by Ron Chernow
The most striking case of Washington’s respect for the inner life of slaves was his constant solicitude for Billy Lee, whom he endowed with the fancy title “Valet de Chambre” after the war.37 Lee may be the dark-skinned slave standing off in the shadows of Edward Savage’s famous painting The Washington Family, completed during the 1790s. In the group portrait, Washington sits at a table with Martha, unfurling a map of the new federal city of Washington, while Nelly and Washy stand beside them. Off to the right, the nameless slave is a dignified presence in a gray jacket with one hand thrust into a red waistcoat, his black hair falling straight over his collar. If Lee is the slave depicted, it would certainly attest to his special place in the Washington household.
During the war Lee had entered into a romantic liaison with Margaret Thomas, a free black or mulatto cook on Washington’s staff, and they considered themselves married. Six months after returning to Mount Vernon, Lee sank into a funk because of his separation from Thomas, who resided in Philadelphia. Under prodding from Lee, Washington agreed to reunite them. The all-powerful Washington didn’t care for Thomas but submitted to the pleas of the one slave he found it hard to deny. Contacting his Philadelphia friend Clement Biddle, he laid out the situation, explaining that Margaret Thomas had been “in an infirm state of health for some time and I had conceived that the connection between them had ceased, but I am mistaken. They are both applying to me to get her here, and tho[ugh] I never wished to see her more, yet I cannot refuse his request (if it can be complied with on reasonable terms) as he has lived with me so long and followed my fortunes through the war with fidelity.”38 Washington asked Biddle to track down Thomas, then living with a free black couple, Isaac and Hannah Sills, who also worked as cooks in Philadelphia. Biddle was instructed to pay Thomas’s passage to Virginia by coach or ship. We don’t know what happened to Margaret Thomas, and no evidence exists that she ever made it to Mount Vernon. Without question, a free black or mulatto woman would have dreaded traveling alone to a slave state such as Virginia, even under the auspices of George Washington. At the very least, as a Mount Vernon cook, she would have been forced to live and work with slaves, while retaining the rights of a free person—hardly a comfortable situation for all involved. One wonders exactly how Washington planned to negotiate this delicate situation. Did he expect Billy Lee to continue as a slave while married to a resident cook and free woman? And how would the other Mount Vernon slaves have reacted to the subversive presence of a free woman of color, wedded to Washington’s favorite slave?
What we do know is that, by the standards of master-slave relationships, Washington remained uncommonly attentive toward Billy Lee. In April 1785 he was surveying land with Lee, who was carrying one of the chains when he slipped and broke his knee, an injury so severe that Washington had to order a sled to transport him home. Three years later Lee tripped again and broke the second knee, turning him into a cripple. We know that Lee had an alcohol problem, but we don’t know whether it was the cause or an effect of these injuries. When two broken knees left Lee incapacitated, Washington converted him into a cobbler and sometime overseer of other slaves. In later years the outgoing Lee was reputedly a loquacious storyteller as he greeted veterans and exhibited his affection for Washington. Despite his servitude, he reminisced nostalgically about the war, even wearing a cocked hat to emphasize his earlier service. Of course, it is impossible to know, as Lee rambled on, what obscure hurts he concealed at being denied the status of a full-fledged soldier.
One also wonders to what extent Washington’s attachment to Lee influenced his later determination to emancipate his slaves. His proximity to a single slave during many years of war must have made it harder for him to believe that slaves were inferior beings and that their bondage could be justified. Lee was not only an expert hunter and horseman but also an energetic raconteur with a vibrant personality and rich emotional life that shines through in the smattering of stories about him. On the other hand, there’s no sense that Washington confided in Lee or treated him as anything like a peer.
While Washington was never sadistic or abusive toward slaves, he could be a demanding boss with minimal patience for error. When English farmer Richard Parkinson visited Virginia in 1798, he picked up scuttlebutt from local planters that Washington “treated [his slaves] with more severity than any other man.”39 Washington’s temperamental outbursts likely stemmed in part from his unrelenting money problems. He also suffered from a conceptual blind spot about slavery, tending to regard it as a fair economic exchange: he clothed and fed his workers, and “in return, I expect such labor as they ought to render.”40 He could never seem to understand why his slaves might regard this tacit bargain as preposterous. Any slaves who shirked work, he believed, were cheating him, and he wouldn’t stand for it. In 1785 he conducted a frosty exchange with a slave whose arm was injured and in a sling. Washington didn’t see why the man couldn’t work. Grasping a rake in one hand and thrusting the other in his pocket, he proceeded to demonstrate one-handed raking. “See how I do it,” Washington said. “I have one hand in my pocket and with the other I work. If you can use your hand to eat, why can’t you use it to work?”41 Similarly, Washington expected pregnant women and elderly slaves to work, albeit at less strenuous jobs closer to home.
