George Washington (John Trumbull, 1780), with William Lee, Washington's enslaved personal servant
George Washington was a Founding Father of the United States
who owned slaves and became uneasy with the institution of slavery, but
only provided for the emancipation of his slaves after his death. Slavery was ingrained in the economic and social fabric of colonial Virginia,
and Washington inherited his first ten slaves at the age of eleven on
the death of his father in 1743. In adulthood his personal slaveholding
grew through inheritance, purchase and natural increase. In 1759, he
gained control of dower slaves belonging to the Custis estate on his marriage to Martha Dandridge Custis. Washington's early attitudes to slavery reflected the prevailing Virginia planter
views of the day and he demonstrated no moral qualms about the
institution. He became skeptical about the economic efficacy of slavery
before the American Revolutionary War. Although he expressed support in private for the abolition of slavery
by a gradual legislative process after the war, Washington remained
dependent on slave labor. By the time of his death in 1799 there were
317 slaves at his Mount Vernon estate, 124 owned by Washington and the remainder managed by him as his own property but belonging to other people.
Washington was a demanding master. He provided his slaves with
basic food, clothing and accommodation comparable to general practice at
the time but not always adequate, and with medical care. In return, he
expected them to work diligently from sunrise to sunset over the six-day
working week that was standard at the time. Some three-quarters of his
slaves labored in the fields, while the remainder worked at the main
residence as domestic servants and artisans. They supplemented their
diet by hunting, trapping, and growing vegetables in their free time,
and bought extra rations, clothing and housewares with income from the
sale of game and produce. They built their own community around marriage
and family, though because Washington allocated slaves to farms
according to the demands of the business without regard for their
relationships, many husbands lived separately from their wives and
children. Washington used both reward and punishment to encourage and
discipline his slaves, but was constantly disappointed when they failed
to meet his exacting standards. They resisted enslavement by various
means, including theft to supplement food and clothing and as another
source of income, by feigning illness, and by running away.
Washington's first doubts about slavery were entirely economic,
prompted by his transition from tobacco to grain crops in the 1760s
which left him with a costly surplus of slaves. As commander-in-chief of
the Continental Army
in 1775, he initially refused to accept African-Americans, free or
slave, into the ranks, but reversed this position due to the demands of
war. The first indication of moral doubt appeared during efforts to sell
some of his slaves in 1778, when Washington expressed distaste for
selling them at a public venue and his desire that slave families not be
split up as a result of the sale. His public words and deeds at the end
of the American Revolutionary War in 1783 showed no antislavery
sentiments. Politically, Washington was concerned that such a divisive
issue as slavery
should not threaten national unity, and he never spoke publicly about
the institution. Privately, Washington considered freeing all the slaves
he controlled in the mid-1790s, but could not realize this because of
his economic dependence on them and the refusal of his family to
cooperate. His will provided for the emancipation of his slaves, the
only slave-owning Founding Father to do so. Because many of his slaves
were married to Martha's dower slaves, whom he could not legally free,
Washington stipulated that, with the exception of his valet William Lee
who was freed immediately, his slaves be emancipated on the death of
Martha. She freed them in 1801, a year before her own death, but her
dower slaves were passed to her grandchildren and remained in bondage.
Background
_-_The_First_Negro_Slaves_Brought_to_Virginia.png)
First slaves arriving in Virginia
Slavery was introduced into the English colony of Virginia when the first Africans were transported to Point Comfort
in 1619. Those who accepted Christianity became "Christian servants"
with time-limited servitude, or even freed, but this mechanism for
ending bondage was gradually shut down. In 1667, the Virginia Assembly passed a law that barred baptism as a means of conferring freedom. Africans who had been baptised before arriving in Virginia could be granted the status of indentured servant
until 1682, when another law declared them to be slaves. Whites and
people of African descent in the lowest stratum of Virginian society
shared common disadvantages and a common lifestyle, which included
intermarriage until the Assembly made such unions punishable by
banishment in 1691.
In 1671, Virginia counted 6,000 white indentured servants among
its 40,000 population but only 2,000 people of African descent, up to a
third of whom in some counties were free. Towards the end of the 17th
century, English policy shifted in favor of retaining cheap labor rather
than shipping it to the colonies, and the supply of indentured servants
in Virginia began to dry up; by 1715, annual immigration was in the
hundreds, compared with 1,500–2,000 in the 1680s. As tobacco planters
put more land under cultivation, they made up the shortfall in labor
with increasing numbers of slaves. The institution was rooted in race
with the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705,
and from around 1710 the growth in the slave population was fueled by
natural increase. Between 1700 and 1750 the number of slaves in the
colony increased from 13,000 to 105,000, nearly eighty percent of them
born in Virginia.
In Washington's lifetime, slavery was deeply ingrained in the economic
and social fabric of Virginia, where some forty percent of the
population and virtually all African Americans were enslaved.
George Washington was born in 1732, the first child of his father Augustine's
second marriage. Augustine was a tobacco planter with some 10,000 acres
(4,000 ha) of land and 50 slaves. On his death in 1743, he left his
2,500-acre (1,000 ha) Little Hunting Creek to George's older
half-brother Lawrence, who renamed it Mount Vernon. Washington inherited the 260-acre (110 ha) Ferry Farm and ten slaves. He leased Mount Vernon from Lawrence's widow two years after his brother's death in 1752 and inherited it in 1761. He was an aggressive land speculator, and by 1774 he had amassed some 32,000 acres (13,000 ha) of land in the Ohio Country on Virginia's western frontier. At his death he possessed over 80,000 acres (32,000 ha).
In 1757, he began a program of expansion at Mount Vernon that would
ultimately result in an 8,000-acre (3,200 ha) estate with five separate
farms, on which he initially grew tobacco.
.jpg)
Mount Vernon estate
Agricultural land required labor to be productive, and in the
18th-century American south that meant slave labor. Washington inherited
slaves from Lawrence, acquired more as part of the terms of leasing
Mount Vernon, and inherited slaves again on the death of Lawrence's
widow in 1761. On his marriage in 1759 to Martha Dandridge Custis, Washington gained control of eighty-four dower
slaves. They belonged to the Custis estate and were held in trust by
Martha for the Custis heirs, and although Washington had no legal title
to them, he managed them as his own property. Between 1752 and 1773, he purchased at least seventy-one slaves – men, women and children. He scaled back significantly his purchasing of slaves after the American Revolution but continued to acquire them, mostly through natural increase and occasionally in settlement of debts. In 1786, he listed 216 slaves – 122 men and women and 88 children. – making him one of the largest slaveholders in Fairfax County.
