Washington: A Life (23 page)

Thanks to pioneering research at Mount Vernon in recent years, we have obtained a much more vivid sense of slave life there. The very design of the estate made it arduous for slaves to maintain families. Mount Vernon came to consist of five farms: the Mansion House Farm (what tourists think of today as Mount Vernon) and four satellite farms: Dogue Run, Muddy Hole, Union, and River. Many Mansion House slaves were either household servants, dressed in brightly colored livery of scarlet coats and white waistcoats, or highly skilled artisans; these last were overwhelmingly male, while the four distant farms held mostly field hands who, contrary to stereotype, were largely female. This sexual division meant that only a little more than a third of Washington’s slaves enjoyed the luxury of living with their spouses and children. Since the slaves worked a grueling six-day week, from sunup to sundown, they had to tramp long distances on Saturday evening or Sunday to visit their far-flung families.
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It speaks volumes about the strength and tenacity of slave families that two-thirds of the adults remained married despite such overwhelming obstacles.

We know that Mary Washington was tightfisted in treating slaves; one neighbor remembered her as “more given to housewifery, and to keeping their servants at their proper business and in their proper places than to any unnecessary forms of etiquette.”
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Thomas Jefferson thought that Washington had inherited that autocratic style. “From his childhood, [Washington] always ruled and ruled severely,” Jefferson was later quoted as saying. “He was first brought up to govern slaves, he then governed an army, then a nation.”
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For the most part, Washington dealt with slaves through overseers whom he prodded to “be constantly with your people … There is no other sure way of getting work well done and quietly by negroes, for when an overlooker’s back is turned, the most of them will slight their work or be idle altogether.”
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Under Virginia law, slaveholders could freely abuse or even murder their slaves in punishing misbehavior and still avoid legal repercussions. Washington believed that whipping slaves was counterproductive and tried to restrain such brutality. As he lectured one estate manager, it “oftentimes is easier to effect [change] by watch-fulness and admonition than by severity and certainly must be more agreeable to every feeling mind in the practice of them.”
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Overseers were required to issue warnings to wayward slaves before flogging them. In theory, they couldn’t apply the lash to slaves unless they first secured written permission from Washington, but due to his extended absences from Mount Vernon, the rule wasn’t always obeyed. “General Washington has forbidden the use of the whip on his blacks,” a French visitor to Mount Vernon later averred, “but unfortunately his example has been little emulated.”
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He wanted his overseers to be strict, not cruel. Whether on the plantation, in the army, or in government, he stressed the need to inspire respect rather than affection in subordinates, a common thread running through his vastly disparate managerial activities.

Washington insisted that overseers track slaves closely during workdays that could stretch up to sixteen hours in summertime. He constantly reprimanded them for being drunk, lazy, or inattentive to their duties. Often feeling burdened by the expense and difficulty of dealing with white overseers, he turned to slave overseers, and at one point blacks supervised three of his five farms.

Washington prided himself on being firm but fair-minded, leading his adopted granddaughter to say later, “He was a generous and noble master and [the slaves] feared and loved him.”
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His presidential secretary, Tobias Lear, said of Mount Vernon, “The negroes are not treated as blacks in general are in this country. They are clothed and fed as well as any laboring people whatever and they are not subject to the lash of a domineering overseer—
but they are still slaves
.”
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Several observers noted that Washington, with perfect self-control in public, could flare up with servants in private. During his presidency the wife of the British ambassador remarked that Washington “acquired a uniform command over his passions on public occasions, but in private and particularly with his servants, its violence sometimes broke out.”
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One cabinet secretary talked of Washington’s reputation for “warm passion and stern severity” with his servants.
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Another observer was taken aback by how gruffly the tactful president addressed his slaves, “as differently as if he had been quite another man or had been in anger.”
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Still another Mount Vernon guest noted how exquisitely attuned the slaves were to the master’s moods: “His servants seemed to watch his eye, and to anticipate his every wish; hence, a look was equivalent to a command.”
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It should be said that if Washington displayed an irritable style with his slaves, he could also be short-tempered with his military and political subordinates.

