INTRODUCTION

The General’s Dream

BEFORE DAWN one summer morning at Mount Vernon, George Washington awoke from a troubling dream. It was 1799, the last year of the general’s life, and he was finally savoring the fruits of retirement. But the serenity of that summer was abruptly shaken by the dream.

Martha had awakened first, and had just risen from the bed when Washington stirred and spoke to her. She could tell at a glance that an uncharacteristic sadness had settled upon her husband in the night.

He had dreamed, he told her, that they were sitting and talking about the happy life they had spent together and the many more years they would have in each other’s company. In the dream “a great light” suddenly surrounded them; and from the light there emerged the barely visible figure of an angel, who stood at Martha’s side and whispered in her ear. As the angel spoke, Martha “suddenly turned pale and then began to vanish from his sight and he was left alone.”

The dream seemed to foretell that Martha would be taken from him, but Washington grasped a different meaning: he said to her, “You know, a contrary result indicated by dreams may be expected. I may soon leave you.”1

Alarmed, Martha tried to comfort him by forcing a laugh at “the absurdity of being disturbed by an idle dream,” but her efforts were in vain. The dream became “so deeply impressed on his mind that he could not shake it off for several days.”

Washington was a fatalist; he feared nothing, not even death. If his time had come, then it had come. The grimness Martha discerned arose not from fear but from a seriousness of purpose. He took the dream as a sign that he had to settle certain accounts before time ran out. From some scraps of paper she came across in his study, Martha soon discovered that, in the wake of his troubling dream, her husband had begun to write his last will.*

“In the name of God amen I George Washington of Mount Vernon—a citizen of the United States, and lately President of the same, do make, ordain and declare this Instrument; which is written with my own hand and every page thereof subscribed with my name, to be my last Will & Testament, revoking all others.” The document was eventually to run to twenty-nine pages and would carefully enumerate bequests to some fifty relatives—a tangled family tree that Washington, like all Southern patriarchs, kept committed to memory.2

In the first, one-sentence item, he provided for the needs of “my dearly beloved wife Martha Washington” for as long as she might live. But after this customary clause, Washington turned to the subject that clearly was uppermost in his mind, to which he had given a great deal of thought for a long time. With his next words George Washington renounced the system that had nurtured him and given him wealth: “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.” After writing that plain declaration, Washington filled almost three pages with explicit instructions for the manner in which his slaves should be freed. He specified that the children should be educated and trained so that they could support themselves as free people.

It was an astounding decision. As he sat in his study—a room that one visitor called “the focus of political intelligence for the new world”—Washington felt the isolation of the man who can see what others cannot or will not. He was a man who had discovered that his moral system was wrong. He had helped to create a new world but had allowed into it an infection that he feared would eventually destroy it.3

No other Founding Father would set his slaves free, and certainly none of them contemplated educating slaves as Washington did. The traditional planter’s definition of benevolence presumed holding the slaves in humane but firm bondage, and the schooling that some favored slaves received was intended not to fit them for independence but to make them more useful to the master. To understand how extraordinary Washington’s decision was, one has only to look at the pronouncements of other Southern Founding Fathers on the subject of slavery. A fellow Virginian, Patrick Henry, wrote of the slaves, “let us treat the unhappy Victims with lenity, it is the furthest advance we can make towards Justice.” Thomas Jefferson scoffed at the very notion of emancipation: “To give liberty to, or rather, to abandon persons whose habits have been formed in slavery is like abandoning children.” Washington thought otherwise.4

In his last months, Washington struggled with the paradox that continues to vex us today: how is it that the nation—conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal—preserved slavery? The word “paradox” suggests abstraction, a debate in a gathering of bewigged white gentlemen. But Washington’s will reveals that, in the stately chambers of Mount Vernon, his struggle over slavery was played out in a sharp family conflict.5

