His Excellency: George Washington (28 page)

Pleasants did not stop there. He concluded with a little lecture designed to strike Washington, otherwise invulnerable, in his most vulnerable spot. If he acted decisively at this propitious moment by freeing his slaves, it would crown his career and assure his place in the history books. But if he faltered and lost this opportunity, the failure would haunt his reputation forever: “For not withstanding thou art now receiving the tribute of praise from a grateful people, the time is coming when all actions shall be weighed in an equal balance, and undergo an impartial explanation.” How sad it would then be to read that the great hero of American independence, “the destroyer of tyranny and oppression,” had failed the final test by holding “a number of People in absolute slavery, who were by nature equally entitled to freedom as himself.”
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Washington did not answer Pleasants’s letter. He was not accustomed to being the butt of lectures, especially from strangers dripping with moral superiority, and most especially from Quakers, whose pristine consciences had obliged them to sit out the war as spectators. Nevertheless, the letter could not be summarily dismissed as a mere irritation. It linked the subject Washington cared about most, posterity’s judgment, with the subject he had come to recognize as the central contradiction of the revolutionary era. Which is to say that Pleasants was incorrect in assuming that Washington had given little thought to the question of slavery. To be sure, the subject remained the proverbial ghost at the banquet, so obviously and ominously a violation of all the Revolution stood for that no one felt free to talk about it openly, lest the guests at the table transform the polite conversation into a shouting match. Despite the code of silence and circumspection, there is considerable evidence that slavery was very much on Washington’s mind during his retirement. And the ideas swirling through his head, to the extent that we can draw them out into the open for scrutiny, followed two separate lines of thought.
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One line of thought was initially prompted by the exigencies of war. Washington had grudgingly accepted free blacks into the Continental army in 1775, then had commanded a racially integrated force for nearly eight years. Characteristically, he made no comment on this development, though it exposed him to a range of racial relationships that he had never encountered as the master of Mount Vernon. The first indication that Washington recognized the disjunction between the purported goals of the War of Independence and the continuation of slavery occurred in 1779, when John Laurens proposed arming three thousand slaves in South Carolina and offering emancipation in return for service to the end of the war. Though clearly a wartime scheme driven by manpower needs, the Laurens proposal broached the possibility of making military service the opening wedge for a more general, if gradual, emancipation. Perhaps Washington was only humoring Laurens, telling a bright young favorite what he wanted to hear, but he endorsed the idea, adding the cautionary note that a partial emancipation could backfire by “rendering Slavery more irksome to those who remain in it” and acknowledging that “this is a subject that has never before employed much of my thoughts.” When the South Carolina legislature rejected the Laurens proposal, as Washington had predicted it would, he described the rejection as a sign that the revolutionary fires, which had burned so brightly early in the conflict, had now subsided, “and every selfish Passion has taken its place.”
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Lafayette, even more than Laurens, also prompted Washington to acknowledge that ending slavery was a logical outcome of the American Revolution. Just before the end of the war, in 1783, Lafayette urged an experiment in emancipation whereby a group of Virginia slaves would be freed and resettled as tenant farmers in some unspecified western region of the state. Washington embraced the plan without reservation: “The scheme, my dear Marquis, which you propose as a precedent to encourage the emancipation of the black people of this Country from that state of Bondage in which they are held, is a striking evidence of the benevolence of your Heart. I shall be happy to join you in so laudable a work.”
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Nothing came of Lafayette’s proposal. And perhaps, as with Laurens, Washington was indulging a dear friend whose visionary scheme, so symptomatic of Lafayette’s romantic temperament, could be safely endorsed precisely because Washington knew that it would never happen. At any rate, Washington’s public behavior at the end of the war cut in the opposite direction. In the aftermath of Yorktown, then again during the British evacuation of New York, he insisted on the return of all escaped slaves in British custody to their respective owners. (Four of his own slaves were included in the contingent of about three thousand carried from New York to freedom by the British navy.) By the start of his retirement, then, any picture of Washington’s mind on the slavery question would be blurry; but there
would
be a picture, because he now recognized that slavery was a massive American anomaly. Before the war the picture would have been completely blank.
