Chapter Eight

The Family Circle

From the diary of Martha Custis Williams, Arlington, February 27, 1854:

Uncle said “Well Markie, dear, have you been reading the Bible to poor old mammy?” No I said, not mammy because she was not well enough to come out in the rain, but to the other servants. “Do you know, he said in a half serious half playful manner, that it is my duty [to] confine you a month in jail, in accordance with the laws of the state?—but surely he continued, it can never be wrong to teach them that Holy Book. No Markie, I wont put you in jail I want you here with me too much.”

From the diary of Martha Custis Williams, Arlington, March 28, 1859:

…I went to dear old Georgetown, to see poor Stasia, to whom I had long promised a visit. The getting to her abode was quite a pilgramage, but I was fully repaid by her hospitable greeting—over & over again, did she assure me, that she was “so glad to see me.” How strong the tie that binds one to an old family servant—one who has known you from babyhood & witnessed for all the years of your life, the numerous vicicitudes of the family-circle. It seemed to me a sacred duty to go see Stasia and therefore I selected my birth-day for its fulfillment.¹

Arlington, near Alex^a Va.
24 April 1858

Mr. A. E. L. Keese—

There are two women belonging to the Estate of G. W. P. Custis, now in Washington, where they have been since 1 Jan y last. One, black, about 35 years old, named Caroline Bingham with a child about 6 mos: old, has been seen frequently in the centre market, going & returning by N. 7 th st. The other, mulatto, about 23 years old, named Catharine Burke, with a nearly white child about 2¹/ 2 years old, has also been seen in the centre market. Last Saturday evening she was seen in Mr. Bryans Grocers store near 7 th St. with Austin Syphax, a freedman from this place. They report themselves at service with my consent—I have offered $ 10 for the apprehension of each of these women, upon their delivery in the Jail at Alexa & the expenses of transporting them there.

A robbery of some articles of jewelry has recently been discovered in this house, in which it is believed that one or both of these women are concerned either as principals or accorsorys. You will find an account of it in the Baltimore Sun for the week ending this day—I have offered a reward of $ 50 for the recovery of the articles & apprehension of the thief.

A mulatto girl of about 14 years old, named Agnes Burke sister to the above Catharine Burke, who was hired in Jany last to Mr. I. W. Atkinson, Blksmith in Alexa has recently left her place & is believed to be in Washington, where she has an Aunt Louisa Burke, & Cousin Hilliard Burke Carpenter in the 1 st Ward, with other relatives. I will give $ 10.00 for her apprehension & delivery to Mr. Atkinson in Alexa.

Austin Bingham, brother to the foregoing named Caroline Bingham, a black boy about 19 years old, hired to Mr. Edwa B. Powell in Jany last, & who resides on Four Mile Run, just above the old Factory, between this Place & Alexa—left his place yesterday. I will give $ 10.00 for his apprehension & delivery to Mr. Powell—

All these people are well known in Washington by any of the negroes residing there. I am told a Mrs Fleming Huckster in Centre Market, knows the two women first named & has seen them there. The people from this place, who frequent that market, meet them there.

Very respy

RE Lee Exr of G.W. P.C.²

THE SOUTH CALLED IT the “peculiar institution.” Abolitionists called it the “monster of darkness.” Slavery was the consuming political question during Robert E. Lee’s lifetime, the crucible over which the nation strained and finally divided. It is also one of the issues around which admirers and detractors have wanted to mold Lee, fitting him to their own predilections. These three documents offer remarkable insights into the reality of life in the black, white, and mulatto Arlington household, where Lee had his most immediate experience of slavery. At first reading the passages seem to be at odds with each other. Two are from a diary kept by Markie Williams during the time she cared for the aging George Washington Parke Custis and acted as mistress of Arlington. Her observations express the bonds of common experience and ties of place she shared with the servants, and a desire that some human warmth might mitigate the severity of the slave system. The exacting hand of the law, dictatorial even on reading the Bible, is expressed here as well—as is the family’s willingness to circumvent it. That the relationships in the household were highly conflicted, however, is evident in the third manuscript, written when Robert Lee was executor of his father-in-law’s estate. This is a business letter. The business was hunting and catching slaves who had tried to escape from his control.

The Custis family had one of the largest holdings of human property in Virginia. In a day when only 10 percent of slave owners possessed more than 20 slaves, G. W. P. Custis held 196 people in bondage.³ Some sixty lived at Arlington; the rest populated his Romancoke and White House estates, or were hired out to other masters.⁴ Most of the blacks had been inherited from his father or his grandmother, Martha Custis Washington. Those from the Washington household, such as Lawrence Parks and “Old Nurse,” were notable personalities, much respected as living links to the first president. When “dear old Mammy” died in 1856, Agnes Lee recalled what “tales she could tell of ‘those good old times’ of Mrs. Washington’s beauty & good management. How ‘she was one of the out-door gals & would run to open the gate for the Gen.’” These personal associations contributed to the special prestige of the estate, and historians such as Jared Sparks, who visited Arlington to research Washington’s life, sought out the servants and recorded their anecdotes.⁵

