by Ron Chernow
While in Richmond, Lafayette had a consequential encounter with James Armistead, the handsome, round-faced slave who had gallantly assisted him during the war. To help him sue for his freedom, Lafayette furnished him with an affidavit that testified to his valor: “His intelligence from the enemy’s camp were industriously collected and most faithfully delivered.”17 Not only did Armistead win his freedom and a pension from the legislature (which also compensated his master), but he changed his name in gratitude to James Armistead Lafayette.
Since Lafayette was slated to return to France in December, Washington, in a loving gesture, volunteered to escort him to his ship in New York—the first time he had ventured out of state since the war. When they reached Annapolis, however, the two men found themselves trapped in such a tedious round of receptions that Washington dreaded the ovations yet to come in Philadelphia and New York. So one day in early December, Washington and Lafayette gave each other an affectionate farewell hug and climbed into their respective carriages. Afterward, in an affecting letter that showed his powerful, if often suppressed, need for intimacy and how he equated Lafayette with his own lost youth, Washington told Lafayette of his turbulent emotions at their parting:In the moment of our separation upon the road, as I traveled and every hour since, I felt all that love, respect, and attachment for you with which length of years, close connection, and your merits have inspired me. I often asked myself, as our carriages distended, whether that was the last sight I ever should have of you? And tho[ugh] I wished to say no, my fears answered yes. I called to mind the days of my youth and found they had long since fled to return no more; that I was now descending the hill I had been 52 years climbing; and that tho[ugh] I was blessed with a good constitution, I was of a short-lived family and might soon expect to be entombed in the dreary mansions of my father’s. These things darkened the shades and gave a gloom to the picture, consequently to my prospects of seeing you again. But I will not repine—I have had my day.18
One of Washington’s premonitions in these melancholy musings proved correct: he never set eyes on Lafayette again.
Back in France, Lafayette showered Washington with gifts, including seven hounds sent in the custody of John Quincy Adams. He also sent along French pheasants and nightingales, which Washington had never seen before. All the while, Lafayette perfected his manumission scheme and acted on it the next year with breathtaking speed. He bought a large sugar plantation in Cayenne (French Guiana), on the South American coast, which came with nearly seventy slaves. He promptly began to educate and emancipate them, paying wages to those old enough to work, providing schooling for the children, and banning the sale of human beings. To make this scheme self-perpetuating, Lafayette instructed his agent to keep on adding more lands and freeing more slaves.
In congratulating him, Washington displayed enormous admiration while again shrinking from any firm commitment to a comparable project: “The benevolence of your heart, my dear Marquis, is so conspicuous upon all occasions that I never wonder at any fresh proofs of it. But your late purchase of an estate in the colony of Cayenne, with a view of emancipating the slaves on it, is a generous and noble proof of your humanity. Would to God a like spirit would diffuse itself generally into the minds of the people of this country, but I despair of seeing it.”19 To set the slaves “afloat” abruptly, he feared, would “be productive of much inconvenience and mischief, but by degrees it certainly might, and assuredly ought to be effected and that, too, by legislative authority.”20
The news of Lafayette’s feat came as Washington was being prodded to take a public stand on abolishing slavery. Before the war it had required an act of the royal governor and his council to free a slave. Then in 1782 a new law gave masters permission to free their own slaves, and hundreds manumitted at least a few. Influenced by the Revolution, antislavery societies sprang up across Virginia. In 1785 the Virginia legislature debated whether freed slaves should be permitted to stay in the state—something that might give their enslaved brethren seditious ideas—and abolitionist petitions were introduced. Washington became the target of a subtle but persistent campaign by abolitionists to enlist him in their cause. When Elkanah Watson visited Mount Vernon in January 1785, he bore books on emancipation written by British abolitionist Granville Sharpe, founder of the African colony of Sierra Leone. And then there were people such as Robert Pleasants, a Virginia Quaker who liberated seventy-eight of his slaves and proclaimed that Washington’s failure to follow suit would leave an everlasting stain on his reputation.
That May, Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury, two eminent Methodist ministers, brought to Mount Vernon an emancipation petition that they planned to introduce in the Virginia legislature. Although Washington refrained from signing it, he voiced “his opinion against slavery,” Asbury recorded in his diary, and promised to write a letter supporting the measure if it ever came to a vote.21 This typified Washington’s ambivalent approach to slavery in the 1780s: he privately made no secret of his disdain for the institution, but neither did he have the courage to broadcast his views or act on them publicly. After endorsing abolition, he shunted direct action onto other shoulders. Amid a blistering debate, the Coke-Asbury petition failed in the Virginia House of Delegates that November, with Madison reporting to Washington, “A motion was made to throw it under the table, which was treated with as much indignation on one side, as the petition itself was on the other.”22 Such fierce emotions must have given pause to Washington, if he harbored any unspoken thoughts about a future return to the political arena.
