by Ron Chernow
An active guessing game arose as to who had composed the farewell address, which remained a well-kept secret for many years. In 1805 Dr. Benjamin Rush inquired of John Adams, “Did you ever hear who wrote General W.’s farewell address to the citizens of the United States? Major [Pierce] Butler says it was Mr. Jay. It is a masterly performance.”31 Jay had reviewed Hamilton’s draft and made suggestions but in no way qualified as a coauthor. Eager to boost Washington’s standing, Hamilton and other intimates kept their lips tightly sealed on the question of authorship. One day as Hamilton and his wife ambled down Broadway in New York, they encountered an old soldier hawking copies of the address. Buying a copy, Hamilton said amusedly to his wife, “That man does not know he has asked me to purchase my own work.”32
Just as Washington feared, some observers attributed his departure to his dread of a poor showing in the fall election. “He knew there was to be an opposition to him at the next election and he feared he should not come in unanimously,” John Adams remarked years later. “Besides, my popularity was growing too splendid, and the millions of addresses to me from all quarters piqued his jealousy.”33 In a still more paranoid vein, Adams surmised that Washington had retired because a malign Hamilton wielded veto power over his appointees: “And this necessity was, in my opinion, the real cause of his retirement from office. For you may depend upon it, that retirement was not voluntary.”34 Somewhat more objectively, Adams noted how spent the sixty-four-year-old Washington was after his prodigious labors: “The times were critical, the labor fatiguing, many circumstances disgusting, and he felt weary and longed for retirement.”35 This was much closer to the portrait that emerges from Washington’s own letters.
To less envious eyes, Washington’s resignation represented another milestone in republican government. Just as he had proved at the end of the war that he did not lust for power, so his departure from the presidency elevated his moral standing in the world. One encomium came from an unexpected quarter. By giving up first military and now political power, he stood out as “the greatest character of the age,” according to George III, who had belatedly learned to appreciate his erstwhile enemy. 36 Though it was not his main intention, Washington inaugurated a custom of presidents serving only two terms, a precedent honored until the time of Franklin Roosevelt. For opponents who had spent eight years harping on Washington’s supposed monarchical obsessions, his decision to step down could only have left them in a dazed state of speechless confusion.
THE MOST FLAGRANT OMISSION in Washington’s farewell statement was the subject most likely to subvert its unifying spirit: slavery. Whatever his private reservations about slavery, President Washington had acted in accordance with the wishes of southern slaveholders. In February 1793 he signed the Fugitive Slave Act, enabling masters to cross state lines to recapture runaway slaves. He remained zealous in tracking down his own fugitive slaves, although like Jefferson, he didn’t care to call attention to such activities. When a slave named Paul ran away in March 1795, Washington, while approving measures to apprehend him, advised William Pearce that “I would not have my name appear in any advertisement, or other measure, leading to it.”37 He was especially worried about his name surfacing in northern papers. Even in Philadelphia, Washington monitored the status of runaway slaves at Mount Vernon. “I see by the last week’s report that Caesar has been absent six days,” he asked Pearce in early 1796. “Is he a runaway? If so, it is probable he will escape altogether, as he can read, if not write.”38
Beyond moral scruples, Washington found slave ownership a political embarrassment. During his second term, the Aurora taunted him by declaring that, twenty years after independence, Washington still possessed “FIVE HUNDRED of the HUMAN SPECIES IN SLAVERY.”39 On another occasion it mocked him as a hypocritical emblem of liberty, arguing that it “must appear a little incongruous then that Liberty’s Apostle should be seen with chains in his hands, holding men in bondage.”40 This was a dangerous game for Bache to play, since it could easily backfire on Jefferson and Madison, two sizable slaveholders who figured as his populist champions. In later correspondence with John Adams, Benjamin Rush served up this tidbit about Washington: “Mr. Jefferson told me he once saw [Washington] throw the Aurora hastily upon the floor with a ‘damn’ of the author, who had charged him with the crime of being a slaveholder.”41 Federalist polemicists also exploited the slavery issue to excoriate Republicans and their southern base. “Oh, happy Carolina! Happy, thrice Virginia!” wrote William Cobbett. “After having spent the day in singing hymns to the Goddess of Liberty, the virtuous Democrat [i.e., Republican] gets him home to his peaceful dwelling and sleeps with his property secure beneath his roof, yea, sometimes in his very arms.”42
During their Philadelphia years, George and Martha Washington must have wondered how long their slaves imported from Mount Vernon would remain loyal. First there had been the flap over the local law that liberated slaves after six months of continuous residence. Slave masters often assumed that slaves brought north and exposed to free blacks were forever “tainted” by the experience; Washington subscribed to the view that otherwise happy, contented slaves could be “tampered with and seduced” by meddlesome northern abolitionists.43 Even though Washington favored abolition in theory, he thought that as long as slavery existed, his slaves ought to cooperate in exchange for the food and shelter he provided.
