A Disease in the Public Mind

by Thomas Fleming

  Federalist-appointed judges soon had several Jeffersonian newspaper editors on trial. None of them could prove the insults and wild accusations they had flung at the president. The idea that a newspaper was supposed to tell the truth would not be accepted by most editors and reporters for another hundred years. The newspaper remained the “political engine” that President Adams had said it was twenty-five years earlier, on the eve of the Revolution.

  Jeffersonian-Republican outrage soon produced an excess to counter this Federalist assault on a free press. Jefferson persuaded James Madison to join him in writing letters to the legislatures of Virginia and the new state of Kentucky, urging them to protest this federal edict. Madison was temperate in his appeal. Jefferson was extreme. He assured the Kentucky legislature that a state could “nullify” any act of Congress, whenever it felt the law impinged on the rights or interests of its citizens.

  Washington was so appalled, he appealed to Patrick Henry to emerge from retirement and persuade Virginia to disavow her allegiance to this ruinous doctrine. Henry died before he could respond to the summons. While Washington sought another spokesman, the grim reaper began stalking him too.5

  • • •

  In 1786, the Marquis de Lafayette had informed Washington that he had bought a plantation in the French South American colony of Cayenne (later French Guiana), where he planned to free a group of slaves and educate them to demonstrate to the world that blacks could live and work independently. He hoped Washington would join him in this enterprise. The older man wrote his adopted son a letter, praising “the benevolence of your heart,” and warmly approved the experiment. But he did not accept Lafayette’s invitation to become his partner. Instead, Washington sadly wished that “a like spirit would diffuse itself generally into the minds of the people of this country but I despair of seeing it.”6

  The cascade of violence and passion that the French Revolution unleashed in France soon claimed Lafayette as one of its victims. Parisian radicals—the infamous Jacobins—seized power and made him a candidate for the guillotine. The Marquis’s property was confiscated and his plantation in Cayenne collapsed. He was forced to flee France, hoping to find refuge in America. But the Austrians, at war with the French, flung the Marquis into prison and ignored Washington’s attempts to free him.

  The Marquis’s harsh fate almost certainly influenced Washington’s attitude toward the French Revolution—and slavery. It reinforced his decision not to make a public statement about slavery while French extremism was dividing America. His desire to free his slaves was regretfully shelved for the foreseeable future.

  • • •

  As president, Washington displayed a grim realism about slavery when the issue intruded on his administration. In 1792, Southerners persuaded Congress to pass a bill requiring the federal government to help capture runaway slaves. Washington signed it without a comment. When Quakers, more and more militant about slavery, presented an emancipation proposal to Congress, Washington did not say a word in its support. Instead he made an approving comment to a friend when Congress ignored the plea.

  The president apparently shared the negative opinion of Quakerism that most Americans had developed during the Revolution. The Quakers had refused to participate in the war, to the point of declining to pay taxes. To those who were risking their lives and property in this struggle for liberty, the sect seemed either cowardly or hypocritical or both. These mistakes had ruined any hope of the Quakers becoming an effective voice for emancipation.

  Not even Benjamin Franklin, a man whom Washington admired, changed the president’s mind about publicly backing emancipation. In the last year of his life, Franklin had become the leader of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and sent an emancipation plea to Congress. When Senator James Jackson of Georgia sneeringly dismissed it, claiming that American blacks were perfectly contented as slaves, Franklin responded with one of his best hoaxes.

  He published a letter in the Federal Gazette saying that Jackson’s speech reminded him of a similar argument by a Muslim ruler of Algiers a hundred years ago, as recorded in “Martin’s Account of his consulship, anno 1687.” The Muslim was responding to a plea to release the thousands of Christians toiling as slaves in his country. His reply marvelously paralleled Jackson’s speech. He insisted that the slaves were needed to keep Algiers prosperous. He also maintained that the Christians were all perfectly happy and much more contented with their lives as obedient well-fed bondsmen than they had ever been in their Christian birthplaces, where they were required “to cut the throats of their fellow Christians” in their frequent wars. President Washington may well have chuckled about the jest in private; he enjoyed a good joke. But he said not a word in public. A year later the eighty-four-year-old Franklin’s voice was silenced by death.7

  • • •

  During Washington’s retirement years, an English visitor to Mount Vernon discussed slavery with him, off the record. The ex-president admitted black bondage looked like a crime, even an absurdity, in the light of the Declaration of Independence. But it was neither. “Till the mind of the slave has been educated to perceive what are the obligations of a state of freedom . . . the gift would ensure its abuse. No man desires . . . this event . . . more heartily than I do. Not only do I pray for it on the score of human dignity, but I can clearly foresee that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union by consolidating it in a common bond of principle.”

  Those words reveal that George Washington had travelled from complacent slave owner to believer in the humanity of black people to would-be emancipator. But he still saw no practical way to make emancipation work in Virginia or any other southern state.8

  Several months later, the ex-president had an unnerving dream. He was sitting with Martha, chatting about their happy memories, when a “great light” suddenly surrounded them. From it emerged an angel who whispered in Martha’s ear. Martha “suddenly turned pale and began to vanish” from his sight. The obvious interpretation was Martha’s early death. But Washington told her that dreams often have opposite meanings. “I may soon leave you,” he said.