G. W. P. Custis’s attitude toward his servants differed little from the common views of his contemporaries. He bemoaned the inefficiency of what he termed “the Vulture of Slavery” and in frustration blamed it for all of Virginia’s economic ills, concluding that the “foot of the Proprietor is the best manure for the soil, so is the sweat of a Freeman’s brow….”⁶ He was strongly against the slave trade and once offered his James River property as a refuge for some Africans who had been seized from an illegal slaving vessel.⁷ He found slave auctions distasteful and refused to speculate in human beings, saying that though “Negro property is of great and increasing value…I have no desire to add one more.”⁸ Yet, like his famous step-grandfather, he liberated neither his slaves nor himself from the system during his lifetime. It was his wife who finally persuaded him to leave a will ending nearly two centuries of slaveholding by the Custis family.⁹

In his treatment of blacks Custis followed the customs and prerogatives of others of his social class. In the 1820s he declared that he wanted his property “well fed, well clothed, treated fairly & kept in proper subjugation to those who are placed over them.”¹⁰ Unfortunately he disliked direct supervision of the workforces and left this to an uneven series of overseers, ignoring day-to-day operations even when it became clear that his estates were gaining a reputation for being out of control. One year the situation became so bad that the estate manager had to defend himself against charges that he starved the slaves, had whipped one to death and drowned others, and that his lax oversight had resulted in a slave stabbing one of the overseers.¹¹ Arlington’s proprietor sold black people when he thought it necessary and gave away human beings as gifts.¹² As justice of the peace, Custis was well aware of the fine points of the slave codes, differentiating between gray areas where he could allow some leniency and situations where he must hew to the law. He might wink at educating the servants after it became unlawful in 1849, and permit a few freed slaves to live illegally under his protection, but in cases with larger social consequences he was firm. Markie Williams witnessed a wrenching scene at Arlington in 1853, when two free blacks, caught without their papers, were brought before Custis. The ultimate punishment for this offense was a return to slavery. Despite the presence of a shocked foreign woman, and the freedmen’s plea that they could not understand the law because they were illiterate, they were consigned to jail, their fate to be determined by a white court.¹³

Custis could be generous to Arlington’s black people, however, particularly on some large issues of identity and self-respect. Slaves at Arlington lived in family groups, with acknowledged lineages and recorded surnames, apparently of their own choosing. As Robert Lee’s letter to A. E. L. Keese shows, whites at Arlington clearly saw the slaves as individuals and were well aware of their relationships and habits. This seemingly commonplace recognition of a family’s name or kinship ties was not something that people in bondage could take for granted. Perceiving how names highlighted the distinction between the ruling caste and those it subjugated, many owners called their slaves only by first names, or imposed identities on them, rather than accept those preferred by the servants. Masters frequently took a casual attitude toward familial relations, guarding the flexibility to relocate or dispose of slaves at will. Marriage between slaves had no legal basis in any southern state, and family unity generally lost out to economic considerations, even when a master was placed under intense emotional pressure. Simply put, if one did not recognize the legitimacy of a family, one need feel no remorse at breaking it apart.¹⁴

At Arlington the situation was better than the norm. Slaves were sold to pay for the construction of the mansion, and into the 1850s Mary Custis Lee saw the auction block as a way to rid the family of recalcitrant blacks. “I wish indeed I could find a purchaser for her for I think she would be much better with an owner who could keep her in order & she deserves no favors,” she wrote of one erring servant.¹⁵ On the whole, however, slave sales were a rare occurrence, and there is evidence that the Custises took some pains to hold families together and even to foster “marriage” among their slaves. In the 1840s Mary Custis and her daughter went to elaborate lengths to arrange the wedding of their servant Rose, buying her a bonnet and dress and making it an occasion for the entire estate. They also allowed those “married” outside the property to visit regularly with their partners.¹⁶ The exception to this generally sympathetic approach came during the hiring process, when slave families were often broken up for years at a time. The Custises and Lees, as well as their overseers, appear to have been oblivious of the trauma this caused. Toward the end of the antebellum period, such insensitivity would have dramatic consequences.¹⁷

Slavery was at heart a system of coerced labor, and it was for this that the black people had been brought to Arlington. Work defined much of the slave’s life, yet the slave had but small power to define his work. The blacks had little say in the amount or pace of their labor, or what form it took. Though sometimes performance was rewarded by a better situation, for the most part a slave’s fate was determined less by his ability or inclination than by the master’s whim. Some of the slaves at Arlington, such as gardener Ephraim Derricks or cook George Clark, were specialists, but most servants lived their lives in the drudgery of hand labor. At best they provided personal services for the family, at the pleasure of the master or mistress.¹⁸

