by Ron Chernow
Though an inexperienced planter, the enterprising Washington was determined to produce high-quality tobacco, and to that end he expanded his acreage and revealed a scientific bent as he dabbled with different varieties. Always receptive to innovation, he pored over agricultural treatises and experimented with oats, wheat, and barley, planted in soil from various corners of his property. Only in retrospect did he perceive the folly of staking his future on tobacco. The soil at Mount Vernon, he duly learned, had “an under stratum of hard clay impervious to water,” washing away the thin topsoil and leaving behind “eyesore gullies.”1 It posed insuperable challenges for a novice planter who had to contend with several seasons of drought and heavy rain, which only compounded the runoff problem. Besides poor topography, Washington also had to contend with fluctuating tobacco prices—under imperial law, all sales went through England—and he never knew what his crops would fetch until he heard back from London. With hindsight, it is easy to fault his emphasis on tobacco, but the crop was so omnipresent in Virginia that planters paid taxes with it and engaged in an intense rivalry to produce superior leaves.
In the 1760s Washington’s letters on his tobacco trade often read like one long jeremiad. He started out with a bumper crop of 147,357 pounds in his first year of marriage, only to be repeatedly victimized by the vagaries of weather. “We have had one of the most severe droughts in these parts that ever was known and without a speedy interposition of providence (in sending us moderate and refreshing rains to mollify and soften the earth), we shall not make one ounce of tobacco this year,” he reported to Robert Cary in 1762.2 The next year his wheat crop was attacked by a fungus known as rust, while his Indian corn and tobacco were choked by weeds and grass spawned by incessant rains. The mediocre quality of his leaves further depressed the price his tobacco drew in London, making it impossible to pare down debt. At melancholy moments Washington sounded as if the elements conspired to punish his crops. In August 1765 he noted that the Mount Vernon soil had been parched since May because of drought, while a mere ten miles away the weather was “perfectly seasonable” and his neighbors had “promising crops of corn and tobacco.”3
Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of tobacco culture was its labor-intensive nature, making it a natural match with slavery. No aspect of his life would so trouble Washington or posterity as his status as a major slave owner. Had he not started with tobacco, he might never have become so enmeshed with a reprehensible system that he learned to loathe. Slaves were ubiquitous in this rich, populous colony, making up 40 percent of Virginia’s population. In fact, slavery had acquired such a firm grip on the colony that one minister maintained in 1757 that “to live in Virginia without slaves is morally impossible.”4
Washington’s opposition to slavery took the form of a gradual awakening over many decades. He seldom uttered the word slavery, as if it grated on his conscience, preferring polite euphemisms such as “servants,” “Negroes,” “my people,” or “my family.” Like other slaveholders, the young Washington talked about slaves as simply another form of property. He was cold-blooded in specifying instructions for buying slaves, telling one buyer, as if he were purchasing a racehorse, that he wanted his slaves “to be straight-limbed and in every respect strong and likely, with good teeth and good countenances.”5 He favored adolescent females who could maximize the number of slave children, urging one planter who owed him money to sell some slaves in the fall “when they are fat and lusty and must soon fall of[f] unless well fed.”6 In this savage world, planters posted slaves as collateral for loans, and Washington upbraided one debtor for asking him to rely upon “such hazardous and perishable articles as Negroes, stock, and chattels.”7 With another debtor, he threatened that, without speedy payment, “your Negroes must be immediately exposed to sale for ready money after short notice.” In his diary, he often wrote of being “at home all day alone” when he was surrounded by slaves in the mansion and fields.