So intent was Washington on extracting the full measure of work from slaves that he could be shockingly oblivious to their hardships. Perhaps the most agonizing work at Mount Vernon involved reclaiming swamps. Even in the iciest weather Washington didn’t relax his grip or halt this grueling outdoor labor. In January and February 1788 eastern Virginia suffered through a winter so frigid that the Potomac froze for five weeks and Mount Vernon lay “locked fast by ice,” as Washington told Henry Knox.42 As the temperature dipped to ten degrees, Washington often found it too cold to attend meetings away from home. Nevertheless, his hands spent more than a week taking ice from the frozen river and packing it into the icehouse.
During this deep freeze Washington refused to cancel any slave activities, and the heavy-duty field work went on unabated. On January 3 he noted that the thermometer stood at twenty-five degrees as he made the chilly rounds of his plantations. Nevertheless everyone was outdoors working. At Dogue Run, he wrote, “the women began to hoe the swamp they had grubbed in order to prepare it for sowing in the spring with grain and grass seeds.” At Muddy Hole, “the women, after having threshed out the peas, went about the fencing.” And at another farm, “the women were taking up and thinning the trees in the swamp, which they had before grubbed.”43 It is hard to imagine more brutal manual labor than women pulling up tree stumps in icy swamps in record-setting cold, but Washington seems not to have found this inhuman scene objectionable and in no way diminished the work. On February 5 the notably rugged Washington informed Knox that “the air of this day is amongst the keenest I ever recollect to have felt.”44 When he made the circuit of his farms the next morning, he introduced an unusual notation: “Rid out, but finding the cold disagreeable, I returned.”45 Despite this fierce cold, with nine inches of snow covering the ground, Washington kept everyone busy in the fields and noted approvingly in his diary, “Hands of all the places (except the men) working in the new ground” at the mansion house.46 It was as if Washington feared that even the slightest concession would lead to a raft of others, so he insisted on getting the daily quota of work from his slaves.
Like all other plantation owners, Washington had become so accustomed to slavery that the bizarre began to seem normal. He had always kept a strict separation between his social and professional lives and for a long time went foxhunting and toured his farms on separate days. Then on January 4, 1786, he began to mix these two incompatible tasks, riding to hounds and visiting field hands at the same time. “After breakfast, I rid by the places where my Muddy Hole and Ferry people were clearing,” he wrote in his diary. “Thence to the [grist] mill and Dogue Run plantations and, having the hounds with me, in passing from the latter toward Muddy Hole plantation
, I found a fox, which, after dragging him some distance and running him hard for near an hour, was killed by the cross road in front of the house.”47 Thereafter he routinely combined foxhunting with tours of the outlying slave plantations. One can only imagine what thoughts passed through the minds of field hands who wearily lifted their heads from stoop labor, only to see the jolly master and his friends careering past them in the wintry landscape behind a pack of foxhunting hounds.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The Ruins of the Past
WHEN WASHINGTON CONSENTED IN 1783 to serve as first president of the Order of the Cincinnati, he imagined himself signing on to a fraternal organization that was charitable in intent and incontrovertibly good. So convinced was he of its virtue that he did not agonize over becoming president the way he mulled over comparable decisions in his life. Though not a founder of the group, he felt a fraternal camaraderie with his fellow officers and cottoned to the idea of perpetuating their comradeship. He even offered a five-hundred-dollar gift to invigorate the Cincinnati. Distracted by other matters, he didn’t heed at first the rancorous debates brewing over the organization’s character. “I was conscious that my own proceedings on that subject were immaculate,” he later declared a shade defensively.1 As shown by the slavery issue, Washington didn’t wish to be ensnared in political controversy or do anything that might mar his hard-won image as the incarnation of national unity.
But the formation of a hereditary society, with membership inherited through eldest sons, awakened the hostility toward aristocracy bred by the Revolution. Blasted as elitist, the society raised the dread specter of a military caste that might dominate American political life. That Washington lacked a male heir spared him no criticism. After all, the society’s very name paid tribute to his ineffable mystique. In hunting down monarchical plots, the new nation displayed an active, often paranoid imagination. In later years Jefferson stated that it had “always been believed” that some army officers, especially Steuben and Knox, had offered a crown to Washington and started the Cincinnati only when he rejected it, hoping the hereditary order would “be engrafted into the future frame of government and placing Washington still at the head.”2 There was no evidence whatsoever that Steuben and Knox ever contemplated such an offer.
When Benjamin Franklin’s daughter transmitted to him press reports about the new society, he replied that he could understand the Chinese practice of honoring one’s parents, who after all had achieved something. To honor descendants, however, merely from the accident of biology, was “not only groundless and absurd but often hurtful to that posterity.” Any sort of hereditary society, he declared, would stand “in direct opposition to the solemnly declared sense” of the new country.3 John Adams also went on the warpath against the Cincinnati, damning the group as “the deepest piece of cunning yet attempted . . . the first step taken to deface the beauty of our temple of liberty.”4
No sooner had Washington announced the first national meeting, to be held in Philadelphia in May 1784, than he was taken aback by angry rumbles about the hereditary requirement, an early inkling of the boisterous democratic tendencies that would reshape the country and challenge the preeminence of the former officer corps. Henry Knox, the society’s first secretary general, summed up this dissent for Washington: “The idea is that it has been created by a foreign influence in order to change our forms of government.”5 Even Lafayette in Paris, heading the French chapter, wound up embroiled in conflict: “Most of the Americans here are indecently violent against our association . . . [John] Jay, [John] Adams, and all the others warmly blame the army.”6 For Washington, it was a painful contretemps: his first public act since the war had backfired, and it engulfed him in a flaming controversy. Since the group’s power derived largely from its identification with Washington, he lacked the option of staying aloof and remaining deaf to this rising storm of criticism.
