CHAPTER ELEVEN

“The Justice of the Creator”

“GRANDPA IS VERY WELL, and much pleased at being once more Farmer Washington.” Thus did Washington’s granddaughter Nelly report to a friend the return of Washington from the presidency to his beloved Mount Vernon in March 1797. He said that the world he had left behind seemed to him “little more than vanity and vexation.”1 He eagerly resumed the familiar, comforting, yet rigorous routine of farm life, which a visitor described:

He gets up at five o’clock in the morning, reads or writes until 7. He breakfasts on tea and cakes made from maize; because of his teeth he makes slices spread with butter and honey. He then immediately goes on horseback to see the work in the fields; sometimes in the middle of the fields he holds a council of war with Mr. Anderson [his manager]. He returns at two o’clock, dresses, goes to dinner. If there are guests, he loves to chat after dinner with a glass of Madeira in his hand. After dinner he diligently reads the newspapers, of which he receives about ten of different kinds. He answers letters, etc. Tea at 7 o’clock; he chats until nine, and then he goes to bed.2

The visitor who recorded this routine was the Polish nobleman Julian Niemcewicz, who met Washington in Georgetown in May 1798. Thomas Law brought Niemcewicz to evening tea at the home of Thomas and Martha Peter, in the Georgetown house they occupied before they built Tudor Place.3 His meeting with the hero left Niemcewicz tongue-tied:

I saw him through the window and I recognized him immediately. One can guess how my heart was beating; I was going to see the man for whom, since my youth, I had had such a great respect, such a man as my unhappy fatherland lacked for its own salvation.… He held out his hand to me and shook mine. We went into the parlor; I sat down beside him; I was moved, speechless. I had not eyes enough to look on him. His is a majestic figure in which dignity and gentleness are united. The portraits that we have of him in Europe do not resemble him much. He is nearly six feet tall, square set, and very strongly built; aquiline nose, blue eyes, the mouth and especially the lower jaw sunken, a good head of hair.… He wore a coat of deep nut brown, black stockings, waistcoat, and breeches of satin of the same color.

Though Washington was renowned for his aloofness, he recognized the befuddlement of the foreign guest and plunged into some small talk.

“How long are you in this country?”

“Eight months.”

“How do you like it?”

“I am happy, Sir, to see in America those blessings which I was so ardently wishing for in my own country. To you, Sir, are the Americans indebted for them.”

“I wished always your country well and that with all my heart.”

The arrival of Eliza Custis Law and her toddler broke the ice. The general swept the child up in his arms and handed her a sweet. He set the girl down and began to chat about farming, “a favorite subject of the General.” It was a congenial evening. Niemcewicz basked in the presence of the young Custis women, “the most beautiful women one could see.” Mrs. Peter played the harpsichord. They had tea and the general told jokes. Washington and the Pole got on so well that Niemcewicz returned the next day as well. Washington was in an expansive mood; when the talk turned to housing projects to accommodate the new government, he told another joke: “They spoke of the offices that were going to be built for the departments [and] discussed at length the difficulty that there would be to finish enough houses to lodge the members. Gen. Washington said … ‘Oh well, they can camp out. The Representatives in the first line, the Senate in the second, the president with all his suite in the middle.’” Later on Niemcewicz played billiards with the general, who then begged the favor of entertaining him at Mount Vernon.

The meeting of the nobleman and the general was fortunate for history, for Niemcewicz recorded in his diary some of the sharpest observations we have about Mount Vernon’s master and his slaves. As Niemcewicz ambled about the region with apparent aimlessness, “possessing nothing and condemned to the life of a vagabond,” as he said of himself, he wrote down all that he encountered with a keen eye and ear, and a sense of humor. After a day of misadventures he and two French companions trudged into Georgetown tired and famished: “We ate dinner table d’hote and paid in our capacity as foreigners double the normal price.”4

Niemcewicz also possessed a moral sense that compelled him to question the obvious contradictions in this new republic.