However horrifying it seems to later generations, abominable behavior toward dark-skinned people was considered an acceptable way of life. In 1767, when four slaves were executed in Fairfax County for supposedly colluding to poison their overseers, their decapitated heads were posted on chimneys at the local courthouse to act as a grim warning to others. Nobody protested this patent atrocity. At the same time, slave masters in the eighteenth century seldom rationalized or romanticized slavery as a divinely sanctioned system, as happened before the Civil War. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and other Virginia planters acknowledged the immorality of slavery, while confessing perplexity as to how to abolish it without producing mayhem and financial ruin. When denouncing British behavior on the eve of the American Revolution, Washington made clear the degrading nature of the system when he said that, if the colonists tolerated abuses, the British “will make us as tame and abject slaves as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.”8
The black population at Mount Vernon grew apace after Washington’s marriage as he purchased slaves aggressively to keep pace with his widening economic activities. During the first year of his marriage, he acquired 13 slaves, then another 42 between 1761 and 1773. Since he paid taxes on slaves older than twelve years of age, we know that he personally owned 56 slaves of working age in 1761, 62 in 1762, 78 in 1765, and 87 in 1770.
Whether from humane considerations or merely from regard for property, Washington was tireless in his medical treatment of slaves; his diaries are loaded with references to doctors, and even to Washington himself, tending sick slaves. During the frosty first winter of his marriage, he grew alarmed by the death of four slaves by late January, three of them dower slaves from the Custis estate. As in the army, whenever trouble struck, Washington didn’t shirk personal involvement. His direct management style became manifest that spring when smallpox cropped up at his western plantation on Bullskin Creek. At once he hastened off to Frederick County and was startled to find that two slaves, Harry and Kit, had already died, and that everything lay “in the utmost confusion, disorder and backwardness.”9 He rushed off to nearby Winchester to secure blankets and medical supplies, summoned a nurse, and instructed his overseer to quarantine slaves with smallpox. By the Revolutionary War, Washington made a regular practice of inoculating slaves against smallpox. The standard method was to scrape contaminated matter from the pustules of a victim with a mild case of smallpox, then slip it on a thread under the skin of the inoculated person. This produced a mild case of the disease, which prevented the more virulent form.
In written agreements with new overseers, Washington exhorted them to treat ailing slaves with a modicum of kindness. In 1762 a new overseer, Nelson Kelly, had to agree “that he will take all necessary and proper care of the Negroes committed to his management, treating them with humanity and tenderness when sick.”10 There seems little doubt that Washington was motivated by human sympathy as well as profit in caring for sick slaves. During his first term as president, he urged his estate manager to have overseers pay special heed to sick slaves, “for I am sorry to observe that the generality of them view these poor creatures in scarcely any other light than they do a draft horse or ox, neglecting them as much when they are unable to work, instead of comforting and nursing them when they lie on a sick-bed.” 11 Possibly because of his scrupulous care of sick slaves, Washington frequently complained about those who feigned illness. When he thought a slave named Sam was faking illness, he ordered his estate manager to “examine his case . . . but not by the doctor, for he has had doctors enough already of all colors and sexes and to no effect. Laziness is, I believe, his principal ailment.”12
Another area of plantation life where Washington’s behavior was comparatively humane, within the overall context of an inhumane system, was in his studious refusal to break up slave families. Although slave marriages were not sanctioned by law, Washington treated them as binding and sacrosanct. In time, he refused to sell slaves if it meant separating families. Slaves who wished to marry slaves from other plantations nee
ded Washington’s permission, but we have no evidence he ever denied it. That he felt a paternalistic responsibility toward his slaves was shown dramatically in his final years when a slave named Fanny was bedridden for a week after being beaten by her husband Ben, a slave on another plantation. Washington, livid, forbade Ben to set foot at Mount Vernon on pain of whipping. Four years later Fanny married another slave.13 When Washington contemplated selling off slaves during the Revolution, he expressed reluctance to do so, then told his manager that “if these poor wretches are to be held in a state of slavery, I do not see that a change of masters will render it more irksome, provided husband and wife and parents and children are not separated from each other, which is not my intention to do.”14 Although he stopped buying slaves in 1772, his slave population swelled from natural increase so that he owned 135 able-bodied slaves when tapped to head the Continental Army. Ironically, his growing scruples about slavery and his refusal to break up families by selling them off saddled him with a fast-growing slave community.