Washington permitted his household slaves a modicum of freedom to roam the city, sample its pleasures, and even patronize the theater. Household accounts for June 1792 disclose expense money doled out for “Austin, Hercules & Oney to go to the play.”44 In the spring of 1793 two of Martha’s maids were given money to attend “tumbling feats,” followed by money to view a local circus. The two slaves most favored with such treats and held in highest esteem by the Washingtons were Ona (or Oney) Judge, Martha’s maid, and Hercules, the master chef. One wonders whether their fleeting experiences of freedom in Philadelphia whetted their appetites for permanent freedom. Washington must have known that their contacts with the large community of free blacks in the capital could only strengthen their desire to throw off the yoke of slavery.
A young mulatto woman, light-skinned and freckled, Ona Judge was the daughter of Andrew Judge, an indentured servant at Mount Vernon, and a slave named Betty. She was Martha’s personal maid and widely known as her pet. Each morning Ona brushed Martha’s hair, laid out her clothing, and assisted her with household sewing. In the president’s words, Ona Judge was “handy and useful to [Martha], being perfect mistress of her needle.”45 Naive about the true feelings of her slaves, Martha assumed that, because Ona enjoyed a relatively privileged status as her personal chambermaid, she would never rebel against her bondage. In 1796 Ona, then about twenty-two, realized that the Washingtons might soon return to Mount Vernon for good, eliminating any possibility of a flight to freedom. As if the young slave would be thrilled by the news, Martha mentioned to Ona one day that she planned to bequeath her to her granddaughter Elizabeth, who was notorious for her grim moods. Far from feeling flattered, Ona felt deep terror at the prospect, later saying with disdain that “she was determined not to be her slave.”46 Since “she did not want to be a slave always,” she later recalled, “she supposed if she went back to Virginia, she would never have a chance to escape.”47
As the Washingtons got ready for a return trip to Mount Vernon in May 1796, Ona Judge set in motion her scheme to escape. While servants boxed belongings for the trip, she used the preparations as camouflage to gather her things, and as the Washingtons dined one evening, she slipped out of the executive mansion and blended into the free black community. After lying low for a month, she sailed north aboard a ship called the Nancy, staffed by a large contingent of black sailors, and eventually wound up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
When the Washingtons discovered the escape, they were convinced that Judge would have fled only if she had been cajoled by a wily seducer. They flattered themselves into thinking that, as a suppo
sedly contented slave, Judge would never have pined for freedom if some intriguing fellow had not planted the forbidden idea. They could not conceive of a slave being the agent of her own fate or running out of a simple hunger for liberty. They felt obliged to denigrate any man who helped her as an unscrupulous cad rather than someone who might have loved her and honestly wanted to assist her.
