His Excellency: George Washington (43 page)

The second long-term pattern in his thinking about slavery was a relentlessly realistic insistence that ideals per se must never define his agenda; indeed, he associated an idealistic agenda with sentimental illusions, like the belief that American virtue was sufficient to defeat Great Britain in the war, or that the French Revolution would succeed because it was a noble cause. His earliest apprehensions about slavery, after all, were more economic than moral; namely, that it was an inefficient labor system ill-suited for the kind of diversified farming he had begun to practice at Mount Vernon in the 1760s. During the war he had entertained suggestions of arming slaves and promising them freedom in return for service for the duration, but moral considerations took a back seat to a higher priority, the manpower needs of the Continental army. Similarly, during his presidency he had opposed federal action on a gradual emancipation scheme, despite a personal acknowledgment of its moral rightness, because the issue threatened to split the nation at the moment of its birth. Ideals were not irrelevant to Washington, but he was deeply suspicious of any idealistic agenda that floated above the realities of power on the ground. And much as we might regret his moral reticence on this occasion, it was an integral part of the same rock-ribbed realism that had proved invaluable, indeed his trademark quality, as commander in chief and president.

Two other factors cut against the kind of clear moral statement about slavery that we might wish. The first was Washington’s obsession with control, which in this case meant deferring emancipation until he was assured that his own financial independence was secure. He had spent a lifetime acquiring an impressive estate, and he was extremely reluctant to give it up except on his terms. The sale of his western land, for example, must meet
his
expectations of a fair price. The decision to emancipate his slaves must be
his
decision, made when
he
ordered it done. It was not easy for him to surrender what he had spent a lifetime accumulating, for it meant shedding assumptions that had served him well in his remarkable ascent to the pinnacle of power in Virginia and the nation at large.

He spared no expense, for example, in seeking to recover two of his most valued slaves: the cook, Hercules; and Martha’s body servant, Ona Judge, both of whom escaped just before his retirement. He told the slave hunter he sent after Hercules to be stealthful, “for if Hercules was to get the least hint of the design he would elude all your vigilance,” a warning that proved prescient, since Hercules escaped detection and remained a free man, probably in Philadelphia. Washington also spent three years trying to repossess Ona Judge, who had fled to New Hampshire. Once he located her there, he tried to persuade Judge to return voluntarily, but she insisted she would do so only on the condition that Washington promise to free her upon his death. Washington refused: “To enter into such a compromise with her . . . is totally inadmissible,” he protested, “for reasons that must strike at first view. For however well disposed I might be to a gradual emancipation, or even to an entire emancipation of that description of People (if the latter was in itself practicable at this moment) it would neither be politic or just to reward unfaithfulness with a premature preference.” Ona Judge eluded capture and remained free in New Hampshire.
²⁶

Another mitigating factor, admittedly more speculative, was Martha. There is no direct evidence—and if there ever was, it disappeared with the letters she burned after Washington’s death—but there is reason to believe that Martha did not share her husband’s principled aversion to slavery or agree with his emancipation plan. As noted earlier, that scheme created problems for her dower slaves, which she fully intended to pass on to her surviving heirs in the Custis and Dandridge lines as part of her estate. (Indeed, in a strictly legal sense Martha did not own the dower slaves. They were part of the Custis estate which
had to be
passed on to her descendants.) One of the possible reasons why Washington did not like to talk more openly about his decision to free his slaves is that it was a sore subject within the household, for it raised doubts about Martha’s status after her husband was gone and about her own control over her financial legacy.

