A French traveler in 1782 observed that Virginians “grieved at having slaves, and are constantly talking about abolishing slavery and of seeking other means of exploiting their lands.” Such statements came from George Mason, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Edmund Randolph. And, eventually, Washington. The Virginia Assembly would take a first step on that road in 1782, when it legalized the manumission (or freeing) of the enslaved by their owners.4
When he assumed command of the American forces around Boston in 1775, Washington halted the enlistment of Black soldiers. He reversed himself after Lord Dunmore in Virginia offered freedom to slaves and indentured servants who joined the British forces. In the Continental Army, Black soldiers fought alongside whites through the war.
More than 700 African American soldiers endured the winter at Valley Forge. Those men and other Black soldiers changed Washington. He felt deeply their suffering and sacrifices. He could not justify treating them differently. Another influence awakening Washington to the talents of the enslaved came from the emancipated poet Phillis Wheatley, who published a popular poem in 1775 celebrating him.5
While at Valley Forge, Washington accepted a Rhode Island proposal to raise a battalion of African American soldiers. Any slave entering the unit would be freed if he served for the duration of the war. A French officer praised that regiment as “the most neatly dressed, the best under arms, and the most precise in its maneuvers.” Washington later ordered that Black and white Rhode Islanders serve in an integrated unit, yet would not endorse a plan to raise a battalion of African Americans in South Carolina and Georgia, which was championed by his former aide John Laurens (son of Henry Laurens, a major slaveholder and president of Congress). Washington feared that the venture would spur the British to create similar units while fomenting unrest among the enslaved in the South. Roughly 5,000 African Americans served in the Continental Army through the long war.6
During that time, Washington began to show regret over his slave owning, though his statements and actions about slavery would always be inconsistent. In 1778, his farm manager (his cousin Lund) acknowledged that Washington had barred the sale of any enslaved person against his or her wishes. A few months later, Washington wrote to Lund that he would gladly acquire land close to Mount Vernon if the seller would accept payment in Negroes “of whom I every day long more and more to get clear of.” Six months later, he repeated to Lund his scruples against sales of enslaved people that would break up families.7
After the war, Lafayette begged Washington to free his Negroes, proposing that they jointly create a plantation to be cultivated by freed slaves, which would demonstrate that the enslaved could behave responsibly. Washington declined, though he applauded Lafayette for establishing freed slaves on land in French Guiana. The enslaved should be freed gradually, Washington insisted, “by legislative authority.” Pennsylvania and other Northern states were following that course.8
Washington’s path on slavery continued to veer between principle and self-interest. In 1786, Washington refused to purchase a group of enslaved people, stating he would not “hurt the feelings of those unhappy people by a separation of man and wife, or of families.” But then he asked whether those slaves “could be separated without much uneasiness.” He ultimately agreed to accept six enslaved people in the transaction so long as they were young, healthy males. Writing to another Virginian, he insisted that he wanted no more slaves, but was willing to purchase a bricklayer if the price was fair and no family would be fractured as a result. He wrote eight years later that were he not principled against selling slaves, he would prefer to be rid of them. He declined other transactions because he did not want to acquire more enslaved people, though he accepted a slave left to him by his mother’s will.9
Washington presented himself as supporting abolition, though his commitment was tepid, conditional, and private. When Quakers sued a slaveholder to enforce a Pennsylvania statute that granted freedom to slaves who lived more than six months in that state, Washington complained that the law was unfair to slaveholders. He quickly added, however, that “there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan for the abolition of it [slavery].” But, he continued, only the legislature could adopt such a plan. He assured a fellow slave owner that he would support laws to abolish slavery “by slow, sure, and imperceptible degrees.” A skeptic might point out that “imperceptible” abolition would be no abolition at all.10
In 1785, two Methodist divines sought Washington’s support for a petition urging Virginia to adopt gradual emancipation. Washington was evasive, and the petitioners record him saying
he was of our sentiments, and had signified his thoughts on the subject to most of the great men of the state; that he did not see it proper to sign the petition; but if the Assembly took it into consideration, would signify his sentiments to the Assembly by letter.
Washington sent no such letter.11
His public silence likely flowed from the calculation that publicly embracing abolitionism would do no good for the world and some harm to himself. Abolitionists were a small minority. Their views smacked of religious zealotry to many Virginians, who would not welcome them in their homes. Washington’s family never voiced anti-slavery sentiments—not his siblings, nor his in-laws, nor his wife. Moreover, Southern states were so enmeshed in the slave system that even gradual abolition terrified many white Southerners. Indeed, a fundamental change in that system would have been costly for Washington, who had a massive investment in his enslaved workers. To a man with constant anxiety about money and a gift for silence, public silence on slavery was a natural course.