The protracted hunt for Ona Judge began when a young woman, Elizabeth Langdon, who had befriended Nelly Custis, spotted her in Portsmouth. When Langdon realized that Martha Washington was nowhere to be seen and that Judge had escaped, she asked Judge, “But why did you come away? How can Mrs. Washington do without you?” “Run away, misses,” Judge replied. “Run away!” said Langdon. “And from such an excellent place! Why, what could induce you? You had a room to yourself and only light nice work to do and every indulgence.”“Yes, I know, but I want to be free, misses; wanted to learn to read and write.”48 Ona Judge, who had stored up grievances that Martha Washington could little comprehend, afterward complained that she had “never received the least mental or moral instruction of any kind, while she remained in Washington’s family.”49
After Judge was spotted, Martha pressured her husband into wielding the powers of the federal government to recapture her. She felt miffed by Judge’s flight and could never understand why blacks felt no gratitude toward lenient masters. As she once wrote to Fanny, “The blacks are so bad in their nature that they have not the least gratitude for the kindness that may be showed to them.”50 Since the Treasury Department ran the customs service and had officers in every major port, Washington wrote confidentially to Secretary Wolcott, asking for aid. He explained that Judge’s escape had “been planned by someone who knew what he was about and had the means to defray the expense of it and to entice her off, for not the least suspicion was entertained of her going or having formed a connection with anyone who could induce her to such an act.”51 Abusing his presidential powers, Washington instructed Wolcott to have the Portsmouth customs collector kidnap Judge and send her back to Virginia: “To seize and put her onboard a vessel bound immediately to this place [Philadelphia] or to Alexandria, which I should like better, seems at first view to be the safest and least expensive [measure].”52 Perhaps contributing to Washington’s vigilance in hunting down Judge was that she was a dower slave, which meant that he would have to reimburse the Custis estate for her loss.
As with runaway slave ads, Washington struggled to confine knowledge of the situation to Virginia and keep it from carping northern abolitionists—hence his preference for whisking Judge off to Alexandria. Dreading publicity, he also convinced Martha that it would be unwise to post a fugitive slave notice. He apologized to Wolcott for the trouble he was giving him “on such a trifling occasion, but the ingratitude of the girl, who was brought up and treated more like a child than a servant (and Mrs. Washington’s desire to recover her) ought not to escape with impunity if it can be avoided.”53 That the Washingtons faulted Judge for “ingratitude” and pretended that she was like a daughter again shows the moral blindness of even comparatively enlightened slave owners. Judge’s flight belied whatever sedative fantasies the Washingtons might have had that slaves developed familial relations with their masters, transcending the indignity of bondage.
The Portsmouth customs collector, Joseph Whipple, tracked down Judge and, to lure her aboard a ship bound for Virginia, cooked up a bogus story about employing her to work for his family. Then something unaccountable happened: Whipple engaged in conversation with Judge and discovered that “she had not been decoyed away, as had been apprehended, but that a thirst for complete freedom . . . had been her only motive for absconding.”54 Remarkably, Judge said that she was prepared to return to servitude, but only if her emancipation were guaranteed at a later date. In Whipple’s words, “she expressed great affection and reverence for her master and mistress and, without hesitation, declared her willingness to return and serve with fidelity during the lives of the president and his lady if she could be freed on their decease, should she outlive them; but that she should rather suffer death than return to slavery and [be] liable to be sold or given to any other persons.”55 Perhaps doubtful that any slave master could really be trusted, Judge’s friends in Portsmouth persuaded her to rescind her offer to return to Mount Vernon.
When Washington heard about the bargaining, he dismissed such negotiations as “totally inadmissible.”56 He found himself tangled in the coils of a terrible contradiction: just as he meditated the emancipation of all his slaves, he was trying to return one of them to bondage. Abashed, he told Whipple that “however well disposed I might be to a gradual abolition, or even to an entire emancipation of that description of people (if the latter was in itself practicable at this moment), it would neither be political or just to reward unfaithfulness with a premature preference and thereby discontent beforehand the minds of all her fellow servants, who by their steady attachments are far more deserving than herself of favor.”57 In other words, Washington insisted that, as long as slavery existed, he must obey its cruel logic. He and Martha clung to the self-serving tale that Judge had “been seduced and enticed off by a Frenchman” who had roguishly sated his lust and then discarded her.58 Unwilling to compromise, Washington demanded that Judge either return voluntarily and “be forgiven by her mistress” or be put “on board a vessel bound either to Alexandria or the Federal City,” conveniently bypassing Philadelphia.59 In a telling concession, Washington instructed Whipple to forget about capturing Judge if forcibly abducting her served to “excite a mob or riot.”60 Shortly to leave office, Washington wanted no incident that might tarnish his departure, especially since he feared that Judge might be pregnant, which would only augment public sympathy for her escape. The evocation of a possible mob or riot suggests how abolitionist sentiment had spread in the New England states, so that Washington defied it at his peril.