Washington’s quandary over slavery was thrown into high relief by a visit on April 9, 1786, from a local slave owner, Philip Dalby, who had recently traveled to Philadelphia with his slave, a mulatto waiter named Frank. After Frank was spirited away by a team of Quaker abolitionists, Dalby filed suit in the Pennsylvania assembly and, to drum up support, placed a shrill ad in the Alexandria newspaper, warning planters about the “insidious” work of Philadelphia Quakers.23 Incensed over the incident, Washington dashed off a strongly worded letter to his Philadelphia friend Robert Morris that expressed no sympathy for the Quakers, decrying instead their “acts of tyranny and oppression.”24 Unless these practices ceased, he warned, “none of those whose misfortune it is to have slaves as attendants will visit the city if they can possibly avoid it, because by so doing they hazard their property or they must be at the expense . . . of providing servants of another description for the trip.”25 This wasn’t the only time Washington talked of slavery as a curse visited on him rather than a system of privilege enforced by him.
At this point in the letter, Washington suddenly remembered that he opposed slavery and had to justify his righteous indignation about the Quaker actions: “I hope it will not be conceived from these observations that it is my wish to hold the unhappy people who are the subject of this letter in slavery. 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, and that by legislative authority. And this, as far as my suffrage will go, shall never be wanting.”26 Of course, Washington lacked a vote in the state legislature and took refuge in a position that was largely symbolic. The idea that abolition could be deferred to some future date when it would be carried out by cleanly incremental legislative steps was a common fantasy among the founders, since it shifted the burden onto later generations. It was especially attractive to Washington, the country’s foremost apostle of unity, who knew that slavery was potentially the country’s most divisive issue.
Historians often quote a September 1786 letter from Washington to John Francis Mercer as signaling a major forward stride in his thinking on slavery: “I never mean (unless some particular circumstance 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, and imperceptible
degrees.”27 But this noble statement then took a harsh turn. Washington mentioned being hard pressed by two debts—to retire one of which, “if there is no other resource, I must sell land or Negroes to discharge.”28 In other words, in a pinch, Washington would trade slaves to settle debts. Clearly, the abolition of slavery would have exacted too steep an economic price for Washington to contemplate serious action. A month later Washington made a comment that narrowed the scope of his possible action: “It is well known that the expensive mansion in which I am, as it were, involuntarily compelled to live will admit of no diminution of my income.”29 In other words, for all his rhetorical objections to slavery, Washington found it impossible to wean himself away from the income it produced. Habituated to profligate spending and a baronial lifestyle, he was in no position to act forcefully on his principled opposition to slavery until the very end of his life.
It has long been debated whether Washington’s growing aversion to slavery resulted from moral scruples or from a sense that slavery was a bad economic bargain, in which masters paid more for slaves’ upkeep than they reaped in profit from their labor. The latter problem weighed on him in the mid-1780s, when the failure of his corn crop, the principal food for his slaves, slashed the profitability of his operations. Though he probably never read it, Washington would have agreed with Adam Smith’s theory in The Wealth of Nations (1776) that slavery was a backward system because workers lacked economic incentives to improve performance. Slavery grew especially inefficient for Washington after he switched from labor-intensive tobacco cultivation to grain production, leaving him with surplus hands. In February 1786 he sat down in his study to tote up the number of slaves at his five farms and came up with a figure of 216. He must have been alarmed to discover that the number of slave children had risen to a startling 92, or nearly half the slaves, a figure that guaranteed that his slave population would burgeon from natural increase.
Whenever Washington discussed slavery with other planters, the inefficiency of the system dominated discussion, whereas with Lafayette, Washington sounded as if he were motivated purely by humanitarian concerns. Writing to Mercer in late 1786, he indicated that he felt burdened by more slaves than he could profitably employ: “For this species of property, I have no predilection nor any urgent call, being already overstocked with some kind of it.”30 He haggled with Mercer over settling money owed to him and expressed his willingness to take six male slaves in exchange for three hundred pounds of debt. Mercer evidently declined, because Washington replied, “I am perfectly satisfied with your determination respecting the Negroes. The money will be infinitely more agreeable to me than property of that sort.”31 Writing to Henry Lee, Jr., on February 4, 1787, Washington again announced that he was “in a great degree principled against increasing my number of slaves”; then in the next breath, he told Lee to buy him a slave, a bricklayer, whose sale was advertised in the newspaper.32 Washington declared he would drop the deal if the slave had a family and refused to be separated. In 1788 Washington accepted another thirty-three slaves at Mount Vernon in settlement of a debt related to the estate of Martha’s brother Bartholomew Dandridge.
In charting Washington’s conflicting statements about slavery after the Revolution, one begins to sense that he had developed a split personality on the issue. On the one hand, his views still reflected his acquisitive prewar personality that had few, if any, ethical qualms about slavery. His business behavior had always been his least attractive side, showing the imprint of early hardship. On the other hand, another part of his personality reflected the countless years of conversations with Lafayette, Laurens, Hamilton, and other young aides inflamed by Revolutionary ideals, when he was headquartered in the North and uprooted from the southern plantation culture. With a politician’s instinct, Washington spoke to different people in different voices. When addressing other Virginia planters, he spoke in the cold, hard voice of practicality, whereas when dealing with Revolutionary comrades, he blossomed into an altruist.
