CHAPTER SEVEN

A Different Destiny

TOWARD THE END OF THE WAR in September 1781, as the American army was racing south to bag Cornwallis, an episode of the greatest poignance occurred. Riding the fastest horse he could find, Washington abruptly left his army behind him in Maryland. Like Odysseus “yearning to see … but the smoke leap upwards from his own land … craving for his wife and for his homeward path,” Washington galloped the sixty miles from Baltimore to Mount Vernon in a single day. The most powerful man on the continent sped through the countryside alone except for one trusted aide, David Humphreys. It had been more than six years since the hero had seen his home, though the image of it had never left him. “How many Lambs have you had this Spring?” he had written to his manager just a few months earlier. “How many Colts are you like to have? are you going to repair the pavement of the Piazza? is anything done with … the Well at the edge of the Hill in front of the House?” In the depths of war nothing had given him more comfort than the image of Mount Vernon. “An account of these things,” he wrote to Lund Washington, “would be satisfactory to me and infinitely amusing in the recital.” As he reined up in front of the mansion Washington laid eyes on four grandchildren for the first time, the offspring of Martha’s son, Jacky Custis. The youngest, still a babe in arms, had been named for the general—George Washington Parke Custis.1

The hero’s homecoming to Mount Vernon was but a brief interlude. Just hours behind him galloped his staff and the French high command, all of whom descended on Mount Vernon to plan the Yorktown campaign. After three seemingly magical days at home, Washington headed south to the final battle, and would not see Mount Vernon again for two more years.

Washington’s brief visit to Mount Vernon included a scene that signifies the ambiguities of trying to comprehend slavery. In addition to his relatives, the large throng of other onlookers who turned out en masse to greet Washington included the Mount Vernon slaves. Humphreys, who witnessed the scene, later recorded it in a poem:

Return’d from war, I saw them round him press,

And all their speechless glee by artless signs express.2

One might be tempted to try to puncture this Currier & Ives vision of the slave master returning to gleeful tributes from his slaves, except that it probably happened as Humphreys described it. (He was no apologist for slavery—he called it in a preceding line “that foul stain of manhood.”) There are other accounts of other slaves greeting their returning masters with apparent joy. But it is impossible to know precisely what the “artless signs” really expressed, especially since a number of Washington’s slaves had unambiguously expressed their feelings about slavery by running away to the British.

Among the blacks captured with the British at Yorktown were two people who had once belonged to George Washington. They were among seventeen slaves who had fled Mount Vernon in early 1781 when the British warship Savage dropped anchor in the Potomac and demanded supplies from Washington’s manager. Washington was able to recover the two at Yorktown and return them to slavery at Mount Vernon because of a clause in the articles of Cornwallis’s surrender permitting the repatriation of captured slaves. He recovered several others at Philadelphia, but a few more managed to reach British lines in New York where, for a time at least, they were beyond Washington’s reach.3

Another black man who was returned to slavery at Yorktown was James Armistead, despite the fact that he had rendered distinguished and dangerous service to the American cause. In the weeks leading up to the Battle of Yorktown, when Lafayette was shadowing Cornwallis’s army in Virginia and wondering what the British were planning, Armistead volunteered to join Lafayette’s network of spies. He entered the British camp at Portsmouth, Virginia, probably posing as a runaway. He wangled a job, perhaps as a forager, that allowed him to move back and forth across the British lines. Lafayette used him as a courier for written instructions to other spies in the network—documents, Lafayette said, “of the most secret and important kind; the possession of which if discovered on him would most certainly have endangered [his] life.” Lafayette also had Armistead feed false information to the British that the Americans had been reinforced. Impressed with Armistead’s apparent ability to collect intelligence, the British hired him as a spy, making him one of the earliest double agents in American history. Lafayette reported Armistead’s findings directly to Washington. On July 31 Lafayette wrote: “a correspondent of mine servant to Lord Cornwallis writes on the 26th July at Portsmouth, and says [the British] are still in town but expected to move.” He revealed that his agent was boldly trying to steal documents from Cornwallis’s headquarters but had been unsuccessful: “his Lordship is so shy of his papers that my honest friend says he cannot get at them.” On August 25 Lafayette wrote to Washington that, through Armistead, “I hear that they begin fortifying at York.”4

Armistead had joined Lafayette’s spy service with the assumption that he would be made free, but that was not the case. His master, William Armistead, reclaimed him after the war. (Washington might actually have met James and William Armistead before the war, for William had business dealings with the Custis estate.) Three years after the Yorktown victory, James Armistead managed to get a meeting with Lafayette, who was more than a little surprised to hear that this loyal agent of the Revolution remained a slave. He immediately wrote out a letter of recommendation that James could use to campaign for his freedom:

This is to certify that the Bearer by the name of James has done Essential Services to me while I had the Honour to Command in this State.… He properly acquitted himself … and appears to me entitled to every reward his Situation can admit of.

Lafayette5

It was another two years before Armistead received his freedom, when by special act of the Virginia House of Delegates and Senate, his petition for freedom was unanimously approved by both houses. Armistead became free in January 1787. Thereupon, in tribute to his patron and protector, he took the surname Lafayette. He bought some land next to that of his former master; tax records show that he owned three slaves, who may have been members of his family. The white and black Lafayettes met again in 1824 when the French hero made a final triumphal tour of the United States, a tour that naturally included Yorktown. Riding in a carriage through a crowd of well-wishers, the marquis recognized his old comrade in the throng despite the passage of years. He ordered the carriage to halt, and stepped out to embrace his black friend.6