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The picture became more focused three years into his retirement. Lafayette made two extended visits to Mount Vernon in 1784–85, and subsequent correspondence between them as well as the commentary of other visitors confirm that Lafayette prodded Washington to take a more outspoken position on slavery. The Virginia legislature was then debating the right of freed slaves to remain in the state, so the question of emancipation was in the political air. In April 1786, Washington wrote Robert Morris: “I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it [slavery]—but there is only one proper and effectual mode by which it can be accomplished, & that is by Legislative authority: and this, as far as my suffrage will go, shall never be wanting.” He wrote a similar letter to Lafayette the following month, also endorsing gradual emancipation. Then in September he wrote John Francis Mercer, who owed him money, saying that he could not accept slaves as payment: “I never mean (unless some particular circumstances should compel me to it) to possess another slave by purchase; it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted, by the legislature by which slavery in this Country may be abolished by slow, sure, & imperceptible degrees.” Whether Lafayette’s affectionate prodding, Pleasants’s lecturish warning, or the natural drift of his own thinking was most influential cannot be known. Whether his motives were purely moral, or mainly a fixation on his future reputation, or some seamless mixture of the two, is equally unknowable. But he was now on record, at least in private, endorsing slavery’s eventual end.
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A second line of thought focused, not on slavery as a national institution, but on slavery at Mount Vernon. During the early months of the war Washington had presumed that his estate would become a target of British or Loyalist recriminations. By 1779, when Mount Vernon still remained miraculously intact, he began to think anew about his labor force. He told his manager, Lund Washington, that he had decided to abandon slave labor if and when the war ended favorably. (If the war ended badly, all plans were meaningless.) The question was not whether he should sell his slaves, he told Lund, but “where, and in what manner it will be best to sell.” The currency inflation mitigated against an immediate sale, and his own convictions precluded any sale that split up families. But he had decided to replace slaves at Mount Vernon with hired workers.
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The correspondence about slavery at Mount Vernon and that with Laurens about emancipating South Carolina slaves in return for service occurred at the same time, the winter of 1779, so it is possible that the two lines of thought crossed. But the language Washington used about slavery at Mount Vernon made no mention of moral or ideological motives. It was a hardheaded business decision rooted in his conviction that slave labor was more inefficient and costly than free labor. And he was thinking about
selling
his slaves into bondage to others, not freeing them. His train of thought about slavery at Mount Vernon was apparently not driven by idealistic considerations but by realistic calculations about profit and loss.

His voluminous correspondence about the management of Mount Vernon during his wartime absence is filled with detailed instructions about which hogs to slaughter, which fields to manure and cultivate with specific kinds of wheat, where to dig irrigation ditches and plant locust trees, but says precious little about the larger contours of his thinking about the operation as a whole. In the absence of conclusive evidence, the most plausible speculation is that the decision to abandon slaves as a labor force followed logically from his earlier decision to abandon tobacco as a cash crop in favor of wheat. Once he made that decision, his Mount Vernon farms resembled the diversified farms of Pennsylvania more than the plantations of the Tidewater or Carolinas. In that altered agrarian scheme, he gradually concluded that the cost of maintaining a slave labor force became prohibitively expensive. In fact, he owned more slaves than he could productively employ. And the surplus was costing him dearly.

Despite his assiduous attention to the most minute details of management, Mount Vernon made only a marginal profit in the best years before the war, and during the war it began to resemble those many Virginia plantations declining toward bankruptcy. Washington’s decision to abandon slave labor, then, fit sensibly into a larger pattern of decisions driven by his acute appreciation of the bottom line and his personal obsession with economic independence. He had recognized that tobacco would not work, and moved to wheat. He had recognized that the consignment system locked him into mounting debts with Cary & Company, and had broken that connection, indeed had eventually seen fit to break with the British Empire itself. Now he recognized that slavery was as much the source of the problem as tobacco or imperial regulations, so he needed to free himself, though not his slaves, from the costs of bondage.