We went this morning to roam about the Capitol. It was eleven o’clock. No one was at work; they had gone to drink grog. This is what they do twice a day, as well as dinner and breakfast.… The Negroes alone work. I have seen them in large numbers, and I was very glad that these poor unfortunates earned eight to ten dollars per week. My joy was not long lived: I am told that they were not working for themselves; their masters hire them out and retain all the money for themselves. What humanity! What a country of liberty.5

Before visiting Mount Vernon, Niemcewicz set out for a tour of the Virginia countryside with his French companions: “We passed along the fields where ten Negroes, men and women, were scratching at the soil and driving in little sticks.… Their emaciated and black skeletons were covered with shreds of rags, bare legs.”6 Eager to speak with the slaves, and not knowing the custom of the country, Niemcewicz and his companions tied up their horses and jumped a hedge to get into the field. The slaves told the visitors they were planting maize, and demonstrated how they scratched into the soil and planted a few grains. Their curiosity satisfied, the foreigners turned to leave when they heard “a furious voice” cry out, “Stop! Stop!”

We returned and saw two men armed with guns, running all out of breath and very anxiously towards the Negro with whom we had just spoken and asking him what we had wanted and what we had said to him. Right in the middle of these interrogations we approached. “What were you looking for here? What did you want with my Negroes?” he asked us in an agitated and frightened voice. We told him we were foreigners, that we were curious to see a tobacco plantation.… “I beg of you a thousand pardons … I thought that you had come to corrupt and seduce my Negroes.” What more wretched existence is there than that of a man who lives in continual anxiety of seeing his unfortunates carried away; whom he knows to be discontented with him and whom he does not cease however, to torment. We left. We saw at the side of the road a few miserable cabins, dwellings of the Blacks.

A few days later Niemcewicz went to Mount Vernon with Thomas Law. Washington often grumbled about the horde of unwanted visitors that descended willy-nilly on Mount Vernon, but he was delighted to see Niemcewicz, who was made so comfortable that he remained for twelve days, remarking in his diary, “I was not as a stranger but a member of the family.”7 He passed long hours in discussions with Washington:

I have often heard the general reproached for his reserve and his taciturnity. It is true that he is somewhat reserved in speech, but he does not avoid entering into conversation when one furnishes him with a subject.… At the table after the departure of the ladies, or else in the evening seated under the portico, he often talked with me for hours at a time. His favorite subject is agriculture, but he answered with kindness all questions that I put him on the Revolution, the armies, etc. He has a prodigious memory.

Martha charmed him as well, and Niemcewicz wrote glowingly of her in his diary. “Mrs. Washington is one of the most estimable persons that one could know, good, sweet, and extremely polite. She loves to talk and talks very well about times past. She told me she remembered the time when there was only one single carriage in all of Virginia. Ladies invited to entertainment arrived on horseback.”

The general took his visitor for a tour of his fields, and Niemcewicz went down to the river to watch the slaves fish for herring. If he ever discussed slavery with his host, Niemcewicz did not record it; that sensitive topic probably did not come up. But Washington’s manager, James Anderson, spoke freely on the subject. He told Niemcewicz that Mount Vernon had three hundred slaves, but only one hundred were actually able to work. “They work all week,” Niemcewicz wrote, “not having a single day for themselves except holidays. One sees by that that the condition of our peasants [in Poland] is infinitely happier.” Anderson told him that “the mulattoes are ordinarily chosen for servants,” and explained that the law of Virginia made slaves of the children of slave women, even if the father was white. Another foreign visitor to Mount Vernon wrote, “The general’s house servants are mulattoes, some of whom have kinky hair still but skin as light as ours. I noticed one small boy whose hair and skin were so like our own that if I had not been told, I should never have suspected his ancestry. He is nevertheless a slave for the rest of his life.”8

Either from his own observation or from what Anderson told him, Niemcewicz wrote, “General Washington treats his slaves far more humanely than do his fellow citizens of Virginia. Most of these gentlemen give to their Blacks only bread, water and blows.” The Pole’s assessment is contradicted by the observation of another foreign visitor, Richard Parkinson, an English farmer who considered leasing some of the Mount Vernon land a few months after Niemcewicz was there. In an account of his time in Virginia he wrote: “The management of negroes was a great obstacle.… they will not do without harsh treatment. Only take General Washington as an example: I have not the least reason to think it was his desire, but the necessity of the case: but it was the sense of all his neighbours that he treated them with more severity than any other man.” Parkinson said he was “amazed” at how sharply Washington spoke when giving orders to slaves: “He spoke as differently as if he had been quite another man, or had been in anger.”9