The slaves carried out an impressive variety of tasks at Arlington. Custis had developed the estate as a gentleman’s country retreat, and black people there were never engaged in the kind of single-crop gang labor that was found in the Tidewater tobacco country or the legendary cotton fields of the lower South. Instead they contributed to the mixed farming that reflected Custis’s ideal of self-sufficiency, or aided in the development of the property. Mount Vernon servant George Clark worked with his master to build Arlington House, and slaves also erected stables, sheds, and their own dwellings.¹⁹ Some performed a variety of farm chores, from milking cows and harvesting wheat to making cider, with work cycles dictated by the seasons.²⁰ Perry Parks lit candles, closed the house for the night, and announced every arrival, from casual visitors to the president of the United States.²¹ Slaves also watched over the Lee children and nursed them at their breast in their infancy.²² One servant accompanied hunting parties; another was sent out in front of the carriage on a dangerous icy morning to light the path and cut notches in the wheels should the road prove too slippery.²³ Once, while visiting cousins at Cedar Grove, Annie Lee was startled to find slaves acting as human vehicles. As their boat landed, the African-Americans waded into the river to carry the passengers to shore—including their host, a tall and stout man, who rode in “on the back of a rather small negro.”²⁴ Nor were the slave children exempt from labor. Mrs. Lee admonished Annie to “keep the children at work”; a little black boy made shade for Markie by holding an umbrella over her head in the garden; others amused the Lee babies, gathered black walnuts, or brought dishes into the house.²⁵

The servants at Arlington did not gain a reputation for carrying out these responsibilities with a will. Robert Lee was openly disdainful of the slaves’ competence, and others affirmed his criticism. Annie Lee regaled a schoolmate with stories of the “laziness of Arlington,” and Lee counseled his wife not to expect much of the servants, since it was “almost useless to attempt improvement, or to resist the current that has been so long setting against industry & advancement.”²⁶ Even sympathetic Molly Custis remarked on the insubordination of the servants. When slave Perry Parks explained to her that he was beating a dog because it was necessary to make him mind, she drily supposed that “the absence of that salutary Discipline is what prevents his minding.”²⁷ Whether the lax performance was due to incompetence or artfulness is an interesting question. It undoubtedly stemmed partially from the attitude of Custis, who was himself negligent of his duties as master, and came to require little from his servants. But the inefficiency also hints at passive resistance, one of the few ways that slaves could manage to control, however marginally, a system in which the power was so asymmetrical.

Slaves took pride in outwitting their masters, in developing elaborate ways of communicating, and in opposing any kind of work that would turn them into beasts of burden. Left without a say about how they lived and toiled, slaves fought the system as best they could. They delayed and dissembled, broke equipment, and embarrassed the master.²⁸ Arlington’s records are filled with actions that fit this pattern. Once when the woods caught on fire, Perry Parks slowly entered the house, apparently unconcerned, to advise Mr. Custis of the crisis, then waited until his orders were repeated twice before rallying the servants to action.²⁹ Visitors found their rooms stifled with roaring fires in eighty-degree weather or missed their trains through the dawdling of the Negro driver.³⁰ One young woman who had been invited to tea had to wait until eight in the evening to be served. When Mary Lee, “fairly provoked,” asked why the tea had been delayed, the servants’ reply was that they needed milk to serve it properly and that “they couldn’t find anything to milk the cow in.”³¹ Items great and small had a habit of disappearing. Letters were lost en route to the post office, and Mrs. Lee cautioned her daughter to lock up the cellar in her absence “as the wine there is a tempting article.”³² In 1860 Robert Lee complained that after his clothes were packed by house servants Selina and Marcelina, a shaving brush and “my pants, my new pants I cannot account for.” Finally, resigned to their loss, he sputtered: “They are only one more item to the number that have disappeared. Perhaps taken off by Spirits, I know not where.”³³ More serious was a robbery of enough note to be mentioned in the Baltimore Sun, as Lee attests in his letter to Keese. Nor were the slaves averse to openly ridiculing their masters. A little black boy mocked one of Mr. Custis’s monumental artistic efforts by putting a clownlike dollop of red paint on the nose of a dying warrior.³⁴ Agnes Lee recalled the disapproval of the slave children when she greedily took some peaches from an orchard, and Annie described the shocked expression of the servants as she tried to single-handedly manure her garden.³⁵ Ridicule, inefficiency, and irritation were the tools slaves used to prove that the system did not work and that there was a limit to their acceptance of it.

In return for raw labor, it was the master’s legal responsibility to provide for the slaves’ daily needs in at least a minimum fashion.³⁶ At Arlington this seems to have been adequate. The servants were decently clothed, their wardrobes augmented by occasional cast-offs from the white family.³⁷ A clue to the way the masters cut financial corners, while maintaining their benevolent self-image, is found in a letter directing that the Custis slaves should have “wooden soaled shoes…. They save two-thirds expense of soal leather, & are far better for the health of the Negroes.” Nothing could have been farther from the truth, of course: wooden soles were rough on the feet and detrimental to foot, leg, and back.³⁸ Slave housing, largely in “mudchinked, and mud-floored, mud-and-stick huts” near the river, was shabby and cramped, but probably typical of its time.³⁹ The health of the slaves commanded a good deal of concern. A doctor visited Arlington for slave ailments sixty-two times in the first seven months of 1807, and similarly high rates of medical attention are recorded in the following decades. When “Old Nurse” suffered a severe eye problem, the best surgeon in Baltimore was called in to perform the operation.⁴⁰ Even Robert Lee, who was generally unsympathetic to the slaves, often commiserated with them about their health. During his first army assignment he brought one of the old Stratford servants with him to Savannah in hopes of curing what appears to have been consumption. The experiment was doomed, but the story of Lee’s considerate treatment of the old man has lived on to this day.⁴¹ To be sure, compassion was coupled with pragmatism in all of this care. The nurturing of life was essential to protect a valuable labor force; in addition, disease could easily become uncontrollable in this small community. In 1836, for example, Lee became concerned when his little boy “Boo” spread the whooping cough to his other children, then to the houseguests, and finally to “all the little Ebony bipeds on the hill.”⁴² In the tangled web of denial about the humanity of the slaves, the communicability of disease was one human link the whites at Arlington could not afford to ignore.