*   *   *

Washington’s victory at Yorktown did not officially end the war. After the battle, Washington returned to his headquarters at Tappan, twenty-five miles up the Hudson River from New York City, which was still in British possession. Sporadic fighting continued while American and British negotiators in Paris hammered out a treaty. Slavery was not an issue in the negotiations until the very last minute, through an odd series of events. Protocol required that Lord Cornwallis, taken prisoner at Yorktown, had to be exchanged for an American captive of equal rank. For this role, fate produced Henry Laurens. (In the sporadic raids and counterraids between British and American forces that occurred after the Battle of Yorktown, young John Laurens was killed in a particularly foolish and notably futile engagement.) Henry had been captured at sea in 1779 on a voyage to Europe, and the British had held him in the Tower of London for almost two years. While awaiting an exchange, he was bailed out of prison by a British friend, Richard Oswald, his old partner in the international slave trade. Laurens had sold Oswald’s slave consignments in South Carolina for a 10 percent commission. Now Laurens was swapped for Cornwallis and given his freedom.7

Since Laurens, former president of the Continental Congress, was in Europe when treaty negotiations were under way, Congress sent him instructions to join the negotiators. He then carried out one of the most abrupt turnabouts of policy one could imagine: this former advocate of liberating slaves inserted a clause in the treaty that compelled the British to hand over any slaves who had taken refuge with them, though the British had promised freedom to those refugees. Laurens inserted the clause at the very last minute—the working copy in the Foreign Office files shows the passage written above another line and linked with a caret—but he easily secured the approval of his fellow American negotiators and their British counterparts.

John Jay, one of the American treaty negotiators, later acknowledged: “By this agreement, Britain bound herself to do great wrong to these Slaves.” But in his account of the negotiations, John Adams described the eleventh-hour maneuvering over the slaves approvingly: “Mr. Laurens said there ought to be a stipulation that the British troops carry off no negroes or other American property. We all agreed.… the article which he caused to be inserted at the very last … which would most probably in the multiplicity and hurry of affairs have escaped us, was worth a longer journey, if that had been all.”8

The terms of this provisional treaty were published in New York City in March 1783; when the formal treaty was signed on September 3, 1783, the Laurens clause remained as written. The British officer responsible for enforcing the treaty during the evacuation from New York was General Sir Guy Carleton, a man with an exceptionally high sense of honor, whose “public character,” one historian observes, “was very similar to that of the revered George Washington.” And now Sir Guy and General Washington sparred, face-to-face, over the fate of the refugee slaves, including some of Washington’s own.9

Instructed to treat the refugees with the most “honorable” care, General Carleton obeyed scrupulously. He issued a public order that the terms of the treaty be “STRICTLY attended to and COMPLIED with,” and sent a request to Congress for observers to ensure American satisfaction. In addition to the official observers, however, slave owners and gangs of hired slave catchers came to New York to round up as many escaped slaves as they could find. To the rage of the slave catchers, Carleton decreed that he would evacuate people who had been in the British camp for at least a year; this group numbered thousands of former slaves. To the protests that he was stealing slaves guaranteed to their masters by the treaty, Carleton replied that the blacks were no longer slaves, since they had become free the moment they crossed into British lines. In his interpretation the treaty did not cover these refugees because they were no longer property. In his view, a series of British military commanders had made promises of freedom to any slaves who joined them, and Carleton was bound by honor to respect those promises.10

In April 1783 Carleton ordered his officials to begin issuing documents of protection to the blacks that, when displayed, compelled a slave catcher to give way or face arrest by British forces. After all, the city was still a British zone, under British military authority. One former slave recalled, “Each of us received a certificate … which dispelled all our fears, and filled us with joy and gratitude.”

This is to certify to all Concerned that the bearer hereof, a Negro, named ______, Aged ___, and formerly the property of ______, appears to have come within the British Lines, under the Sanction, and Claims the Privilege of the Proclamation respecting Negroes, heretofore issued for their Protection.…

By order of the Commandant.11

Thirteen Virginia slave owners who traveled to New York to seize three hundred of their escaped people were told by a British officer that “no slaves were to be given up” who possessed a certificate. Two Virginia slave owners appealed directly to General Washington to do something. Washington replied, “Several of my own are with the Enemy but I scarce ever bestowed a thought on them; they have so many doors through which they can escape from New York, that scarce any thing but an inclination to return … will restore many.” Judging by this remark, he was at first resigned to losing the slaves who had reached British lines in New York—his own and those of other planters. But soon the Virginians pressured him into requesting a parley with Carleton at the American headquarters in Tappan, New York. Carleton sailed up the Hudson in the frigate Perseverance for the meeting on May 3, 1783.12

Washington apparently expected that a summit conference between the two top commanders would settle this nettlesome issue quickly and to the satisfaction of the planters. Speaking “without animation & in a low tone,” he raised the issue of the “preservation of property … especially the Negroes.” But his equanimity was broken when Carleton informed him that many of the blacks had already been embarked. A British observer noticed that “Mr. Washington appeared to be startled—already imbarked says he.” Given the rank of his interlocutor, Washington could not indulge in any displays of temper, but he went on to “express his Surprize” that the treaty had been violated. To this, according to the eyewitness, “Sir Guy then observed, that no Interpretation could be put upon the Articles inconsistent with prior [promises] binding the National Honor which must be kept with all Colours.” Carleton continued lecturing Washington on the subject of honor. Notwithstanding any clause in the treaty, Carleton declared, in his view the British government could not have meant to breach “their Faith to the Negroes who came into the British lines.” Finally, he upbraided Washington for even suggesting that a crown official would consent to a “notorious breach of the public faith towards people of any complection”—an imputation that Carleton said he regarded as hostile. When Washington continued to protest, Carleton said that the slave owners could apply for compensation, but he would never hand over the people. Perhaps weary of debating the matter with Washington, the British general evaded another meeting the following day by claiming illness. Washington knew he was beaten. He wrote to one of the Virginians who had complained to him, “the Slaves which have absconded from their Masters will never be restored to them.”13

On legal grounds, Washington may have been justified. Commenting privately on the negotiations, a New York judge (and loyalist), Thomas Jones, agreed with Washington that the Laurens clause in the treaty was binding, but on moral grounds he excoriated the British treaty negotiators who had yielded on this point and had “thought the sacrifice of 2,000 negroes … a mere bagatelle.” He believed that Carleton had undone the negotiators’ moral error and redeemed British honor. “Sir Guy … possessed the honour of a soldier, the religion of a Christian, and the virtues of humanity.… He shuddered at the article that gave up the blacks, and at once resolved to apply a substitute.” The very highest authorities in Britain sided with Carleton. Lord North called Carleton’s stand “an Act of Justice” that did not violate the treaty. King George III himself, “in the fullest and most ample Manner,” expressed “His Royal Approbation.”14