Nothing better illustrated his humanitarian views on slavery than a famous statement he made to David Humphreys, the young New England poet who resided at Mount Vernon while working on his authorized biography. At some point in 1788 or early 1789, Washington made an eloquent, if self-serving, statement—Humphreys may have prettied it up—expressing qualms about slavery and the paternalistic compromises he had forged over the issue: “The unfortunate condition of the persons whose labor in part I employed has been the only unavoidable subject of regret. To make the adults among them as easy and as comfortable in their circumstances 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, afforded some satisfaction to my mind and could not, I hoped, be displeasing to the justice of the Creator.”33 The passage makes plain that guilt tugged at Washington’s mind as he struggled to square slavery with his religious beliefs. The question remains: Did he really make life for the adult slaves “as easy and as comfortable” as possible and prepare the slave children for a different destiny?
Whether from genuine concern or from patent self-interest, Washington prided himself on his treatment of his slaves: “It has always been my aim to feed and clothe [the slaves] well and be careful of them in sickness.”34 While we have no proof that Washington wished to educate his slaves, we do know that Lund Washington’s wife, Elizabeth, a devout woman, taught slaves to read and distributed Bibles among them—an activity that would have been considered taboo on many plantations. There is no proof that Washington took sexual advantage of his slaves, although one French visitor noted that many house servants were mulattoes, “some of whom have kinky hair still but skin as light as ours.”35
In recent years a controversy has raged as to whether Washington might have fathered a mulatto slave named West Ford, who was born in the immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War and bore a vague resemblance to the Washington clan. The controversy first surfaced in 1940 but gained a new lease on life in 1998, when DNA tests strongly pointed to Thomas Jefferson as having had children with his slave Sally Hemings. This dramatic discovery lent fresh credence to the oral history of mixed-race families that claimed direct descent from America’s slaveholding founders.
The son of a slave named Venus, West Ford was owned by Washington’s brother Jack and his wife, Hannah, and grew up on their plantation, Bushfield, in Westmoreland County. When Hannah died around 1801, she singled out West Ford as the only slave to receive his freedom when he reached twenty-one. Ford’s privileged status was further confirmed when Jack and Hannah’s son Bushrod, who would inherit Mount Vernon, gave him 160 acres adjoining the estate. Beyond such undeniable evidence of partiality, legend passed down through two branches of Ford descendants that Venus had identified George Washington as the little boy’s father and that he had attended church with Washington and even gone hunting and riding with him.
While historians have learned not to repudiate such stories with knee-jerk rigidity, George Washington’s paternity of West Ford seems highly doubtful. The notion that he might have met and impregnated Venus during a trip that her mistress, Hannah, made to Mount Vernon seems unlikely. (Washington didn’t visit Bushfield during the years in question.) Where the Sally Hemings affair was exposed during Jefferson’s lifetime and her son Madison later published a memoir about it, the West Ford story slumbered suspiciously for a century and a half. With Mount Vernon invaded by visitors after the Revolutionary War, Washington constantly regretted his lack of privacy, and he would not likely have gambled his vaunted, hard-earned reputation by sleeping with a visiting slave. There is also the problem that Washington was likely sterile, although the problem with having children may have come from Martha. Perhaps the most compelling evidence against Washington being West Ford’s father is that, in this abundantly documented life, not a single contemporary ever alluded to his having this mulatto child around him. Nor is there a single reference to Venus or West
Ford in his voluminous papers. By contrast, one notes how frequently the ubiquitous Billy Lee pops up in Washington’s papers or in contemporary accounts. Had the decorous Washington fathered West Ford, he most certainly would not have flaunted this lapse by taking him to church or riding to hounds with him. It is also hard to believe that Washington’s malicious political enemies during his presidency would not have dredged up this damaging episode to discredit him. The most likely explanation of West Ford’s singular status is that he was sired by Jack Washington or one of his three sons, Bushrod, Corbin, or William Augustine.
Washington’s most commendable side was the respect he accorded to slave marriages, which enjoyed no standing under Virginia law. In April 1787, needing a bricklayer, he bought a slave named Neptune from a John Lawson. When Neptune showed up at Mount Vernon, Washington was dismayed to learn that he was distraught at being separated from his wife. Washington at once informed Lawson that he was “unwilling to hurt the feelings of anyone. I shall therefore, if agreeable to you, keep him a while to see if I can reconcile him to the separation (seeing her now and then), in which case I will purchase him; if not, I will send him back.”36 Taking matters into his own hands, Neptune escaped from Mount Vernon and returned to Lawson’s plantation and a reunion with his wife. Interestingly enough, Neptune wasn’t punished for this misbehavior and agreed to a compromise whereby he was hired out to Washington on a monthly basis.