Thanks to pioneering research at Mount Vernon in recent years, we have obtained a much more vivid sense of slave life there. The very design of the estate made it arduous for slaves to maintain families. Mount Vernon came to consist of five farms: the Mansion House Farm (what tourists think of today as Mount Vernon) and four satellite farms: Dogue Run, Muddy Hole, Union, and River. Many Mansion House slaves were either household servants, dressed in brightly colored livery of scarlet coats and white waistcoats, or highly skilled artisans; these last were overwhelmingly male, while the four distant farms held mostly field hands who, contrary to stereotype, were largely female. This sexual division meant that only a little more than a third of Washington’s slaves enjoyed the luxury of living with their spouses and children. Since the slaves worked a grueling six-day week, from sunup to sundown, they had to tramp long distances on Saturday evening or Sunday to visit their far-flung families.15 It speaks volumes about the strength and tenacity of slave families that two-thirds of the adults remained married despite such overwhelming obstacles.
We know that Mary Washington was tightfisted in treating slaves; one neighbor remembered her as “more given to housewifery, and to keeping their servants at their proper business and in their proper places than to any unnecessary forms of etiquette.”16 Thomas Jefferson thought that Washington had inherited that autocratic style. “From his childhood, [Washington] always ruled and ruled severely,” Jefferson was later quoted as saying. “He was first brought up to govern slaves, he then governed an army, then a nation.”17 For the most part, Washington dealt with slaves through overseers whom he prodded to “be constantly with your people . . . There is no other sure way of getting work well done and quietly by negroes, for when an overlooker’s back is turned, the most of them will slight their work or be idle altogether.”18
Under Virginia law, slaveholders could freely abuse or even murder their slaves in punishing misbehavior and still avoid legal repercussions. Washington believed that whipping slaves was counterproductive and tried to restrain such brutality. As he lectured one estate manager, it “oftentimes is easier to effect [change] by watch-fulness and admonition than by severity and certainly must be more agreeable to every feeling mind in the practice of them.”19 Overseers were required to issue warnings to wayward slaves before flogging them. In theory, they couldn’t apply the lash to slaves unless they first secured written permission from Washington, but due to his extended absences from Mount Vernon, the rule wasn’t always obeyed. “General Washington has forbidden the use of the whip on his blacks,” a French visitor to Mount Vernon later averred, “but unfortunately his example has been little emulated.”20 He wanted his overseers to be strict, not cruel. Whether on the plantation, in the army, or in government, he stressed the need to inspire respect rather than affection in subordinates, a common thread running through his vastly disparate managerial activities.
Washington insisted that overseers track slaves closely during workdays that could stretch up to sixteen hours in summertime. He constantly reprimanded them for being drunk, lazy, or inattentive to their duties. Often feeling burdened by the expense and difficulty of dealing with white overseers, he turned to slave overseers, and at one point blacks supervised three of his five farms.
Washington prided himself on being firm but fair-minded, leading his adopted granddaughter to say later, “He was a generous and noble master and [the slaves] feared and loved him.”21 His presidential secretary, Tobias Lear, said of Mount Vernon, “The negroes are not treated as blacks in general are in this country. They are clothed and fed as well as any laboring people whatever and they are not subject to the lash of a domineering overseer—but they are still slaves.”22 Several observers noted that Washington, with perfect self-control in public, could flare up with servants in private. During his presidency the wife of the British ambassador remarked that Washington “acquired a uniform command over his passions on public occasions, but in private and particularly with his servants, its violence sometimes broke out.”23 One cabinet secretary talked of Washington’s reputation for “warm passion and stern severity” with his servants.24 Another observer was taken aback by how gruffly the tactful president addressed his slaves, “as differently as if he had been quite another man or had been in anger.”25 Still another Mount Vernon guest noted how exquisitely attuned the slaves were to the master’s moods: “His servants seemed to watch his eye, and to anticipate his every wish; hence, a look was equivalent to a command.”26 It should be said that if Washington displayed an irritable style with his slaves, he could also be short-tempered with his military and political subordinates.
