by Alexis Coe
Most modern accounts of Washington’s will are fairly forgiving, even sometimes congratulatory. Mount Vernon, now a museum and presidential library, summarizes it thus: “At the end of his life Washington made the bold step to free all his slaves in his 1799 will—the only slave-holding Founding Father to do so.”8 The often repeated statement lacks crucial details and context: the slaves’ manumission was not immediate and other slave-owning founders, including Benjamin Franklin, didn’t emancipate their slaves in their wills because they had already done so while they were alive. After Franklin returned from France in 1785, he freed his slaves. In 1790, he petitioned Congress to abolish slavery—while Washington was president, three years before he signed the Fugitive Slave Law.
“If his countrymen in Washington’s state of Virginia had followed his example in freeing their slaves as quickly as practicable,” writes Ashley Bateman, a teacher, “who knows the impact it could have had on the South.”9 Bateman ignores that Virginians already had in-state models to follow. Prominent Virginian Robert Carter III (whom Washington may have known through his eldest half brother Lawrence) manumitted over four hundred and fifty slaves in his lifetime. Like Washington, Carter had hoped gradual emancipation would pass the Virginia legislature in his lifetime, but unlike Washington, when it seemed clear it would not, he began to do so himself in 1791.
“Doctor, I die hard,” Washington said when Craik appeared at his bedside around 5 p.m. “But I am not afraid to go.” He thanked the rest of the doctors for their “attentions,” but he would have no more. “Let me go quietly,” he said, as all but Craik retired. “I cannot last long.” They tried to make him comfortable, applying wheat bran to his legs and feet, then attempted another round of blistering. Eventually, though, all but Craik left “without a ray of hope.” Over the next few hours, Washington rarely complained, though he often asked for the time. The bloodletting had continued, and by that point he had been drained of a few more pints of blood.
By 10 p.m., Washington finally showed fear. “Do not let my body be put into the Vault in less than three days after I am dead,” he ordered Lear, perhaps doubting that he, after surviving so much, would actually die. Lear reported that he “bowed assent, for I could not speak.”
“Do you understand me?” Washington asked.
“Yes,” Lear managed.
“’Tis well,” Washington said, and his hands went limp. Craik closed his eyes. Martha, standing at the foot of the bed, asked if he was gone. Then, according to Lear, she repeated, “’Tis well.”
Epilogue
At 3 p.m. on December 18, 1799, four days after Washington’s death, a schooner on the Potomac fired off a twenty-one-gun salute. On land, Virginia Cavalry led a funeral procession to the beating of drums; up at the front, two of the general’s slaves, Cyrus and Wilson, led his riderless horse.
Washington received a military burial at home. Pallbearers, mostly Freemasons, carried his mahogany coffin from the mansion house, where it had been lying on the dining room table, down a footpath to the old burial vault. He died before a new one could be built. Family, friends, clergy, slaves, and staff stood quietly among the juniper and cypress trees as his coffin, draped in black velvet, was placed inside the communal tomb. (Patsy, his stepdaughter, and George Augustine, a nephew, were already there.) Eleven cannons fired, and Virginia infantry shot their muskets. It was a little more than he had wished in his will—“that my Corpse may be Interred in a private manner, without parade, or funeral Oration”—but less than most wanted. Across the country, elected officials, citizens, and military officers wore black.
His widow was noticeably absent from the funeral. Perhaps Martha was too overcome by the loss, or maybe she was just done being on display; those around her observed that she remained dry-eyed. “The world now appears to be no longer desireable to her and yet she yields not to the grief which would be softened by tears,” Lear wrote to his mother.1
Martha seemed to believe that her career in public service, which she had never signed up for, was over. She did not travel to Philadelphia to attend the official congressional eulogy where General Henry Lee declared Washington “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”2 But she could not escape it all. When naval ships passed by Mount Vernon on the Potomac, they acknowledged, with a thirteen-gun salute, the man who had signed the department into law. Congress waived postage on letters and packages to her; she left most responses to Lear. When the seat of government moved to the City of Washington, she resigned herself to an ever-increasing number of visitors. Now that her husband was dead, paying their respects to his widow was the closest they could come to his approval.
Thomas Jefferson visited on June 1, 1800. “He must have known,” Martha supposedly told Connecticut governor John Cotton Smith, a Federalist, “that we then had the evidence of his perfidy in the house.”3 She found his trip to Mount Vernon uniquely unpleasant; the leader of the Democratic-Republicans’ treachery against Washington’s administration was still fresh in her mind, from which she was not exempt. When he condemned their levees, dinners, and ceremonies as monarchical in newspapers, hiding behind pseudonyms, he was criticizing her; playing hostess was her chief role as the president’s wife. Perhaps it was a coincidence that he visited six months after Washington’s death, when he was running for president and would have benefitted from her support. Either way, she didn’t give it, and he won anyway. When she found out, a guest recalled that “she spoke of the election of Mr. Jefferson as one of the most detestable of mankind, as the greatest misfortune our country has ever experienced.”4
Martha finally shed tears, apparently, when she was reminded that her husband was not, even in death, fully hers; she had planned on her body being reunited with his in the vault upon her death, but Congress proposed a different plan. They wanted to erect a marble monument in the City of Washington and relocate his body there. She resigned herself to the news, having learned “never to oppose my private wishes to the public will,” but wanted it to be known that “in doing this, I need not, I cannot, say what a sacrifice of individual feeling I make to a sense of public duty.”5 In the meantime, she frequently went to visit his grave, and kept private what she could, burning the letters she and Washington exchanged, missing just a few, stuck in the back of a drawer. (The plan to bury Washington under the Washington Monument did not materialize.)
