Washington: A Life (98 page)

It has long been debated whether Washington’s growing aversion to slavery resulted from moral scruples or from a sense that slavery was a bad economic bargain, in which masters paid more for slaves’ upkeep than they reaped in profit from their labor. The latter problem weighed on him in the mid-1780s, when the failure of his corn crop, the principal food for his slaves, slashed the profitability of his operations. Though he probably never read it, Washington would have agreed with Adam Smith’s theory in
The Wealth of Nations
(1776) that slavery was a backward system because workers lacked economic incentives to improve performance. Slavery grew especially inefficient for Washington after he switched from labor-intensive tobacco cultivation to grain production, leaving him with surplus hands. In February 1786 he sat down in his study to tote up the number of slaves at his five farms and came up with a figure of 216. He must have been alarmed to discover that the number of slave children had risen to a startling 92, or nearly half the slaves, a figure that guaranteed that his slave population would burgeon from natural increase.

Whenever Washington discussed slavery with other planters, the inefficiency of the system dominated discussion, whereas with Lafayette, Washington sounded as if he were motivated purely by humanitarian concerns. Writing to Mercer in late 1786, he indicated that he felt burdened by more slaves than he could profitably employ: “For this species of property, I have no predilection nor any urgent call, being already overstocked with some kind of it.”
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He haggled with Mercer over settling money owed to him and expressed his willingness to take six male slaves in exchange for three hundred pounds of debt. Mercer evidently declined, because Washington replied, “I am perfectly satisfied with your determination respecting the Negroes. The money will be infinitely more agreeable to me than property of that sort.”
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Writing to Henry Lee, Jr., on February 4, 1787, Washington again announced that he was “in a great degree principled against increasing my number of slaves”; then in the next breath, he told Lee to buy him a slave, a bricklayer, whose sale was advertised in the newspaper.
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Washington declared he would drop the deal if the slave had a family and refused to be separated. In 1788 Washington accepted another thirty-three slaves at Mount Vernon in settlement of a debt related to the estate of Martha’s brother Bartholomew Dandridge.

In charting Washington’s conflicting statements about slavery after the Revolution, one begins to sense that he had developed a split personality on the issue. On the one hand, his views still reflected his acquisitive prewar personality that had few, if any, ethical qualms about slavery. His business behavior had always been his least attractive side, showing the imprint of early hardship. On the other hand, another part of his personality reflected the countless years of conversations with Lafayette, Laurens, Hamilton, and other young aides inflamed by Revolutionary ideals, when he was headquartered in the North and uprooted from the southern plantation culture. With a politician’s instinct, Washington spoke to different people in different voices. When addressing other Virginia planters, he spoke in the cold, hard voice of practicality, whereas when dealing with Revolutionary comrades, he blossomed into an altruist.

Nothing better illustrated his humanitarian views on slavery than a famous statement he made to David Humphreys, the young New England poet who resided at Mount Vernon while working on his authorized biography. At some point in 1788 or early 1789, Washington made an eloquent, if self-serving, statement—Humphreys may have prettied it up—expressing qualms about slavery and the paternalistic compromises he had forged over the issue: “The unfortunate condition of the persons whose labor in part I employed has been the only unavoidable subject of regret. To make the adults among them as easy and as comfortable in their circumstances as their actual state of ignorance and improvidence would admit, and 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 and could not, I hoped, be displeasing to the justice of the Creator.”
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The passage makes plain that guilt tugged at Washington’s mind as he struggled to square slavery with his religious beliefs. The question remains: Did he really make life for the adult slaves “as easy and as comfortable” as possible and prepare the slave children for a different destiny?