The documents suggest that British officers and officials were genuinely baffled by Washington’s insistence on recovering the slaves in person rather than accepting cash compensation for them. The British did not grasp a fundamental point of plantation economics: the value of slaves lay not only in their productivity but in their fertility. Cash payments for lost laborers would not compensate the planters for the loss of future offspring. The planters were banking on the future generations. The historian Ellen Wilson, who has examined the British state papers on these negotiations, came across a torrid denunciation of the American commander. A memorandum stated that in the conference with Carleton, Washington had demanded the return of the slaves “with all the Grossness and Ferocity of a Captain of Banditti.” The British could understand the American position that the slaves had been property, but they could not comprehend Washington’s position that the slaves’ value trumped the slaves’ humanity. The British actually feared that some slaves would kill themselves and their families rather than return to slavery.15*

As British troops departed American soil from Savannah, Charleston, and New York in 1783, some 13,000–14,000 blacks left with them. Not all were free. White loyalists who owned slaves were allowed to take their slaves with them, some British officers held slaves, and some American blacks who had joined the British for freedom were sold into slavery in the West Indies and East Florida. A small number of American blacks departed for Europe as free people with Hessian units in which they had served. Examining German military records, the historian Robert Selig found that “on the eve of departure for Europe, the Hessians discharged some two dozen black men who wanted to stay in America. About 30 soldiers plus an unknown number of officer servants not on regimental rosters, some with their wives and children, crossed the Atlantic for Cassel, where they arrived in late 1783.”16

In some instances the free blacks were given the option of choosing their destination—England, Nova Scotia, Jamaica, or other destinations where a British ship might be able to take them (though free blacks who went to England later faced discrimination, unemployment, and poverty). Many chose to go to Africa. Whatever their destination, the freed people were desperate to leave rather than return to slavery and the mercies of their former owners. In Charleston, as time and available berths ran out, panic set in. When it became apparent that the evacuation of all refugees could not be completed by the time the last ships had to leave, the British posted troops on the wharves to beat back refugees with cutlasses and bayonets. The most desperate dove into the water and clung to the sides of departing British long-boats. One eyewitness wrote, “to prevent this dangerous practice the fingers of some of them were chopped off.”17

As the result of Carleton’s resistance to Washington, the name of Washington and the spirit of the American Revolution reached Africa. One escaped slave who had taken refuge in New York was a certain Henry Washington from Mount Vernon. When Carleton’s officials put him on the list for evacuation in the “Register of Negroes,” he stated his age as forty-three and said that he had fled Mount Vernon in 1776, much earlier than 1781 with the slaves on the Savage. Under Carleton’s policy Henry Washington took a British ship to Nova Scotia (as did two other former Mount Vernon slaves, a man and a woman) and from there continued to Sierra Leone, where he planned to begin a farm making use of the scientific farming techniques he had learned at Mount Vernon. In 1800 Washington was among several hundred settlers who rose up in a brief rebellion against white rule there. The precipitating issue was one familiar from the American Revolution: taxes. The settlers were required by the Sierra Leone Company, which ran the colony for the British government, to pay taxes, or quitrents, for the use of their land; the land itself remained the property of the company. The settlers formed a provisional government and wrote up a set of laws, which they nailed to the office door of a company administrator. The company responded by sending a corps of recently arrived Jamaican blacks against the rebels. In the trials that followed the defeat of the rebellion, Henry Washington was among the rebels sentenced to banishment to another location in Sierra Leone, where he became one of the two leaders of a new settlement.18

*   *   *

It became the honor of the Marquis de Lafayette to inform George Washington that a preliminary treaty of peace had been signed on January 20, 1783. Lafayette was in Cadiz, Spain, when news of the signing reached him. Overcome with joy (and apparently unaware of the Laurens clause), Lafayette arranged for the fastest French ship available, the aptly named Triumph, to carry the news to Congress, and particularly to George Washington. In his letter to Washington, dated February 5, he wrote, “I rejoice at the blessings of a peace where our noble ends have been secured.” He recalled the travail they endured together at Valley Forge and said that he intended to revisit America in the near future.19

In Lafayette’s mind, history had arrived at a peculiar, perhaps unique moment. Lafayette saw that the birth of American independence marked the birth of a new age in world history. He declared that the creation of the United States “has begun, for the civilized world, the era of a new and of the only true social order founded on the inalienable rights of man.” He gave much of the credit to “our beloved matchless Washington.” At that moment, historical planets were aligned but would not long remain so: in the same letter he proposed to begin emancipating America’s slaves. He did not envision freeing all the slaves at once, which would be too ambitious an undertaking; rather, he envisioned a small start but one that would be powerfully symbolic and persuasive. He proposed to Washington that the general begin freeing his slaves.

