by Ron Chernow
As it happened, George Washington, closeted in his study, was devoting considerable time to answering this most insoluble of questions. He saw, with some clairvoyance, that slavery threatened the American union to which he had so nobly consecrated his life. “I can clearly foresee,” he predicted to an English visitor, “that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union, by consolidating it in a common bond of principle.”6 Beyond moral objections to slavery, he had wearied of its immense practical difficulties. In September 1798 he regretted that his slaves were “growing more and more insolent and difficult to govern,” and he seemed to want to be free of the sheer unpleasantness of keeping so many human beings in bondage.7
Because of natural increase since 1786, the Mount Vernon slave population had soared from 216 to 317, of whom Washington owned outright 124, with 40 rented from a neighbor, Penelope Manley French. The remaining 153 dower slaves, who belonged to the Custis estate, would be inherited by her grandson after Martha died. Writing to Robert Lewis on August 17, 1799, Washington reflected on the baffling conundrum posed by the excess slaves: “To sell the overplus [of slaves] I cannot, because I am principled against this kind of traffic in the human species. To hire them out is almost as bad because . . . to disperse the families I have an aversion. What then is to be done? Something must or I shall be ruined.”8 He possessed “a thorough conviction that half the workers I keep on this estate would render me a greater net profit than I now derive from the whole.”9 That he owned fewer than half the slaves himself perhaps set the stage for the most courageous action of his career. If he emancipated his own slaves in his will, he would satisfy his conscience, set a sterling example for futurity, and still leave a viable plantation behind. In 1799 a convenient convergence of economic and moral factors enabled Washington to settle the issue that had so long gnawed at his mind.
George and Martha Washington had to perceive that their smartest slaves and those in highest standing were most likely to escape, Hercules and Ona Judge being prime recent examples. In early 1798 a slave called Caesar, in his late forties and able to read and write, ran away. Partial to black-and-white clothing, he had functioned as a self-appointed preacher among Mount Vernon’s slaves. In a runaway slave notice inserted in the newspaper, Washington offered a reward for Caesar’s arrest and attested that he had fled “without having received any correction, or threats of punishment, or, in short, without any cause whatever.”10 The escape formed part of a now-familiar pattern: seemingly docile slaves quietly bided their time, called no attention to themselves, then suddenly fled when the moment was propitious.
After Billy Lee was crippled, Washington had turned to a young slave, Christopher Sheels, as his body servant. After Washington stepped down as president, Sheels had been bitten by a rabid dog. Washington valued him so highly that he sent him back to Pennsylvania for treatment, informing the doctor there that “besides the call of humanity, I am particularly anxious for his cure, he being my own body servant.”11 When Sheels asked Washington for permission to marry a mulatto slave on another plantation, Washington blessed the match, even though it opened up fresh temptations for Sheels to escape. In September 1799 Washington discovered that Sheels indeed intended to flee with his bride aboard a ship. Although Washington must have reprimanded him, there is no evidence that he punished him. The incident surely made him question anew the wisdom of owning human beings who naturally yearned to be free, no matter how well treated. Over the previous four decades, at least forty-seven slaves belonging to George and Martha Washington had made a brave dash for freedom.12
Always a methodical, well-organized man, George Washington experienced the “greatest anxiety” about leaving his affairs in order after he died. No less than in life, he craved the world’s posthumous approval and was eager “that no reproach may attach itself to me when I have taken my departure for the land of spirits.”13 In early July 1799 he summoned up the courage, in the seclusion of his study, to draft a remarkable new will. He did not use a lawyer and laboriously wrote out the twenty-nine pages in his own handwriting, disclosing his plans to nobody. In the text, he mentioned that “no professional character has been consulted,” observed that it had taken many “leisure hours to digest” the document, and hoped it wouldn’t “appear crude and incorrect”—an odd apology for an ex-president, harking back one last time to his insufficient education.14 Everything was spelled out with painstaking precision, including an inventory that listed 51,000 acres of land.
In a comprehensive catalog of his slaves, Washington divided them by farms and jotted down their names and ages. These statistics offered dramatic proof that, without prompt remedial action, his slave population would burgeon. Of the 277 slaves he and Martha controlled, no fewer than 98 were under the age of twelve. The trickiest issue he faced was strikingly evident: 90 slaves were reported as married. Many of Washington’s slaves had married Martha’s dower slaves or else slaves at nearby plantations.