Of that total, 103 belonged to Washington, the remainder being dower
slaves. By the time of Washington's death in 1799, the slave population
at Mount Vernon had increased to 317 people, including 143 children. Of
that total, he owned 124, leased 40 and controlled 153 dower slaves.
Slavery at Mount Vernon
Washington
thought of his workers as part of an extended family with him the
father figure at its head. He displayed elements of both patriarchy and
paternalism in his attitudes to the slaves he controlled. The patriarch
in him expected absolute obedience and manifested itself in a strict,
rigorous control of the slaves and the emotional distance he maintained
from them. There are examples of genuine affection between master and slave, such as was the case with his valet William Lee, but such cases were the exception.
The paternalist in him saw his relationship with his slaves as one of
mutual obligations; he provided for them and they in return served him, a
relationship in which slaves were able to approach Washington with
their concerns and grievances. Paternal masters regarded themselves as generous and deserving of gratitude. When Martha's maid Oney Judge
escaped in 1796, Washington complained about "the ingratitude of the
girl, who was brought up and treated more like a child than a Servant."
George Washington is a
hard master, very severe, a hard husband, a hard father, a hard
governor. From his childhood he always ruled and ruled severely. He was
first brought up to govern slaves, he then governed an army, then a
nation. He thinks hard of all, is despotic in every respect, he
mistrusts every man, thinks every man a rogue and nothing but severity
will do.
Thomas Jefferson, 1799
Although Washington employed a farm manager to run the estate and an
overseer at each of the farms, he was a hands-on manager who ran his
business with a military discipline and involved himself in the minutiae
of everyday work.
During extended absences while on official business, he maintained
close control through weekly reports from the farm manager and
overseers.
He demanded from all of his workers the same meticulous eye for detail
that he exercised himself; a former slave would later recall that the
"slaves...did not quite like" Washington, primarily because "he was so
exact and so strict...if a rail, a clapboard, or a stone was permitted
to remain out of its place, he complained; sometimes in language of
severity."
In Washington's view, "lost labour is never to be regained," and he
required "every labourer (male or female) [do] as much in the 24 hours
as their strength without endangering the health, or constitution will
allow of." He had a strong work ethic and expected the same from his
workers, slave and hired.
He was constantly disappointed with slaves who did not share his
motivation and resisted his demands, leading him to regard them as
indolent and insist that his overseers supervise them closely at all
times.
In 1799, nearly three-quarters of the slaves, over half of them
female, worked in the fields. They were kept busy year round, their
tasks varying with the season. The remainder worked as domestic servants in the main residence or as artisans, such as carpenters, joiners, coopers, spinners and seamstresses. Between 1766 and 1799, seven dower slaves worked at one time or another as overseers.
Slaves were expected to work from sunrise to sunset over a six-day work
week that was standard on Virginia plantations. With two hours off for
meals, their workdays would range between seven and a half hours to
thirteen hours, depending on season. They were given three or four days
off at Christmas and a day each at Easter and Whitsunday. Domestic slaves started early, worked into the evenings and did not necessarily have Sundays and holidays free.
On special occasions when slaves were required to put in extra effort,
such as working through a holiday or bringing in the harvest, they were
paid or compensated with extra time off.
Washington instructed his overseers to treat slaves "with humanity and tenderness" when sick.
Slaves who were less able, through injury, disability or age, were
given light duties, while those too sick to work were generally, though
not always, excused work while they recovered. Washington provided them with good, sometimes costly medical care – when a slave named Cupid fell ill with pleurisy,
Washington had him taken to the main house where he could be better
cared for and personally checked on him throughout the day.
The paternal concern for the welfare of his slaves was mixed with an
economic consideration for the lost productivity arising from sickness
and death among the labor force.
Living conditions
Modern reconstruction of a slave cabin at Mount Vernon
At Mansion House Farm, most slaves were housed in a two-story frame building
known as the "Quarters for Families". This was replaced in 1792 by
brick-built accommodation wings either side of the greenhouse comprising
four rooms in total, each some 600 square feet (56 m2). The Mount Vernon Ladies' Association
have concluded these rooms were communal areas furnished with bunks
that allowed little privacy for the predominantly male occupants. Other
slaves at Mansion House Farm lived over the outbuildings where they
worked or in log cabins.
Such cabins were the standard slave accommodation at the outlying
farms, comparable to the accommodation occupied by the lower strata of
free white society across the Chesapeake area and by slaves on other Virginia plantations. They provided a single room that ranged in size from 168 square feet (15.6 m2) to 246 square feet (22.9 m2) to house a family.
The cabins were often poorly constructed, daubed with mud for draft-
and water-proofing, with dirt floors. Some cabins were built as
duplexes; some single-unit cabins were small enough to be moved on
carts.
There are few sources which shed light on living conditions in these
cabins, but one visitor in 1798 wrote, "husband and wife sleep on a mean
pallet, the children on the ground; a very bad fireplace, some utensils
for cooking, but in the middle of this poverty some cups and a teapot."
Other sources suggest the interiors were smoky, dirty and dark, with
only a shuttered opening for a window and the fireplace for illumination
at night.
Washington provided slaves with a blanket each fall at most,
which they used for their own bedding and which they were required to
use to gather leaves for livestock bedding.
Slaves at the outlying farms were issued with a basic set of clothing
each year, comparable to the clothing issued on other Virginia
plantations. Slaves slept and worked in their clothes, leaving them to
spend many months in garments that were worn, ripped and tattered.
Domestic slaves at the main residence who came into regular contact
with visitors were better clothed; butlers, waiters and body servants
were dressed in a livery
based on the three-piece suit of an 18th-century gentleman, and maids
were provided with finer quality clothing than their counterparts in the
fields.