Contradictions such as these multiply in the record of slavery at Mount Vernon. Washington tried to put a stop to the excesses of overseers who treated the slaves as “brute beasts,” but he also used these overseers as a threat to his house servants: if they misbehaved they would be exiled to the “several Plantations.”10 He did not treat all his slaves alike; some were “deserving,” some were “worthless” (and therefore got less from him in the way of clothing). He instructed his manager in 1795: “the better sort of linnen to be given to the grown people, and the most deserving; whilst the more indifferent sort is served to the younger ones and worthless.” He could be quite blunt in his assessments: in 1795 he wrote, “The death of Paris is a loss, that of Jupiter the reverse.” Washington recognized competence when he saw it, writing of the “smart young negro man who acts as an Assistant in the mill.” His mulatto overseer Davy did a reasonably good job, and for another assignment he suggested “the children of Daphne at the river farm [who] are among the best disposed negros I have.”11

Niemcewicz saw evidence that the slaves at Mount Vernon were reasonably contented: “Either from habit, or from natural humor disposed to gaiety, I have never seen the Blacks sad. Last Sunday there were about thirty divided into two groups and playing at prisoner’s base. There were jumps and gambols as if they had rested all week. I noticed that all spoke very good English.” Yet he also saw the conditions in which Washington’s slaves lived when Anderson and Law took him to the slave quarter on an outlying farm:

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; a very bad fireplace, some utensils for cooking, but in the middle of this poverty some cups and a teapot. A boy of 15 was lying on the ground, sick, and in terrible convulsions. The General had sent to Alexandria to fetch a doctor. A very small garden planted with vegetables was close by, with five or six hens, each one leading 10 to 15 chickens. It is the only comfort that is permitted them; for they may not keep either ducks, geese, or pigs. They sell the poultry in Alexandria and procure for themselves a few amenities.

From Washington’s own description, a slave house might be so insubstantial that, in order to move it, the slaves could just pick it up and put it on a cart, and they might not even need the cart. A black overseer’s house was so flimsy Washington’s manager feared a strong wind might knock it over and kill the overseer’s family. In one letter Washington referred to the slaves’ houses as “coverings,” implying that they offered but the bare minimum of shelter, and he admitted that white people would not live in them. His cousin and manager, Lund, thought of the slaves’ houses as the benchmark of squalor: in describing to Washington the poor workmanship of some new chimneys in the mansion, Lund wrote in 1775, “they really smoke’d so Bad that the wall lookd as bad as any negro Quarter.…”12 It might seem to be a contradiction that Washington kept his slaves in such miserable conditions while planning to free them. But in Washington’s view, society was hierarchical: there would always be people at the bottom, laborers both white and black whose lot was a harsh one. Washington accepted the notion that a laborer’s life would be hard, but he rejected the idea that the laborer should be enslaved.

Near the end of his visit, Niemcewicz saw the arrival, in grand style, of the Washingtons’ granddaughter Eleanor, the widow of Jacky Custis, and her second husband, Dr. David Stuart. They thundered up the drive in a coach and four, with a pair of slaves on horseback and two black postilions clinging to the rear of the carriage. Niemcewicz had a long talk with Stuart about slavery, in which Stuart expounded on the inferiority of the black race, “which will never mix in the society of Whites.”

Not mentioning that two years earlier Washington had tried to carry out a massive emancipation, Stuart mouthed the usual self-justifications that slave owners kept ready for outsiders: “He told me: no one knows better than the Virginians the cruelty, inconvenience and the little advantage of having Blacks. Their support costs a great deal; their work is worth little if they are not whipped; the [overseer] costs a great deal and steals into the bargain. We would all agree to free these people; but how to do it with such a great number?” The masters had one set of facts for outsiders and another among themselves. Stuart told Niemcewicz that “this unfortunate black color has made such a sharp distinction between the two races. It will always make them a separate caste.” To Washington, his fellow slaveholder, Stuart had said the exact opposite: “the only thing to be regretted is, that they are not of the same colour with ourselves—But time which applies a remedy to all things, will no doubt soon find one for this.”13