THE WILL AND THE DREAM

T
HERE IS
a seductive story about Washington’s decision to write his will that has become a mainstay of the lore about his latter days. According to the story, which is based on a letter from Martha to an anonymous recipient, Washington woke her up in the middle of the night in September 1799 to describe a disturbing dream. In it he foresaw Martha’s death, which he interpreted as a premonition of his own imminent departure, and therefore as an auspicious sign that he needed to put his affairs in order. Since Washington’s will is one of the most historically significant and personally revealing documents he ever wrote—a more intimate version, if you will, of his Farewell Address—the notion that it was prompted by a dream has always had an irresistibly dramatic appeal. The more prosaic fact is that the letter on which the story is based is almost certainly a forgery. Even if authentic—and Martha
was
quite ill in the fall of 1799—it cannot explain Washington’s decision to draft a will, for the simple reason that he had already done so earlier that summer.
²⁷

This time there was no Hamilton or Lear to serve as draftsman. Washington secluded himself in his study in June and July and wrote every word with his own hand, taking care to sign each of the twenty-three pages of the document—he did miss one page by mistake—in order to preclude subsequent doubts about its accuracy as a statement of his intentions. Though he knew his days were numbered, he was not ailing at the time, so there is no plausible reason to explain his motivation in terms of some grim glimpse of the final curtain, dream-driven or not. Given the contents of the will, it makes more sense to understand his decision in terms of the estate planning he had been doing for the past five years. It was becoming obvious to Washington that his complex scheme for property consolidation to be followed by human emancipation was not progressing according to schedule. The drafting of his will was his way of assuring that, if he was not able to implement the plan while alive, he could do so from beyond the grave.

In preparation, Washington compiled a comprehensive assessment of all his property. It revealed a personal empire that included acreage in Kentucky, Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania, housing lots in Alexandria and Federal City—which he identified for the first time as “City of Washington”—and multiple plots in Virginia beyond the borders of Mount Vernon. The mother lode, however, were his tracts on the Ohio and Great Kanawha, which accounted for more than half his landed wealth. In total, he estimated his net worth at $530,000, which did not include the land and slaves at Mount Vernon.
²⁸

Two facts leap out from these numbers. First, Washington was hardly the impoverished farmer he often claimed to be, especially when friends or family asked him for financial assistance. He did have what we might call a cash flow problem, meaning that his assets were tied up in land rather than more liquid forms of wealth, so he could honestly refuse a request for money on the grounds that he did not have any to spare. But the belief that Washington was living out his retirement on the edge of bankruptcy, a view that has seeped into some of the history books, is dead wrong. In fact, Washington was one of the richest men in America.

Second, the core of his wealth had been acquired early in his life as a result of his prominent role in the French and Indian War. To be sure, he had assiduously protected and amplified his holdings throughout his later years. And one could interpret his victory in the War of Independence, at least at the personal level, as a successful effort to secure his control over holdings in the Ohio Valley that would otherwise have been lost if the American Revolution had failed. But nothing that he did as America’s preeminent soldier and statesman paid the same economic dividends as his youthful service on behalf of the British crown. Ironically, his lasting fame depended upon defeating an enemy that had, in the person of Virginia’s royal governor, given him his lasting fortune. The old man was rich primarily because of what the young man had done.

What Washington called his “Schedule of Property” included a farm-by-farm, name-by-name listing of slaves. It showed that there were 317 at Mount Vernon, of which Washington owned 124 outright, plus another 40 he had leased from a neighbor. This meant that, although he had been managing all the Mount Vernon slaves for forty years, Washington had legal control over less than half those on the premises. They were the focal point of the most dramatic words in Washington’s will, which deserve to be quoted in full:

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. . . . I do hereby expressly forbid the Sale, or transportation out of the said Commonwealth of any slave I may die possessed of, under any pretence whatsoever. And I do most pointedly and solemnly enjoin it upon my Executors hereafter named . . . to see that this clause respecting Slaves, and every part thereof be religiously fulfilled at the Epoch at which it is directed to take place without evasion, neglect or delay.
²⁹