Washington desired his slaves to be fed adequately but no more. Each slave was provided with a basic daily food ration of one US quart (0.95 l) or more of cornmeal,
up to eight ounces (230 g) of herring and occasionally some meat, a
fairly typical ration for slaves in Virginia that was adequate in terms
of the calorie requirement for a young man engaged in moderately heavy
agricultural labor but nutritionally deficient.
The basic ration was supplemented by slaves' own efforts hunting (for
which some slaves were allowed guns) and trapping game. They grew their
own vegetables in small garden plots they were permitted to maintain in
their own time, on which they also reared poultry.
Washington often tipped slaves on his visits to other estates,
and it is likely that his own slaves were similarly rewarded by visitors
to Mount Vernon. Slaves occasionally earned money through their normal
work or for particular services rendered – for example, Washington
rewarded three of his own slaves with cash for good service in 1775, a
slave received a fee for the care of a mare that was being bred in 1798
and the chef Hercules profited well by selling slops from the presidential kitchen. Slaves also earned money from their own endeavors, by selling to Washington or at the market in Alexandria food they had caught or grown and small items they had made.
They used the proceeds to purchase from Washington or the shops in
Alexandria better clothing, housewares and extra provisions such as
flour, pork, whiskey, tea, coffee and sugar.
Family and community
Interior of the reconstructed slave cabin at Mount Vernon
Although the law did not recognize slave marriages, Washington did,
and by 1799 some two-thirds of the adult slaves at Mount Vernon were
married.
To minimize time lost in getting to the workplace and thus increase
productivity, slaves were accommodated at the farm on which they worked.
Because of the unequal distribution of males and females across the
five farms, slaves often found partners on different farms, and in their
day to day lives husbands were routinely separated from their wives and
children. Only thirty-six of the ninety-six married slaves at Mount
Vernon in 1799 lived together, while thirty-eight had spouses who lived
on separate farms and twenty-two had spouses who lived on other
plantations.
The evidence suggests couples that were separated did not regularly
visit during the week, and doing so prompted complaints from Washington
that slaves were too exhausted to work after such "night walking",
leaving Saturday nights/Sundays and holidays as the main time such
families could spend together.
Despite the stress and anxiety caused by this indifference to family
stability – on one occasion an overseer wrote that the separation of
families "seems like death to them" – marriage was the foundation on
which slaves established their own community, and longevity in these
unions was not uncommon.
Large families that covered multiple generations, along with
their attendant marriages, were part of a slave community-building
process that transcended ownership. Washington's head carpenter Isaac,
for example, lived with his wife Kitty, a dower-slave milkmaid, at
Mansion House Farm. The couple had nine daughters ranging in age from
six to twenty-seven in 1799, and the marriages of four of those
daughters had extended the family to other farms within and outside the
Mount Vernon estate and produced three grandchildren. Children were born into slavery, their ownership determined by the ownership of their mothers.
The value attached to the birth of a slave child, if it was noted at
all, is indicated in the weekly report of one overseer, which stated,
"Increase 9 Lambs & 1 male child of Lynnas." New mothers received a
new blanket and three to five weeks of light duties to recover. An
infant remained with its mother at her place of work.
Older children, the majority of whom lived in single-parent households
in which the mother worked from dawn to dusk, performed small family
chores but were otherwise left to play largely unsupervised until they
reached an age when they could begin to be put to work for Washington,
usually somewhere between eleven and fourteen years old. In 1799, nearly sixty percent of the slave population was under nineteen years old and nearly thirty-five percent under nine.
There is evidence that slaves passed on their African cultural values through telling stories, among them the tales of Br'er Rabbit
which, with their origins in Africa and stories of a powerless
individual triumphing through wit and intelligence over powerful
authority, would have resonated with the slaves.
African-born slaves brought with them some of the religious rituals of
their ancestral home, and there is an undocumented tradition of voodoo
being practiced at one of the Mount Vernon farms. Although the slave condition made it impossible to adhere to the Five Pillars of Islam, some slave names betray a Muslim cultural origin. Anglicans
reached out to American-born slaves in Virginia, and some of the Mount
Vernon slaves are known to have been christened before Washington
acquired the estate. There is evidence in the historical record from
1797 that Mount Vernon slaves had contacts with Baptists, Methodists and Quakers.
The three religions advocated abolition, raising hopes of freedom among
the slaves, and the congregation of the Alexandria Baptist Church,
founded in 1803, included slaves formerly owned by Washington.
Mulattoes
In 1799 there were some twenty mulatto
(mixed race) slaves at Mount Vernon. The probability of paternal
relationships between slaves and hired white workers is indicated by
some surnames: Betty and Tom Davis, probably the children of Thomas
Davis, a white weaver at Mount Vernon in the 1760s; George Young, likely
the son of a man of the same name who was a clerk at Mount Vernon in
1774; and Judge and her sister Delphy, the daughters of Andrew Judge, an
indentured tailor at Mount Vernon in the 1770s and 1780s.
There is evidence to suggest that white overseers – working in close
proximity to slaves under the same demanding master and physically and
socially isolated from their own peer group, a situation that drove some
to drink – indulged in sexual relations with the slaves they
supervised. Some white visitors to Mount Vernon seemed to have expected slave women to provide sexual favors.
The living arrangements left some slave females alone and vulnerable,
and the Mount Vernon research historian Mary V. Thompson writes that
relationships "could have been the result of mutual attraction and
affection, very real demonstrations of power and control, or even
exercises in the manipulation of an authority figure."
Resistance
Advertisement placed in the Pennsylvania Gazette after Oney Judge absconded from the President's House in 1796
The frequent comments Washington made about "rogueries" and "old
tricks" indicate the resistance displayed by the slaves against the
system.
The most common act of resistance was theft, so common that Washington
made allowances for it as part of normal wastage. Food was stolen both
to supplement rations and to sell, and Washington believed the selling
of tools was another source of income for slaves. Because cloth and
clothing were commonly stolen, Washington required seamstresses to show
the results of their work and the leftover scraps before issuing them
with more material. Sheep were washed before shearing to prevent the
theft of wool, and storage areas were kept locked and keys left with
trusted individuals.
In 1792, Washington ordered the culling of slaves' dogs he believed
were being used in a spate of livestock theft and ruled that slaves who
kept dogs without authorization were to be "severely punished" and their
dogs hanged.