Always jealous of his reputation for republican purity, Washington hated to have his integrity questioned. To defuse the controversy, he was eager to eliminate the group’s more odious features. As he told Jonathan Trumbull, Jr., “If we cannot convince the people that their fears are ill-founded, we should (at least in a degree) yield to them and not suffer that which was intended for the best of purposes to produce a bad one which will be the consequence of divisions.”7 As was his wont, he responded to criticism by soliciting disparate opinions. He turned to Jefferson, who predictably faulted the group for relying on “preeminence by birth” and also worried that some future president of the Cincinnati might “adopt a more mistaken road to glory.”8
By the time of the Philadelphia meeting, Washington was eager to respond to criticism swirling around the group. Some of it he thought maliciously exaggerated “by designing men to work their own purposes upon terrified imaginations,” but he acknowledged the genuine kernel of discontent.9 In his inaugural speech, he stated categorically that the Society of the Cincinnati must mend its ways. In notes prepared for the speech, he listed his reform agenda: “Strike out every word, sentence, and clause which has a political tendency. Discontinue the hereditary part in all its connections . . . Admit no more honorary members into the society. Reject subscriptions or donations from every person who is not a citizen of the United States.”10 Delivering this blunt message, the ordinarily circumspect Washington was fiery and outspoken. As one of those present, Winthrop Sargent, observed, “In a very long speech, and with much warmth and agitation, he expressed himself on all the parts of the institution deemed exceptionable and reiterated his determination to vacate his place in the society, if it could not be accommodated to the feeling and pleasure of the several states.”11
Washington’s performance in Philadelphia showed that he could be a forceful orator who spoke at length and with passion if he wanted to. That he often failed to do so was because he preferred to keep his own counsel and reveal only a tiny portion of his thoughts, keeping his options open. He knew his power before a crowd of people, as shown during the Newburgh uprising, and could turn on the spigot of his oratory at will. The speech also showed Washington’s awareness of his unique political standing—and his willingness to exploit it by threatening to resign if objectionable traits of the Cincinnati were not removed. His emotional comments also suggest extreme irritation at being dragged into the unwelcome glare of public controversy. The methodical Washington didn’t like to be taken by surprise. The French engineer Pierre-Charles L’Enfant had designed for the society an insignia with a bald eagle, hung from a pale blue and white ribbon. When French officers gave Washington this medal, adorned with diamonds and emeralds, he secreted it in a drawer and never wore it for fear of being branded a pseudoroyalist.
Although he agreed to serve a three-year term as president, he later said that it was “much against my inclination,” a way to salve any wounded feelings among his fellow officers. 12 His success in purging the society of its disputed features was only partial. He wanted the group to discard national meetings and limit assemblies to state chapters, which, among other things, would lower his own high-profile connection with it. Openly opposing him, delegates voted to retain the general gatherings, and several state chapters refused to accept the alterations adopted at the national meeting, leaving the hereditary feature intact. If Washington had shown political agility in tackling the group’s problems and juggling conflicting demands, he had also seen that he couldn’t determine the final outcome and was reluctant to be party to something beyond his control.
Having quieted the uproar temporarily, Washington knew that “the jealousies of the people are rather asleep than removed on this occasion.”13 Had it not been for his deep sense of solidarity with American and French officers and a respect for the group’s laudable work for widows and orphans, Washington probably would have severed his ties with the Cincinnati and proposed its abolition. The intransigence of state societies in contesting reforms only hardened his resolve to insulate himself from them. He devised a compromise whereby he remaine
d a figurehead and signed official forms, while keeping a self-protective distance, planning all the while to step down as president before the next general meeting in 1787.
A far happier association was with the Masons. Whatever conspiracy theories later circulated about the group, the brotherhood provoked no suspicions in late-eighteenth-century America, and Washington seldom missed a chance to salute their lodges. The group’s soaring language, universal optimism, and good fellowship appealed to him. When he was sent Masonic ornaments late in the war, he recast the struggle in Masonic imagery, saying that all praise was due “to the Grand Architect of the Universe, who did not see fit to suffer his superstructures and justice to be subjected to the ambition of the princes of this world.”14 In June 1784 he was inducted into the Alexandria lodge as an honorary member, which gave him dual membership there and in the Fredericksburg lodge. Later elevated to master of the Alexandria lodge, he earned the distinction of being the only Mason to hold this post while simultaneously serving as president of the United States. Where he had kept a wary attitude toward the Cincinnati, he proudly embraced Masonic rituals. When an elderly resident of Alexandria, William Ramsay, was buried in 1785, Washington noted in his diary that he had not only attended the funeral but “walked in procession as a free mason, Mr. Ramsay in his lifetime being one and now buried with the ceremonies and honors due to one.”15