Niemcewicz captured more in his diary than he realized. His conversation with Dr. Stuart reveals the stubbornness that Washington had to battle in his own family, and it shows his isolation. Washington had looked hard for a way to free his slaves, yet Stuart was braying that it was impossible. Washington despised the selling of human beings, yet Thomas Peter was busy at it. Washington’s own family had no qualms at all about the slave market. His brother John Augustine called for the sale of slaves in his will. His nephew Corbin wrote in his will of 1799:

as it is not uncommon for Negroes to become disobedient to their Mistresses after the Death of their Masters to prevent any inconvenience on this head I do hereby give my said dear Wife full powers & authority to sell & dispose of any of them so offending in her Opinion, and Vest the money arising therefrom in Other Negroes, or such other Property as She may consider most beneficial to herself and Children.14

After Washington’s death, Bushrod, irritated by repeated escapes, sold fifty of his slaves from Mount Vernon to the Deep South traders. Thus Washington lived among an extended family and in a society that compelled him to silence and, when pressed, prevarication. In 1798 he made an eloquent little speech on slavery to a visiting Englishman—all of it false but for the last line.

A black coming at this moment, with a jug of spring water, I could not repress a smile, which the General at once interpreted. “This may seem a contradiction, but I think you must perceive that it is neither a crime nor an absurdity. When we profess, as our fundamental principle, that liberty is the inalienable right of every man, we do not include madman or idiots; liberty in their hands would become a scourge. Till the mind of the slave has been educated to perceive what are the obligations of a state of freedom, and not confound a man’s with a brute’s, the gift would insure its abuse. We might as well be asked to pull down our old warehouses before trade has increased to demand enlarged new ones. Both houses and slaves were bequeathed to us by Europeans, and time alone can change them; an event, sir, which, you may believe me, no man desires more heartily than I do. Not only do I pray for it, on the score of human dignity, but I can clearly foresee that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union, by consolidating it in a common bond of principle.”15

His remarks to the visitor seemed to defend the indefinite continuation of slavery; yet at the same time he admitted that its perpetuation threatened the nation. For years he had been plotting emancipation, and just a few months later he wrote the will that set his people free.

For the man who lived by the maxim “I have made it a rule…,” Washington displayed surprising vacillation when slavery was involved. On no other issue was he so vulnerable to pressure. During the Revolution he first forbade blacks to be soldiers, because that was what his officers seemed to want and that was the prejudice he brought from the South, but then he accepted them after a direct appeal from the blacks themselves. He first supported the Laurens plan for emancipation, then backed away. At the end of the war he thought the slaves who had reached British lines were gone forever, but when pressured by other planters he tried to force General Carleton, unsuccessfully, to yield up the escaped slaves. When he outlined his emancipation plan to Lear he said to keep it secret (in a break with procedure, a copy of that letter was not kept at Mount Vernon). He told Humphreys that slavery was his great regret, but that regret never appeared in his letters to his family (with the exception of the remarkable blast at Spotswood over selling slaves “as if they were cattle”). When he assured David Stuart that the Quaker emancipation proposal had been put to sleep, he did not acknowledge that he had been considering a private emancipation himself. He sensed his isolation on this issue, especially within his own family. When Washington wrote to his nephew Lawrence Lewis in 1799 to tell him what land he was getting in his will, he did not tell Lewis that he would not be getting slaves as well. One month after he had written his will, Washington wrote to another relative of the problem of surplus labor at Mount Vernon but said nothing of his plan to liberate the slaves. He was keeping his emancipation a secret. This pattern of concealment can only mean that Washington expected fierce opposition if he revealed his plan in advance—opposition he might not be able to overcome.16

*   *   *

Washington’s decision to write his will seems to have been made abruptly in July 1799. The nineteenth-century journalist Benson Lossing, an intimate of the Custis family, printed the letter from Martha describing the dream Washington had about his impending death, the dream that set him to writing his will. The original of this letter has not been found, and the legitimacy of it has been questioned. But the core of the story has the ring of truth. Interestingly, Washington formulated his secret 1794 emancipation plan at another moment when he thought he was dying—he had disfiguring skin lesions which he took, incorrectly, to be cancerous. It makes sense that an intimation of death in 1799 would have impelled him to put his final emancipation plan on paper before it was too late.17