Another means by which slaves resisted, one that was virtually
impossible to prove, was feigning illness. Over the years Washington
became increasingly skeptical about absenteeism due to sickness among
his slaves and concerned about the diligence or ability of his overseers
in recognizing genuine cases. Between 1792 and 1794, while Washington
was away from Mount Vernon as President, the number of days lost to
sickness increased tenfold compared to 1786, when he was resident at
Mount Vernon and able to control the situation personally. In one case,
Washington suspected a slave of frequently avoiding work over a period
of decades through acts of deliberate self harm.
Slaves asserted some independence and frustrated Washington by the pace and quality of their work. In 1760, Washington noted that four of his carpenters quadrupled their output of timber under his personal supervision.
Thirty-five years later, he described his carpenters as an "idle...set
of rascals" who would take a month or more to complete at Mount Vernon
work that was being done in two or three days in Philadelphia.
The output of seamstresses dropped off when Martha was away, and
spinners found they could slacken by playing the overseers off against
her.
Tools were regularly lost or damaged, thus stopping work, and
Washington despaired of employing innovations that might improve
efficiency because he believed the slaves were too clumsy to operate the
new machinery involved.
The most emphatic act of resistance was to run away, and between
1760 and 1799 at least forty-seven slaves under Washington's control did
so. Seventeen of these, fourteen men and three women, escaped to a British warship that anchored in the Potomac River near Mount Vernon in 1781.
In general, the best chance of success lay with second- or
third-generation African-American slaves who had good English, possessed
skills that would allow them to support themselves as free people and
were in close enough contact with their masters to receive special
privileges. Thus it was that Judge, an especially talented seamstress,
and Hercules escaped in 1796 and 1797 respectively and eluded recapture.
Washington took seriously the recapture of fugitives, and in three
cases an escaped slave was sold off in the West Indies after recapture,
effectively a death sentence in the severe conditions slaves had to
endure there.
Control
Slavery was a system
in which enslaved people lived in fear; fear of being sold, fear of
being separated from their families or their children or their parents,
fear of not being in control of their bodies or their lives, fear of
never knowing freedom. No matter what their clothing was like, no matter
what food they ate, no matter what their quarters looked like, enslaved
people lived with that fear. And that was the psychological violence of
slavery. That's how slave owners maintained control over enslaved
people.
Jessie MacLeodAssociate Curator
George Washington's Mount Vernon
Washington used both reward and punishment to encourage discipline and productivity in his slaves.
In one case, he suggested "admonition and advice" would be more
effective than "further correction", and he occasionally appealed to a
slave's sense of pride to encourage better performance. Rewards in the
form of better blankets and clothing fabric were given to the "most
deserving", and there are examples of cash payments being awarded for
good behavior.
He opposed the use of the lash in principle, but saw the practice as a
necessary evil and sanctioned its occasional use, generally as a last
resort, on both male and female slaves if they did not, in his words,
"do their duty by fair means."
There are accounts of carpenters being whipped in 1758 when the
overseer "could see a fault", of a slave called Jemmy being whipped for
stealing corn and escaping in 1773 and of a seamstress called Charlotte
being whipped in 1793 by an overseer "determined to lower Spirit or skin
her Back" for impudence and refusing to work.
Washington regarded the "passion" with which one of his overseers
administered floggings to be counter-productive, and Charlotte's
protest that she had not been whipped in fourteen years indicates the
frequency with which physical punishment was used.
Whippings were administered by overseers after review, a system
Washington required to ensure slaves were spared capricious and extreme
punishment. Washington did not himself flog slaves, but he did on
occasion lash out in a flash of temper with verbal abuse and physical
violence when they failed to perform as he expected.
Contemporaries generally described Washington as having a calm
demeanor, but there are several reports from those who knew him
privately that talk of his temper. One wrote that "in private and
particularly with his servants, its violence sometimes broke out."
Another reported that Washington's servants "seemed to watch his eye and
to anticipate his every wish; hence a look was equivalent to a
command."
Threats of demotion to fieldwork, corporal punishment and being shipped
to the West Indies were part of the system by which he controlled his
slaves.
Evolution of Washington's attitudes
Life of George Washington: The Farmer by Junius Brutus Stearns (1851)
Washington's early views on slavery were no different from any Virginia planter of the time. He demonstrated no moral qualms about the institution and referred to his slaves as "a Species of Property."
The economics of slavery prompted the first doubts in Washington about
the institution, marking the beginning of a slow evolution in his
attitude towards it. By 1766, he had transitioned his business from the
labor-intensive planting of tobacco to the less demanding farming of
grain crops. His slaves were employed on a greater variety of tasks that
needed more skills than tobacco planting required of them; as well as
the cultivation of grains and vegetables, they were employed in cattle
herding, spinning, weaving and carpentry. The transition left Washington
with a surplus of slaves and revealed to him the inefficiencies of the
slave labor system.
There is little evidence that Washington seriously questioned the ethics of slavery before the Revolution.
In the 1760s he often participated in tavern lotteries, events in which
defaulters' debts were settled by raffling off their assets to a
high-spirited crowd.
In 1769, Washington co-managed one such lottery in which fifty-five
slaves were sold, among them six families and five females with
children. The more valuable married males were raffled together with
their wives and children; less valuable slaves were separated from their
families into different lots. Robin and Bella, for example, were
raffled together as husband and wife while their children,
twelve-year-old Sukey and seven-year-old Betty, were listed in a
separate lot. Only chance dictated whether the family would remain
together, and with 1,840 tickets on sale the odds were not good.
The historian Henry Wiencek
concludes that the repugnance Washington felt at this cruelty in which
he had participated prompted his decision not to break up slave families
by sale or purchase, and marks the beginning of a transformation in
Washington's thinking about the morality of slavery.
