A Year With George Washington
On February 18, 1786, Washington penned an entry in his diary in which he made a detailed accounting of his slaves (both his own and the dower slaves, owned by Martha Washington). He totaled the population at 216, of whom nearly half were children.
A product of the 18th century, Washington was not unlike many of his wealthy planter Virginians, who purchased slaves to maintain both their households and their agricultural enterprises. By the time of Washington, slavery had been well woven into the fabric of society. He was the third generation in his family to hold human beings as chattel.
Washington had inherited his first ten slaves at the age of eleven after his father’s unexpected death. As his wealth grew, so did his slave population. With his marriage to the widow Martha Dandridge Custis, Washington’s enslaved population grew larger still.
Washington privately grew to detest the ”wicked, cruel, and unnatural trade” and, in 1774, publicly endorsed those very words in the Fairfax Resolves, a widely distributed resolution protesting the Intolerable Acts of the British Parliament.
Article 17 of the resolution, which was highly influenced by George Washington and written by his neighbor, George Mason, reads as follows:
Resolved that it is the Opinion of this Meeting, that during our present Difficulties and Distress, no Slaves ought to be imported into any of the British Colonies on this Continent, and We take this Opportunity of declaring our most earnest Wishes to see an entire Stop for ever put to such a wicked cruel and unnatural Trade.
During the Revolutionary War, Washington initially opposed the service of black soldiers in the army, but expediency and the voices of his military aides, the Marquis de Lafayette, Alexander Hamilton, John Laurens, and others chipped away at his opposition. His integrated army would be the only one so constituted until President Harry S. Truman signed an executive order to that effect in 1948, following World War II.
Lafayette would broach the subject of slavery in numerous letters, even offering plans to effect emancipation. His plan was for the two of them to purchase “a small estate where we may try the experiment to free the Negroes and use them only as servants.” He knew that, like so many difficult challenges that faced America, only Washington possessed the gravitas to bring it about, if it was possible at all.
Lafayette did not wait for his hero and surrogate father and put his money, literally, where his mouth is. He purchased a sugar plantation on the South American coast in Cayenne, French Guiana. The plantation came with nearly seventy slaves. The Marquis freed them, installed an educational program, and compensated all for their labor. He provided schooling for the children and prohibited the use of slave labor. He instructed his managers to seek out more opportunities to repeat the enterprise.
Among all the founding fathers who held human beings in bondage, Washington expressed the most disdain for the horrid institution, both in word and in practice. Thomas Jefferson had written of the scourge in his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, but it was stricken in the final draft.
Washington had scores of opportunities to help dismantle slavery, but his keen sense of the social and economic turmoil he knew would unfurl kept him a quiet cheerleader rather than a robust participant.
Hearing of Lafayette’s Cayenne Plantation, Washington wrote an effusive letter praising his young protégé.
“The benevolence of your heart, my dear Marquis, 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.”
Washington followed his praise for Lafayette’s generous deed with a cautionary tone. He feared that if newly emancipated slaves were freed without considerable forethought, it would “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.”
“But by degrees” was the course on which Washington was most comfortable. He knew full well that an economy highly dependent on slave labor would likely collapse. He would not be immune to such a calamity himself.
The Constitutional Convention would be the best chance to eradicate the institution, but while most participants wished to do so, they could manage only, for fear of rejection of the Constitution as a whole, to ban the importation of slaves twenty years hence. Article I, Section 9, Clause I prohibited the importation of slaves after 1808.
For at least the last three decades of his life, Washington wrestled with the bane of his existence. In his extraordinary life, his dogged persistence and rare heroic character were more than a match for every Gordian Knot put before him. In time, he had dispatched every obstacle in his path but one – emancipation.
Still, his angst would find relief in his parting this earth. In his will, he instructed that all his slaves (excepting the dower slaves belonging to his wife) should be freed upon the death of Martha.
Washington made one exception, whom he freed immediately, and that was his faithful attendant, Billy Lee. Billy rarely left his side and had suffered with him for the entire eight years of the Revolutionary War. He had shivered with him at Valley Forge and ridden next to him in battle, exposing himself to the very same hazards as the General. After the war, Billy broke his leg while assisting Washington in surveying a tract of land. Just three years later, he injured his other knee, rendering him only able to cobble shoes.
It is clear that Washington cared for Billy, and the sentiment was returned. Billy was freed, given a $30 yearly pension, and offered a home at Mount Vernon if he wished. He chose to remain at the only home he had known since his youth. He was buried there when he died in 1810.
It is not uncommon nor unproductive to get mired in the contradiction of the man who did more than any other for American freedom, while simultaneously owning slaves. It is, after all, the most paradoxical aspect of the “all men are created equal’ American creed.
Still, one must take care not to peer upon the past with eyes of the present. We must adorn ourselves with the spectacles of the time and view our subject through the often-blurry lens of history. It is hard for the twenty-first-century mind to resist the impulse to judge from afar, but we must.
Just as with the American Revolution, the Constitutional Convention, and the establishment of the presidency, George Washington’s powerful and unrelenting will manifested what came to be with regard to eventual emancipation. His prediction that if emancipation were to be undertaken “by degrees, it certainly might, and assuredly ought to be effected, and that, too, by legislative authority.”
Washington’s warning that doing so suddenly would “be productive of much inconvenience and mischief” seems like an understatement given what we know of the bloody Civil War and its death toll of some 600,000 Americans, but he was not wrong. He knew full well that the eradication of “that peculiar institution,” as Abraham Lincoln called it, was far more an entrenched problem than even he, “the greatest man of the age,” was able to solve in his time.
And yet, he did solve it. It just took time. He and his fellow founders gave the world both the courage and, just as important, the language to eradicate the evil scourge from the better part of the world. In the immediate decades following his death, American legislatures stepped up their efforts to end slavery. Great Britain banned it and dispatched the Royal Navy worldwide to enforce it. All over the globe, the wretched practice began to disappear. It was not just “the shot heard’round the world,” at Lexington and Concord, it was the cry for freedom.
Washington, were he able to visit us in our time, would, like us, have to suppress his judgment. But he would be proud of at least one thing – that liberty for all, something he was willing to die for, finally rings true.
The question often asked when contemplating George Washington is, “How could a man who fought so hard for freedom not grant the same to those for whom he had the power to give it? The answer to that question is to ask a better question.
To whom does every American owe the most gratitude, reverence, and honor for his or her freedom?
The answer is indisputably George Washington.