Slavery presented special challenges to a hypercritical personality like Washington, for the slaves had no earthly reason to strive for the perfection he wanted. However illogical it might seem, he expected them to share his work ethic and was perturbed when they didn’t follow his industrious example. Feeling entitled to extract the maximum amount of work from slaves, he advised one overseer that “every laborer (male or female)” should do “as much in the 24 hours as their strength, without endangering their health or constitution, will allow of.”
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Not surprisingly, his letters contain frequent references to slaves whom he saw as indolent or prone to theft, and he never regarded such behavior as rational responses to bondage. Reproaching his slave carpenters, he said, “There is not to be found so idle a set of rascals.”
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Of a slave named Betty who worked as a spinner in the mansion, he complained that “a more lazy, deceitful and impudent hussy is not to be found in the United States.”
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He talked caustically about malingering slaves as if they were salaried workers who had failed to earn their wages—a blind spot he never entirely lost.

Fond of system and efficiency, Washington was stymied by his slaves’ inability to meet his high standards. Once in February 1760 he was dismayed to find that four slave carpenters had jointly hewn only 120 feet of poplar logs that day. Like a modern efficiency expert, he sat down, consulted his watch, and clocked them in a time-and-motion study. The master’s presence instantly stimulated the slaves to
quadruple
their output to 125 feet of timber apiece. Once he had solved the motivational mystery, Washington wondered about the material being used. “It is to be observed here that this hewing and sawing likewise was of poplar,” he wrote in his diary. “What may be the difference therefore between the working of this wood and [an]other some future observations must make known.”
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It is easy to see how the methodical Washington, with his excellent business mind, would have found infuriating an economic system that naturally discouraged hard work.

Male slaves at the Mansion House enjoyed accommodations superior to those of slaves at the outlying farms. They likely had better quarters because they were often trained artisans and lived within eyeshot of family members and visitors. At a later period many inhabited a large brick building with glazed windows that was divided into four rooms and fitted out like an army barrack, with bunks lining the walls. In the four remote farms, slaves were jammed into small, one-room log cabins, crafted flimsily from sticks cemented with mud. A Polish nobleman who admired Washington was taken aback by these squalid hovels. “We entered one of the huts of the blacks, for one cannot call them by the name of houses. They are more miserable than the most miserable of the cottages of our peasants. The husband and wife sleep on a mean pallet, the children on the ground; [there is] a very bad fireplace, some utensils for cooking, but in the middle of this poverty, some cups and a teapot.”
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Each slave received one set of new clothes per annum—a woolen jacket, a pair of breeches, two shirts, a pair of stockings, and a pair of shoes—often made from a coarse brown linen called osnaburg. Slave women received an annual petticoat and smock. Some slaves also had Sunday outfits of dark coats with white vests and white breeches. Every day the slaves received approximately one quart of Indian cornmeal, and every month twenty salted herrings, which sounds like a terribly meager ration. “It is not my wish or desire that my Negro[e]s should have an ounce of meal more, nor less, than is sufficient to feed them plentifully,” Washington told his estate manager.
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Recent archaeological work at Mount Vernon has revealed that the slave diet was not entirely bleak. On Sundays Washington allowed slaves to borrow his large nets, or “seines,” to fish in the Potomac. At least one elderly slave named Father Jack kept a canoe on the river and supplied fish to others. Archaeologists have identified bones from sixteen types of fish in the cellar of the main slave residence. Washington also distributed to the slaves meat left over from his table, innards of hogs slaughtered on the estate, surplus fish from his fishery, and buttermilk left after the milk was churned.

The most intriguing archaeological find has been the discovery of lead shot and gun flints, showing that Washington allowed selected slaves to keep firearms and hunt wild game in the woods. The remains of fifty-eight animal species have been identified in the slave cellar. The slaves could either eat the game or sell it to the master’s table. Washington’s adopted grandson remembered how a slave named Tom Davis hunted duck on the Potomac with his Newfoundland dog and brought down with his musket “as many of those delicious birds as would supply the larder for a week.”
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This made up part of a strictly limited market economy at Mount Vernon in which Washington allowed slaves to till their own garden plots, keep poultry, and sell eggs, chicken, fruits, and vegetables. On Sunday mornings he even permitted them to travel with passes to nearby Alexandria and peddle their wares in the open marketplace. This freedom of movement enabled Washington’s slaves to meet and marry slaves on other plantations.