Wiencek writes that in 1775 Washington took more slaves than he needed
rather than break up the family of a slave he had agreed to accept in
payment of a debt. The historians Philip D. Morgan and Peter Henriques
are skeptical of Wiencek's conclusion and believe there is no evidence
of any change in Washington's moral thinking at this stage. Morgan
writes that in 1772, Washington was "all business" and "might have been
buying livestock" in purchasing more slaves who were to be, in
Washington's words, "strait Limb'd, & in every respect strong &
likely, with good Teeth & good Countenance." Morgan gives a
different account of the 1775 purchase, writing that Washington resold
the slave because of the slave's resistance to being separated from
family and that the decision to do so was "no more than the conventional
piety of large Virginia planters who usually said they did not want to
break up slave families – and often did it anyway."
American Revolution
Washington's taxable property in April 1788: 121 slaves, 98 horses, 4 mules and a chariot
From the late 1760s, Washington became increasingly radicalized
against the North American colonies' subservient status within the British Empire. In 1774 he was a key participant in the adoption of the Fairfax Resolves which, alongside the assertion of colonial rights, condemned the transatlantic slave trade on moral grounds. He began to express the growing rift with Great Britain
in terms of slavery, stating in the summer of 1774 that the British
authorities were "endeavouring by every piece of Art & despotism to
fix the Shackles of Slavry [sic]" upon the colonies. Two years later, on taking command of the Continental Army at Cambridge at the start of the American Revolutionary War,
he wrote in orders to his troops that "it is a noble Cause we are
engaged in, it is the Cause of virtue and mankind...freedom or Slavery
must be the result of our conduct."
The hypocrisy inherent in slave owners characterizing a war of
independence as a struggle for their own freedom from slavery was not
lost on the British writer Samuel Johnson, who asked, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?"
Washington shared the common southern concern about arming
African-Americans or slaves and initially refused to accept either into
the ranks of the Continental Army. He reversed his position on the
recruitment of free African-Americans when the royal governor of
Virginia, Lord Dunmore, issued a proclamation
in November 1775 offering freedom to rebel-owned slaves who enlisted in
the British forces. Three years later and facing acute manpower
shortages, Washington approved a Rhode Island initiative to raise a
battalion of African Americans.
Washington gave a cautious response to a 1779 proposal from his young aide John Laurens
for the recruitment of 3,000 South Carolinian slaves who would be
rewarded with emancipation. He was concerned that such a move would
prompt the British to do the same, leading to an arms race in which the
Americans would be at a disadvantage, and that it would promote
discontent among those who remained enslaved.
During the war, some 5,000 African-Americans served in a Continental
Army that was more integrated than any American force before the Vietnam War,
and another 1,000 served on American warships. They represented less
than three percent of all American forces mobilized, though in 1778 they
provided between six and thirteen percent of the Continental Army.
The first indication of a shift in Washington's thinking on
slavery appears during the war, in correspondence of 1778 and 1779 with Lund Washington, who managed Mount Vernon in Washington's absence.
In the exchange of letters, a conflicted Washington expressed a desire
"to get quit of Negroes", but made clear his reluctance to sell them at a
public venue and his wish that "husband and wife, and Parents and
children are not separated from each other."
His determination not to separate families became a major complication
in his deliberations on the sale, purchase and, in due course,
emancipation of his own slaves.
His restrictions put Lund in a difficult position with two female
slaves he had already all but sold in 1778, and Lund's irritation was
evident in his request to Washington for clear instructions.
Despite Washington's reluctance to break up families, there is little
evidence that moral considerations played any part in his thinking at
this stage. He sought to liberate himself from an economically unviable
system, not to liberate his slaves. They were still a property from
which he expected to profit. During a period of severe wartime
depreciation, the question was not whether to sell his slaves, but when,
where and how best to sell them. Lund sold nine slaves, including the
two females, in January 1779.
Washington's actions at the war's end reveal little in the way of
antislavery inclinations. He was anxious to recover his own slaves and
refused to consider compensation for the upwards of 80,000 slaves
evacuated by the British, insisting without success that the British
return them to their owners.
Before resigning his commission in 1783, Washington took the
opportunity to give his opinion on the opportunities and challenges that
faced the new nation in his Circular to the States, in which he made not one mention of slavery.
Confederation years
The Marquis de Lafayette
Emancipation became a major issue in Virginia after liberalization of the manumission
law in 1782. Inspired by the rhetoric that had driven the revolution,
it became popular to free slaves. The free African-American population
in Virginia rose from some 3,000 to more than 20,000 between 1780 and
1800, when the proslavery interest re-asserted itself.
The historian Kenneth Morgan writes, "..the revolutionary war was the
crucial turning-point in [Washington's] thinking about slavery. After
1783...he began to express inner tensions about the problem of slavery
more frequently, though always in private..." Although Philip Morgan identifies several turning points and believes no single one was pivotal, most historians agree the Revolution was central to the evolution of Washington's attitudes on slavery.
It is likely that revolutionary rhetoric about the rights of men, the
close contact with young antislavery officers who served with
Washington – such as Laurens, the Marquis de Lafayette and Alexander Hamilton – and the influence of northern colleagues were contributory factors in that process.
Washington was drawn into the postwar abolitionist discourse
through his contacts with antislavery friends, their transatlantic
network of leading abolitionists and the literature produced by the
antislavery movement,
though he was reluctant to volunteer his own opinion on the matter and
generally did so only when the subject was first raised with him.
At his death, Washington's extensive library included at least
seventeen publications on slavery. Six of them had been collated into an
expensively bound volume titled Tracts on Slavery, indicating that he attached some importance to that selection. Five of the six were published in or after 1788.
All six shared common themes that slaves first had to be educated about
the obligations of liberty before they could be emancipated, a belief
Washington is reported to have expressed himself in 1798, and that
abolition should be realized by a gradual legislative process, an idea
that began to appear in Washington's correspondence during the Confederation period.
Washington was not impressed by what Dorothy Twohig – a former editor-in-chief of The Washington Papers –
described as the "imperious demands" and "evangelical piety" of Quaker
efforts to advance abolition, and in 1786 he complained about their
"tamper[ing] with & seduc[ing]" slaves who "are happy & content
to remain with their present masters."
Only the most radical of abolitionists called for immediate
emancipation. The disruption to the labor market and the care of the
elderly and infirm would have created enormous problems. Large numbers
of unemployed poor, of whatever color, was a cause for concern in
18th-century America, to the extent that expulsion and foreign
resettlement was often part of the discourse on emancipation.