Whether from genuine concern or from patent self-interest, Washington prided himself on his treatment of his slaves: “It has always been my aim to feed and clothe [the slaves] well and be careful of them in sickness.”
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While we have no proof that Washington wished to educate his slaves, we do know that Lund Washington’s wife, Elizabeth, a devout woman, taught slaves to read and distributed Bibles among them—an activity that would have been considered taboo on many plantations. There is no proof that Washington took sexual advantage of his slaves, although one French visitor noted that many house servants were mulattoes, “some of whom have kinky hair still but skin as light as ours.”
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In recent years a controversy has raged as to whether Washington might have fathered a mulatto slave named West Ford, who was born in the immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War and bore a vague resemblance to the Washington clan. The controversy first surfaced in 1940 but gained a new lease on life in 1998, when DNA tests strongly pointed to Thomas Jefferson as having had children with his slave Sally Hemings. This dramatic discovery lent fresh credence to the oral history of mixed-race families that claimed direct descent from America’s slaveholding founders.

The son of a slave named Venus, West Ford was owned by Washington’s brother Jack and his wife, Hannah, and grew up on their plantation, Bushfield, in Westmoreland County. When Hannah died around 1801, she singled out West Ford as the only slave to receive his freedom when he reached twenty-one. Ford’s privileged status was further confirmed when Jack and Hannah’s son Bushrod, who would inherit Mount Vernon, gave him 160 acres adjoining the estate. Beyond such undeniable evidence of partiality, legend passed down through two branches of Ford descendants that Venus had identified George Washington as the little boy’s father and that he had attended church with Washington and even gone hunting and riding with him.

While historians have learned not to repudiate such stories with knee-jerk rigidity, George Washington’s paternity of West Ford seems highly doubtful. The notion that he might have met and impregnated Venus during a trip that her mistress, Hannah, made to Mount Vernon seems unlikely. (Washington didn’t visit Bushfield during the years in question.) Where the Sally Hemings affair was exposed during Jefferson’s lifetime and her son Madison later published a memoir about it, the West Ford story slumbered suspiciously for a century and a half. With Mount Vernon invaded by visitors after the Revolutionary War, Washington constantly regretted his lack of privacy, and he would not likely have gambled his vaunted, hard-earned reputation by sleeping with a visiting slave. There is also the problem that Washington was likely sterile, although the problem with having children may have come from Martha. Perhaps the most compelling evidence against Washington being West Ford’s father is that, in this abundantly documented life, not a single contemporary ever alluded to his having this mulatto child around him. Nor is there a single reference to Venus or West Ford in his voluminous papers. By contrast, one notes how frequently the ubiquitous Billy Lee pops up in Washington’s papers or in contemporary accounts. Had the decorous Washington fathered West Ford, he most certainly would not have flaunted this lapse by taking him to church or riding to hounds with him. It is also hard to believe that Washington’s malicious political enemies during his presidency would not have dredged up this damaging episode to discredit him. The most likely explanation of West Ford’s singular status is that he was sired by Jack Washington or one of his three sons, Bushrod, Corbin, or William Augustine.

Washington’s most commendable side was the respect he accorded to slave marriages, which enjoyed no standing under Virginia law. In April 1787, needing a bricklayer, he bought a slave named Neptune from a John Lawson. When Neptune showed up at Mount Vernon, Washington was dismayed to learn that he was distraught at being separated from his wife. Washington at once informed Lawson that he was “unwilling to hurt the feelings of anyone. I shall therefore, if agreeable to you, keep him a while to see if I can reconcile him to the separation (seeing her now and then), in which case I will purchase him; if not, I will send him back.”
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Taking matters into his own hands, Neptune escaped from Mount Vernon and returned to Lawson’s plantation and a reunion with his wife. Interestingly enough, Neptune wasn’t punished for this misbehavior and agreed to a compromise whereby he was hired out to Washington on a monthly basis.

The most striking case of Washington’s respect for the inner life of slaves was his constant solicitude for Billy Lee, whom he endowed with the fancy title “Valet de Chambre” after the war.
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Lee may be the dark-skinned slave standing off in the shadows of Edward Savage’s famous painting
The Washington Family,
completed during the 1790s. In the group portrait, Washington sits at a table with Martha, unfurling a map of the new federal city of Washington, while Nelly and Washy stand beside them. Off to the right, the nameless slave is a dignified presence in a gray jacket with one hand thrust into a red waistcoat, his black hair falling straight over his collar. If Lee is the slave depicted, it would certainly attest to his special place in the Washington household.