He also stipulated that, once freed, his slaves must not be simply abandoned to their fate. All the old and infirm slaves “shall be comfortably cloathed and fed by my heirs while they live.” The very young slaves should be supported until they reached adulthood, which he defined as twenty-five years, and taught to read and as well as “brought up to some useful occupation.” His final instruction concerned Billy Lee, who had been hobbling around Mount Vernon for over a decade on two badly damaged knees. He should be freed outright upon Washington’s death and provided with a small annuity along with room and board, “as a testimony to my sense of his attachment to me, and for his faithful services during the Revolutionary War.”
³⁰

There it was, a clear statement of his personal rejection of slavery. As we have seen, he had been groping toward this position for many reasons and for more than thirty years, more gradually than we might prefer, more steadily than most of his fellow slave owners in Virginia. He was, in fact, the only politically prominent member of the Virginia dynasty to act on Jefferson’s famous words in the Declaration of Independence by freeing his slaves. He had been brooding about how to do it for over five years, procrastinating within a tangle of financial factors, and the drafting of his will represented his ultimate recognition that the only way to do it was, well, to do it. Though conscience, his deep moral revulsion at the blatant wrongness of human bondage, surely played an important role in his decision, his motives were not purely or merely moral, as they seldom were. For he knew that posterity was watching, and that his statement on this score would help to clear his legacy of the major impediment to his secular immortality. Sifting through the different layers of Washington’s thinking on this tortured topic is an inherently tricky business, but doing the right thing for his slaves became imperative because it also meant doing the right thing for his historic reputation. Finally, the quite imperious language he used in ordering his executors to carry out his commands suggests that he anticipated resistance from Martha’s side of the family, perhaps an attempt to defy his will by selling off his slaves after he died, but while Martha was still alive and legally controlled them. He wanted to make sure he closed that loophole.

The remainder of Washington’s will dealt with the apportionment of his other property. His papers, for example, went to Bushrod Washington, a nephew recently appointed to the Supreme Court; the crabtree walking stick bequeathed to him by Franklin went to his sole surviving brother, Charles, who unfortunately did not live long enough to inherit it; his stock in the Potomac Company went toward that long-standing hope of his heart, a national university in the capital. Apart from the specific provisions, however, the principle he chose to apply in distributing the fortune he had accumulated represented a personal statement almost as dramatic as his decision to free his slaves: there would be an equal division among twenty-three heirs.
³¹

The customary practice within wealthy families was an unequal distribution, which preserved the core of the estate intact in order to sustain family wealth and status over several generations. Washington’s decision to give equal shares to his many descendants effectively precluded the possibility of a dynasty that would live on under the patriarch’s name well into the future. His decision to divide Mount Vernon into five separate plots with different heirs embodied the same distributive principle, though Bushrod received the largest plot. Washington clearly wanted to live on in the memory of succeeding generations as the founding father of an emerging American empire, but the terms of his will assured that he would not live on as the founding father of a prominent American family. As a remembered national hero, he wished to live forever. As an ancestral presence, he wished to disappear. Moreover, the equal distribution meant that none of his heirs received more than a modest nest egg; none would be guaranteed a head start in life; or, to put it differently, none would be burdened by unearned wealth as Jackie and Jackie’s son had been. All would have to fend for themselves, just as he had done. If the provisions in the will concerning slavery constituted a statement about freedom, those allocating his assets constituted a statement about equality of opportunity. While it was Jefferson who wrote lyrical tributes to the idea that “the earth belongs to the living,” it was Washington who put the principle into practice.
³²

All in all, then, when Washington signed his will on July 9, 1799, he was doing more than putting his financial affairs in order. The will was also intended as a final testament to the human values he cherished most. He had time and again shown himself to be an aficionado of exits, whether it was the theatrical performance before the officers of the Continental army at Newburgh, surrendering his sword at Annapolis, or the stately cadences of the Farewell Address. These earlier exits, of course, had been orchestrated affairs, dramatic departures from the public stage designed as conspicuous demonstrations of self-mastery, the triumph of virtue over power. His will was his ultimate exit statement, a wholly personal expression of his willingness to surrender power in a truly final fashion as he prepared to depart the stage of life itself.