A sudden end to slavery would also have caused a significant financial
loss to slaveowners whose human property represented a valuable asset.
Gradual emancipation was seen as a way of mitigating against such a loss
and reducing opposition from those with a financial self-interest in
maintaining slavery.
In 1783, Lafayette proposed a joint venture to establish an
experimental settlement for freed slaves which, with Washington's
example, "might render it a general practise," but Washington demurred.
As Lafayette forged ahead with his plan, Washington offered
encouragement but expressed concern in 1786 about "much inconvenience
and mischief" an abrupt emancipation might generate, and he gave no
tangible support to the idea. Washington privately expressed support for emancipation to prominent Methodists Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury
in 1785, but declined to sign their petition. Although he spoke to
other leading Virginians about his sentiments and promised to write in
support if the petition was considered in the Virginia Assembly, nothing
further came of it.
Henriques identifies Washington's concern for the judgement of
posterity as a significant factor in Washington's thinking on slavery,
writing, "No man had a greater desire for secular immortality, and
[Washington] understood that his place in history would be tarnished by
his ownership of slaves."
Philip Morgan similarly identifies the importance of Washington's
driving ambition for fame and public respect as a man of honor; in December 1785, the Quaker and fellow Virginian Robert Pleasants
"[hit] Washington where it hurt most", Morgan writes, when he told
Washington that to remain a slaveholder would forever tarnish his
reputation.
In correspondence the next year, Washington expressed "great
repugnance" at buying slaves, stated that he would not buy any more
"unless some peculiar circumstances should compel me to it" and made
clear his desire to see the institution of slavery ended by a gradual
legislative process.
Washington did not let principle interfere with business; he
still needed labor to work his farms, and there was little alternative
to slavery. Hired labor south of Pennsylvania was scarce and expensive,
and the Revolution had cut off the supply of indentured servants and
convict labor from Great Britain.
Washington significantly reduced his slave purchases after the war,
though it is not clear whether this was a moral or practical decision;
he repeatedly stated that his inventory and its potential progeny were
adequate for his current and foreseeable needs. Nevertheless, he negotiated with John Mercer to accept six slaves in payment of a debt in 1786 and expressed to Henry Lee a desire to purchase a bricklayer the next. In 1788, Washington acquired thirty-three slaves from the estate of Bartholomew Dandridge in settlement of a debt and left them with Dandridge's widow on her estate at Pamocra, New Kent County, Virginia. Later the same year, he declined a suggestion from the leading French abolitionist Jacques Brissot
to form and become president of an abolitionist society in Virginia,
stating that although he was in favor of such a society and would
support it, the time was not yet right to confront the issue.
Presidential years
The unfortunate
condition of the persons, whose labour in part I employed, has been the
only unavoidable subject of regret. To make the Adults among them as
easy & as comfortable in their circumstances as their actual state
of ignorance & improvidence would admit; & 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, & could
not I hoped be displeasing to the justice of the Creator.
Statement attributed to George Washington that appears in the notebook of David Humphreys, c.1788/1789
Another complication for Washington's personal position on slavery
was the political ramifications of emancipation. He presided over the Constitutional Convention
in 1787, during which it became obvious just how explosive the issue
was and how willing the antislavery faction was to accept the
preservation of slavery to ensure national unity and the establishment
of a strong federal government. The support of the southern states for
the new constitution was secured by granting them concessions that
protected slavery, including the Three-Fifths Compromise and the Fugitive Slave Clause,
plus clauses that guaranteed the transatlantic slave trade for at least
twenty years and federal aid for the suppression of any slave
rebellion.
Washington's preeminent position ensured that any actions he took
with regard to his own slaves would become a statement in a national
debate about slavery that threatened to divide the country. Wiencek
suggests Washington considered making precisely such a statement on
taking up the presidency in 1789. A passage in the notebook of
Washington's biographer David Humphreys
dated to late 1788 or early 1789 recorded a statement that resembled
the emancipation clause in Washington's will a decade later. Wiencek
argues the passage was a draft for a public announcement Washington was
considering in which he would declare the emancipation of some of his
slaves. It marks, Wiencek believes, a moral epiphany in Washington's
thinking, the moment he decided not only to emancipate his slaves but
also to use the occasion to set the example Lafayette had urged in 1783. Other historians dispute Wiencek's conclusion; Henriques and Joseph Ellis
concur with Philip Morgan's opinion that Washington experienced no
epiphanies in a "long and hard-headed struggle" in which there was no
single turning point. Morgan argues that Humphreys' passage is the
"private expression of remorse" from a man unable to extricate himself
from the "tangled web" of "mutual dependency" on slavery, and that
Washington believed public comment on such a divisive subject was best
avoided for the sake of national unity.
As president
President George Washington by Gilbert Stuart (1795)
Washington took up the presidency at a time when revolutionary
sentiment against slavery was giving way to a resurgence of proslavery
interests. No state considered making slavery an issue during the
ratification of the new constitution, southern states reinforced their
slavery legislation and prominent antislavery figures were muted about
the issue in public. Washington understood there was little widespread
organized support for abolition.
He had a keen sense both of the fragility of the fledgling Republic and
of his place as a unifying figure, and he was determined not to
endanger either by confronting an issue as divisive and entrenched as
slavery.
He was president of a government that passed a resolution in 1790
affirming states' rights to regulate treatment of slaves and legislate
on slavery free of congressional interference, provided materiel and
financial support for French efforts to suppress the Saint Domingue slave revolt in 1791 and implemented the proslavery Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. He also signed into law the Slave Trade Act of 1794 that sought to limit American involvement in the international slave trade.
Washington never spoke publicly on the issue of slavery during his
eight years as president, nor did he respond to, much less act upon, any
of the antislavery petitions he received. He described a 1790 Quaker
petition to Congress
urging an immediate end to the slave trade as "an illjudged piece of
business" that "occasioned a great waste of time." The issue of slavery
was not mentioned in either his last address to Congress or his Farewell Address.
Late in his presidency, Washington told his Secretary of State, Edmund Randolph, that in the event of a confrontation between North and South, he had "made up his mind to remove and be of the Northern."
In 1798, he imagined just such a conflict when he said, "I can clearly
foresee that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the
existence of our union."