Ona Judge never returned to slavery or the South. In late December Joseph Whipple informed Washington that she would shortly get married, making a mockery of Washington’s scenario of a cunning Frenchman who had duped and impregnated her. That January she married a “colored sailor” named John Staines, and about a year later they had a daughter, the first of three children, proving that Judge had not been pregnant at the time of her flight. Despite this news, Martha refused to let the matter drop. During the summer of 1799, when she learned that her nephew, Burwell Bassett, Jr., was traveling to Portsmouth, the news led to one last attempt to recapture Judge. While instructing Bassett to shy away from doing anything “unpleasant or troublesome,” Washington told him that if Judge could be brought back by “easy . . . and proper means . . . it would be a pleasing circumstance to your aunt.”61 Bassett located Judge, who was now a mother, and assured her that no punishment would occur if she returned. Apparently she had heard rumors that Bassett would seize her and her child by force, if necessary, and she would not be coaxed back into bondage. “I am free now and choose to remain so,” she declared, settling the matter for good.62
The other slave who shocked the Washingtons by his disappearance was Hercules, who was owned directly by the president. We recall that he had noisily protested his loyalty to Washington over the issue of the six-month slave law in Pennsylvania. Hercules oversaw a mixed staff of slaves and indentured servants who worked in a separate kitchen building, attached to the executive residence by an underground passage. Being top chef for the president carried high status, and the dandyish Hercules, who was partial to black silk waistcoats, coats with velvet collars, cocked hats, and gold-headed canes, relished his eminence around town. He also appreciated the money he made from selling kitchen leftovers, spending it on fancy clothes, watches, and shoe buckles. One Mount Vernon visitor got this report of the headstrong Hercules: “The cook who rejoiced in the name of Hercules was . . . something of a tyrant, as well as a capital cook.”63
The freedom that Hercules enjoyed in Philadelphia could only have made more oppressive the prospect o
f returning to Virginia, emboldening him to escape. Around the time that Washington left the presidency, Hercules suddenly disappeared. Although Washington made efforts to retrieve him, they were neither as systematic nor as prolonged as with Ona Judge. For one thing, he knew that Hercules had friends in the local black community who could hide him and that with his culinary skills he could easily make a living. George and Martha Washington did not seem to feel as personally betrayed by Hercules’s flight as by Judge’s, perhaps because he was an older and more independent personality who had nothing to gain by remaining a slave now that the presidency had ended.
In January 1798 Washington sent a pair of notes to Frederick Kitt, a household steward during his presidency, laying out secret plans for recapturing Hercules. As with Judge, Washington wanted to have Hercules hustled aboard a ship bound for Alexandria “with a strict charge to the master not to give him an opportunity of escaping.” 64 Washington showed implicit respect for Hercules’s shrewdness, warning Kitt that if he gets “the least hint of the design, he would elude all your vigilance.”65 Although Kitt made inquiries and verified Washington’s hunch that Hercules had indeed lingered in Philadelphia, the ex-slave was never caught and succeeded in winning his freedom. He paid a hefty price for it. He left behind his son Richmond, who had been sent back to Mount Vernon for allegedly stealing money, possibly the prelude to a joint escape with his father. He also had to say goodbye to a six-year-old daughter at Mount Vernon. When a French visitor confronted the little girl as to whether she was upset at her father’s action, she retorted, “Oh! Sir, I am very glad, because he is free now.”66