During the war Lee had entered into a romantic liaison with Margaret Thomas, a free black or mulatto cook on Washington’s staff, and they considered themselves married. Six months after returning to Mount Vernon, Lee sank into a funk because of his separation from Thomas, who resided in Philadelphia. Under prodding from Lee, Washington agreed to reunite them. The all-powerful Washington didn’t care for Thomas but submitted to the pleas of the one slave he found it hard to deny. Contacting his Philadelphia friend Clement Biddle, he laid out the situation, explaining that Margaret Thomas had been “in an infirm state of health for some time and I had conceived that the connection between them had ceased, but I am mistaken. They are both applying to me to get her here, and tho[ugh] I never wished to see her more, yet I cannot refuse his request (if it can be complied with on reasonable terms) as he has lived with me so long and followed my fortunes through the war with fidelity.”
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Washington asked Biddle to track down Thomas, then living with a free black couple, Isaac and Hannah Sills, who also worked as cooks in Philadelphia. Biddle was instructed to pay Thomas’s passage to Virginia by coach or ship. We don’t know what happened to Margaret Thomas, and no evidence exists that she ever made it to Mount Vernon. Without question, a free black or mulatto woman would have dreaded traveling alone to a slave state such as Virginia, even under the auspices of George Washington. At the very least, as a Mount Vernon cook, she would have been forced to live and work with slaves, while retaining the rights of a free person—hardly a comfortable situation for all involved. One wonders exactly how Washington planned to negotiate this delicate situation. Did he expect Billy Lee to continue as a slave while married to a resident cook and free woman? And how would the other Mount Vernon slaves have reacted to the subversive presence of a free woman of color, wedded to Washington’s favorite slave?

What we do know is that, by the standards of master-slave relationships, Washington remained uncommonly attentive toward Billy Lee. In April 1785 he was surveying land with Lee, who was carrying one of the chains when he slipped and broke his knee, an injury so severe that Washington had to order a sled to transport him home. Three years later Lee tripped again and broke the second knee, turning him into a cripple. We know that Lee had an alcohol problem, but we don’t know whether it was the cause or an effect of these injuries. When two broken knees left Lee incapacitated, Washington converted him into a cobbler and sometime overseer of other slaves. In later years the outgoing Lee was reputedly a loquacious storyteller as he greeted veterans and exhibited his affection for Washington. Despite his servitude, he reminisced nostalgically about the war, even wearing a cocked hat to emphasize his earlier service. Of course, it is impossible to know, as Lee rambled on, what obscure hurts he concealed at being denied the status of a full-fledged soldier.

One also wonders to what extent Washington’s attachment to Lee influenced his later determination to emancipate his slaves. His proximity to a single slave during many years of war must have made it harder for him to believe that slaves were inferior beings and that their bondage could be justified. Lee was not only an expert hunter and horseman but also an energetic raconteur with a vibrant personality and rich emotional life that shines through in the smattering of stories about him. On the other hand, there’s no sense that Washington confided in Lee or treated him as anything like a peer.

While Washington was never sadistic or abusive toward slaves, he could be a demanding boss with minimal patience for error. When English farmer Richard Parkinson visited Virginia in 1798, he picked up scuttlebutt from local planters that Washington “treated [his slaves] with more severity than any other man.”
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Washington’s temperamental outbursts likely stemmed in part from his unrelenting money problems. He also suffered from a conceptual blind spot about slavery, tending to regard it as a fair economic exchange: he clothed and fed his workers, and “in return, I expect such labor as they ought to render.”
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He could never seem to understand why his slaves might regard this tacit bargain as preposterous. Any slaves who shirked work, he believed, were cheating him, and he wouldn’t stand for it. In 1785 he conducted a frosty exchange with a slave whose arm was injured and in a sling. Washington didn’t see why the man couldn’t work. Grasping a rake in one hand and thrusting the other in his pocket, he proceeded to demonstrate one-handed raking. “See how I do it,” Washington said. “I have one hand in my pocket and with the other I work. If you can use your hand to eat, why can’t you use it to work?”
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Similarly, Washington expected pregnant women and elderly slaves to work, albeit at less strenuous jobs closer to home.