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There was a simple but sweeping quality to Washington’s grasp of the elemental realities underlying the plantation economy of Virginia, which conjured up a vision of slavery as an economic anachronism that went hand in hand with his still developing picture of slavery as a moral anachronism. Carried to its logical and imaginative limits, it was a vision of the Old Dominion as the southern outpost of a Middle Atlantic economy based on crop diversification and free labor, rather than the northern outpost of a Deep South economy based on a single cash crop and slavery. (If this vision had ever been implemented, the political chemistry of the subsequent national debate over slavery would have been dramatically different, as would the inevitability of the Civil War, which is difficult to imagine with Virginia on the Union side.) By the time he began his retirement, Washington’s mind had not changed on this score, at least in terms of what he preferred for sensible economic reasons. But neither had the swollen size of the slave population at Mount Vernon, which now numbered slightly more than two hundred men, women, and children.
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Given Washington’s justifiable reputation for carrying through on his convictions, the question becomes: Why did he not carry through on his decision to sell his slaves? The desire to do so apparently remained alive in August 1784, when William Gordon, visiting Mount Vernon to do research for his history of the war, reported a conversation between Washington and Lafayette: “You wish to get rid of all your Negroes,” Gordon recalled, “& the Marquis wisht that an end might be put to the slavery of all of them,” a complementary set of goals that would “give the finishing stroke & polish to your political characters.” About this time, however, it was gradually dawning on Washington that any wholesale scheme for selling his slaves encountered three overlapping difficulties that, taken together, posed an intractable dilemma: first, the dower slaves inherited through the Custis estate did not legally belong to him, and were therefore not his to sell; second, the eldest slaves, who had been acquired when he was developing his Mount Vernon properties in the 1760s, were now beyond their prime work years and therefore nearly impossible to sell; third, and most importantly, the multiple and many-layered connections by blood and marriage within the slave population at Mount Vernon virtually precluded any general sale once Washington had resolved not to break up families. By the middle of the 1780s, then, he faced what we might call a truly Faulknerian situation; both he and his black workforce were trapped together in a network of mutual dependency that was spiraling slowly downward toward economic ruin.
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Hindsight permits us the clairvoyance to see that the only escape from this trap, the solution that Robert Pleasants urged then and modern-day moralists have echoed in our own time, was to free his slaves outright. If he gave that possibility any serious consideration in the 1780s, the idea did not make it into the historical record. (It does seem plausible, though there is no evidence for it, that this was the moment when he first considered freeing his slaves in his will.) The evidence that does exist suggests a more muddled position: he vowed never again to purchase another slave, a somewhat hollow promise since, as he himself acknowledged, he was already overstocked with “this species of property”; he accepted, grudgingly, the fact that Mount Vernon would never show a profit, because it had become a retirement home and child-care center for many of his slave residents, whom he was morally obliged to care for.
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In 1787 he admitted that Mount Vernon had run a deficit for the past eleven years, and there was every reason to expect that trend to continue. The following year he reported that his annual losses caused him “to feel
more sensibly
the want of money, than I have ever done at any period of my life.” An English farmer, James Bloxam, whom he hired in 1786 to improve techniques of cultivation, claimed that the soil around Mount Vernon was one obstacle, but the lackadaisical workforce was the major liability: “The General have some very (
illegible
) But badly manedge and he will never have them no Better for he have a Sett About him which I nor you would be trobled with. But the General is goot them and he must keep them. But they are a verey Disagreable People.” (Some of the slaves, finding Bloxam equally disagreeable, threatened to poison him if he stayed at Mount Vernon.) Washington himself noted that the youngest slaves were seldom assigned chores, “for at present to skulk from house to house under some frivolous pretence or another seems to be the principal employment of most of them.” The prewar master of Mount Vernon would never have allowed such behavior. The postwar master was mellower, more willing to accept the fact that much of what he grew on his farms would never reach the marketplace, but would be consumed on the grounds by his black laborers and their families. In sum, if he could not sell them, Washington chose to make the maintenance of slave families at Mount Vernon a higher priority than profit. At some unspoken level, he saw this as a moral posture, and a small price for a troubled conscience to pay for a measure of solace.
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