The emancipation clause stands out from the rest of Washington’s will in the unique forcefulness of its language. Elsewhere in it Washington used the standard legal expressions—“I give and bequeath,” “it is my will and direction.” In one instance he politely wrote, “by way of advice, I recommend it to my Executors…” But the emancipation clause rings with the voice of command; it has the iron firmness of a field order: “I do hereby expressly forbid the Sale … of any Slave I may die possessed of, under any pretence whatsoever.” This plainly implies that Washington expected that pretenses would be made and slaves would be sold once he was gone. Furthermore, Washington commanded his family “to see that this clause respecting Slaves, and every part thereof be religiously fulfilled … without evasion, neglect or delay” (the emphasis is Washington’s). Nowhere else in the document did he speak with such vehemence. The force of his commands makes it clear that within his own family Washington was entirely alone in his thinking about slavery. He expected that the emancipation would come as a shock to his family and, moreover, he expected them to resist it. Washington was positioning himself as the protector of his slaves.*

Washington’s emancipation of his slaves at Mount Vernon has long been dismissed as a mere parting grace note, of little significance except as a mark of his inherent benevolence. But the will hints at a profound moral struggle; indeed, his decision to free his slaves represented a repudiation of a lifetime of mastery. For his entire life he had been conditioned to be indifferent to the aspirations and humanity of African-Americans. Something happened to change him and to set him radically apart from his peers and his family.

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Crossing the barrier into the past is treacherous, but the journey is doubly difficult if one is seeking to understand a man as elusive, as contradictory, but as critically important as George Washington. “As to the inner man we are strangely ignorant,” one historian wrote, “no more elusive personality exists in history.” A French visitor remarked, “an atmosphere of silence envelops the deeds of Washington.” Even in his own time, Washington’s achievement surrounded him with a blinding, almost divine radiance that made the man himself seem unapproachable. Watching him as he merely walked down the street, Abigail Adams could almost feel the ground tremble under the shoe of the man who appeared “as awful as a god.” Once when he entered a room full of his step-granddaughter’s friends, apparently eager for an informal chat, all conversation instantly ceased. The step-granddaughter recalled that because of “the awe and respect he inspired … his own near relatives feared to speak or laugh before him.” On the occasions when his presence chilled a social event, “he would sit a short time and then retire, quite provoked and disappointed.” Then and now his unique eminence arises from his sterling personal qualities, from the inescapable fact that we Americans owe everything we have to him, and from the eerie sense that, in him, some fragment of divine Providence did indeed touch this ground.6

Washington’s home on the Potomac, Mount Vernon, has been a place of pilgrimage since his lifetime. More than a million people come to Mount Vernon every year, seeking some clue to understanding the character of the distant figure at the core of the American endeavor. Washington designed Mount Vernon himself. The house and every foot of its gardens and grounds present a view of the inner man and the workings of his mind. (One visitor of Washington’s time said as much, remarking that “the good Order of its Masters Mind appears extended to every Thing around it.”) The house is the perfect mirror of the man: it presents one puzzle after another. And it embodies a basic contradiction—Mount Vernon is not the humble abode of a democrat, but the manor house of a colonial potentate. Washington lived privately in some grandeur and rural pomp, with a decidedly British flavor; and yet he was the man who refused to be king, who infused the ceremonies of republican government with plainness, who left a legacy of presidential modesty.

When you approach Mount Vernon from its gate today you are seeing it as a visitor would have in 1799. You are also seeing it the way Washington wanted you to—from a distance, set back behind a long greensward, the whole view framed by groves, which a visitor described as a “labyrinth of evergreens where the sun cannot … penetrate.” The first view of the house was designed to impress the onlooker, and it surely does. The numerous outbuildings that surround the mansion call to mind the variety of labors that maintained this estate—kitchen, storehouse, smokehouse, washhouse, stable, coachhouse, overseer’s quarters, ice house, greenhouse, and, farther off from the house, a gristmill and even a distillery. In itself this scene reveals the power of the occupant, who commanded so much work. Even in colonial times the scope of a planter’s ownership could surprise outsiders, as it did a Frenchman who visited a Virginia plantation and remarked, “When I reached his place I thought I was entering a rather large village, but later was told that all of it belonged to him.”7

The exterior surface of the house strangely has the texture of sandpaper. Washington ordered wooden weatherboarding to be cut, painted, and dusted with sand so that the boards would look exactly like blocks of stone. Stone was what British potentates used. He could not afford stone, but he wanted the look, and he got it, even if the monumental effect fades on close inspection and if the scheme is surprisingly un-American in its taste. One modern historian rather unkindly describes the house as “pretentious” and opines, “when Mount Vernon was seen in a haze of nostalgia after a bottle or two of Madeira, the woodwork turned to stone in the eyes of homesick Englishmen.” Washington never visited England, but British style did form his frame of reference.8