The next years confirmed the futility of abolition efforts in the South. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Georgians and South Carolinians furiously opposed restrictions on slave imports, vowing to abandon the union if their views were not accommodated. When anti-slavery petitions came to the floor of the First Congress, the response from Deep South legislators was just as vehement and largely successful.12
Washington’s convoluted engagement with slavery came to the fore in 1791, when he learned that the slaves brought from Mount Vernon to staff his Philadelphia residence could claim their freedom after living in Pennsylvania for six months. Despite his expressed preference for emancipation by legislative act, he directed his secretary, Tobias Lear, to evade the Pennsylvania legislation by sending out of state any of the enslaved who might soon qualify for freedom. He feared, he explained, that “the idea of freedom might be too great a temptation for them to resist.” He added that the moves should be “accomplished under pretext that may deceive both them and the public.”13
Lear, a New Hampshire native who was as loyal an employee as Washington ever had, disliked the subterfuge, telling Washington that he had no wish to prolong “the slavery of a human being.” Perhaps reflecting other statements Washington had made to him, Lear added that he had “the fullest confidence that [the slaves] will at some future period be liberated.”14
Perhaps the truest passage Washington ever wrote about slavery came in 1794: “I do not like to think, much less talk about it.” Some of his tangled thinking about slavery shows in the views of his confidant, David Stuart, who had married Jack Custis’s widow. To a European visitor, Stuart explained that slaveholders felt trapped. “No one knows better than the Virginians the cruelty, inconvenience, and the little advantage of having blacks [as slaves],” Stuart said. They were expensive, they would not work without whipping, and overseers were high-priced and larcenous. But freeing the slaves, Stuart continued, would condemn them to life “as an inferior class which will never mix in the society of whites”—a condition that he evidently thought would be worse than bondage.15
However thorny the issue, and however much he disliked thinking about it, Washington could not avoid slavery. It surrounded him, in all its ugliness and horror. In the last several years of his life, he tried to conf
ront it, working on a plan to end his slave ownership, to cause only modest damage to his financial situation, and to help emancipated slaves succeed in an irredeemably racist society. The seeds of this effort may be found in Washington’s remarks in 1788 to his longtime aide David Humphreys, referring to his ownership of slaves as “the only unavoidable subject of regret.” He then expressed the goals of making his adult slaves, when freed, “as easy and comfortable . . . as their actual state of ignorance and improvidence would admit,” while “prepar[ing] the rising generation for a different destiny.”16
* * *
Washington’s lands contained two different groups of slaves. He could do as he wished with the slaves he owned outright, but the majority of Mount Vernon slaves were Custis or “dower” slaves, owned by the estate of Martha’s first husband. Under Virginia law, Martha (and Washington as her husband) held a dower interest in these slaves, but her three granddaughters and grandson had full rights to them after Martha’s death. George and Martha had a legal duty to protect the value of those slaves for the grandchildren’s benefit. Consequently, Washington could free the dower slaves only if he purchased them first, at fair prices, from the Custis estate. Addressing the dower slaves was important because after thirty years at Mount Vernon, many of them and Washington’s people had intermarried. Freeing only his own slaves would divide those intermarried families. He lacked the money, however, to buy the dower slaves.
He did nonetheless own land: many thousands of unimproved acres in the west, a sprinkling of parcels around Northern Virginia, and about 8,000 acres at Mount Vernon, divided into five farms. If he could sell or lease enough of those lands, he might generate the funds to liberate all the enslaved people and still live with Martha in their accustomed manner.
In late 1793, Washington wrote to Arthur Young, an agricultural expert in England, about leasing out four of his five Mount Vernon farms, retaining only the one closest to the mansion house for his amusement. He offered a glowing description of the properties, and mentioned in passing that he expected to “remove my Negroes.”17
After receiving a bland reply from Young, Washington worried that his first letter had not been sufficiently explicit. He did not want new tenants to assume responsibility for his slaves, he explained in a second letter, but “had something better in view for them.” Each new tenant could hire the slaves “as he would do any other laborers.” That is, the enslaved people would be free, as Washington made clear to an intimate at the same time. The “most powerful” motive behind the plan, he explained, was “to liberate a certain species of property which I possess, very repugnantly to my own feelings.”18
By early 1796, Washington went public with his search for purchasers for western land and for tenants for Mount Vernon, where he was now willing to subdivide the farms into individual fields. His 4,000-word advertisement described the livestock, equipment, and other items included in the leases, but never mentioned enslaved workers. A separate list of lease terms clarified that Washington did not wish the lands to be worked by slaves, but that commitment was wobbly: “Although the admission of slaves with the tenants will not be absolutely prohibited; it would, nevertheless, be a pleasing circumstance to exclude them.” The ad circulated in Britain, in western newspapers, and as a handbill.19
When Washington confided his plan to David Stuart, he wrote that liberating the slaves was more important than making a profit, but the lease revenue was critical. It had to be sufficient to pay the grandchildren for the slaves, over time, and also to support those enslaved people who were too young or too old to work. To gauge those expenses, he directed his farm manager to prepare a list of all the enslaved, noting their ages. Because of the political controversy his plan might ignite, Washington asked Stuart not to disclose it until Washington had responses to his advertisement.20
Washington also revealed the plan to his farm manager and his secretary, Tobias Lear, stressing that “One great object . . . is to separate the Negros from the land” while preserving for himself “tranquility with a certain income.” Yet he sometimes waffled on emancipation. If potential tenants proposed to lease some of Mount Vernon’s slaves along with the farms, he would consider that possibility. The plan, it seems, was not etched in stone.21
Washington was not the only Virginian searching for a road out of slaveholding. His godson, Ferdinando Fairfax, published a short proposal for Congress to establish a colony in Africa for freed slaves. The idea of shipping the enslaved “back to Africa” appealed to many Southerners who could not imagine a multiracial society, and would lead to the formation of the American Colonization Society after Washington’s death. Washington, however, never indulged the fantasy of mass relocation that lay at the heart of the colonization movement. He expected emancipated slaves to stay near their homes, and planned accordingly.