  Martha tried to make a joke of the dream, but Washington remained haunted by it. Soon Martha came across scraps of writing in his study that indicated he was composing his will. The document began with a very predictable sentence. He directed his executors to care for “my dearly beloved wife Martha” for the rest of her life. The second sentence revealed why Washington had made this abrupt decision, now. “Upon the death of my wife, it is my Will & desire that all the Slaves which I hold in my own right shall receive their freedom.” Following that declaration were three pages of extremely explicit directives for his slaves’ emancipation. He wanted them to be educated and trained to earn a living. Aging or ill slaves who could not leave Mount Vernon were to be supported there until their deaths.

  The ex-president did not mince words. “I do hereby expressly forbid the sale . . . of any slave I may die possessed of, under any pretence whatsoever.” Summing up, he commanded all concerned “to see that this clause respecting slaves and every part thereof be religiously fulfilled without evasion, neglect or delay.”

  In a South where many thought blacks should not be taught to read and write, or worse, that they could not be taught, Washington was calling for their education. He was also emancipating all his slaves in one stroke of his pen—something he clearly sensed his heirs would not like. If Martha had not been alive, he may well have freed them all immediately. Out of consideration for her, he delayed their emancipation until her death because so many of his slaves had intermarried with slaves that belonged to her.9

  • • •

  Six months later, in December 1799, Washington awoke with an alarming constriction in his throat, which made it extremely difficult for him to breathe. He awoke Martha and asked her to send for their family doctor. But there was little the physician or other doctors who were summoned could do with the p
rimitive medical skills of their era. Already suffering from a bad cold, Washington had contracted an infection of his epiglottis, a cartilage just below his larynx. At the end of an agonizing day of struggling for breath, which he endured with remarkable stoicism, he died with Martha weeping beside him.

  The news of Washington’s death fell like a thunderclap from on high across the entire nation. The loss was so huge, so absolute, it seemed to alter everything from the nation’s politics to its confidence in the future. The fact that he had emancipated his slaves dwindled to a blip in the context of the other meanings of his departure. His act of emancipation excited little or no comment. Part of the reason may have been the fact that the slaves all had to remain at Mount Vernon until Martha’s death. There was no opportunity for newspaper stories of an exodus to freedom.

  A year later, Martha freed all Washington’s slaves unilaterally, and allowed them to leave Mount Vernon. Why? When President Adams’s wife, Abigail, visited Mount Vernon on the first anniversary of Washington’s death, Martha told her she feared one of the freed slaves might poison her to hasten their emancipation. Abigail, who described Martha’s anxiety in a letter to her sister, thought it was doleful proof of “the banefull [sic] effects of slavery.” Abigail’s dislike of the institution had been visible in her letters to John even in 1776, when he was persuading the Continental Congress to vote for independence.10

  Martha Washington’s reaction revealed that emancipating slaves could be a complex business. Martha and most of her grandchildren (her four children were dead) did not agree with Washington’s decision. Only her grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, honored Washington’s example and freed his slaves at his death.

  This disagreement was the reason for the tone of command in the emancipation pages of Washington’s will. Even if Martha had agreed with her husband, she could not have freed her slaves. Under the terms of her first husband’s will, they belonged to her only during her lifetime. At her death these “dower slaves” were to be handed on to her Custis descendants.11

  George Washington’s inability to convince the people closest to him, above all his beloved wife of forty years, was an ominous omen for the future of black freedom in the South. The second Emancipation Proclamation was as ignored and forgotten as the first one.

  Fifty-eight years later, Washington’s example would have an ironic resurrection. When George Washington Parke Custis died in 1857, the man who was responsible for freeing his slaves was his son-in-law, Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee. The impact of the experience on this already famous soldier became a tragic turning point in American history.

  CHAPTER 6

  Thomas Jefferson’s Nightmare

  In 1800, the year after George Washington died, Thomas Jefferson was elected third president of the United States. One of the new chief executive’s early visitors was Louis-André Pichon, the affable young chargé d’affaires of the new French republic. Jefferson greeted him warmly as the spokesman for a country that had long stirred his deepest political emotions.

  Chargé Pichon asked what the president would do or say if Paris sent an army to the rebellious island of Saint-Domingue to restore it to French control. For over a century France had owned a third of the island. The Spanish, who owned the larger slice, called it Santo Domingo—the name that most Americans used.

  The French section’s sugar, coffee, and indigo plantations had made it France’s most valuable overseas possession until the 1789 revolution in Paris triggered a civil war that had wrecked the economy. For American merchants, Saint-Domingue had been a prime customer. In 1790, U.S. exports to the island, mostly food and lumber, amounted to $3 million, second only to the $6.9 million in similar products that the Americans shipped to England.

