Getting to Know GW (13): Slavery, Again

I posted earlier about Washington's discomfort with the institution of slavery. For a number of reasons he was uncomfortable with the practice and worked to mitigate some of its harshness on his own estates, but he refused to ever speak out candidly against slavery. This position put the leader of a nation striving towards individual freedom and liberty in not a little hypocritical position. George Orwell said famously in Animal Farm, "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others," and something like this sentiment abound in early America as it surely does in every other political system in one way or another (Orwell was, of course, satirizing communism). 

One of the great myths of Southern slavery is that the abuses and excesses are overblown by our retroactive moralistic judging of the institution and that most slaves were treated well. What's more, they were content in their position and it was only abolitionist agitators that stirred up in their docile minds notions of freedom. Washington held to this notion as well. He believed if he treated his human chattel well and extended a certain amount of liberty to them they would be content in their status as human chattel. 

Washington was disabused of this notion toward the end of his life when two of his most trusted slaved, not to mention the two that had the easiest go of it, ran away as soon as they had opportunity. One was the personal chef named Hercules that Washington had brought from Mount Vernon to the presidential mansion in Philadelphia. The other was Martha's attendant Ona. Both decided they would rather have a harder life and be free than an easy life with bondage.

One of the little known facts of Washington's life (at least I had never heard it before) is that he wrote a will in his final months that set all of his slaves free. I couldn't help but wonder if the disappearance of two beloved slaves whom he assumed with all of the blithe ignorance of the wealthy member of a privileged class were happy in their estate finally caused Washington to see through all of the b.s. his society had constructed to justify slavery. 

Certainly part of his motivation in this benevolent act was to rectify his image with posterity. He had to know that slavery as a system was unsustainable in the long term and that future generations would judge harshly its practitioners. Washington, as we have seen, was hypercritical of his public image. But part of me thinks that there was a more human concern playing out with the old man. He had always felt uncomfortable with slavery and the disappearance of the two best treated slaves put flight to the notion that well-treated slaves will be content in their confinement. The last moral card he held in his deck was shredded. And he did what was in his power hoping that it would make a positive example to other slaveholders in the region. It did not, and 65 years later America finally had its bloodletting that Washington had helped it avoid during his remarkable career. 

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."