Now, my dear General, that you are going to enjoy some ease and quiet, permit me to propose a plan to you, which might become greatly beneficial to the black part of mankind. Let us unite in purchasing a small estate, where we may try the experiment to free the negroes, and use them only as tenants. Such an example as yours might render it a general practice; and if we succeed in America, I will cheerfully devote a part of my time to render the method fashionable in the West Indies. If it be a wild scheme, I had rather be mad this way, than to be thought wise in the other task. [Emphasis added]

Of all the officers who fought by Washington’s side in the Revolution, Lafayette was probably the man closest to him. (Lafayette had personally underwritten the American war effort in the amount of some $1 million.) Washington always spoke of him with affection, and Lafayette regarded Washington with profound admiration. Their relationship was one of father and son. Twenty-five years older than Lafayette, Washington was childless, and the Frenchman had lost his father when he was an adolescent. Lafayette alluded to this bond in a letter to Washington written during the French Revolution: “Give me leave, my dear General, to present you with a picture of the Bastille, just as it looked a few days after I ordered its demolition, with the main key of the fortress of despotism. It is a tribute which I owe as a son to my adoptive father—as an aide-de-camp to my general—as a missionary of liberty to its patriarch.”20*

With his intimate emotional connection to Washington, Lafayette detected in his friend enough signs of doubt over slavery that he was able to propose the plan. He obviously thought that Washington would be amenable to the idea; he also might have thought that, left on his own, Washington might not embark on such a scheme at that time, but might proceed if a partner offered to share some of the expense. The offer suggests Lafayette’s grasp of Washington’s thinking, as the letter combines practicality, some slight flattery, and idealism. He proposed to help underwrite the emancipation by joining in the purchase of the necessary land. His allusion to Washington’s unique status as an exemplar has the tone of flattery but was a statement of fact. And Lafayette defused any objection that such “a wild scheme” was doomed to failure by pledging his personal reputation: if people thought him mad because he strove to free slaves, so be it. Personal honor was an intangible but no less real asset: Lafayette was implicitly challenging potential detractors to assault his personal honor. He also seemed to be saying to his former commander: let us once more be comrades in idealism.

Lafayette never reconciled himself to the contradiction between American liberty and American slavery. He said, “I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America, if I could have conceived that thereby I was founding a land of slavery.” He wrote to John Adams: “In the cause of my black brethren, I feel myself warmly interested, and most decidedly side, so far as respects them, against the white part of mankind. Whatever be the complexion of the enslaved, it does not, in my opinion, alter the complexion of the crime which the enslaver commits—a crime much blacker than any African face.” The very idea that slaves were still being transported on ships flying the American flag in 1786 appalled Lafayette, for whom the symbols of freedom had profound resonance: “It is to me a matter of great anxiety and concern, to find that this trade is sometimes perpetrated under the flag of liberty, our dear and noble stripes, to which virtue and glory have been constant standard-bearers.”21

During Lafayette’s famous tour of America in 1824, the city of Savannah banned all blacks from attending the parades in the visitor’s honor, but Lafayette made a point of paying a public call on a slave who had served in the Revolution. In New Orleans he met with a group of black veterans and greeted each of them personally. He said to them, “I have often during the War of Independence seen African blood shed with honor in our ranks for the cause of the United States.”22

Very tentatively, and very vaguely, Washington accepted Lafayette’s suggestion for an emancipation—at least he seemed to agree to consider it—but he put off any immediate action. He wrote in April 1783:

The scheme, my dear Marqs. which you propose as a precedent, to encourage the emancipation of the black people of this Country from that state of Bondage in wch. they are held, is a striking evidence of the benevolence of your Heart. I shall be happy to join you in so laudable a work; but will defer going into a detail of the business, ’till I have the pleasure of seeing you.23

The following year, 1784, Lafayette visited Mount Vernon, where he and Washington continued their discussion about the experiment. As a houseguest present at the time recalled the conversation: “[Washington] wished to get rid of [his] Negroes, & the Marquis wisht that an end might be put to the slavery of all of them.” But despite his desire to be “rid of” his slaves, Washington was not yet ready to take steps to liberate them. Lafayette, however, actually purchased a plantation in Cayenne, on the coast of French Guiana, to begin his experiment of gradually preparing slaves for emancipation. About a year after the conversation at Mount Vernon, he told his lawyer to buy land there, with the provision that the seller must not “sell or exchange any black” living on the land. Perhaps hoping to prod his reluctant friend into action, Lafayette wrote to Washington several months later to advise him that he was embarking on his emancipation plan: “I Have purchased for Hundred and twenty-five thousand French livres a plantation in the Colony of Cayenne and am going to free my Negroes in order to make that Experiment which you know is My Hobby Horse.”24

Washington was effusive in his praise for Lafayette’s endeavor but evaded taking action himself. He wrote from Mount Vernon in May 1786:

The benevolence of your heart … is so conspicuous upon all occasions, that I never wonder at any fresh proofs of it; but your late purchase of an estate in the colony of Cayenne, with a view of emancipating the slaves on it, is a generous and noble proof of your humanity. Would to God a like Spirit would diffuse itself generally into the minds of the people of this country; but I despair of seeing it. Some petitions were presented to the Assembly, at its last Session, for the abolition of slavery, but they could scarcely obtain a reading. To set them afloat at once would, I really believe, be productive of much inconvenience and mischief; but by degrees it certainly might, and assuredly ought to be effected; and that too by Legislative authority.25

Lafayette never sent Washington a detailed account of what happened at the Cayenne plantation, La Belle Gabrielle, but if he had, the general would have seen that Lafayette’s plan took into account his reservations about setting slaves “afloat” without adequate preparation. Lafayette agreed that people who had been enslaved and freed abruptly could not be expected to function successfully. The blacks at Cayenne were not freed immediately but were paid for their work and given some education. The experiment lasted only a few years—when Lafayette was imprisoned in 1792 by the Austrians, his property was confiscated and sold by the French Revolutionary government.26

*   *   *

The retirement Washington so deeply yearned for did not last long. By 1786 the new United States was in a crisis over the weakness of the federal government as established under the Articles of Confederation agreed to in November 1777 and ratified in 1781. While the Revolutionary War was still going on, Jefferson had worried about the future stability of the United States, writing in 1781, “from the conclusion of this war we shall be going down hill.” Two years later he feared that conflicts among the states could invite foreign intervention, writing to Edmund Randolph, “I know no danger so dreadful and so probable as that of internal contests.… The states will go to war with each other in defiance of Congress; one will call in France to her assistance and another Gr. Britain, and so we shall have all the wars of Europe brought to our own doors.” In fact Europe stood at the American door: British troops remained in the United States in defiance of the Treaty of Paris and Spain continued to control the Mississippi. Abroad the new nation was humiliated when Barbary pirates kidnapped thousands of Americans and held them for ransom. Washington said that America’s weakness had made it a laughingstock: “What a triumph for the advocates of despotism to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves, and that systems founded on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal and fallacious!”27