The modest amount expended for the servants’ food at Arlington stands in contrast to the sums spent for clothing and medical care.⁴³ Bacon and corn were bought to feed the slaves, and fish were salted for their use during the shad and herring runs in the Potomac.⁴⁴ Increasingly, however, the blacks fed themselves. G. W. P. Custis had never been a shrewd agriculturalist like his step-grandfather Washington, and over the years he became ever more wrapped up in his artistic and literary pursuits. This, coupled with a long period of agricultural depression in northern Virginia, diminished his ambitions for Arlington.⁴⁵ The estate’s slaves were allowed to tend their own gardens, to keep chickens, even to sell produce in the markets at Washington and Alexandria.⁴⁶ They eagerly sought this privilege, since it generally meant provisions that were substantially better than the standard ration of a peck of corn and pound of fat bacon per week. Slaveholders also amplified their self-image in this way, masking the more brutal aspects of slavery through such seemingly generous policies. Nonetheless, like so many other aspects of slavery, the “privilege” carried a paradoxical twist. Slaves cultivated the coveted gardens on their own time, robbing them of leisure and adding to their labor. The only benefit they theoretically derived from slavery—the assurance of sustenance—was now casually removed from the master’s responsibility and put into their own hands.

To further the irony, the favor seemed to make the slaves dissatisfied and demanding. Part of the reason blacks hoped to grow their own food was that it connected them to the product of their labor and increased their ability to maneuver in the world outside the estate. Far from inspiring gratitude, it served ultimately to whet the bondsmen’s appetite for freedom and increase the self-sufficiency needed to obtain it. Jim Parks caught the incongruity of the Arlington slaves’ quasi-freedom when he recalled: “We used to go to Washington ’cross de long bridge, or we’d dress up and row across. People ud look at us an’ say: ‘Who’s dem fine folks?’ Den some’d say: ‘Dey’s de free Custis niggers.’ Dey had dey own horses an’ cows, an’ raised dey own stuff.”⁴⁷ This kind of respect lifted the slaves’ confidence, so much so that it sometimes caused public protests or encouraged the servants to run away.⁴⁸ As Lee’s letter to Keese attests, the Custis slaves were granted a good deal of leeway in their movements, only to disappear in distressing numbers. A taste of liberty, a worldview that encompassed life outside the plantation, and an appreciation of what they could achieve on their own became powerful forces in shaping the slaves’ aspirations.

A watercolor sketch of a slave leaving for the market, by Mary Custis Lee.
COURTESY OF THE LEE FAMILY AND ARLINGTON HOUSE, THE ROBERT E. LEE MEMORIAL, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

The lenience at Arlington reflected the hope that the slaves could be trained into a kind of “gradual emancipation,” one that would keep them temporarily in subservience but develop skills needed for eventual freedom. Mary Fitzhugh Custis, who was raised in a home that had great ambivalence toward slavery, was particularly wedded to this philosophy. Both she and her daughter relinquished their rights to slaves they were to inherit from the Fitzhugh estate, in exchange for a legal commitment that would release all of the black children from servitude.⁴⁹ For fifty years Molly Custis dedicated herself to the creation of a community at Arlington that would conform to the law but prepare the black people for an independent life. She began educational and religious programs, instructed the Lee children to treat the servants with consideration, and compassionately cared for the sick. Over time, practices such as selling slaves and harsh child labor were discontinued.⁵⁰ Her husband admitted that all this was “not according to my notions…I have my own notions on those subjects.”⁵¹ Indeed, one of the family servants remembered that Custis was “’clined to be rude to ’em in his young days,” but that under his wife’s influence he mellowed.⁵² The slave families were well aware of the way that “Mistress” tried to smooth their path. At her death slave William Burke remarked that “her kindness & Instruction to me is what I never can forget.”⁵³ Crusty “Old Nurse,” who prided herself on speaking just as she pleased, left this eulogy: “Now, when you consider all things up & down this side & tother, from the beginning to the endeing Mistress was the greatest Lady and the best in the whole land.”⁵⁴ When Mary Fitzhugh Custis was laid to rest behind her cherished gardens, the pallbearers were family slaves.⁵⁵

