Getting to Know GW (3)

George Washington was a life-long slaveholder. He was a landowner and a tobacco farmer, and in eighteenth century Virginia it was difficult, if not impossible, to be both of those things and now own slaves.

There are some who look at this fact and jump immediately to the judgment that Washington was therefore a terrible person and one whom we have need of taking seriously in any other respect. These people seem to believe that if they were inserted into Washington's situation they would have adopted an abolitionist stance and toiled in their fields with the help of unionized farmhands. These are people for whom, in other words, history essentially does not exist.

I do not follow this stringent ethic, because it would relegate most of our ancestors as deplorable people for one thing or another. But it is problematic in another regard. Washington, like Jefferson, was deeply ambivalent about the morality of slaveholding. He saw the evils therein, but had no idea how to move beyond it. Jefferson famously compared slavery to holding a wolf by the ears. You don't like it but at the same time you don't dare let go.

Ambivalence noted, it was also immensely profitable to have a workforce that was paid in a quart of corn per day and twenty anchovies a month, with one new set of clothing per annum, as our first president's slaves were allotted. If I am ambivalent about the inequities and immorality of pornography but watch it every night, what exactly has my ambivalence gained me? Moreover, ever concerned with efficiency, part of Washington's problem with the institution was that it was hard to get quality labor from an unpaid and unmotivated workforce. Presumably, an industrious slave would be of more value to him and would have erased a measure of his moral qualm.  

There is plenty of evidence that Washington was a conscientious slaveholder. Visitors to Mount Vernon remarked upon Washington's benevolence and relative charity to his slaves.  He refused to break up slave families and honored the slave marriages that had no legal standing in the colony. He instructed the overseers to be lenient and spare the whip when possible. He struggled to be fair-minded in disputes and was reticent to go to the extent of the law (which was essentially non-existent; murder was legal as long as there was wrongdoing on the part of the slave). However, there were limited instances that recalcitrant escapees were sold to Caribbean sugar plantations both as punishment for their wrongdoing and to set an example to other indolent slaves that it could always be worse.

Overall, Chernow treated this topic quite fairly, refusing to castigate Washington for defying the prevailing morality of his time, nor neglecting the fact that this is problematic for any attempted hagiography of the Founder of Our Nation. Perhaps what needs to be said here was best said by Tobias Lear (good name), Washington's presidential secretary: "The negroes are not treated as blacks in general are in this country. They are clothed and fed as well as any laboring people whatever and they are not subject to the lash of a domineering overseer--but they are still slaves."