Washington was among those who believed that only a radical restructuring of government could save the Revolution from failure, that a strong central government was essential. “Things cannot go on in the same train forever,” he remarked. There were dangers from all levels of society. He took note that “respectable characters speak of a monarchical form of government without horror,” but he was equally concerned when a group of impoverished Massachusetts farmers, under the leadership of the veteran soldier Daniel Shays, rose up in armed protest against taxes. To Washington it seemed “we are fast verging to anarchy and confusion.” He was elected to lead the Virginia delegation to a convention in Philadelphia to revise the Articles. On the day of his departure from Mount Vernon in May 1787 he suffered a sudden, racking headache, which one biographer, John Ferling, takes as a sign of “a severe case of raw nerves.”28

Washington’s arrival in Philadelphia on May 14 was triumphal. “Yesterday His Excellency General WASHINGTON arrived here,” reported the Pennsylvania Packet. “He was met at some distance and escorted into the city by the troops of horse, and saluted at his entrance by the artillery. The joy of the people on the coming of this great and good man was shown by their acclamation and the ringing of bells.”29

Washington was elected to preside over the convention, occupying, both literally and figuratively, an august position. The historian Max Farrand describes Washington as almost a godlike figure:

He sat on a raised platform; in a large, carved, high-backed chair, from which his commanding figure and dignified bearing exerted a potent influence on the assembly; an influence enhanced by the formal courtesy and stately intercourse of the times. Washington was the great man of his day and the members not only respected and admired him; some of them were actually afraid of him. When he rose to his feet he was almost the Commander-in-Chief again. There is evidence to show that his support or disapproval was at times a decisive factor in the deliberations of the Convention.30

As president of the convention Washington was not allowed to take part in the debates, which were recorded by James Madison. His influence on the constitutional provisions that emerged can only be a matter of speculation. In describing the general’s view of the convention, Ferling notes his pragmatic mode of thinking about politics:

Washington always thought of political activists in terms of the interests they represented, and his correspondence is studded with references to the “financial interest,” the “mercantile interests,” the “local interest,” the “interested views of desperate characters,” the “minor part,” and the “better kind of people.” … With such an outlook he would have had far less difficulty than have some historians in seeing this Convention as an assemblage of various interest groups intent on altering the national charter in such a way as to protect and further their own factional considerations.

But there was one striking challenge to a total focus on “interests”; it came during the debate on slavery.31

The question of allowing the continued importation of slaves immediately brought the moral and ethical underpinnings of the slave system into the light. Luther Martin of Maryland declared that the importation of slaves “was inconsistent with the principles of the Revolution, and dishonorable to the American character.” John Rutledge of South Carolina replied, “Religion and humanity had nothing to do with this question. Interest alone is the governing principle with nations. The true question at present is whether the Southern states shall or shall not be parties to the Union.” It was in the financial interest of the Northern states to allow an increase in Southern slaves, he pointed out: “If the Northern states consult their interest, they will not oppose the increase of slaves, which will increase the commodities of which they will become the carriers.”32

Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut agreed: “Let every state import what it pleases. The morality or wisdom of slavery are considerations belonging to the states themselves. What enriches a part enriches the whole, and the states are the best judges of their particular interest.” Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina repeated his colleague’s threat that his state would never accept the Constitution if it prohibited the slave trade, because “South Carolina and Georgia cannot do without slaves.” He raised the possibility that, someday, “South Carolina may perhaps, by degrees,” eliminate the slave trade. This prospect appealed to Roger Sherman of Connecticut, who observed “that the abolition of slavery seemed to be going on in the United States, and that the good sense of the several states would probably by degrees complete it.” He thought the slave trade should be left alone. His Connecticut colleague Ellsworth agreed: “Let us not intermeddle.” He, too, believed that slavery was waning anyway, and predicted, “As population increases, poor laborers will be so plenty as to render slaves useless. Slavery, in time, will not be a speck in our country.”33

Pinckney rose to clarify his earlier remark that South Carolina might someday cease to import slaves. He “thought himself bound to declare candidly, that he did not think South Carolina would stop her importations of slaves, in any short time; but only stop them occasionally.” And Rutledge bluntly threatened, “If the Convention thinks that North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, will ever agree to the plan, unless their right to import slaves be untouched, the expectation is vain. The people of those States will never be such fools, as to give up so important an interest.”

The southernmost states, South Carolina and Georgia, remained intransigent because their markets had the greatest appetite for the slave trade. Philip Morgan writes: “Virginia had been weaning itself gradually of African supplies in the last years of the colonial era. The process was essentially complete by the onset of the Revolution. Suffering no great wartime loss of black labor, Virginia never again imported Africans. In South Carolina, by contrast, the Revolution interrupted a veritable orgy of African slave-trading.” He cites the observation of a Georgian in 1784, the “Negro business … is to the Trade of this Country, as the Soul to the Body.”34

Pennsylvania delegate Gouverneur Morris observed that a compromise was needed if the Southern states would not yield on slavery: “These things may form a bargain among the Northern and Southern States.” Despite their protestations about the immorality of slavery, New Englanders were happy to compromise on the issue. Joseph Ellis writes that a “secret deal” broke the deadlock over slavery: “The bargain entailed an exchange of votes whereby New England agreed to back an extension of the slave trade for twenty years in return for support from the Deep South for making the federal regulation of commerce a mere majority vote in the Congress rather than a super-majority of two-thirds.” The Washington scholar Dorothy Twohig enumerates the concessions extracted by the slave states in exchange for their support of the Constitution:

The three-fifths clause gave them extra representation in Congress, the electoral college gave their votes for president more potency than the votes from the north, the prohibition on export taxes favored the products of slave labor; the slave trade clause guaranteed their right to import new slaves for at least twenty years; the fugitive slave clause gave slave owners the right to repossess runaway slaves in free states; in the event of a slave rebellion the domestic violence clause promised the states federal aid.35