Three generations of Arlington women taught the slaves rudimentary reading and writing, laced with scriptural wisdom. Former slaves remembered gathering in a little back room to learn their ABCs, along with such childhood hymns as “Little Drops of Water.”⁵⁶ Results seem to have been mixed. Robert Lee did not think black people were “as capable of acquiring knowledge as the white man is,” but noted that some of the servants “learned to read and write very well.” Some extant letters from former Arlington slaves bear out the latter assessment, showing a high degree of literacy.⁵⁷ Nonetheless, the teachers sometimes railed against the poor motivation or disappointing progress of their students. Annie Lee ruefully noted that her pupils did not “do us, their masters teachers I mean, much credit.”⁵⁸ That little slip may have been one explanation for the uneven learning, since the presence of the master, even in the benevolent guise of teacher, could be intimidating. Then there was the fact that the “teachers” were untrained girls. Markie Williams’s recollection of these days indicates that her own grasp of spelling and grammar was none too sure: “I went up stairs to hear the children their lessons. They said a spelling lesson, read a Chapter in the Bible & wrote a coppy on their slates.” Another complicating factor was that one classroom contained pupils of all ages and abilities. “We have a considerable number of ‘ebony mites’ as Papa calls them & as no one knows as much as another it makes their instruction very tedious,” grumbled Agnes.⁵⁹

The slaves, moreover, may not have valued such book knowledge in the way that the Custis and Lee families did. Extensive networks of practical learning existed among African-American populations. Wisdom about job skills, recipes and remedies, religious and cultural heritage, and endurance under a cruel system were conscientiously passed along among generations. Asked how she knew her catechism so well, Mammy replied that she and others at Mount Vernon had learned from “two old black men, that used to know something and they used to teach the rest of us.”⁶⁰ Lessons given by white owners were hardly an exercise in filling empty brains, for the slaves had a vast store of knowledge and a realistic understanding of what was relevant to their survival and what was not.⁶¹ In addition, the school was held just once a week, on Sunday, interrupting the only day that the servants were allowed any leisure. As one of Arlington’s elite house slaves told Markie, the classes were “just too much trouble.”⁶²

The main objective of teaching the slaves was to give them religious instruction. Christian teaching was thought to elevate morale, improve the work ethic, and offer eternal salvation in return for obedience, patience, and fealty. As an evangelical Episcopalian, influenced by the religious revivals of the early national period, Mary Fitzhugh Custis was convinced that she was responsible not only for the slaves’ physical health but their fitness for eternal life.⁶³ To promote the spiritual atmosphere at Arlington she included the servants in daily family prayers and had a small log schoolhouse outfitted to hold services every Sunday evening. Blacks and whites worshipped there together, sometimes walking through the woods, conversing pleasantly as they made their way to the church. Biblical texts were carefully chosen, inclining toward the optimistic, and avoiding such difficult passages as the Exodus or those extolling the brotherhood of man. One sermon preserved by Markie Williams stresses the notion of gratitude to the master and acceptance of one’s lot in life.⁶⁴ Students from the nearby Episcopal Theological Seminary led the congregation, providing an outreach service and honing their preaching skills. The inexperience of the young theologians sometimes resulted in a certain hilarity. “When they get up to discourse, they make all sorts of rare gesticulations & say the most extraordinary things,” Cousin Markie confided to her diary, “then partially discovering what they have said, they try to unsay & this always makes things worse. Then they look as if they should expire.”⁶⁵

G. W. P. Custis enjoyed these evenings, finding an inner peace that eluded him in formal churchgoing, and a tranquillity that sometimes set him to dozing. He once mentioned that he liked this humble manner of worship, and “that although he paid pew rent in the church at Alexandria, he should never go anywhere but here.” Markie Williams agreed. She went to the “little tabernacle in the woods” every week during her residence at Arlington and wrote that “I felt my soul might be more benefited there, than in the gorgeous edifices of Paris.” Robert Lee also occasionally attended the church, and was observed to be “singularly alert and reverent in his bearing.”⁶⁶ The reaction of the servants was more nuanced. One Sunday evening Markie was surprised to hear from a black companion that, although they faithfully appeared at the Episcopal services, one and all considered themselves Baptists, and many of them were members of that church. Markie also learned that the slaves held their own religious services, “preaching and exhortation among themselves at home in the morning,” and that many disliked the family’s custom of hymn singing, and soberly refrained from the activity.⁶⁷ She had an even more intense cultural encounter with slave religion on a visit to Cedar Grove in 1855. Her cousin Ada convinced her to attend a charismatic worship service among the plantation slaves, at which she was pressed into reading and interpreting Scripture. The slaves sang “with the most unearthly voices,” flashed whips, writhed, and moaned. As soon as Markie began to read from the Bible, she said, “they began to groan & repeat my words and assent to all I said with earnest gesticulations, in a manner I had never seen them act before. By god’s grace, however, I was enabled to restore the solemnity of my feelings….”⁶⁸ Doubtless some of the slaves appreciated those Sunday services in the chapel at Arlington. But the Baptist leanings and morning “exhortations” again pointed up the dual culture that existed on the estate: one to which the slaves outwardly conformed, another that expressed their true sentiments and life ways.⁶⁹