That the slaves at Mount Vernon could move about without supervision runs counter to the common view of slavery as a system enforced only by the daily terror of whips and shackles. Like other major planters, Washington owned more slaves than his overseers could effectively monitor, and so the only way to control a captive population was to convince them that runaways would be severely punished. Virginia had perfected a system of terror for capturing fugitive slaves. Under a 1748 law, a master could seek out two justices of the peace and have them issue a proclamation against runaways. To give the slaves fair warning, the proclamation had to be posted on church doors throughout the county. If the slave still didn’t surrender, the law said that “it shall be lawful for any person … to kill and destroy such slaves by any ways or means, without accusation or impeachment of any crime for the same.”
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If Washington, with few exceptions, avoided inflicting harm on captured runaways, he showed notable zeal in hunting them down, and the problem consumed considerable time. The scholar Philip Morgan has computed that Washington had forty-seven runaway slaves over the years, or 7 percent of the total population.
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A year after his marriage Washington pursued a runaway named Boson and wound up paying a ten-shilling bounty to a slave from another plantation who recaptured him. Many slaves who fled were favorites of George and Martha Washington, who invariably reacted with a sense of shock and betrayal. In his diary for 1761, Washington recorded deep concern for the fate of a slave named Cupid, who had recently arrived from Africa, scarcely spoke English, and had contracted pleurisy. The master made a point of dropping in to inquire after Cupid’s health and in one diary entry wrote anxiously that “when I went to bed, I thought [Cupid] within a few hours of breathing his last.”
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Notwithstanding this special care, Cupid subsequently ran away with three other slaves named Peros, Jack, and Neptune. On August 11, 1761, Washington placed a fugitive slave advertisement in the
Maryland Gazette,
noting that they had escaped “without the least suspicion, provocation, or difference with anybody, or the least angry word or abuse from their overseers.”
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Washington’s description of the four slaves showed that he didn’t see them as an indistinguishable mass but as a collection of distinct individuals. Of Peros he said that he was thirty-five to forty years old, had a “yellowish complex[ion] with a very full round face and full black beard,” and wore “a dark colored cloth coat, a white linen waistcoat, white breeches and white stockings.”
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He added that the runaway slave spoke decent English, had shed much of his African dialect, and was “esteemed a sensible, judicious Negro.”
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Of Cupid, Washington noted that “the skin of his face is coarse and inclined to be pimply.”
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Two of the slaves showed recent African ancestry, having been scarified by their tribes. Jack had “cuts down each cheek bearing his country marks,” while Neptune had “his teeth straggling and filed sharp.”
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Washington offered a forty-shilling reward for the recovery of all four men.

Unless they proved repeat offenders, Washington usually forgave runaways who were brought back to Mount Vernon. He accepted the return of the “sensible, judicious” Peros without reprisals, only to have him flee again in 1770. In general, Washington didn’t have the stomach for the more odious forms of punishment. On occasion, however, he resorted to the grisly penalty of selling refractory slaves in the Caribbean, where they faced hard labor and almost certain death as they toiled in sweltering sugarcane brakes. In July 1766 Washington meted out this unspeakable fate to a “healthy, strong” young slave named Tom whom he described as “both a rogue and runaway.”
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He assigned him to Captain Josiah Thompson, whose schooner
Swift
was sailing for St. Kitts. Washington told the skipper to keep Tom handcuffed until they got to sea and that if he was “kept clean and trimmed up a little when offered to sale,” he might reap a good price.
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From the proceeds, Washington hoped to receive one hogshead of molasses and one of rum, along with a barrel of limes and a pot of tamarinds. On at least two other occasions, Washington exported recalcitrant slaves to the Caribbean and brandished the threat of doing so to intimidate others.