could look forward to collecting rent, Washington was preparing to accept a tremendous financial sacrifice. One good field hand was worth as much as a small city lot, three thousand pounds of beef, or three hundred gallons of whiskey. The many more than a hundred slaves Washington hoped to free constituted what was probably his largest financial asset and certainly (since slaves sold much more easily than land) his most negotiable. In addition, he would incur extra financial obligations. He would have to support the freed children until they were old enough to support themselves, and pension for life those too old or infirm to work. These two groups constituted almost half of the slaves he would liberate.
To the black workers, Washington’s plan offered a great advantage. They would not be “set adrift.” The only dictated change in their situation would be their freedom. Now paid for their hire, those who wished could continue to pursue familiar tasks with their relations and old friends in familiar surroundings. This would help bridge what was perhaps the greatest transition a human being could experience.
The leap from slavery to freedom was so basic that (particularly in the case of the most numerous slaves, the field hands) there seemed no way to prepare people in the earlier condition for success (or even survival) in the later. A slave did not have any incentive to learn skills, become self-reliant, or in any way try to better himself. And without stirring up chaos or even insurrections, a slave could not, Washington believed, be encouraged to have the psychology of a free man until he was actually freed. On one recorded occasion, Washington asked despairingly how “the mind of a slave [could] be educated to perceive what are the obligations of a state of freedom?” As he had told Humphreys, he did not hope actually to prepare slaves for freedom but only to lay a foundation on which they could be prepared. According to Washington’s plan, the crucial reeducation could take place after freedom but before the freed individual had to fly on his own wings.
Washington did not dare let move across his fields even the slightest hint of what he was trying to achieve lest his slave quarters be completely disrupted. Secrecy was also essential in the white United States for reasons which Washington described as “of a political and indeed imperious nature.”
He was already in enough trouble with the southern Republicans without word leaking out that he hoped to set an example towards undermining the institution of slavery. It was not only because he considered English farmers more skillful that he was seeking to bring in renters from abroad. They would have no predilection for slavery. And, ocean crossings being what they then were, offers could hardly reach Washington before he was safely out of the Presidency. The storm would then only strike at him personally, not at the federal government.
When Washington left the Presidency, he made use of the Pennsylvania law which he had previously taken care to evade. He slipped into freedom several of his house slaves so quietly, by simply leaving them behind, that no member of the southern opposition even guessed. Indeed, the secret remained undiscovered until this writer happened on a clue when examining a seemingly trivial letter to Washington’s tailor.
Resident again at Mount Vernon, Washington found that what efforts he had made to improve the lot of his slaves had, like everything else on the plantation, gone
backwards during his absence. In 1788, all five of his overseers had been blacks, and now none were. His efforts to train the unmotivated slaves to trades—gardening, shoemaking, spinning, milling—had, it is true, never been particularly successful, but he was not happy to see that whites had slipped into many of the jobs. Since he was no longer familiar enough with the black families to know where to look for promising youngsters, he could not mitigate the situation.
The frustration of slavery was all round him. Those blacks for whom the Washingtons had personal affection, the house slaves, lacerated their proprietors’ emotions by applying the sophistication and skills they had acquired in the family circle to running away. The only major effort Washington made—it proved vain—to recover an absconded slave was due to Martha’s hurt feelings at being deserted by a black girl, Oney Judge, whom she had brought up almost as her own child, but who had learned at her knee not only to be a fine seamstress but also to value freedom.
The field hands were a perpetual problem. Washington controlled, spread out over the five farms, the population of a large village: in 1799, more than three hundred. They were supposed to be under the management of the overseers, but the overseers were inefficient, stupid, and often drunken. Furthermore, there was on the plantation of a humane proprietor no effective way to punish a recalcitrant slave. Blacks could not be imprisoned without giving them vacations; they had no property with which to pay fines; they had been allowed no pride that would make them unhappy when upbraided. To use as a penalty sale to an unhappy environment was past Washington’s sensibilities. The only visible punishment was whipping, and this Washington hated to authorize on practical as well as moral grounds: the overseers who administered the punishment were further brutalized, and the slaves made the more resentful.
There may have been Virginia estates on which slaves moved in lock-step to bellowed commands, but Mount Vernon was not one of them. Mount Vernon was a whirlpool of anarchy where all managerial efforts hardly sufficed to keep the confusion from overflowing the banks.
In their labors, the slaves, having nothing to gain, made an art of malingering and inefficiency. They demonstrated genius in breaking any machine that could be made useless by human hands. And when they temporarily slipped the moorings that were supposed to keep them on their farms, they found innumerable ways to harass their master to their own amusement and profit. If the doors were not sternly watched, the Mansion House would be awash with black children smashing things. The flowers in the gardens were picked and trampled; vegetables and fruit disappeared, as did any portable object that was not nailed down or kept under strict surveillance. There were nearby stores and tippling houses where neither slaves nor overseers were ever asked where they had procured the goods they bartered.
Washington estimated that the services of a white farm hand (if one could be procured despite the lure of westward settlement) cost ten to fifteen pounds sterling a year. A slave cost only eight to twelve. Yet, because of their inefficiency and the superfluity he had to support, Washington believed that his slaves did not actually earn their keep. That their way of life, if anything but luxurious, was healthy is demonstrated by the high percentage of those too young or old to work. The profit of Virginia slaveholders came primarily from breeding blacks for sale. This Jefferson did, but Washington’s conscience forbade it.