Robert Lee and his in-laws were convinced that bondage was a way station for blacks on what they considered to be a necessary journey toward “civilization” and “salvation” and that as slaveholders they were fulfilling God’s design. They took some risks in achieving this vision. Antebellum social custom did not approve of instilling notions that would set slaves above their station. Moreover, they were on shaky legal ground. Arlington was located in the District of Columbia until 1847, the year in which Virginia reclaimed its section of the federal city. The laws of Washington, D.C., did not preclude educating slaves or holding religious meetings, as long as they took place before ten o’clock at night.⁷⁰ Once the estate came under Virginia jurisdiction, however, the Custises were subject to a more rigid slave code. After Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion, which had been plotted in late-night “religious meetings,” whites were highly suspicious of any black gathering or of skills that might allow slaves to forge passes or formulate subversive opinions. In response, the Virginia House of Delegates had passed legislation forbidding the hiring of teachers for black instruction and any nighttime African-American religious assemblages. Technically those at Arlington still could have remained within the law under these conditions, for their teachers and ministers were not paid, and the meetings took place in the daytime. But in 1849 Virginia closed the legal loopholes by making “every assemblage of Negroes for the purpose of instruction in reading or writing… an unlawful assembly.” Whites who taught either slaves or free blacks were to be confined to jail for up to six months. G. W. P. Custis, as justice of the peace, was only half joking when he told Markie that he should throw her in jail for teaching the servants. After 1849 the little church in the woods may have remained just within the law, since the new code did not prohibit services led by white preachers, as long as they were not paid. The slaves’ own religious celebrations, however, were clearly illegal, for the new code prohibited any meeting at all that was led by a Negro.⁷¹

The Arlington philosophy, which embraced eventual emancipation but shunned the notion of an interracial society based on equality, led its owners to participate actively in the American Colonization Society. The society was founded in 1816 by prominent national leaders—including President James Madison, John Marshall, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster—who proposed settling freed slaves in Liberia, a West African state created especially for this purpose. It was presented as an enlightened response to the potential dangers of a mass of uneducated and underemployed freed blacks, who were seen as having no realistic chance of succeeding in America, and who increasingly threatened the guardians of the stratified southern class system. In its early years the society enjoyed a reputation as a practical alternative to perpetual slavery, giving planters the possibility of emancipation without any lingering responsibility, and offering blacks a kind of pioneer experience in Africa, which was perceived to be their natural home. The prestige of the charter members and their well-known religiosity initially gave the society credibility. William Henry Fitzhugh, brother of Arlington’s mistress, and her cousin William Meade, were charter members of the organization. Meade’s opinions illustrated the confusion and sometimes the duality of purpose that lay behind the society. On the one hand he was candid about his aspirations for the program—the demise of a system he thought was a burden for whites, and the attractive prospect of promoting evangelical Christianity in Africa—but on the other he believed that the slave system was truly wicked and needed to be purged. “We make the sins of our Fathers our own…,” he wrote prophetically to Molly, stating that slavery was “an evil which grows with our growth & strengthens with our strength, and will soon outgrow us & beat us to the ground.” He, like his cousin at Arlington, found slavery incompatible with his personal religiosity and promoted colonization in an idealistic spirit.⁷² Mrs. Custis also became convinced that Arlington’s blacks would profit from emigration, both materially and morally. “For years this has been the subject of her hopes & prayers not only for their own benefit but that they…might aid in the mighty work of carrying light & Christianity to the dark heathen countries,” wrote her daughter.⁷³ Like her mother, Mary Custis Lee strongly encouraged the movement, both spiritually and financially, and even the little Lee girls collected flowers to sell for the cause.⁷⁴ George Washington Parke Custis was a more reluctant convert, though he was a member of the organization and spoke at its rallies. Robert Lee never officially joined the society, but he often acted as scribe for his mother-in-law or wife in their business with it.⁷⁵ The families’ robust words seem to have been somewhat more decisive than their deeds, however. The Lees donated funds to the society well into the 1850s, but the evidence indicates that only a handful of slaves were actually sent to Liberia.⁷⁶