So a bargain was struck. The slave trade was allowed to continue, and the word “slavery” was never mentioned in the Constitution. The delegates genuinely feared that disagreements over slavery and other issues would cause the states, as Ellsworth remarked, to “fly into a variety of shapes and directions, and most probably into several confederations, —and not without bloodshed.” They handed the problem to the future. Interestingly, those with the least direct experience of slavery were the ones who clung to the hope, or illusion, that the institution was waning. The Southerners knew they would never give it up.36

In the midst of the debate, in a moment of uncanny prescience, one of the Virginians predicted that bloodshed was not being avoided but merely delayed. Washington’s friend and neighbor George Mason denounced “this infernal traffic” and derided the idea that slavery was dying by degrees: “The Western people are already calling out for slaves for their new lands, and will fill that country with slaves, if they can be got through South Carolina and Georgia.” He tallied the evils slavery brought on a country: “Slavery discourages arts and manufactures. The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. They prevent the immigration of whites, who really enrich and strengthen a country. They produce the most pernicious effect on manners. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant.” In tones of thunder, he voiced a prediction that Washington himself was to make years later, though not so forcefully. Slaves “bring the judgment of Heaven on a country,” Mason warned. “As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, Providence punishes national sins by national calamities.”37

Throughout this debate Washington sat listening wrapped in his ex officio silence. When delegates denounced the immorality of slavery, he heard echoes of the points Lafayette had already raised with him directly in their correspondence the previous year. If he really had expected that Lafayette’s benevolent spirit might “diffuse itself generally into the minds of the people of this country,” the debate crushed that hope, along with the dream that an emancipation “by degrees” might be effected “by Legislative authority.” What Washington really thought or felt about the debates cannot be clearly known, but in his letter to Lafayette a year earlier he had expressed how his thinking on the subject of leadership was evolving. Forward-thinking individuals had to wait for the thinking of the people to catch up to theirs; otherwise a democratic government could not succeed. At the same time, the forward-thinker had to be prepared to suffer for his ideals. The implication is that Washington was not prepared just yet to suffer in the cause of emancipation:

It is one of the evils of democratical governments that the people, not always seeing & frequently mislead, must often feel before they can act right—but then evils of this nature seldom fail to work their own cure. It is to be lamented, nevertheless, that the remedies are so slow, & that those, who may wish to apply them seasonably are not attended to before they suffer in person, in interest & in reputation.38

The preeminent issue was the preservation of the union. In a letter two years before the convention Washington declared, “I confess to you candidly that I can foresee no evil greater than disunion.” He could see that mere discussion of slavery tended to divide the new nation dangerously. He saw the apparent intransigence of South Carolina and Georgia. With his personal knowledge of slavery and slaveholders, it is doubtful that he shared the impression that slavery was withering away.39

Fritz Hirschfeld writes, “Whatever Washington may have thought of the slavery issues being debated and decided at the federal convention, it is interesting to note that the proslavery views that found their way into the Constitution were (coincidentally or not) those most compatible with Washington’s own values and beliefs.” And he cites the interpretation of the historian John Hope Franklin: “The fathers of the Constitution were dedicated to the proposition that ‘government should rest upon the dominion of property.’ For the Southern fathers this meant slaves.”40

Washington set his seal on the bargains in the Constitution in his official “Letter of the President of the Federal Convention” to the president of Congress, transmitting the Constitution. He stated that the single most important objective was guaranteeing the continuation of the Union: “In all our deliberations on this subject we kept steadily in our view, that which appears to us the greatest interest of every true American, the consolidation of our Union, in which is involved our prosperity, felicity, safety, perhaps our national existence.” He acknowledged that this focus led to compromises: “This important consideration, seriously and deeply impressed on our minds, led each state in the Convention to be less rigid on points of inferior magnitude, than might have been otherwise expected.” The Constitution was, he said, “the result of a spirit of amity, and of that mutual deference and concession” which might not meet “the full and entire approbation of every state.” The Constitution enshrined slavery.41

Another critical moment in history had passed. The founders who believed that slavery would wither away were wrong. The compromise on slavery has made the American endeavor vulnerable to the charge of moral blindness, and to the charge that the United States was corrupt at its creation. The historian Joseph Ellis sums up the frustration of modern scholars who study the Constitutional debates, saying that slavery was “the tragic and perhaps intractable problem that even the revolutionary generation, with all its extraordinary talent, could neither solve nor face.” Among Americans today there is probably a consensus that it is futile to criticize the founders at this distance in time for acting as they did: the political system was at an impasse over slavery; economic interests and racial prejudice precluded even a gradual emancipation plan. Certainly there were dissenters, such as the Quakers, but they were in the minority. The greatness of the Constitution, created in “the miracle at Philadelphia” (a paraphrase of Washington’s words), overshadows its weakness on this issue, despite the horrific consequences for ensuing generations of enslaved people and for the country as a whole.42

The compromise over slavery implicitly contained a moral judgment: if the founders, including Washington, were able to agree on such a compromise, then to them slavery was morally acceptable. Nineteen slave owners attended the Constitutional Convention. Knowing full well the cruelties of slavery, they insisted on preserving it, and Washington acquiesced. Jefferson said of Washington: “His integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known, no motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision. He was indeed, in every sense of the word, a wise, a good and a great man.” When Washington set his seal on the bargain over slavery, he could not but have had in mind the system he himself imposed at Mount Vernon and his own lifelong experience as a master.43

And so, it seemed, the issue of slavery was settled and the course of our history set. But not long after Washington put his seal on the Constitution and its great compromise, his own spirit of “deference and concession” began to crack. He began to speak, in private, of his “regret” over slavery. But, more important, Washington seems to have believed he had found a way around the political impasse over slavery. As Lafayette had proposed to him, his example, his prestige, could be the sword that cut the Gordian knot. He laid a plan, in secret, to free his slaves.