The requirements of modern tourism compel visitors to enter the house in an apparently unusual but historically correct way, not through the front door but through a side door into a large dining room. This is just how guests at a semipublic event would have entered the house in Washington’s time. The dining room is two stories in height, with an impressive Palladian window dominating one wall of the room. Washington chose to adorn the ceiling of this public room not with some heroic relief or constellation of classical symbols, but with images of tools. One looks up at his ceiling to find plaster scythes, shovels, and picks. The size of the room tells something about the owner’s social station, but the room’s real significance is that it symbolizes his unshakable optimism. Work had begun on the dining room, along with other improvements and enlargements around the house, just before Washington rode off to command the Revolutionary army. Like many, he hoped the war would be a short one; but even as the conflict dragged on year after dreary year, he sent orders for the work on his house to be kept up. He expected to see it again, larger and more handsome than it was when he left it. It was six years before he laid eyes on it again.

From the dining room one gets only a peek at a jewel-box chamber painted, at Washington’s own choice, in an eye-popping shade called “Prussian blue.” Now closed off by a velvet rope, this room was the family’s West Parlor, where with special guests they sipped tea and played cards under the frowning brows of heavily carved paneling. Washington chose the patterns from British architectural books; the paneling added historical heft to his colonial outpost and created a room-sized frame for his gallery of family portraits. Here he placed the portrait of himself—done at Martha’s earnest request—by Charles Willson Peale. This is the face which should, by rights, be on the dollar—it shows Washington in the uniform he wore as frontier commander in the French and Indian War, with marching orders stuffed in his pocket and a look of jaunty courage. Here he is every inch the man who wrote to his brother, “I heard Bullets whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound.” On another wall is a portrait of Martha at the age of twenty-six, done in dowdy fashion by the society painter John Wollaston, the favorite of the Virginia gentry for his ability to render in oils their importance, though their charm eluded him. Here also are the Custis children, Jacky and Patsy, whom Martha brought to Mount Vernon and whom Washington adopted as his own. Despite its museumlike atmosphere, Mount Vernon in its day was always home to young children—first the Custis children and then the grandchildren.9

This room neatly encapsulates Washington’s social history—one might call it his Virginia Genealogy Room, though the grandest family connections belonged not to him but to Martha. As a Virginia historian wrote, “not even retroactively, not even after George became the absolute number one citizen of Virginia and the new nation, were the Washingtons ever included in the aristocracy.”10 His forebears were middling planters, but Washington’s architectural tastes show his yearning to gain entry to the top tier for himself. His wife and her children, however, were already at the top. Martha’s first husband was a Custis, whose mother had been a Parke: two names at the peak of colonial Virginia society. Martha’s children and grandchildren carried the middle name Parke as a badge of their lineage and, no less important, to qualify them as heirs to an old Parke estate.* George Washington presided over a household of wealthy aristocrats, inheritors of a tradition that excluded Washington himself, no matter how grand his mansion might be. Another aspect of his life revealed in this room is the absence of portraits of Washington’s own children. He and Martha were childless, and that failure saddened him.

Mount Vernon occupies two landscapes and straddles, as far as that is possible, two realms of time. The key to grasping the vision behind Washington’s plan is the enormous view that unfolds from the piazza at the rear of the house. The land falls away below you into a massive landscape, with the Potomac River winding to infinity and forests stretching to the horizon. This was Washington’s favorite spot, where he sat every afternoon, and this was the place one visitor, Abigail Adams, called Mount Vernon’s “greatest adornment.”11 Behind you, forgotten now, is the clipped and calculated paradise of the colonial Virginia gentleman. Before you stretches an open and endless prospect, encompassing anything the world could send it—a view not of the past but of the future. The genius of the house and of its builder is most fully felt here; this eighteenth-century artifact, and its creator, still speak so powerfully today because they frame this view of the future.

The future Washington envisioned for this house, after he was gone, was one without slavery. That is the ultimate contradiction of Mount Vernon. The place we see today, beautifully restored, is a place Washington wished to see, in part, dismantled. Of course he wished that it would endure, but on a different foundation.