She never returned to the bedroom in which her late husband had died, the one they shared for four decades, or to his study. She slept on the third floor, near Nelly, and down the hall from Wash. Did she ever notice that her grandson took a particular interest in several of the female slaves? The victims of these nonconsensual encounters were forced to bear his children. An article from 1865 suggests that Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee, Wash’s only legitimate daughter, knew that she had forty half siblings.6 It would have been nothing new to Martha; her first husband had an emancipated half brother, Jack, whom their father acknowledged and provided for in his will.
Martha, it seems, was overcome by two emotions: She mourned the loss of her husband, and she was deathly afraid of his slaves.
Washington’s will had been circulated in pamphlet form. Some of his slaves had decided to immediately emancipate themselves and fled Mount Vernon, while the rest watched her closely, knowing that her death meant their freedom. “She did not feel as tho her Life was safe in their Hands,” Abigail Adams explained to her sister, Mary Adams.7 At one point, Bushrod and Chief Justice John Marshall were called away from the Supreme Court because one or more of the slaves intended to burn down the mansion house.8
There is ample evidence to suggest that Martha was disinclined to free Washington’s slaves before she had to, and may never have agreed to, or known about the plan to begin with. When she mentioned slaves in her letters, it was not uncommon for her to write things like “Blacks are so bad in thair nature that they have not the least Gratatude for the kindness that
may be shewed to them.”9 In her own will, the slaves she controlled, whom she could have freed, she left to her family. It was not, then, morality that drove Martha to, on December 15, 1800, sign a deed of manumission, freeing all of her late husband’s slaves. It was self-preservation.
In January 1801, one hundred and twenty-three people were free from bondage, but not, for many of them, heartbreak. When Martha died a little over a year later, on May 22, 1802, at the age of seventy, the hundred and fifty dower slaves who remained at Mount Vernon were divided among her four grandchildren. About twenty families were separated; many would never see each other again.
A FAMILY DIVIDED
Isaac and Kitty’s family serves as one heartbreaking example of what the Washingtons’ plan meant for their slaves. Isaac had been enslaved by Washington, and was the only free member of his family. Kitty, his wife, was a dower slave, and so were their nine daughters and seven grandchildren, who were divided among the Custis heirs. They went from living on one plantation to five different locations, far apart. There’s no evidence they were ever reunited.10
CUSTIS HEIR
MEMBER OF KITTY’S FAMILY THEY CHOSE
SEPARATED FROM
MOVED TO
Eliza
Kitty (£50) and her two youngest daughters, Barbara (£40), aged thirteen, and Levina, aged nine (£5, flagged as an “invalid”)
Kitty from Isaac and her other children and grandchildren;
Barbara and Levina from Isaac, their sisters, nieces, and nephews
Washington, D.C.
Martha
Godfrey (£100);
Lucy (£65), twenty-four, and her children Burwell (£25) and Hannah (£15);
Letty (£70), twenty-four, and her daughter Tracy (£12), Nancy (£60), eighteen
Godfrey from his wife, Mima, and their children;
Lucy from her parents, Isaac and Kitty, and her husband;
Letty and Nancy from her parents, Isaac and Kitty, most of her sisters, and her nieces and nephews
Georgetown
Nelly
Sinah (£80), thirty, and her daughter, Nancy (£30), five, Mima (£65), twenty-eight, and her three young sons, John (£35), Randolph (£20), and Isaac (£6)
Sinah’s husband, Ben, who had been owned by Washington
Mima’s husband, Godfrey
Woodlawn, on Mount Vernon land given to them by Washington
Wash
Grace (£60), twenty-two
From her husband, Juba, who was enslaved at Tobias Lear’s farm; her parents Isaac and Kitty; her sisters, nieces, and nephews
Arlington, Virginia
* * *
In 1831, Bushrod’s nephew and heir, John Augustine Washington II, oversaw the completion of a new burial vault. The bodies of Washington, Martha, Bushrod, Fanny, and a few other family members were transferred to the exact verdant spot Washington had wanted, with small but significant deviations from what he’d envisioned. In 1837, his mahogany casket was enclosed in a marble sarcophagus bearing the Great Seal of the United States. During the Civil War, Confederate and Union soldiers carved their initials into the walls of the vault, a fitting addition to the resting place of the man whose fondest hope was for the nation to be unified. Both sides, the South and the North, the slave-owning and the free, viewed him as their inspiration. And both were right.
