Washington: A Life (97 page)

When Washington received Lafayette’s letter, the war was winding down and he was dwelling on his impaired finances. His economic well-being depended on slavery, so that whatever his theoretical sympathy with Lafayette’s idea, he could not have been thrilled by the timing. Not wanting to disillusion his worshipful protégé, he replied the way a fond father might write to an ardent but impractical son: “The scheme, my dear Marq[ui]s, which you propose as a precedent to encourage the emancipation of the black people of this country … 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 detail of the business till I have the pleasure of seeing you.”
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This was Washington’s canny way of crediting Lafayette’s noble project while also sidestepping any specific commitment to it.

At his home in Paris, Lafayette flaunted his ties to the American Revolution, posting a portrait of Washington and American flags on the walls. His infatuation did not cool with time. He seemed to live in an eternal, high-flown rapture with Washington and wrote to him in language that was almost ecstatic. In one letter he labeled Washington “the savior of his country, the benefactor of mankind, the protecting angel of liberty, the pride of America, and the admiration of the two hemispheres”—all in a single sentence.
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After the war Washington was powerfully tempted to go to Paris, especially when a French nobleman assured him that King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette had “expressed their desire to be acquainted with the circumstances of a life which has so much contributed to the liberty of your country.”
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Washington felt the full force of this royal favor, which he labeled “one of the most flattering incidents” of his life.
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When Lafayette pleaded with him to visit France, Washington had to rule it out because of his financial plight and because Martha was “too far advanced in life and is too much immersed in the care of her little progeny to cross the Atlantic.” Writing like a pious hermit instead of a world-renowned general, Washington urged Lafayette and his wife to travel to Mount Vernon “and call my cottage your home … You will see the plain manner in which we live and meet the rustic civility. And you shall taste the simplicity of rural life.”
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Nothing could stop Lafayette’s triumphant return to America. While projecting a trip there in the spring of 1783, he wrote to Washington in a typical burst of enthusiasm, “Happy, ten times happy will I be in embracing my dear general, my father, my best friend.”
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Not until the following March did Lafayette assure Washington that, before the summer was out, “you will see a vessel coming up [the] Potomac, and out of that vessel will your friend jump with a panting heart and all the feelings of perfect happiness.”
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Washington responded with gratitude to the buckets of Gallic charm that Lafayette poured over his head at every turn.

Upon arriving at Mount Vernon in August 1784, Lafayette was delighted to find a group portrait of himself and his family in an honored place in the parlor. He bore a cherished gift from Paris, a Masonic apron that Adrienne had embroidered for the general. Lafayette was instantly entranced by Nelly and Washy. “The general has adopted them and loves them deeply,” he told his wife. “It was quite funny when I arrived to see the curious looks on those two small faces who had heard nothing but talk of me the entire day and wanted to see if I looked like my portrait.”
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Finding Washington busy but relaxed, Lafayette delighted in his company and treasured their dinner conversations, when they swapped wartime anecdotes. Washington guided him around the grounds and quizzed him about European flowers that might flourish there. All the while the vexed question of slavery hung heavily in the air. Earlier in the summer, during William Gordon’s two-week stay, Washington had admitted to a desire to be rid of his slaves and mentioned Lafayette’s abolitionist plans. “I should rejoice beyond measure could your joint counsels and influence produce it,” Gordon responded, “and thereby give the finishing stroke and the last polish to your political characters.”
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Unfortunately, we don’t know the specifics of the conversation between Washington and Lafayette about slavery. When Lafayette encountered James Madison, the former said he was now gripped by three obsessions: the French-American alliance, the unity of the thirteen states, and “the manumission of the slaves.”
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Madison, a large slave owner, wrote to Jefferson, another large slave owner, that Lafayette’s position on slavery “does him real honor, as it is a proof of his humanity.”
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After the Revolution it was unquestionably fashionable to utter such high-minded sentiments, but talk was cheap and direct action was quite another matter.

While in Richmond, Lafayette had a consequential encounter with James Armistead, the handsome, round-faced slave who had gallantly assisted him during the war. To help him sue for his freedom, Lafayette furnished him with an affidavit that testified to his valor: “His intelligence from the enemy’s camp were industriously collected and most faithfully delivered.”
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Not only did Armistead win his freedom and a pension from the legislature (which also compensated his master), but he changed his name in gratitude to James Armistead Lafayette.

Since Lafayette was slated to return to France in December, Washington, in a loving gesture, volunteered to escort him to his ship in New York—the first time he had ventured out of state since the war. When they reached Annapolis, however, the two men found themselves trapped in such a tedious round of receptions that Washington dreaded the ovations yet to come in Philadelphia and New York. So one day in early December, Washington and Lafayette gave each other an affectionate farewell hug and climbed into their respective carriages. Afterward, in an affecting letter that showed his powerful, if often suppressed, need for intimacy and how he equated Lafayette with his own lost youth, Washington told Lafayette of his turbulent emotions at their parting:

One of Washington’s premonitions in these melancholy musings proved correct: he never set eyes on Lafayette again.