  The French Revolution’s cry of liberty, equality, and fraternity had reached Saint-Domingue early in the 1790s. The precarious social mixture of royal officials, rich creole planters, middle class storekeepers and craftsmen, and free mulattoes was sitting on a potential volcano of 500,000 black slaves, whose toil on the plantations created the island’s wealth. The mulattoes were almost as numerous as the whites and frequently as wealthy. They owned an estimated 100,000 slaves. But they were forbidden to dress like white men. They could not marry a white woman. They could not carry guns. If a mulatto struck a white man, his hand would be amputated. A white man could strike a mulatto and risk nothing but a fine.

  The black slaves, called noirs, were kept under control with unspeakable brutalities. This cry of rage from a man who spent half his life as a noir is a grisly summary of French slave owners’ tactics.

  Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to eat shit? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms or on anthills or lashed them on stakes in the swamps to be devoured by mosquitos? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women into barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks to man-eating dogs until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off by bayonet and poniard?1

  As early as 1685, a French official wrote: “In the Negroes we have redoubtable domestic enemies.” Hundreds of slaves fled into the mountains and became maroons, whose legends had inspired John Brown. Some of these communities lasted for decades, repeatedly repulsing or evading troops sent to destroy them. The most fearsome of these early rebels was one-armed Francois Macandal, who preached a terrifying doctrine: death to all whites.

  When war erupted between Great Britain and Revolutionary France in 1793 and the Jacobins seized control of the French National Assembly, they issued a declaration freeing all the slaves in France’s overseas dominions. The move was motivated only in part by a belief in universal liberty. The radicals also hoped to trigger slave revolts in Jamaica and other English colonies and in the United States. By that time President George Washington had declared America neutral in the global war—an act the French considered a betrayal of the treaty of alliance they had signed with the embryo United States in 1778.

  When news of the Jacobin decree reached Saint-Domingue, a civil war of unbelievable ferocity exploded, with royalist whites fighting Jacobin whites and mulattos and blacks, compounded by the invasion of a British army. In the island’s prosperous northern plain, slaves came out of the night to burn plantation houses and massacre their owners. All the equipment of sugar production, the boiling houses, the mills, the warehouses, was destroyed.

  • • •

  Out of this sanguinary turmoil had emerged a charismatic black leader, Toussaint Louverture, a short, wiry forty-seven-year-old former coachman and veterinarian on a plantation owned by the Comte de Breda. So thin he was nicknamed “the Broomstick,” Toussaint could read and write—and think. He preached equality between blacks and whites and started creating a multiracial society.2

  President John Adams and his secretary of state, Timothy Pickering, saw Louverture as an opportunity to frustrate British and French imperialism in the Caribbean and maintain America’s lucrative trade with Saint-Domingue. They shipped supplies and ammunition to Louverture’s army, and at Alexander Hamilton’s suggestion they sent his boyhood friend Edward Stevens, born on the Danish island of St. Croix, to Saint-Domingue’s major port, Cap Francois, where he became Louverture’s trusted friend and advisor. The Adams administration even ordered the small American fleet in the Caribbean to show the flag at Cap Francois. Without quite saying it, they urged Louverture to declare independence.

  Louverture routed the British army and became the de facto ruler of Saint-Domingue. His troops quickly conquered the Spanish part of the island as well. Edward Stevens asked Alexander Hamilton to advise the black leader on a constitution. True to his authoritarian instincts, Hamilton told Louverture to appoint himself governor general for life—and e
nroll every able-bodied man in the militia. An assembly was also added to the government’s structure, but it had no power to initiate legislation.3

  With driving energy, Louverture invited whites, blacks, and mulattoes to join him in restoring a semblance of prosperity to Saint-Domingue. He banned slavery forever but persuaded most of the former slaves to return to the plantations to work as paid draftees in the service of the state. Unfortunately, he never trusted the slave-owning Americans enough to declare independence. He retained a frequently expressed loyalty to Revolutionary France, which had given his race their freedom.

  • • •

  In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in Paris. One of his many careening ambitions was the restoration of France’s colonial empire. This was the reason why Pichon visited President Jefferson to ask about Saint-Domingue. Jefferson’s reply exceeded Pichon’s most sanguine hopes. The new president urged Pichon to tell his government that America was eager to help restore French rule in Saint-Domingue. He welcomed France’s proposal to send an army to crush the black rebels. “Nothing will be easier than [for us] to furnish your army and fleet with everything and to reduce Toussaint to starvation,” Jefferson said.4

  There was a reason for the urgency that Jefferson concealed in his reply. During the 1790s, the upheaval on Saint-Domingue had prompted more than a few white French planters to flee the island for the comparative safety of the United States, where they talked of their often harrowing experiences. Inevitably, American slaves overheard some of these stories and wondered if this triumph over slave owners might be repeated in America. As early as 1793, Virginian John Randolph claimed to have caught two slaves discussing plans for an uprising that would massacre the whites “as the blacks had killed the whites in the French islands.” Other rumors and reports of black plots and threats had swirled through Virginia and other Southern states in succeeding years.5