The portions of the will relating to the slaves stand out as written with special vigor. At the outset, Washington referred to Martha as “my dearly beloved wife” and gave her the use of his whole estate.15 He made clear that he did not want to deprive her of income generated by the slaves as long as she lived: “Upon the decease [of] my wife, it is my will and desire th[at] all the slaves which I hold in [my] own right shall receive their free[dom].”16 While he had “earnestly wished” to free them upon his own death, that would entail breaking up marriages between his own slaves and dower slaves, provoking “the most painful sensations, if not disagreeable consequences.”17 Of course, waiting to free the slaves he owned until Martha died only postponed the problem instead of solving it. (Martha could not free the dower slaves, who were committed to the Custis heirs.) Mindful of the young and elderly slaves who might have difficulty coping with sudden freedom, Washington made special provision that they “shall be comfortably clothed and fed by my heirs while they live.”18 At a time when black education was feared as a threat to white supremacy, Washington ordered that the young slaves, before being freed, should “ be taught to read and write and to be brought up to some useful occupation.”19 He also provided a fund to care for slaves too sick or aged to enjoy the sudden fruits of freedom. Unlike Jefferson, Washington did not wish to banish free blacks from Virginia and made no mention of colonizing them elsewhere, as if he foresaw them becoming part of a racially mixed community. Nor did he express fear of racial intermingling once his slaves were emancipated. He must have had a premonition that Martha or other family members would water down or bypass these daring instructions, so he expressly said that they should be “religiously fulfilled” by the executors.20
Singled out for special treatment was Billy Lee, who had earned an honored place in the annals of Washington’s life. Now incapacitated by his knee troubles, he worked as a shoemaker at the Mansion House farm. Washington directed that “my mulatto man William (calling himself William Lee) I give immediate freedom; or, if he should prefer it (on account of the accidents which have befallen him and which have rendered him incapable of walking or of any active employment) to remain in the situation he now is, shall be optional in him to do so. In either case, I allow him an annuity of thirty dollars during his natural life” beyond the food and clothing he already received. Washington gratefully acknowledged “his attachment to me and . . . his faithful services during the Revolutionary War.”21
By freeing his slaves, Washington accomplished something more glorious than any battlefield victory as a general or legislative act as a president. He did what no other founding father dared to do, although all proclaimed a theoretical revulsion at slavery. He brought the American experience that much closer to the ideals of the American Revolution and brought his own behavior in line with his troubled conscience. On slave plantations, the death of a master usually unleashed a mood of terror as slaves contemplated being sold to other masters or possibly severed from their families. Now Washington reversed the u
sual situation, relieving the dread and making the death of the master and mistress an occasion for general rejoicing among the slaves—at least if one set aside the thorny complexities of the intermingling through marriage of Washington’s slaves and Martha’s dower slaves.
In another visionary section of the will, Washington left money to advance the founding of a university in the District of Columbia, possibly under government auspices, where students could observe government firsthand and shed their “local attachments and state prejudices.”22 This phrase was more than a mere restatement of Washington’s nationalism: it spoke to the way his own life had transcended his parochial background. Back in 1785 Washington had been flustered and embarrassed when the state of Virginia granted him shares in the Potomac and James River companies, and he had accepted them only with the proviso that they would be dedicated to public uses. Now he pledged his fifty shares of the Potomac River Company to the new university in the capital and his hundred shares of the James River Company to Liberty Hall Academy in western Virginia, which later became Washington and Lee University. He also left twenty shares in the Bank of Alexandria for a school, associated with the Alexandria Academy, to educate orphaned and indigent children.
In a demonstration of his humility, Washington did not seek to preserve Mount Vernon as a monument to his career; rather he planned to dismantle the estate he had spent a lifetime assembling, dividing it among relatives after Martha’s death. A thoroughgoing family man, he included more than fifty relatives in his will. His nephew Bushrod Washington would receive the coveted Mansion House and surrounding four thousand acres of farm. In part, Washington wished to repay a debt to Bushrod’s father, who had managed Mount Vernon while he fought in the French and Indian War. Washington may also have believed that Bushrod, as a Supreme Court justice, needed a suitably high-toned place for entertaining dignitaries. He also demonstrated his faith in his nephew by leaving him a prized possession: the civil and military papers that he had tended with such assiduous care. Washington remarked that, once he realized he would not have children of his own, he had decided to consider Martha’s grandchildren “as I do my own relations and to act a friendly part by them.”23 This was especially true of Nelly and Washy. That fall Lawrence and Nelly Lewis had already received the two-thousand-acre farm at Dogue Run, while George Washington Parke Custis got twelve hundred acres in Alexandria and an entire square that Washington owned in the new capital. The two orphaned sons of George Augustine Washington split another two-thousand-acre farm.
A story, likely apocryphal, is told that one morning that September Washington awoke from a disturbing dream, which he narrated to Martha. An angel had appeared to him in a sudden burst of light and stood whispering in Martha’s ear. Martha then became pale and began to fade from sight altogether, leaving Washington feeling alone and desolate. According to lore, he interpreted this dream as a premonition of his own death and was oppressed for days by its lingering memory. Whatever the veracity of this story, it expressed a truth about the mortality-laden mood of the Washington household that fall. For nearly two months in September and October Martha tried to shake a fever that produced “uneasy and restless symptoms” and resulted in at least one midnight summons to Dr. Craik.24 No less stoical than her husband and sharing his philosophy of minimal medication, she at first refused to take any remedy that might moderate the fever, but she recovered by late October.