Slavery was for him uneconomic, and all the dark pleasures offered by slaveholding had for him no charms. Neither lust (despite legends to the contrary) nor sadism beckoned him on to his slave quarters. No otherwise unsatisfied yearning for power urged him to tyrannize over the helpless. He was temperamentally incapable of being indolent while others worked for him. Towards the mass of his black possessions who had not individually caught his interest or affection, his emotions were unhappy: frustration, pity, anxiety concerning the possibility of a slave revolt,* and a deep personal sense of guilt.
Commonly slave holders opposed permanent marriage among blacks as an impediment to the mobility of individual slaves. Ownership of children being determined by the ownership of the mother, a family was defined as a woman and her offspring. At first, Washington accepted this conception with the other conventions of slavery. But he came to encourage slave marriages. When he listed his slaves in 1799, almost all were marked down as married to specific partners.
This support of his family life created, as Washington looked forward to freeing his blacks, severe problems. He could free only about one half the slaves in his cabins; the other half, which had come with his marriage to Martha, were entailed to the Custis estate and would on Martha’s death become the property of her grandchildren. Since the two groups had intermarried, his freeing of those he controlled would divide many families. “To part, will be affecting and trying events,” he mourned, “happen when it will.” But he could see no way out.
Washington continued, whenever he had the opportunity, to offer his farms for rent on terms that did not include the slaves. However, as his declining years passed by, the end remained unachieved. When he drew up his will in July, 1799, a final decision could no longer be postponed. The provisions he worked out reveal that the old man was unable to visualize any practical solutions to the dilemmas involved in bringing freedom to black Mount Vernon.
Having failed to establish a way to assure the adult slaves some employment congenial to their situation and experience, he saw no choice but to free them out of hand. He did require his heirs to make sure that all who were old or infirm would be “comfortably clothed and fed while they live.” And he did his best to protect his former slaves from the harpies who kidnapped free blacks for sale further south or in the Indies. He specified that none be “under any pretext whatsoever” transported out of Virginia. But all this failed to ensure that the black workers, thrown unprepared into freedom, would not be worse off than before.
Children whose parents could not or would not take care of them were to be supported until they were old enough to be legally bound as if they were white apprentices. They were to serve until the age of twenty-five, “be taught to read and write, and brought up to some useful occupation agreeable to the laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia providing for the support of orphan and other poor children.” They were thus not to be discriminated against but gathered into the white world as if they were not black.
The problem of separating the slaves he could free from their relations whom he could not produced Washington’s lamest solution. He reasoned that the crises should pass more easily when the whole estate was broken up: the plantation was to be divided, after Martha’s death, among three sets of heirs. Thus, he postponed the freeing of his slaves until “the decease of my wife.” Although he had for years seen a danger of convulsing his slave quarters with premature hints of manumission, he chose to ignore the situation Martha would find herself in when some one hundred and fifty individuals were awaiting her death to set them free.
In December, 1800, almost exactly a year after Washington died, Abigail Adams visited his widow at Mount Vernon. The Massachusetts abolitionist wrote her sister that “the estate is now going into decay. Mrs. Washington with all her fortune finds it difficult to support her family, which consists of three hundred slaves. One hundred and fifty of them are now to be liberated, men with wives and young children who have never seen an acre beyond the farm are now about to quit it, and go adrift into the world without horse, home, or friend. Mrs. Washington is distressed for them. At her own expense she has cloaked them all, and very many of them are already miserable at the thought of their lot. The aged she retains at their request; but she is distressed for the fate of others. She feels a parent and a wife.” Those married to the Custis slaves would “quit all their connections—yet what could she do in the state in which they were left by the General, to be free at her death? She did not feel as though her life was safe in their hands, many of whom would be told that it was their interest to get rid of her. She therefore was advised to set them all free at the close of the year.” This M
artha did.
According to Washington’s stepgrandson, the liberated blacks “succeeded very badly as free men: so true is the axiom ‘that the hour that makes a man a slave takes half his worth away.’” The General’s heirs did not limit their support to blacks who had been infirm at his death. Taking others back under the wing of his estate, they made their last pension payment in 1833. Washington’s provisions for preparing the children for a white world could not be carried through because his Virginia neighbors passed laws against educating blacks.
* Not invented for blacks, slavery stretches to the beginnings of human history. When Washington was a boy, it had not been officially challenged anywhere.
* This fear, as old in the slaveholding regions as slavery itself, had been given a new urgency by the slave revolt—an offshoot of the French Revolution—which bloodied Santo Domingo (Haiti) in 1791.
FIFTY-TWO
Death of a Hero
(1799)
Washington did his best to cast an attractive aura about the creation of his will. He had special paper made, the watermark showing a goddess of agriculture seated upon a plow, holding in one hand a staff surmounted by a liberty cap, and in the other a flowering branch. He inscribed the text in his most careful hand, breaking the words without regard to syllabic structure so that the right-hand margin would be as straight as the left. He boasted that he had not called on the aid of any “professional character.” Yet to the depression of every man facing disillusion there was added the fact that the only situation that would give the will meaning did not exist. He had no heirs of his body.
Washington- The Indispensable Man Page 43