Back in France, Lafayette showered Washington with gifts, including seven hounds sent in the custody of John Quincy Adams. He also sent along French pheasants and nightingales, which Washington had never seen before. All the while, Lafayette perfected his manumission scheme and acted on it the next year with breathtaking speed. He bought a large sugar plantation in Cayenne (French Guiana), on the South American coast, which came with nearly seventy slaves. He promptly began to educate and emancipate them, paying wages to those old enough to work, providing schooling for the children, and banning the sale of human beings. To make this scheme self-perpetuating, Lafayette instructed his agent to keep on adding more lands and freeing more slaves.

In congratulating him, Washington displayed enormous admiration while again shrinking from any firm commitment to a comparable project: “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.”
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To set the slaves “afloat” abruptly, he feared, 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.”
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The news of Lafayette’s feat came as Washington was being prodded to take a public stand on abolishing slavery. Before the war it had required an act of the royal governor and his council to free a slave. Then in 1782 a new law gave masters permission to free their own slaves, and hundreds manumitted at least a few. Influenced by the Revolution, antislavery societies sprang up across Virginia. In 1785 the Virginia legislature debated whether freed slaves should be permitted to stay in the state—something that might give their enslaved brethren seditious ideas—and abolitionist petitions were introduced. Washington became the target of a subtle but persistent campaign by abolitionists to enlist him in their cause. When Elkanah Watson visited Mount Vernon in January 1785, he bore books on emancipation written by British abolitionist Granville Sharpe, founder of the African colony of Sierra Leone. And then there were people such as Robert Pleasants, a Virginia Quaker who liberated seventy-eight of his slaves and proclaimed that Washington’s failure to follow suit would leave an everlasting stain on his reputation.

That May, Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury, two eminent Methodist ministers, brought to Mount Vernon an emancipation petition that they planned to introduce in the Virginia legislature. Although Washington refrained from signing it, he voiced “his opinion against slavery,” Asbury recorded in his diary, and promised to write a letter supporting the measure if it ever came to a vote.
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This typified Washington’s ambivalent approach to slavery in the 1780s: he privately made no secret of his disdain for the institution, but neither did he have the courage to broadcast his views or act on them publicly. After endorsing abolition, he shunted direct action onto other shoulders. Amid a blistering debate, the Coke-Asbury petition failed in the Virginia House of Delegates that November, with Madison reporting to Washington, “A motion was made to throw it under the table, which was treated with as much indignation on one side, as the petition itself was on the other.”
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Such fierce emotions must have given pause to Washington, if he harbored any unspoken thoughts about a future return to the political arena.

Washington’s quandary over slavery was thrown into high relief by a visit on April 9, 1786, from a local slave owner, Philip Dalby, who had recently traveled to Philadelphia with his slave, a mulatto waiter named Frank. After Frank was spirited away by a team of Quaker abolitionists, Dalby filed suit in the Pennsylvania assembly and, to drum up support, placed a shrill ad in the Alexandria newspaper, warning planters about the “insidious” work of Philadelphia Quakers.
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Incensed over the incident, Washington dashed off a strongly worded letter to his Philadelphia friend Robert Morris that expressed no sympathy for the Quakers, decrying instead their “acts of tyranny and oppression.”
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Unless these practices ceased, he warned, “none of those whose
misfortune
it is to have slaves as attendants will visit the city if they can possibly avoid it, because by so doing they hazard their property or they must be at the expense … of providing servants of another description for the trip.”
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This wasn’t the only time Washington talked of slavery as a curse visited
on
him rather than a system of privilege enforced
by
him.

At this point in the letter, Washington suddenly remembered that he opposed slavery and had to justify his righteous indignation about the Quaker actions: “I hope it will not be conceived from these observations that it is my wish to hold the unhappy people who are the subject of this letter in slavery. I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it [slavery], but there is only one proper and effectual mode by which it can be accomplished, and that by legislative authority. And this, as far as my suffrage will go, shall never be wanting.”
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Of course, Washington lacked a vote in the state legislature and took refuge in a position that was largely symbolic. The idea that abolition could be deferred to some future date when it would be carried out by cleanly incremental legislative steps was a common fantasy among the founders, since it shifted the burden onto later generations. It was especially attractive to Washington, the country’s foremost apostle of unity, who knew that slavery was potentially the country’s most divisive issue.

Historians often quote a September 1786 letter from Washington to John Francis Mercer as signaling a major forward stride in his thinking on slavery: “I never mean (unless some particular circumstance should compel me to it) to possess another slave by purchase, it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by the legislature by which slavery in this country may be abolished by slow, sure, and imperceptible degrees.”
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But this noble statement then took a harsh turn. Washington mentioned being hard pressed by two debts—to retire one of which, “if there is no other resource, I must sell land or Negroes to discharge.”
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In other words, in a pinch, Washington would trade slaves to settle debts. Clearly, the abolition of slavery would have exacted too steep an economic price for Washington to contemplate serious action. A month later Washington made a comment that narrowed the scope of his possible action: “It is well known that the expensive mansion in which I am, as it were, involuntarily compelled to live will admit of no diminution of my income.”
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In other words, for all his rhetorical objections to slavery, Washington found it impossible to wean himself away from the income it produced. Habituated to profligate spending and a baronial lifestyle, he was in no position to act forcefully on his principled opposition to slavery until the very end of his life.