*   *   *

Having presided over the framing of the Constitution, Washington returned to Mount Vernon, deeply yearning for permanent retirement from public life. But soon, inevitably, a clamor arose for him to become the first president of the newly constituted nation. The office, after all, had been tailored for him specifically. As Pierce Butler of South Carolina said, the delegates at the Constitutional Convention had “cast their eyes toward General Washington as President and shaped their ideas of the powers to be given to a President, by their opinions of his virtue.”44

Washington’s close friend, former comrade in arms, and biographer, David Humphreys, was at Mount Vernon in late 1788 and early 1789. Humphreys recorded their intimate conversations as the general agonized over the decision to accept or reject the presidency. His notebook contains a startling statement of Washington’s:

The unfortunate condition of the persons, whose labour in part I employed, has been the only unavoidable subject of regret. To make the Adults among them as easy & as comfortable in their circumstances as their actual state of ignorance & improvidence would admit; & to lay a foundation to prepare the rising generation for a destiny different from that in which they were born; afforded some satisfaction to my mind, & could not I hoped be displeasing to the justice of the Creator.45

The more I studied these remarks the more curious they became. The statement bears a striking resemblance to the emancipation clause in Washington’s will written ten years later, alluding to care for the elderly (the “Adults”) and to training or education for slave children. But more curiously, the passage is written in the past tense, describing thoughts or actions that had already taken place. In broad outline, the Humphreys statement sounds like comments on an emancipation that had already occurred. But Washington in 1789 was not training children and certainly none of his slaves were “comfortable in their circumstances.” It seemed to make no sense until I examined a photocopy of Humphreys’s original notebook. This fragment was composed amid public statements Humphreys was drafting for Washington prior to his assuming the presidency. Indeed, a draft of Washington’s acceptance of the presidency appears just a few pages before the remark on slavery. Very likely, this passage about slavery was not just a private expression of regret, but the draft of a public statement in which Washington intended to announce that he had freed some of his slaves before taking office.46

The effect of such an act would have been profound. As the first president, Washington was well aware that his every public act set a precedent. (He later remarked in a private letter, “The eyes of Argus are upon me.”) If Washington had done such a thing, it would have established the precedent that a slaveholding chief executive would emancipate his slaves before taking office. This way of approaching the issue bypassed the political process altogether; after all, the nation had just ratified a Constitution that approved slavery, so what hope was there for an emancipation bill? Washington would do what Lafayette had urged—lead the country by personal example.

As vague as the statement was, I thought I could detect in it some of Washington’s specific intentions. He said he had made the “Adults … easy &… comfortable.” Certainly, he could not have been referring to people of working age but only to the elderly, those past labor. The old slaves would remain at Mount Vernon, supported by Washington—but they would be free, so presumably they could leave if they wished. The children would become free upon reaching their majority, after they had received some rudimentary education and training. The working adults would remain slaves; they would not be cast loose to fend for themselves. But when they reached the end of their working lives they would be freed. This scheme eliminated the most obvious objection to emancipation—that the slaves were not ready for such a step—and it was astonishingly similar to the plan Washington wrote out in detail in his will ten years later.

As I first considered this interpretation, it seemed somewhat farfetched. Perhaps, I thought, I was reading too much into this document. Washington could not possibly have considered such a radical step in 1789. But then I came across yet another emancipation that Washington planned while he was actually in office. In 1794 he wrote to his private secretary, Tobias Lear, asking him to look for a buyer for his land in western Virginia. He told Lear that he wished to consolidate his farming operations, but in a passage of the letter that Washington marked Private, he declared: “I have another motive which makes me earnestly wish for the accomplishment of these things, it is indeed more powerful than all the rest. namely to liberate a certain species of property which I possess, very repugnantly to my own feelings.”47

This is the same man who had blithely written, during the Revolution, “The advantages resulting from the sale of my negroes, I have very little doubt of;… the only points therefore for me to consider, are … the sum they will now fetch and the interest of the money.” Fifteen years later Washington had changed utterly. He was now planning to yield up his most valuable remaining asset, his western lands, the wherewithal for his retirement, to finance the emancipation of his Mount Vernon slaves. This was the thinking not of a benevolent master but of a man sickened by slavery, willing to sacrifice his own substance to end it. And he was going to do it publicly, as a sitting president. Slavery was incompatible with holding the highest office. He could see a different destiny. With that phrase Washington overturned a pillar of the slave system: the belief that blacks were destined by nature and by law to be slaves for life, and their children likewise, and their children’s children. There is a vision in that statement, an understanding that the generation that would see freedom was already alive.48

Washington’s plan contradicted one of the most important conditions for emancipation he had laid down to Lafayette a few years earlier, that it be effected “by Legislative authority.” He had now given up waiting for a general emancipation by legislative authority and was prepared to begin freeing his own people. Another striking, mysterious aspect of the Lear letter was that Washington kept it secret. At his instruction, the private portion of the letter was omitted from the official record of his correspondence, and survives only in the original of the letter.

During the Revolution Washington had witnessed the heroism and patriotism of the black troops, yet this had not been enough to persuade him to begin freeing his slaves. There was no evidence in the following decade of a sudden and massive improvement in the character of the slaves that would have convinced Washington that they were “ready.” In fact he told David Humphreys that his slaves were ignorant and improvident. Nor is there evidence for a sudden and unusual deterioration in the slaves’ condition or the atmosphere of slavery itself at that time. Washington’s stated reason for wishing to free his slaves in 1794 was not a sudden belief in their readiness for freedom or the urgency of it, but his conviction that slavery was “repugnant.” What, then, suddenly made slavery so repugnant to him?

*   *   *

I had begun my research on Washington with a fundamental error. I had assumed that his decision to free his slaves had come rather abruptly in the last months of his life, out of a sense of remorse that gripped him as he approached death. But his remark about slavery to Humphreys, and the plan he outlined to Lear to sell his land to finance an emancipation, showed that he had already decided upon an emancipation as early as 1789, ten years before his death. He had experienced a moral epiphany. The hallmark of his plans for emancipation was that they were drawn up in secret, even the final one in his last will. He kept his ideas secret most of all from his own family. The only explanation for this secrecy is that he knew they would oppose him if they found out what he was doing before he could actually carry out his plans. His isolation was complete.