Many who embraced the effort did so believing that it was, in Lee’s words, a “noble & Christian enterprize.”⁷⁷ Its reputation began to suffer, however, when it became clear that some of its followers actually hoped to reinforce the system of slavery by ridding the nation of “the great public evil” of blacks not under direct white control, and removing the disturbing influence of freedmen from the vicinity of their slaves. Abolitionists took issue with the theory that the deportation of freedmen would hasten the demise of slavery and pointed out that there was strong opposition to the idea from the slaves. Many black families had been in America for a century or more and no longer considered themselves Africans. They also heard with alarm the tales of real hardship that was endured by those settling in Liberia.⁷⁸ Both Mary Fitzhugh Custis and William Meade were frustrated by the lack of interest the slaves showed in the prospect of deportation. At the death of Mrs. Custis’s brother, nearly 250 slaves had been freed with the intention of sending them to Liberia, but to their dismay the family found that “not a single one of them will go to Africa.” Duped and swindled when they tried to hire out their labor, and disheartened by the intelligence that “amalgamation [was] out of the question” in the North, the newly liberated people determined not to work at all. “I think freedom is a curse to them in this country,” Mary Lee wrote in despair.⁷⁹ Controversy about the intent and feasibility of the society’s proposals, coupled with the failure of Congress to provide sufficient funding to sustain it, weakened the organization. At the same time those in favor of unambiguous emancipation were gaining vocal authority in the North. Mary Fitzhugh Custis lamented with uncharacteristic bitterness that “the whole New England states are arrayed against us,” and her friend Ralph Gurley, head of the Colonization Society, looked with troubled presentiment on the situation. “There is a deep, strong & increasing dissatisfaction with slavery, & with the South for doing nothing to ameliorate its condition & ultimately remove it,” he wrote in 1842, while on a fund-raising tour of the northern states. “The mind of the North, & especially of the Christian community, is I aprehend becoming more & more alienated from the South.”⁸⁰ As the abolitionists gained momentum, the American Colonization Society withered and died. Its legacy was the provocation of an open debate about race relations in the United States and the emigration of some 19,000 blacks to Liberia.⁸¹

When Markie Williams wrote of the bonds within “the family-circle,” she was probably referring to the communal household at Arlington, which formed a distinct economic and social unit. Among the tragedies of slavery, however, was the fact that many who lived in these close plantation environments were family in more than shared experience. Sexual relations between blacks and whites had begun as soon as the first slaves arrived in the New World. By the 1850s, the practice had, in the words of one historian, “reached a crescendo.”⁸² Virginia and the District of Columbia had tried to restrain such relations, sometimes from moral fastidiousness, more often because of the confusion it caused in the class structure. Despite these efforts, racial intermingling, usually by white males and female slaves, often under conditions of brutality, was a well-understood part of the system.⁸³ One Lee cousin deplored the fact that a “double standard of living in a spectacular chivalry walked hand in hand with intemperance and moral laxity, open and unabashed…. I venture to say that every family has its more or less open secrets…but because of the very prudery of the times, buried in the darkest closets of the memory.”⁸⁴ A former Virginia slave gave horrifying reality to the coercion involved in most of these situations when he wrote: “Did de dirty suckers associate wid slave wimen?…Lord chile, dat wuz common. What we saw, couldn’t do nothing ’bout it. My blood is bilin’ now [at the] thoughts of dem times.”⁸⁵ Some slave owners who fathered children by their slave women, such as Custis’s cousin George Calvert, acknowledged their offspring and took pains to care for them. Others simply ignored what they did not want to acknowledge. A cousin of Molly Custis, reeling from the pain of living alongside a slave who had given birth to the daughter of one of her menfolk, admitted that “in similar cases among us, nothing is ever done, & this makes it difficult for me to act—”⁸⁶ Slave codes stipulated harsh sentences against miscegenation for whites as well as blacks, but they were rarely enforced.⁸⁷ Moreover, mulatto children inherited the status of the mother, and these children were then forced to live in bondage. Of slavery’s many horrors, perhaps none is so shocking as the abuse of black women, and the chilling fact that as the mulatto population grew, increasingly the whites were enslaving themselves.⁸⁸

It appears that Arlington did not escape this sad manifestation of human frailty and unequal power. The Custis family had a reputation for interracial dalliance, and many of the mulatto servants had clearly descended from illicit ties. John Custis IV, the great-great-grandfather of G. W. P. Custis, endowed his slave Jack with freedom and grants of land that would have made him a substantial property holder. John Custis grew so fond of Jack that he feared the boy’s death and wrote, “I am sure I should soon follow him, it would break my heart, and bring my grey hairs with sorrow to the grave my lif[e] being wrapt up in his.” Evidence points to the fact that Jack was his son. Later Custis wrote a will that instructed his legitimate son Daniel, in quite an insulting manner, to provide handsomely for Jack. G. W. P. Custis told the story differently, concluding that Jack was but an amusement to his ancestor and that the will had been written to taunt his white son. However, the legal record shows a consistent pattern of concern that seems to override assertions that Jack had merely “turned somersets” to secure the affection of his master.⁸⁹ The Custis rumors continued in the next generation. Martha Dandridge Custis Washington was said to have had a mulatto half sister, Ann Dandridge, who was kept as a slave at Mount Vernon, and that this sister in turn produced a child by Martha’s problematic son Jacky Custis. The truth of these histories, preserved in family lore but rarely in official record, is often difficult to verify. What is well established is that the son of Ann Dandridge, named William Custis Costin, was freed, was well known to G. W. P. Custis, and was sometimes financially supported by him. Costin became a respected figure in the free black community and a trusted employee of the Bank of Washington.⁹⁰