Washington knew all too well that Mount Vernon was overstocked with laborers. Anderson told Niemcewicz that only one hundred out of three hundred slaves actually worked. Washington himself thought there were twice as many slaves as the plantation actually needed. He also knew all too well what his heirs would do with the surplus: they would sell them. Washington himself owned only 123 of Mount Vernon’s 316 slaves; forty others were rented; the rest were the property of the Custis estate and would go to the Custis heirs after Martha’s death. Washington could free his own people but he could not touch the dower slaves. He acknowledged this difficulty in the will:

Upon the decease of my wife, it is my Will & desire that all the Slaves which I hold in my own right, shall receive their freedom. To emancipate them during her life, would, tho’ earnestly wished by me, be attended with such insuperable difficulties on account of their intermixture by Marriages with the dower Negroes, as to excite the most painful sensations, if not disagreeable consequences from the latter, while both descriptions are in the occupancy of the same Proprietor; it not being in my power, under the tenure by which the Dower Negroes are held, to manumit them.

By delaying his slaves’ emancipation until Martha’s death, he did not solve the problem of breaking up the slaves’ families but merely put it off, which would have been evident to Martha. He foresaw “most painful sensations” and “disagreeable consequences” if this breakup of families were allowed to happen. This was a tacit appeal to Martha and the Custis heirs to join him in emancipating their slaves along with his. Unlike Hannah and John Augustine Washington, who had clearly discussed the fine points of John Augustine’s will, George and Martha Washington were not even speaking to each other about slavery by the end of their lives together. He had to appeal to her humanity from the grave.

And whereas among those who will recieve freedom according to this devise, there may be some, who from old age or bodily infirmities, and others who on account of their infancy, that will be unable to support themselves; it is my Will and desire that all who come under the first & second description shall be comfortably cloathed & fed by my heirs while they live.…

Washington’s stipulation that the old and the infirm be cared for until death would seem unnecessary; the plantation lore passed down to us holds that masters always cared for the old slaves. But that was not the case. Thomas Peter tried to sell off a sixty-year-old Custis slave, but found no takers. A decade after Washington died, his cousins at Blenheim similarly tried to rid themselves of an old couple, also finding no takers. Washington knew the magnanimity of the masters was uncertain. If they could pick up a few dollars for an aged, unwanted attendant, no scruple would restrain them; the prohibition against this had to be written into the will. Washington specified that “a regular and permanent fund be established for their support so long as there are subjects requiring it; not trusting to the uncertain provision to be made by individuals.”

The clause that followed was perhaps the most extraordinary:

[the children who] have no parents living, or if living are unable, or unwilling to provide for them, shall be bound by the Court until they shall arrive at the age of twenty five years; and in cases where no record can be produced, whereby their ages can be ascertained, the judgment of the Court, upon its own view of the subject, shall be adequate and final. The Negros thus bound, are (by their Masters or Mistresses) to be taught to read & write; and to be brought up to some useful occupation, agreeably to the Laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia, providing for the support of Orphan[s] and other poor Children.

Education for slaves—the very thought of it was revolutionary. With this clause Washington overturned generations of prejudice. Washington was not a racist: he did not believe that the slaves were inherently inferior people; he believed that the apparent deficiencies in African-Americans were the result of their enslavement, and that with education and the opportunity to find work they could prosper as free people.

His next clause may have been addressed directly to Thomas Peter:

and I do hereby expressly forbid the Sale, or transportation out of the said Commonwealth, of any Slave I may die possessed of, under any pretence whatsoever. And I do moreover most pointedly, and most solemnly enjoin it upon my Executors hereafter named, or the Survivors of them, to see that this clause respecting Slaves, and every part thereof be religiously fulfilled at the Epoch at which it is directed to take place; without evasion, neglect or delay …

The vehemence of Washington’s language suggests that he trusted none of his heirs and executors. The order for an emancipation should have been clear and sufficient in itself; but Washington did not think so. He expected evasions and pretenses. There is an extraordinary element in this clause as well. Virtually every emancipation plan proposed in Washington’s time included forced exile for the freed slaves to Africa or the West Indies. Washington insisted that no one be exiled; the slaves had a right to live on American soil.