On September 20, while she was sick, Washington absorbed the additional bad news that the last of his siblings, his younger brother Charles, had died. “I was the first, and am now the last, of my father’s children by the second marriage who remain,” he remarked. “When I shall be called upon to follow them is known only to the giver of life.”25 In late November Martha’s younger sister Elizabeth Henley also died, meaning that she had outlived all seven of her siblings. George and Martha Washington must have felt that their remaining time was brief and that their accomplishments already belonged to history.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
Homecoming
AFTER LEAVING THE PRESIDENCY, Washington had sworn a whimsical pledge to friends that he would not “quit the theater of this world before the year 1800,” and it looked as if he might deliver on his half-humorous resolve to finish out the century.1 When Elizabeth Carrington socialized with the Washingtons that fall, she found them in good spirits, with Martha looking “venerable, kind and plain.”2 Though increasingly deaf, the ex-president was in a convivial mood and happy to relive the glories of yesteryear, staying up past midnight to spin out wartime narratives. On December 9 he bade nephew Howell Lewis a memorable farewell at the door of Mount Vernon. “It was a bright, frosty morning,” Howell recalled, “and . . . the clear, healthy flush of [Washington’s] cheek and his sprightly manner brought the remark . . . that we had never seen the General look so well.”3
Resigned to the close of his political career, Washington remarked in November that, with the ship of state now afloat, he was content to be “a passenger only” and would “trust to the mariners, whose duty it is to watch, to steer it into a safe port.”4 On December 12, he composed a last letter to Hamilton, applauding his plan for an American military academy. In a fitting finale to a patriotic life, he endorsed the concept wholeheartedly: “The establishment of an institution of this kind . . . has ever been considered by me as an object of primary importance to this country.”5 This was the last political letter that flowed from his prolific pen.
From his earliest days, Washington had led an outdoors life, trusting to his body’s recuperative powers and suffering poor health early in his presidency when he became too sedentary. Perhaps, as one relative later reflected, he had relied too much on his health and “exposed himself without common caution to the heat in summer and cold in winter.”6 In late November, renewing his old surveying skills, he spent three days running property lines in northern Fairfax County. This heedless behavior—if such it was—might have proved his undoing. On the other hand, had he not spent his whole life defying fate, bullets, the British Empire, and the elements?
On Thursday, December 12, Washington brushed aside inclement weather to make a full five-hour tour of his farms on horseback. His diary entry told of the dreadful weather: “About 1 o’clock, it began to snow—soon after to hail and then turned to a settled, cold rain.”7 When he arrived home for the midday meal, his nape was slick with rain, his hair matted with snow. With customary courtesy, the sodden host did not wish to keep his guests waiting and sat down to eat without changing his damp clothes. The next day the snow fell even harder, piling up three inches deep on the ground. Despite a sore throat, Washington trudged down the hill toward the Potomac in the late afternoon light. Still determined to perfect Mount Vernon, he planned a gravel walk and fishpond by the river and now marked out trees that he wanted cut down to improve the landscape. In a final letter to James Anderson, he carped about the filthy cattle stalls at one farm: “Such a pen as I saw yesterday at Union Farm would, if the cattle were kept in it one week, destroy the whole of them.”8 It was apt that, in this valedictory letter, Washington came across as the same old exacting, hypercritical boss.
Although he experienced hoarseness and chest congestion that evening, Washington’s mood was cheerful. He smarted at old political wounds from onetime allies. When he read aloud a newspaper story that James Madison had nominated James Monroe for Virginia governor, he allowed himself some acerbic comments. He spurned Lear’s advice to take medicine. “You know I never take anything for a cold,” he protested. “Let it go as it came.”9 Instead, he sat up late in his library before mounting the steps to his bedroom. Martha expressed dismay that he had not come upstairs earlier, but he said that he had done so as soon as he had finished his business. In the middle of the night, he awoke with a raw, inflamed throat. When he shook Martha awake, she grew alarmed by his labored breathing and wanted to fetch a servant, but he feared she might catch a chill on this cold night. Once again relying on his body’s restorative po
wers, he had Martha wait until daybreak to call for help. When a slave named Caroline kindled a fire in the early morning, Martha asked her to scout out Tobias Lear, who found Washington breathing with difficulty and scarcely able “to utter a word intelligibly.”10 Christopher Sheels propped up his master in a chair by the fire as Lear sent a swift slave to Alexandria for Dr. Craik, the Scottish physician who had served Washington with such fervent devotion since the French and Indian War. Meanwhile, to soothe his flaming throat, Washington consumed a syrupy blend of molasses, vinegar, and butter, though he nearly choked when he tried to swallow it.
Washington’s last day was spent in a lovely but simple setting, a plain bedroom prettily decorated with a table, armchair, and dressing table. As he faced death, Washington’s indomitable poise was remarkable. With preternatural self-control, he had an overseer named George Rawlins bleed him before Dr. Craik arrived. When Rawlins blanched, Washington gently but firmly pressed him. “Don’t be afraid,” he said, and once Rawlins had sliced into the skin, making the blood run freely, he added, “The orifice is not large enough.”11 Martha showed better medical judgment and pleaded for a halt to the bleeding, but Washington urged Rawlins on, saying “More, more!” until nearly a pint of blood had been drained.12 A piece of moist flannel was wrapped around his throat while his feet were soaked in warm water.