But there is no indication Washington ever favored an immediate end to
slavery. His abolitionist aspirations for the nation were confined to
the hope that slavery would disappear naturally over time with the prohibition of slave imports in 1808, the earliest date such legislation could be passed as agreed at the Constitutional Convention.
As Virginia farmer
As
well as political caution, economic imperatives remained an important
consideration with regard to Washington's personal position as a
slaveholder and his efforts to free himself from his dependency on
slavery. He was one of the largest debtors in Virginia at the end of the war,
and by 1787 the business at Mount Vernon had failed to make a profit
for more than a decade. Persistently poor crop yields due to pestilence
and poor weather, the cost of renovations at his Mount Vernon residence,
the expense of entertaining a constant stream of visitors, the failure
of Lund to collect rent from Washington's tenant farmers and wartime
depreciation all helped to make Washington cash poor.
It is demonstrably
clear that on this Estate I have more working Negroes by a full moiety,
than can be employed to any advantage in the farming system; and I shall
never turn to Planter thereon...To sell the surplus I cannot, because I
am principled against this kind of traffic in the human species...
George Washington to Robert Lewis, August 17, 1799
The overheads of maintaining a surplus of slaves, including the care
of the young and elderly, made a substantial contribution to his
financial difficulties.
In 1786, the ratio of productive to non-productive slaves was
approaching 1:1, and the c. 7,300-acre (3,000 ha) Mount Vernon estate
was being operated with 122 working slaves. Although the
productive/non-productive ratio had improved by 1799 to around 2:1, the
Mount Vernon estate had grown by only 10 percent to some 8,000 acres
(3,200 ha) while the working slave population had grown by 65 percent to
201. It was a trend that threatened to bankrupt Washington.
The slaves Washington had bought early in the development of his
business were beyond their prime and nearly impossible to sell, and from
1782 Virginia law made slaveowners liable for the financial support of
slaves they freed who were too young, too old or otherwise incapable of
working.
During his second term, Washington began planning for a retirement that would provide him "tranquillity with a certain income." In December 1793, he sought the aid of the British agriculturalist Arthur Young in finding farmers to whom he would lease all but one of his farms, on which his slaves would then be employed as laborers. The next year, he instructed his secretary Tobias Lear
to sell his western lands, ostensibly to consolidate his operations and
put his financial affairs in order. Washington concluded his
instructions with a private passage in which he expressed repugnance at
owning slaves and declared that the principal reason for selling the
land was to raise the finances that would allow him to liberate them. It is the first clear indication that Washington's thinking had shifted from selling his slaves to freeing them.
In November the same year, Washington declared in a letter to his
friend and neighbor Alexander Spotswood that he was "...principled agt. [sic] selling Negroes, as you would Cattle in the market..."
In 1795 and 1796, Washington devised a complicated plan that
involved renting out his western lands to tenant farmers to whom he
would lease his own slaves, and a similar scheme to lease the dower
slaves he controlled to Dr. David Stuart
for work on Stuart's Eastern Shore plantation. This plan would have
involved breaking up slave families, but it was designed with an end
goal of raising enough finances to fund their eventual emancipation (a
detail Washington kept secret) and prevent the Custis heirs from
permanently splitting up families by sale.
None of these schemes could be realized because of his failure to sell
or rent land at the right prices, the refusal of the Custis heirs to
agree to them and his own reluctance to separate families.
Wiencek speculates that, because Washington gave such serious
consideration to freeing his slaves knowing full well the political
ramifications that would follow, one of his goals was to make a public
statement that would sway opinion towards abolition.
Philip Morgan argues that Washington freeing his slaves while President
in 1794 or 1796 would have had no profound effect, and would have been
greeted with public silence and private derision by white southerners.
As Washington subordinated his desire for emancipation to his
efforts to secure financial independence, he took care to retain his
slaves.
From 1791, he arranged for those who served in his personal retinue in
Philadelphia while he was President to be rotated out of the state
before they became eligible for emancipation after six months residence
per Pennsylvanian law.
Not only would Washington have been deprived of their services if they
were freed, most of the slaves he took with him to Philadelphia were
dower slaves, which meant that he would have had to compensate the
Custis estate for the loss. Because of his concerns for his public image
and that the prospect of emancipation would generate discontent among
the slaves before they became eligible for emancipation, he instructed
that they be shuffled back to Mount Vernon "under pretext that may
deceive both them and the Public."
Washington spared no expense in efforts to recover Hercules and
Judge when they absconded. In Judge's case, Washington persisted for
three years. He tried to persuade her to return when his agent
eventually tracked her to New Hampshire, but refused to promise her
freedom after his death; "However well disposed I might be to a gradual
emancipation," he said, "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 politic or just to reward unfaithfulness
with a premature preference." Both Hercules and Judge eluded capture.
Washington's search for a new chef to replace Hercules in 1797 is the
last known instance in which he considered buying a slave, despite his
resolve "never to become the Master of another Slave by purchase"; in
the end he chose to hire a white chef.
Posthumous emancipation
Washington's will published in the Connecticut Journal, February 20, 1800
In July 1799, five months before his death, Washington wrote his
will, in which he stipulated that his slaves should be freed. In the
months that followed, he considered a plan that betrayed a continuing
prioritization of profit above his concerns about the institution of
slavery. The plan involved repossessing tenancies in Berkeley and Frederick
Counties and transferring half of his Mount Vernon slaves to work them.
It would, Washington hoped, "yield more nett profit" which might
"benefit myself and not render the [slaves'] condition worse", despite
the disruption such relocation would have had on the slave families. The
plan died with Washington on December 14, 1799.
Washington's slaves were the subjects of the longest provisions
in the twenty-nine-page will, taking three pages in which his
instructions were more forceful than in the rest of the document. His
valet, William Lee, was freed immediately and his remaining 123 slaves
were to be emancipated on the death of Martha.
The deferral was intended to postpone the pain of separation that would
occur when his slaves were freed but their spouses among the dower
slaves remained in bondage, a situation which affected twenty couples
and their children. It is possible Washington hoped Martha and her heirs
who would inherit the dower slaves would solve this problem by
following his example and emancipating them. Those too old or infirm to work were to be supported by his estate, as mandated by state law.
