Passing by Mount Vernon just south of Washington D.C. last week, I decided on a whim to visit George Washington’s ancestral home, which I’d never seen before.
Paying to take the tour (the home is privately maintained and not visible except by tour), I learned several interesting details about our first president’s extraordinary life and indispensable role in helping America win the Revolutionary War.
But I also couldn’t help but notice what was missing from the tour, namely much in the way of specifics about Washington’s greatest character flaw — the fact that he owned hundreds of slaves and didn’t free a single one in his lifetime.
Some historians would say that founding fathers like Washington and Jefferson who owned slaves were merely reflecting the Virginia society they lived in at the time. And that was certainly true. Except that both Washington and Jefferson found slavery morally troubling and yet failed to emancipate their own slaves when they finally had the chance. (Prior to 1982 it was illegal to emancipate slaves in Virginia.)
Jefferson was especially appalled by the slave trade — if not slavery itself — and as America’s third president led the legislative battle that ultimately (in 1806) outlawed the importation and selling of new slaves. Washington, himself, stopped selling slaves after the Revolutionary War, not wanting to break up their families.
He also considered freeing all his slaves while the war was still in progress, but ultimately concluded it wasn’t economically feasible for his family to do so.
How could that be?
Washington biographers who’ve delved into the subject say, first of all, you have to understand that America’s first president didn’t just own a few house slaves. He owned a plantation’s worth of field slaves who performed all the manual labor on one of the largest farms in Virginia.
His father had built the original home there on 2,000 acres, but Washington remodeled the house into a 22-room mansion with numerous out-buildings and extended the family’s land holdings to 8,000 acres. On his land he grew more than a hundred different crops. While most of his neighbors were fixated on farming tobacco, Washington was an early adapter at raising wheat. And with the wheat and other grains as essential ingredients he built a huge distillary, one of the largest in the land. And all of it was predicated on slave labor.
Much has been written about Jefferson as a slave-owner, particularly his liaison (as a widower) with Sally Hemings, who gave birth to four of his children. But relatively little has been written about Washington on the same subject, though at the time of his death Mount Vernon housed 316 slaves, more than twice as many as Jefferson maintained at Monticello.
How did Washington come by so many slaves?
By getting an early start, according to research conducted by Henry Wiencek, author of An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America.
Washington’s father had died when his son was just 11, but his will awarded young George the sum of “10 slaves.” Then Washington married into some more. Martha brought with her a “dowry” of more than a hundred slaves who were originally the property of her first husband. At the time of Washington’s death in 1799, his plantation housed 153 slaves owned by Martha’s estate, 123 owned by the president and 40 leased from a neighbor.
To his credit, Washington ultimately broke the cycle of passing on slaves to his children. His will stipulated that the 123 slaves he owned outright be emancipated upon the death of his wife (who passed away two years after he did), and that his heirs care for his ex-slaves (who lived that long), “the elderly ones to be clothed and fed, the younger ones to be educated and trained at an occupation.”
And to the credit of the private non-profit organization that now maintains Washington’s home, it also offers a “Slave Life at Mount Vernon” tour from April through October, with a visit to a slave memorial and burial ground. I just wasn’t there then. And one of the 20 exhibits inside the Mount Vernon education center year-around focuses on “The Dilemma of Slavery.”
So apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play? Speaking for myself — and the tour of Mount Vernon — I liked it quite a bit. Here’s a few more odds and ends from my notebook…
(1) While Washington is almost always pictured as a stony-faced senior citizen, he was pretty special as a young guy too. He left his family farm at 17 to explore the American frontier as a surveyor and got to know certain aspects of it better than any other Virginian. At 19 he was already a war hero, fighting for the British in the French-Indian War. And at 23, as colonel of the Virginia regiment, he’d achieved the highest rank open to an American.
(2) A couple decades later, of course, Washington switched sides and led the continental army against the British in the American War of Independence. A turning point in that war came on Christmas Day, 1776, when he famously ordered his frostbitten and demoralized troops to cross the icy Deleware River near Trenton and catch the British forces unawares. Still, the war dragged on for five more years — until 1981, when 6,000 Americans and 7,000 French teamed together to defeat 5,000 British in the war’s decisive battle at Yorktown. (Rush Limbaugh, please note the crucial role the French played in the American Revolution.)
(3) After the British surrendered, Washington ordered his men not to jeer at the redcoats as they filed past. There’d be no trash-talking or dancing in the end-zone. Later, biographers would find some of Washington’s schoolboy papers, including the 110 precepts of “The Rules of Civility” he’d copied at age 16. Lesson No. 22: “Show not yourself glad at the misfortune of another though he were your enemy.”
(4) The founders didn’t know what to call their first leader. Suggestions varied from “His Highness the President of the United States” to “His Exalted High Mightiness.” Washington favored the more straight-forward “President of the United States” (which soon got shortened even more to “Mr. President”) and insisted on not serving more than two terms — unlike other young revolutionaries in history who later became egotistic despots themselves. (See: Oliver Cromwell, in Great Britain, who would declare himself “Lord Protector of England” and Napoleon Bonaparte, in France, who fancied himself a modern-day Caesar and changed his title from “First Consul” to “Emporer of France.”)
Good on you, George.
Travels with Harley 