The final portion of the emancipation clause recognized the service of one particular slave:

And to my Mulatto man William (calling himself William Lee) I give immediate freedom; or if he should prefer it (on account of the accidents which have befallen him, and which have rendered him incapable of walking or of any active employment) to remain in the situation he now is, it shall be optional in him to do so: In either case however, I allow him an annuity of thirty dollars during his natural life, which shall be independent of the victuals and cloaths he has been accustomed to receive, if he chuses the last alternative; but in full, with his freedom, if he prefers the first; & this I give him as a testimony of my sense of his attachment to me, and for his faithful services during the Revolutionary War.

As faithful as William Lee had been to him for more than thirty years, Washington did not reveal in other records that he had ever grown especially close to him. Washington looked after Lee when he was injured; gave him permission to bring his wife, whom Washington disliked, to Mount Vernon (though she may never have come; there is no record of her); and granted Lee immediate freedom. But there is no account of their conversing or sharing any intimate moment. Washington did not love this slave, and when he set him free he acted not out of sentiment but out of a sense of justice that extended to all the slaves, including those who had malingered or stolen from him or tried to escape. He did not free only a favored few, as other masters and mistresses occasionally did. His sense of justice knew no exceptions.

*   *   *

Washington lived just five more months after writing his will. In December 1799 a sudden snowstorm blew in while he was on his daily rounds inspecting his farming operations. That night he awakened with a sore throat, his air passage so swollen that he struggled to breathe. Doctors rushed to his bedside and applied, at Washington’s insistence, the standard treatment of the time, bleeding; he was probably suffering an acute infection. His death was slow and painful, tantamount to a slow strangulation, but he endured the agony with immense stoicism. Throughout his ordeal he was cared for by slaves—Molly, Charlotte, Christopher Sheels, and Caroline Branham. He had one final decision to make, the nature of which is not known. He asked Martha to bring him the wills he had written—not one, but two. He glanced at the papers and asked her to burn one of them, which was done. What clauses it contained, no one knows. He died on the night of December 14, a Saturday, between ten and eleven o’clock.18

After her husband died, Martha moved to a small bedroom on the third floor. “Wash” Custis took another room on that floor to keep her company, but there is some thought that she became a bit of a recluse. Perhaps at her husband’s request, she burned all of their decades of personal correspondence.19

Washington’s emancipation clause had an unintended effect. Martha began to fear that his slaves would kill her to hasten the day of their freedom. Her grandson “Wash” Custis wrote, “The slaves were left to be emancipated at the death of Mrs. Washington; but it was found necessary (for prudential reasons) to give them their freedom in one year after the general’s decease.” Accordingly, on New Year’s Day 1801, Washington’s slaves were all set free. Martha died on May 22, 1802, then possessing only one slave in her own name. Two months before her death Martha added a codicil to her will about this slave: “I give to my grandson George Washington Parke Custis my mulatto man Elish—that I bought of mr Butler Washington … to him and his [heirs] forever.”* The example George Washington set was not followed even in his own household; there were no exceptions even for a single soul. The Custis estate passed intact to Martha’s heirs, augmented by Elish.20

In the end George Washington did precisely what he had said was impossible: he freed his slaves all at once, not by imperceptible degrees. Earlier he had insisted that an emancipation could only be done with the sanction of law, but he had lost faith that the political process could solve the problem of slavery. The interests opposed to emancipation were too strong and held too many seats.

Washington’s will was a blueprint for a future that did not come to pass. He implicitly declared that slaves had a right to freedom, to education, to productive work. He believed that the African-Americans had a rightful place in the United States. The contrast with Thomas Jefferson is illuminating. Speaking of the impossibility of emancipation, Jefferson wrote, “We have the wolf by the ear: and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” Washington did not dither over making fine metaphors; he simply freed his people.21

Washington may have believed that, given his immense prestige, his will would have some lasting influence on the debate over slavery. But Jefferson’s vision of America’s racial future won out over Washington’s. Jefferson wrote:

It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race. —To these objections, which are political, may be added others, which are physical and moral.22

Jefferson was wrong about the blacks, whose history since Emancipation has consistently been one of forgiveness, not revenge. Yet Jefferson was correct about the “deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites,” as evidenced by subsequent events during Reconstruction and into the twentieth century.

