Washington: A Life (157 page)

When Julian Niemcewicz visited Virginia in June 1798, he played billiards with Washington and enjoyed conversing with Martha, who “loves to talk and talks very well about times past.”
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He rated Washington as a relatively benevolent slave master: “G[enera]l Washington treats his slaves far more humanely than do his fellow citizens of Virginia. Most of these gentlemen give to their blacks only bread, water, and blows.”
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In some respects, Niemcewicz left an absurdly rosy picture of slave existence: “Either from habit, or from natural humor disposed to gaiety, I have never seen the blacks sad.”
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One recurring theme he overheard was far more accurate: that slavery was not only cruel but unprofitable. Estate manager James Anderson estimated that only one hundred of the more than three hundred slaves actually worked, while Washington hypothesized that, from a purely economic standpoint, his farms held twice as many slaves as needed. The growing number of slave children and elderly slaves meant more mouths to feed and fewer able-bodied hands. Dr. David Stuart, the husband of Jacky Custis’s widow, flatly asserted that it simply did not pay to own slaves: “Their support costs a great deal; their work is worth little if they are not whipped; the [overseer] costs a great deal and steals into the bargain. We would all agree to free these people, but how to do it with such a great number?”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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 usual 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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.