Since 2014, the woods near the vault have been undergoing excavation. The area is never mentioned in the thousands of documents Washington left behind. It is a cemetery for the people he enslaved, full of unmarked graves.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to the documentary editors, archivists, and librarians at the University of Virginia and the Library of Congress. These are the people who transcribed and annotated George Washington’s letters and uploaded them to the National Archives’ Founders Online, a heavenly, free, easy-to-use website that allowed me to do the bulk of my research from my home. I cannot thank them enough.
A very special thank you to William M. Ferraro, the managing editor of the Papers of George Washington at UVA. I randomly emailed Bill a question a few years ago, and he’s been stuck with me ever since. He graciously signed on to fact-check this book, and in the process he went far beyond the call of duty. He edited every chapter (several times) and talked me out of the fetal position (many times)—particularly in the final months. Thanks to Laura Ferraro for her support as well.
Over at Mount Vernon, Mary V. Thompson, the greatest living Washington scholar, was an absolute delight to correspond with, and a wonderful resource as well. I thank her and her colleagues for letting me wander the grounds during the week I spent there, and for all that they do; the symposiums, exhibitions, and catalogs they produce were vital resources. Thank you also to the Library of Congress, the Fraunces Tavern Museum, the New York Academy of Medicine Library, and the New York Historical Society. As always, I went straight to Sara Georgini at the Massachusetts Historical Society and John Overholt at the Houghton Library at Harvard. Thank you as well to Martha Saxton for the calls and emails about the much-maligned Mary Washington. Emily Schmitz took charge of the endnotes with unreasonably good cheer, for which I am eternally grateful.
It’s an honor to be published by Viking. Thank you to my editor, Laura Tisdel, who picked up the project with much enthusiasm, and to Andrea Schulz, whose excitement never waned. I’m grateful to the entire team, including the many people who worked tirelessly behind the scenes: Christina Caruccio, Brianna Harden, Daniel Lagin, Brianna Linden, Lindsay Prevette, Amy Sun, Brian Tart, Melanie Tortoroli, and Eric Wechter. I had high hopes for an original George Washington portrait, and Alexis Franklin most certainly delivered!
Over the past eight years, Jay Mandel at WME has talked me out of my worst ideas and supported the hell out of my better ones. I’m grateful for the many reassuring calls and quick reads and sound advice. Thanks also to his former assistant Lauren Shonkoff and his current assistant, Sian-Ashleigh Edwards, for all their efforts, and to Bradley Singer, my WME television agent, for always looking out for me. While writing this book, Matthew Ginsburg and Tim Healy and the History Channel gave me the opportunity to consider Washington in a different medium. A special thanks to Doris Kearns Goodwin; it has been a great privilege to work with you.
Thank you to the friends who encouraged me along the way. You’re too numerous to name here, but those who made the mistake of offering to read parts of the draft deserve a mention: Elizabeth Castoria, Daniel Jacobson, Laura Olin, Daniel Mallory Ortberg-Lavery, Aminatou Sow, and Avi Steinberg.
Fari, thank you for taking such good care of Poppy while I worked, and thanks to Emma, Jon, and Louisa for welcoming her into your home.
Thank you, most of all, to my husband, Anthony Lydgate, who kept me well fed and loved, and for his edits throughout this insane process. I do hope that, one day soon(ish), you achieve the George Washington-less life of your dreams. Poppy, I’ve never been so disrespected on a personal or professional level by anyone in my entire life! Thanks for making me slow down and be. You’re the ideal tiny primate, and I love you and your dad more than anything.
Notes
I preserved the original spellings and syntax of the early American manuscripts I’ve quoted, all of which predate standardized dictionaries. The spelling was phonetic, the capitalization wild, monetary value inconsistent, and style and grammar varied greatly from person to person.* The letters and documents were meant to be read aloud back then, and I hope you will consume them that way, too. Consider,
for instance, this brutally honest assessment from Jonathan Boucher, his stepson’s tutor in Annapolis, and imagine Washington and Martha reading it in bed on December 18, 1770:
I mean, his Love of Ease, & Love of Pleasure—Pleasure of a Kind exceedingly uncommon at his Years. I must confess to You I never did in my Life know a Youth so exceedingly indolent, or so surprizingly voluptuous.
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS FOR ARCHIVES
DGW: Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig, eds. The Diaries of George Washington. 6 vols. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976–1979.
JCC: Library of Congress. Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789. 34 vols. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1904–1937.
PAH: Harold C. Syrett and Jacob Cooke, eds. Papers of Alexander Hamilton. 27 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961–1987.
PCC: Papers of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789. 204 rolls. Washington, D.C.: National Archives, National Archives and Records Service, General Services Administration, 1957–1959.
PGW, Confederation: W. W. Abbot et al., eds. The Papers of George Washington: Confederation Series. 6 vols. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992–1997.
PGW, CS: W. W. Abbot et al., eds. The Papers of George Washington: Colonial Series. 10 vols. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983.
PGW, PS: W. W. Abbot et al., eds. The Papers of George Washington: Presidential Series. 16 vols. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1987–.
PGW, RWS: W. W. Abbot et al., eds. The Papers of George Washington: Revolutionary War Series. 25 vols. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985–.