There is a spot at Mount Vernon where one can stand today and see a revealing remnant of the system that Washington rejected. I had passed the place many times without realizing what I was looking at. Like so much about slavery, something important was carefully concealed while standing in plain sight, because it had been disguised. While strolling through the elegant garden at Mount Vernon, I paused to admire the majestic Greenhouse that Washington designed himself. Here, Washington grew oranges, so exotic and precious they were regarded as “the fruit of kings.” In his time, “possession of a greenhouse [implied] that we have scaled the heights of power … that we have almost allegorical control over the natural universe,” as the garden historian Mac Griswold has written.12 On one side, the Greenhouse faces the Upper Garden, where Washington liked to take guests for a stroll down paths bordered with boxwood and flowerbeds. Then and now, someone walking through the elegant garden and admiring the majestic Greenhouse would not know that the wings extending from the sides of the building, providing architectural balance and harmony, were slave barracks.

The barracks opened to the rear, and on the garden side there were no doors nor windows large enough to afford a glimpse at the interior. So when Washington’s guests strolled past the Greenhouse they saw no sign that these long, handsome brick wings housed the plantation’s slaves. Washington had devised an architecture that rendered slavery invisible, while at the same time weaving slavery into the fabric of his grand design. It was a brilliant, chilling stroke of architectural inspiration.

Built of brick and attached to one of the most prominent buildings on the estate, the barracks signify the permanence of slavery. At one time Washington envisioned that slavery would be part of the fabric of Mount Vernon’s future and America’s future. Slavery would be not merely accommodated but embraced and transformed into a beautiful, imposing symbol of status and “control over the natural universe.” The Greenhouse is a vestige of the system Washington eventually rejected. He built it and then he emptied it.

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In our time Mount Vernon has felt the reverberations of the thunder-clap that struck Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s mountaintop home to the south, when DNA testing of Jefferson’s descendants and descendants of his slave Sally Hemings indicated that Jefferson was most likely the father of Hemings’s children. To many people, that revelation in 1998 came with as much shock as the discovery of a new continent. If we thought we had fully mapped our world, we were wrong. In the wake of the Jefferson-Hemings revelation, descendants of Washington’s slaves came forward to ask for their own DNA testing. Their oral tradition, they said, had long held that their black forebear, a slave named West Ford, was the son of George Washington and a slave named Venus. While this information was not exactly new—it had long been known to the Ford descendants and to some scholars—it emerged forcefully into public view at a moment when it seemed that a single new nugget of information could, overnight, completely change our view of a major historical figure.

Oral history is very difficult to interpret, and while a story may contain obvious errors, that does not mean that it can be summarily dismissed. In the matter of West Ford, the documentary evidence is ambiguous, but there is virtually no doubt he was kin to the first president.

George and Martha Washington had other relatives in their slave community as well. A few months into my research on Washington I came across information that Martha had a half sister who was black, whose family remained close to the Washington and Custis families at least until the 1850s. The relationship was hardly secret—it was described in detail in a Congressional document published in 1871. Some might see such revelations as scandalous; I see them as windows into a past we are struggling to understand.

To consider Washington in connection with slavery challenges the myth of Washington as the perfect secular god. The biographer Douglas Southall Freeman wrestled with this issue when he wrote in 1948, “The integrity of the United States was assumed, for some reason, to presuppose the flawlessness of Washington’s character. Complete faith in him was part of the creed of loyalty.”13 On the one hand, the myth of Washington hides a great deal—his pride, his ambition, his acquisitiveness (some might call it greed), and his willingness to subordinate the weak to his ambition. But on the other hand, the myth does not do him justice, for he transformed himself, shedding his ambition and his self-seeking, to bring liberty to a people who were exasperatingly indifferent and reluctant to share sacrifice. It has been said that he was bedeviled by feelings of inadequacy, perhaps resulting from his difficult relationship with his mother and the absence of a father. Certainly he was keenly aware of his lack of education. But against this he threw a relentless drive for attainment and a habit of discipline. In his young adulthood this drive had no other object beyond his own aggrandizement. When he committed himself to the patriot cause, this drive, this discipline, this single-mindedness helped win the nation its independence. Toward the end of his life he grappled with the problem of slavery. His wrenching private conflict over race and slavery was a microcosm of the national struggle—one that is not yet over.