Washington went beyond the legal requirement to support and
maintain younger slaves until adulthood, stipulating that those children
whose education could not be undertaken by parents were to be taught
reading, writing and a useful trade by their masters and then be freed
at the age of twenty-five.
He was particularly pointed in forbidding the sale or transportation of
any of his slaves out of Virginia before their emancipation. Including the Dandridge slaves, who were to be emancipated under similar terms, more than 160 slaves would be freed.
Although Washington was not alone among Virginian slaveowners in
freeing their slaves, he was unusual for doing it so late, after the
post-revolutionary support for emancipation in Virginia had faded. He
was also unusual for being the only slaveowning Founding Father to do
so.
Aftermath
Slave burial ground memorial at Mount Vernon
Any hopes Washington may have had that his example and prestige would
influence the thinking of others, including his own family, proved to
be unfounded. His action was ignored by southern slaveholders, and
slavery continued at Mount Vernon. Already from 1795, dower slaves were being transferred to Martha's three granddaughters as the Custis heirs married.
Martha felt threatened by the fact that she was surrounded with slaves
whose freedom depended on her death and freed her late husband's slaves
on January 1, 1801.
Able-bodied slaves were freed and left to support themselves and their families.
Within a few months, almost all of Washington's former slaves had left
Mount Vernon, leaving 121 adult and working-age children still working
the estate. Five freedwomen were listed as remaining: an unmarried
mother of two children; two women, one of them with three children,
married to Washington slaves too old to work; and two women who were
married to dower slaves. William Lee remained at Mount Vernon, where he worked as a shoemaker. After Martha's death on May 22, 1802, most of the remaining dower slaves passed to her grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, to whom she bequeathed the only slave she held in her own name.
There are few records of how the newly freed slaves fared.
Custis later wrote that "although many of them, with a view to their
liberation, had been instructed in mechanic trades, yet they succeeded
very badly as freemen; so true is the axiom, 'that the hour which makes
man a slave, takes half his worth away'." The son-in-law of Custis's
sister wrote in 1853 that the descendants of those who remained slaves,
many of them now in his possession, had been "prosperous, contented and
happy," while those who had been freed had led a life of "vice,
dissipation and idleness" and had, in their "sickness, age and poverty",
become a burden to his in-laws.
Such reports were influenced by the innate racism of the well-educated,
upper-class authors and ignored the social and legal impediments that
prejudiced the chances of prosperity for former slaves, which included
laws that made it illegal to teach freedpeople to read and write and, in
1806, required newly freed slaves to leave the state.
There is evidence that some of Washington's former slaves were
able to buy land, support their families and prosper as free people. By
1812, Free Town in Truro Parish,
the earliest known free African-American settlement in Fairfax County,
contained seven households of former Washington slaves. By the mid
1800s, a son of Washington's carpenter Davy Jones and two grandsons of
his postilion
Joe Richardson had each bought land in Virginia. Francis Lee, younger
brother of William, was well known and respected enough to have his
obituary printed in the Alexandria Gazette on his death at Mount
Vernon in 1821. Sambo Anderson – who hunted game, as he had while
Washington's slave, and prospered for a while by selling it to the most
respectable families in Alexandria – was similarly noted by the Gazette when he died near Mount Vernon in 1845. Research published in 2019 has concluded that Hercules worked as a cook in New York, where he died on May 15, 1812.
A decade after Washington's death, the Pennsylvanian jurist Richard Peters
wrote that Washington's servants "were devoted to him; and especially
those more immediately about his person. The survivors of them still
venerate and adore his memory." In his old age, Anderson said he was "a
much happier man when he was a slave than he had ever been since,"
because he then "had a good kind master to look after all my wants, but
now I have no one to care for me."
When Judge was interviewed in the 1840s, she expressed considerable
bitterness, not at the way she he had been treated as a slave, but at
the fact that she had been enslaved. When asked, having experienced the
hardships of being a freewoman and having outlived both husband and
children, whether she regretted her escape, she replied, "No, I am free,
and have, I trust, been made a child of God by [that] means."
Political legacy
Washington's will was both private testament and public statement on the institution.
It was published widely – in newspapers nationwide, as a pamphlet
which, in 1800 alone, extended to thirteen separate editions, and
included in other works – and became part of the nationalist narrative.
In the eulogies of the antislavery faction, the inconvenient fact of
Washington's slaveholding was downplayed in favor of his final act of
emancipation. Washington "disdained to hold his fellow-creatures in
abject domestic servitude," wrote the Massachusetts Federalist Timothy Bigelow
before calling on "fellow-citizens in the South" to emulate
Washington's example. In this narrative, Washington was a
proto-abolitionist who, having added the freedom of his slaves to the
freedom from British slavery he had won for the nation, would be
mobilized to serve the antislavery cause.
An alternative narrative more in line with proslavery sentiments
embraced rather than excised Washington's ownership of slaves.
Washington was cast as a paternal figure, the benevolent father not only
of his country but also of a family of slaves bound to him by affection
rather than coercion. In this narrative, slaves idolized Washington and wept at his deathbed, and in an 1807 biography, Aaron Bancroft wrote, "In domestick [sic] and private life, he blended the authority of the master with the care and kindness of the guardian and friend." The competing narratives allowed both North and South to claim Washington as the father of their countries during the American Civil War that ended slavery more than half a century after his death.
Memorial
In
1929, a plaque was embedded in the ground at Mount Vernon less than 50
yards (45 m) from the crypt housing the remains of Washington and
Martha, marking a plot neglected by both groundsmen and tourist guides
where slaves had been buried in unmarked graves. The inscription read,
"In memory of the many faithful colored servants of the Washington
family, buried at Mount Vernon from 1760 to 1860. Their unidentified
graves surround this spot." The site remained untended and ignored in
the visitor literature until the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association
erected a more prominent monument surrounded with plantings and
inscribed, "In memory of the Afro Americans who served as slaves at
Mount Vernon this monument marking their burial ground dedicated
September 21, 1983." In 1985, a ground-penetrating radar
survey identified sixty-six possible burials. As of late 2017, an
archaeological project begun in 2014 has identified, without disturbing
the contents, sixty-three burial plots in addition to seven plots known
before the project began.