The tragedy, for the nation, is that Washington did not act upon his convictions during his lifetime. Had he freed his slaves in 1794 or in 1796, while in office, the effect might have been profound. He would have set the precedent that the chief executive cannot hold slaves. When the question of slavery arose at the Constitutional Convention and later in Congress, South Carolina and Georgia were always adamant in their opposition to any emancipation plan, no matter how long it might have played out nor how the costs might have been defrayed. Those states threatened secession. As Joseph Ellis has pointed out, “perhaps, as some historians have argued, South Carolina and Georgia were bluffing. But the most salient historical fact cannot be avoided: No one stepped forward to call their bluff.” Washington, the practiced Williamsburg gambler, was the man who could have called the bluff. Jefferson himself said that Washington was “the one man who outweighs them all in influence over the people.”23

The biographer James Thomas Flexner argues that Washington supported Alexander Hamilton’s plan to promote manufacturing because it would move the United States away from slavery. And it is clear that Washington could see the deleterious effects of the slave system. He wrote in 1796 to a British correspondent, “The present prices of lands in Pennsylvania are higher than they are in Maryland and Virginia, although they are not of superior quality; (among other reasons) because there are laws [in Pennsylvania] for the gradual abolition of slavery, which neither of the two States above mentioned have at present, but which nothing is more certain than they must have, and at a period not remote.”24

Washington seems to have believed that a gradual emancipation would not have caused an insuperable labor problem. By the 1790s sharecropping was a long-established labor system; it was not born after the Civil War. It may seem fanciful to speculate from the distance of two centuries that sharecropping might have been a viable alternative to slavery in the 1790s, but evidently that is what Washington himself had in mind. Washington had white tenant farmers; in his youth, most white males on the Northern Neck were sharecroppers. David Stuart’s February 1796 letter to Washington discusses in detail a sharecropping plan for the freed Mount Vernon slaves—even Stuart did not find the idea to be fantastic.

A gradual emancipation that turned slaves into free sharecroppers would have largely preserved the labor pool, but it would have deranged the financial planning of the elite, who had become dependent on slaves for portable, bequeathable, disposable capital. Land in Virginia was losing its value, having been ruined by tobacco; but slaves held their value, and increased in value if sent to the Piedmont or farther west. No one knew this better than Washington’s relatives, such as his cousin Spotswood, who wrote to Washington about moving slaves to Kentucky to sell them in a higher market. Spotswood’s scheme marked a rising trend. After studying the prices of slaves in Washington’s era and later, Winthrop Jordan found that as slavery’s profits declined in Virginia, “superfluous slaves could be transferred to regions where they would no longer be superfluous, to Kentucky or … to the southward.” As early as 1793 “great numbers” of slaves, wrote a contemporary observer, were being transported from Virginia. Jordan writes: “by the turn of the century American slavery had taken on new dimensions.”25

Though only a tiny minority of men and women in the United States were slaveholders, they controlled public policy over slavery. The figures from Washington’s own county in Virginia, Fairfax, show that slaveholding was the domain of the very few. In 1782 only 7 percent of Fairfax residents owned slaves—and yet they dominated every facet of the political system, which yielded to their interests. To preserve the world they had always known from any change, they clung to the past, with disastrous consequences not long in coming. As the historian Gordon Wood writes, “By the 1820s the South, which at the time of the Revolution had thought of itself as the heart and soul of the nation, had become a bewildered and beleaguered slave-ridden minority out of touch with the tales of reform and free enterprise that now dominated the country.”26

In his racial views, Washington might have agreed with what Abraham Lincoln said in his debate with Stephen Douglas:

There is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas that he is not my equal in many respects—certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas and the equal of every living man.27

The error of the founders, including Washington, regarding slavery, had to be undone—and Lincoln undid it. Both Washington and Jefferson had a premonition of what might come if slavery were not abolished. Washington stated bluntly, “I can clearly foresee that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union.” There is strong evidence that slavery had pushed George Washington to a political breaking point. During his presidency the preeminent Founding Father made the startling, indeed, amazing, remark that if the Union split apart into North and South, “he had made up his mind to remove and be of the Northern.” He made the comment to his secretary of state, Edmund Randolph; it was recorded by Jefferson.28 Both Washington and Jefferson feared a calamity. Jefferson famously said, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that His justice cannot sleep forever.”29 When Washington confided to Humphreys his “regret” over slavery, he invoked “the justice of the Creator,” an invocation Lincoln echoed three score and sixteen years later:

Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.”30