A complex approach came from St. George Tucker, a law professor at the College of William & Mary. Tucker proposed the emancipation of every enslaved female when she reached age twenty-eight, with the gradual emancipation of her descendants. Afraid that former slaves, unfamiliar with freedom, would become “hordes of vagabonds, robbers, and murderers,” Tucker proposed to deny them civil rights and offer them incentives to move west; they could be free, but they should be gone.22
Some Virginians already were freeing their human property. Between 1780 and 1790, the number of free Blacks in the state more than quadrupled, to 13,000. Washington’s cousin Lund asked his wife to free their slaves after he died; she did. Robert Carter III manumitted more than 500 slaves. By 1800, the number of free Blacks in Virginia reached 20,000. But nothing like that happened at Mount Vernon. No tenants leased Washington’s farms, and no viable purchasers bid for his western lands.23
Washington felt trapped. Unable to exit from slaveholding on satisfactory terms, he remained responsible for managing more than 300 enslaved people at Mount Vernon, in a region where people in bondage were the principal source of labor. As a slave master, he felt the need to compel work that had to be done. Despite his insistence that “I am principled against this kind of traffic in the human species,” he approved the sale of one slave and accepted slaves as security for a loan he extended to a relative.24
He sought to recover highly valued slaves who escaped: Martha’s maid Ona Judge fled from the president’s residence in Philadelphia, and his chef, Hercules, disappeared from Mount Vernon. Washington advertised for their return and employed agents to lure them back, to no avail. To replace Hercules, he was willing to break his vow never to purchase another slave. In September 1799, he discovered that his personal valet, Christopher Sheels, also was planning escape, though that plan was thwarted.25
The situation wore on him. While still president, he had predicted that slaves would become “a very troublesome species of property.” When a nephew reported a runaway slave, Washington’s response was bleak:
these elopements will be MUCH MORE, before they are LESS frequent; . . . I wish from my soul that the Legislature of this state could see the policy of a gradual abolition of slavery; it would prevent much future mischief.
The enslaved people, he wrote to a friend, “are growing more and more insolent and difficult to govern.”26
So long as Washington mostly refused to sell slaves, his slave “family” would continue to outgrow Mount Vernon’s ability to support them. He considered moving what he called the “overplus” to other lands, but that would break up slave families. In summer 1799, he offered to return to a neighbor leased lands and the slaves who worked them.27
In that year, he made his gloomiest prediction yet. Slavery, he feared, might be fatal for the union: “I can clearly foresee that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union, by consolidating it in a common bond of principle.” What, he was asking himself, could he do about that? Demanding immediate abolition, he was convinced, would destroy the nation. But a gradual approach, for the South or f
or Mount Vernon, had proved impossible.28
Washington consulted few people about ending his involvement with slavery—the circle seems to have included David Stuart and Tobias Lear and his farm manager. Occasional remarks recorded from Martha about enslaved people were unsympathetic. “The blacks are so bad in their nature,” she wrote to a niece, “that they have not the least gratitude for the kindness that may be showed to them.” In seeking a new housekeeper, she specified the need for someone sober and attentive, which was especially important “among blacks—many of whom will impose when they can do it.” Washington’s aggressive pursuit of the runaways Ona Judge and Hercules is sometimes attributed to Martha’s anger over their departure.29
In June 1799, Washington asked his farm manager to prepare an updated census of the enslaved people at Mount Vernon.30 Armed with this roster, Washington took a firm step toward granting freedom to those within his power. For those people, it turned out, he took that step just in time.
Chapter 53
Farewell Forever
Washington’s final illness struck in mid-December 1799. It lasted barely two days. Grippingly recounted by Tobias Lear, it began with a horseback tour of Mount Vernon’s farms on December 12, a nasty day of hail, rain, and snow. Washington sat down to dinner without drying off, wrote a letter to Hamilton after the meal, and noted in his diary a “large circle around the moon.” He woke the next morning with a sore throat.
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