Slavery presented special challenges to a hypercritical personality like Washington, for the slaves had no earthly reason to strive for the perfection he wanted. However illogical it might seem, he expected them to share his work ethic and was perturbed when they didn’t follow his industrious example. Feeling entitled to extract the maximum amount of work from slaves, he advised one overseer that “every laborer (male or female)” should do “as much in the 24 hours as their strength, without endangering their health or constitution, will allow of.”27 Not surprisingly, his letters contain frequent references to slaves whom he saw as indolent or prone to theft, and he never regarded such behavior as rational responses to bondage. Reproaching his slave carpenters, he said, “There is not to be found so idle a set of rascals.”28 Of a slave named Betty who worked as a spinner in the mansion, he complained that “a more lazy, deceitful and impudent hussy is not to be found in the United States.”29 He talked caustically about malingering slaves as if they were salaried workers who had failed to earn their wages—a blind spot he never entirely lost.
Fond of system and efficiency, Washington was stymied by his slaves’ inability to meet his high standards. Once in February 1760 he was dismayed to find that four slave carpenters had jointly hewn only 120 feet of poplar logs that day. Like a modern efficiency expert, he sat down, consulted his watch, and clocked them in a time-and-motion study. The master’s presence instantly stimulated the slaves to quadruple their output to 125 feet of timber apiece. Once he had solved the motivational mystery, Washington wondered about the material being used. “It is to be observed here that this hewing and sawing likewise was of poplar,” he wrote in his diary. “What may be the difference therefore between the working of this wood and [an]other some future observations must make known.”30 It is easy to see how the methodical Washington, with his excellent business mind, would have found infuriating an economic system that naturally discouraged hard work.
Male slaves at the Mansion House enjoyed accommodations superior to those of slaves at the outlying farms. They likely had better quarters because they were often trained artisans and lived within eyeshot of family members and visitors. At a later period many inhabited a large brick building with glazed windows that was divided into four rooms and fitted out like an army barrack, with bunks lining the walls. In the four remote farms, slaves wer
e jammed into small, one-room log cabins, crafted flimsily from sticks cemented with mud. A Polish nobleman who admired Washington was taken aback by these squalid hovels. “We entered one of the huts of the blacks, for one cannot call them by the name of houses. They are more miserable than the most miserable of the cottages of our peasants. The husband and wife sleep on a mean pallet, the children on the ground; [there is] a very bad fireplace, some utensils for cooking, but in the middle of this poverty, some cups and a teapot.”31
Each slave received one set of new clothes per annum—a woolen jacket, a pair of breeches, two shirts, a pair of stockings, and a pair of shoes—often made from a coarse brown linen called osnaburg. Slave women received an annual petticoat and smock. Some slaves also had Sunday outfits of dark coats with white vests and white breeches. Every day the slaves received approximately one quart of Indian cornmeal, and every month twenty salted herrings, which sounds like a terribly meager ration. “It is not my wish or desire that my Negro[e]s should have an ounce of meal more, nor less, than is sufficient to feed them plentifully,” Washington told his estate manager.32 Recent archaeological work at Mount Vernon has revealed that the slave diet was not entirely bleak. On Sundays Washington allowed slaves to borrow his large nets, or “seines,” to fish in the Potomac. At least one elderly slave named Father Jack kept a canoe on the river and supplied fish to others. Archaeologists have identified bones from sixteen types of fish in the cellar of the main slave residence. Washington also distributed to the slaves meat left over from his table, innards of hogs slaughtered on the estate, surplus fish from his fishery, and buttermilk left after the milk was churned.
The most intriguing archaeological find has been the discovery of lead shot and gun flints, showing that Washington allowed selected slaves to keep firearms and hunt wild game in the woods. The remains of fifty-eight animal species have been identified in the slave cellar. The slaves could either eat the game or sell it to the master’s table. Washington’s adopted grandson remembered how a slave named Tom Davis hunted duck on the Potomac with his Newfoundland dog and brought down with his musket “as many of those delicious birds as would supply the larder for a week.”33 This made up part of a strictly limited market economy at Mount Vernon in which Washington allowed slaves to till their own garden plots, keep poultry, and sell eggs, chicken, fruits, and vegetables. On Sunday mornings he even permitted them to travel with passes to nearby Alexandria and peddle their wares in the open marketplace. This freedom of movement enabled Washington’s slaves to meet and marry slaves on other plantations.