Washington might have believed that the United States would begin to do away with slavery in 1808, when Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution called for an end to the importation of slaves. That clause, part of the great compromise over slavery, was challenged in the first session of Congress, during Washington’s first term as president. In February 1790 a Quaker group presented petitions, soon endorsed by Benjamin Franklin, that Congress consider an immediate end to the importation of slaves and debate ways of beginning a gradual emancipation. The petitions reopened the whole question of slavery, which the South had considered closed until 1808. In his superb account of the ensuing uproar in Founding Brothers, Joseph Ellis demonstrates how “virtually every argument that southern defenders of slavery would mount during the next seventy years of the national controversy, right up to the eve of the Civil War, came gushing forth” during this debate. (Ellis might have added that these arguments continue to echo right up to this day.) The Southerners proclaimed that slavery was “a necessary evil,” that they could not till their fields without slaves—“rice cannot be brought to market without these people.” One asked, “What is to be done with the slaves when freed?” and cited Jefferson’s remark that “deep rooted prejudices” would forever prevent whites and blacks from getting along peacefully—evidence that Notes on the State of Virginia had already become a philosophical pillar of the proslavery platform. Another asked if the Quakers would mind “giving their daughters to negro sons, and receiving the negro daughters for their sons.”49

The Quaker petitions backfired. Rather than vote upon some loosening of slavery’s hold on the country, Congress tightened it. Led by James Madison, the House of Representatives passed a resolution that enlarged the protection offered to slavery. The Constitution had protected the slave trade until 1808; the resolution stated that “The Congress have no authority to interfere in the emancipation of slaves, or in the treatment of them within any of the States.” Madison himself said it was unconstitutional “to attempt to manumit them at any time.” Slavery was, apparently, made permanent.50

The only recorded comments made by the President during the debate were private ones in letters to a Custis in-law, Dr. David Stuart. On March 28 he wrote, “The memorial of the Quakers (and a very mal-apropos one it was) has at length been put to sleep, and will scarcely awake before the year 1808.” He followed this with another remark in June: “The introductions of the Memorial respecting Slavery, was to be sure, not only an illjudged piece of business, but occasioned a great waste of time. The final decision thereon, however, was as favourable as the proprietors of that species of property could have expected considering the great dereliction to Slavery in a large part of this Union.” These comments show that Washington felt the need to prevaricate when speaking to his relatives on the subject of slavery. He did not say that the Quakers were wrong, but only that their approach was ill-timed. Their attempt had confirmed what he already suspected, that a legislative plan for an emancipation was a political impossibility. And yet Washington had already told Humphreys of his regret over slavery, and the plan that he outlined to Lear indicates that the obstacles to emancipation raised by other Southerners did not seem insuperable to him at all.51

He had a solution to the labor problem and the problem of what to do with the slaves once they were free: free them, then hire them right back. Before Washington wrote to Lear about his intention to free his slaves, he wrote to an Englishman, Arthur Young, asking his help in finding English farmers willing to emigrate to Virginia and rent Washington’s farms. There was an ample supply of workers, he said. “Many of the Negroes, male and female, might be hired by the year as labourers.”52

Washington was thinking about the various feasibilities for emancipation outside the political process while it became ever clearer that waiting for a political solution was hopeless. His peers, indeed his own family, were driven wild by the mere suggestion of the slaves’ emancipation. His seemingly dismissive remarks about the Quakers were calculated to soothe the wrath of his relative, David Stuart, who wrote two letters to Washington bellowing about the damage Congress was doing simply by debating the issue. His letters show the intensity of the pressure Washington was under from his fellow Virginians and from his own family. The Stuart letters also show that the Southern defense of slavery in the Congressional debate was a tissue of rationalizations. His complaints to the president did not mention either loss of labor or racial mixing. Washington’s peers in Virginia had a substantial investment in slaves, and Stuart was enraged that the debate was driving down market prices for them.

The late transactions of Congress have soured the Publick mind to a great degree.… With respect to the slave business, I am informed … that great advantage has been taken of it … by many who wished to purchase slaves [by] circulating a report that Congress were about to pass an act for their general emancipation. This occasioned such an alarm that many were sold for the merest trifle. That the sellers were of course much enraged at Congress taking up a subject which they were precluded by the Constitution from meddling with for the present, and thus [causing] the alarm [that] induced them to sell. As the people in that part of the country were before much opposed to the Government it may naturally be supposed that this circumstance has embittered them much more against it.53

The South had monetized slaves; they were portable wealth. As the inheritor of slaves, Washington knew this—he knew it when he raffled slaves to collect a debt in 1769 and when he wrote of “The advantages … from the sale of my negroes” in 1779—but the scale of the transactions was growing larger. He made a well-known statement in 1794 against the sale of slaves as if they were animals, a statement that has been taken as a sign of Washington’s high-mindedness. In fact it was an angry blast at a relative who had blithely asked his advice on the slaves’ market value. The relative, Alexander Spotswood, was planning to move his family from Virginia to Kentucky, and he asked Washington airily, “Would you advise carrying many negroes?… I think in that country they must be of much value, and will increase fast.” Washington replied to his kinsman, with restraint, that he had no idea “what you can sell for here, and buy at there.” But later in the letter he let his anger come through: “I am principled agt. selling negros, as you would do cattle in the market.”54

David Humphreys said of Washington, “He loved truth, he sought it unceasingly & he endeavoured to regulate all his actions by that standard.” In the last decade of his life Washington grasped some truth about slavery that was eluding everyone around him. Slavery had evolved into a system that his sense of justice could no longer tolerate. For all its superficial benevolence, the slave regime cloaked crimes that Washington could no longer stomach. The transcripts of public debates contain only part of the truth of Washington’s struggle with slavery. The rest, perhaps the most important part, played out in private, in secret, among families.55