George Washington Parke Custis may also have fathered mulatto children. As a young man, both before and after his marriage, Custis began to free a few of his female slaves and their mulatto offspring, in at least one case bestowing land along with liberty, and causing even the Congressional Record to note that he showed “something perhaps akin to a paternal instinct” in so doing. These were the only slaves he freed before his death. One of the families, named Syphax, who allegedly stemmed from a relationship between Custis and Mount Vernon slave Airrianna Carter, stayed on the Arlington property, despite a Virginia law requiring freedmen to move out of the state. The family produced a number of distinguished civic leaders, among them William Syphax, whose photographs show a marked resemblance to G. W. P. Custis.⁹¹ Another slave, Lucy Harrison, and her mulatto offspring were “sold” to distant relatives in Alexandria on the condition that they be freed. The new owners believed that Lucy Harrison was the daughter of G. W. P. Custis and Mount Vernon servant Caroline Branham. “She bore a very strong remembrance to his daughter Mary Custis…,” confided one of the Custis cousins. “The children might easily have passed for white…an uncle Uncle William Parke became a wealthy man in Washington, educated his daughters & sent them west & south where they married white men & occupied excellent positions.”⁹²

Demographics uphold the evidence of miscegenation at Arlington. It is thought that 9 to 11 percent of the South’s population was mulatto between 1850 and 1860, and some scholars put the figure as low as 7.7 percent. The inventory taken at G. W. P. Custis’s death, and the 1860 census for Arlington, show that more than 50 percent of the slaves, and all of the free people living on the property, were of mixed race.⁹³ Acquaintances spoke openly to G. W. P. Custis of “your yellow coloured Servants,” using the nineteenth-century term yellow for mulatto. Even Cousin Markie remarked on the “little safron colored pupils” she taught.⁹⁴ Three of the seven runaways Robert Lee was trying to apprehend were described as mulatto, including a “nearly white” child. A picture of an Arlington slave and his grandson, taken before the war, shows a startling contrast in color.⁹⁵ There is no evidence that Lee himself indulged in sexual activity with the slaves, but certainly he was aware of it. “Everyone was so mixed, half-colored and half-white,” concluded a daughter of Arlington slaves. “Those were terrible times. Nothing pleasant to think about.”⁹⁶

Arlington slave Charles Syphax with his grandchild.
ARLINGTON HOUSE, THE ROBERT E. LEE MEMORIAL, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

This was the experience of human bondage that most immediately influenced Robert E. Lee. It was, as he would write, a system characterized by “a union of wealth, poverty, want elegance, sloveness.”⁹⁷ Like all studies of slavery, it is painful to read, invoking private guilt and the anguish of a legacy that cannot be easily overcome. It is particularly distressing because its familiarity and its oppression existed simultaneously. It is clear that the Lee and Custis families genuinely cared for “their people.” They took pains to treat them with courtesy, watched after their legal affairs, and enjoyed their company. Treats such as sledding and gifts of dolls or candy for the children coexisted with deprivation.⁹⁸ Harsh rebukes there were, but it is also difficult to doubt the genuine emotion in Agnes Lee’s tearful farewell to the black people: “each servant, with the parting gift have been told good-by with the wish ‘I hope I’ll see you next summer, well & happy’ how truly those words came from my heart….”⁹⁹ Mrs. Lee’s letters show as solicitous a concern for the servants as for her own relatives. Without question the white families flouted the law to give the slaves some education, and with it, a little chance to dream. When the Lees fled Arlington in 1861, it was to the black housekeeper that Mrs. Lee entrusted the keys, and this servant carried out the responsibility with loyalty and spirit, challenging Union generals to stop their troops from looting.¹⁰⁰

In 1862 young Robert E. Lee Jr. described the family’s still-unfreed slaves at the White House plantation, telling his sister that the “most delightful thing about the place is the set of negroes. They are the real old Virginny kind, as polite as possible devoted to their master & mistress, who are devoted to them & who do everything for them.”¹⁰¹ This was the pleasant, paternalistic world that slave owners liked to portray. The slaves also had their idealized tales of warm bonds and powerful connections. The Syphax family passed down a story that G. W. P. Custis’s illegitimate daughter Maria Carter was “raised in the Custis Mansion and educated by the same Tuitor as her half sister Maryanna Custis.”¹⁰² Another slave family cherished the tradition that housekeeper Selina Gray had been married in the same room as Robert and Mary Lee, by the same Episcopal minister.¹⁰³ In all three of these accounts truth melds into the wistful desire to believe in a harmonious connection between master and slave. They point to the fond fantasy that this household, so interdependent economically, might constitute a true family circle, with shared traditions, genuine respect, and mutual support. The reality of course was far harsher, even at Arlington. That some of these ties existed is indisputable; that blood relations gave the experience a haunting intimacy is strongly implied. Yet the slaves were denied any ability to determine their simplest actions or to define their lives and the fate of their children. Slave women came in for special abuse, but the whipping post in the Arlington slave quarter was a silent testament to the ever-present threat of humiliation for all black people.¹⁰⁴ No matter how close the human bonds, they were always overshadowed by the specter of perpetual servitude and the rigidity of a stratified class system, as Robert Lee’s chronic problem with runaways affirms. Ultimately, under the strains of that system the Arlington slaves would begin to openly rebel.¹⁰⁵