George Washington and the Freeing of His Slaves

When I used to think of George Washington, I usually thought of the guy whose picture was on the one dollar bill. Most everyone else I know thinks of Washington in the same way, which is sort of sad. In the past few years, I’ve read more about George Washington and have grown to admire him. During his lifetime, he was revered by his countrymen for his courage in leading the Continental Army to victory against the most powerful military in the world, and he drew even greater praise for his willingness to give up power and respect the spirit of republican government of the early United States. He was a good man and a wise leader, and nothing shows Washington’s character more than his evolving views towards slavery. Though he started out having the same views on race as his fellow Southern plantation owners, Washington’s views evolved to the point where he was a strong voice against slavery and wished that some means for the country to rid itself of the institution.

At the start of the Revolutionary War, Washington had over 200 slaves and he held conventional views of race for the time. He found himself, though, in charge of a multi-racial army that included over 5,000 free African Americans, and necessity forced Washington to accept the services of all his troops. In 1781, Baron Von Closen visited the Continental Army and noted that one our of every four Continental soldier was African American. The valor of these African Americans in times of battle began a slow change in Washington’s views on race. In the assault that eventually ended the war, Washington handpicked the Rhode Island unit, which happened to be 75 percent black, to carry out the most important military assignment. Washington’s friend, Lafayette, was full of enthusiasm of the Revolutionary spirit and urged Washington to enact emancipation plans in the spirit of the American Revolution.  In March, 1776, Washington met the African American poet, Phillis Wheatley, whose poems he admired.  At the war’s end, George Washington was firmly favoring of someone coming up with some sort of plan to gradually emancipate slaves.

Washington’s slow change in attitude on race was not perfect.  Washington was against a Quaker petition that was sponsored by Benjamin Franklin to ask the Congress to debate for emancipation plans because of fears of Southern secession.  He signed the Fugitive Slave Act as President in 1793.  In 1796, when one of his slaves, Oona Judge, escaped to New York, Washington tried discreetly to lure her back to his plantation.    Henry Wiencek, in his book, Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America, notes that Washington was contemplating the freeing of his slaves during his Presidency, but backed away from those plans.  Wiencek felt this was a great missed opportunity for Washington and the nation.  Washington was the one person with the prestige and respect to possibly persuade the South to accept gradual emancipation plans.  As Joseph Ellis wrote in his book, Founding Brothers:

“First, the arguments of the Deep South were unanswerable because there was sufficient truth in the fatalistic diagnosis to persuade  other members of the House that the slavery problem was intractable;  and second, whatever  shred of possibility still existed to take concerted action against slavery ws overwhelmed by the secessionist threat from South Carolina and Georgia, since there would be no national solution to the slavery problem if there were no nation at hand to implement a solution.  Perhaps, as some historians have argued, South Carolina and Georgia were bluffing.  But the most salient historical fact cannot be avoided:  No one stepped forward to call their bluff.”

George Washington wrote his will in secret in July 1799, to conceal his emancipation plans from the disapproval of his family. Henry Wiecker notes in his book that Washington owned only 123 of the 316 slaves in Mount Vernon. The rest were Martha’s slaves. He put in his will that the slaves that he owned would be freed upon the death of Martha Washington, as a way to appeal to Martha to follow his lead and emancipate her own slaves. The old and the infirm freed slaves would be taken care of until death by their heirs. The freed children would be bound by the Court until they reached 25 years of age, and they would be taught to read and write and be brought up to some useful occupation. To ensure that the executors of the will would not try to find some way to evade his wishes to free the slaves, Washington wrote:

“…and 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 moreover most pointedly, and most solenmly enjoin it upon my Executors hereafter named, or the Survivors of them, 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…”

For me, it’s important how Americans view George Washington.   He was viewed since his lifetime as the Father of our nation, and in some sense that is an appropriate title.  Historians have swung the spectrum in evaluating him, putting him on a pedestal in one extreme and tearing him down in the other extreme.  Washington was a human filled with the same mixture of virtues and flaws as we all have, one filled with the same contradictions as our nation.  Washington grew in his racial attititudes and was against slavery, yet it is true that he didn’t do enough to use his stature to persuade the South to adopt a gradual abolition plan. Yet he achieved great things in leading our nation to its founding, and he earned the respect and adulation of his countrymen.  It may seem hard nowadays to picture someone with the stature that Washington once had with our nation.  Roger Wilkins, in his wonderful book Jefferson’s Pillow, compared Washington to a leader today with the same stature in his country.    He wrote:

“Those who think Washington elusive, as I once did, and find his greatness heard to define might look to a contemporary figure whose virtues seem very similar to Washington’s. In 1990, shortly after he was released from prison, Nelson mandela troued the United States to raise both consciousness and cash for the African National Congress and the freedom struggle in South Africa. i was fortunate enough to be asked by his host, the entertaier Harry Belafonte, to coordinate that trip, so I had the opportunity to be with Mandela for ten days as he traveled across America…

Like Washington, Mandela led through character, not through eloquence; like him, he had a strong ego on which he kept a firm grip. Mandela’s self-reliance and rock-hard intertiry were likewise formed in adversity, outside the normal fountains of privilege that so often bear people up to positions of critical prominence and power. Like Washington, Madela was able to curb his normal human need for self-aggrandizement in order to devote himself to a larger cause. And like Washington, Mandela, in choosing to subordinate his ego to serve his country, earned immortality.”

Reading History on the Fourth of July

Growing up, my views of the American Revolution were influenced by the musical 1776 and the School House Rock specials on Saturday morning.   I grew to deeply respect our Founding Fathers and to see in them a heroism that is lacking in today’s leaders.  As a grown up I’ve started reading a lot of history books that remind that though these Founding Fathers were great leaders, they were also human, and that the Revolution was as much the story of the ordinary merchants, farmers, slaves, native Americans, and women as it was of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.  Our historians remind us that the American Revolution was a complicated event, with mixed results many of the people who participated in the fight.   I’ve especially learned from 3 of my favorite historians, Howard Zinn, Gordon Woods, and Joseph Ellis, to see the founding of our nation in new ways.

Howard Zinn’s book, A People’s History of the United States, devotes two chapters to the American Revolution.  He focuses on the divide between the rich upper classmen of New England businessmen and Southern gentry that made up the American leadership, and the merchants, sailors, farmers, slaves, indentured servants, and the rest of the American population that had to be mobilized to win the revolution.  In the beginning, John Adams estimated that a third of the population was opposed to the revolution, a third supported the cause, and a third were neutral.  Zinn noted that while mechanics and sailers were incensed at the British, much of the public was lukewarm.  The men who first joined the revolutionary army were respectable men with property and respectability in their communities, but the need for greater numbers led to the recruitment of poorer white men.  The military was a place where the poor could rise in rank and change their social status and many joined for that reason.   Some states used conscription to fill the ranks of their armies.   Excluded initially from the militia were friendly Indians, free African Americans, and white servants.  So the majority of support for the revolution came from the town mechanics, laborers, seamen, and small farmers who made up “the people” and bonded through the camraderie of military service and benefitted from the distribution of land.

During the War for Independence, Zinn noted that occassional riots would occur that were motivated by the resentments of the poor against the rich elite.  Divisive civil conflicts occurred during the course of the war in Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, Georgia, and to a lesser degree, Virginia.  The threat of slave revolts were a constant worry to Southern plantation owners.   Amid the chaos of the war, thousands of slaves fled for freedom, leaving on British ships to settle in England, Nova Scotia, the West Indies, or Africa, or staying in America as free blacks, evading their masters.   The war gave African Americans and other oppressed groups a venue to make demands for equal treatment from their white countryment.  In Boston, African Americans asked for city money to educate their children.  In Norfolk, they asked to be allowed to testify in court.  Peter Matthews, a butcher in Charleston, led free black artisans and tradesmen in petitioning the legislature to repeal discriminatory laws against blacks.  In 1780, seven African Americans in Dartmouth, Massachussetts, petitioned for the right to vote.  The agitation of African Americans and the poor white classes showed the gap between the high idealism of the Declaration of Independence and the realities of discrimination and poverty of a large segment of the American population.  This gap has led more radical historians like Zinn to see the American Revolution as being the trading of a British elite with an American elite.

Joseph Ellis is a historian who sees much more of the accomplishments of the Revolution than Zinn.  He’s famous for his books on the Revolutionary era and his latest book, American Creation, explores the evolution of the United States as it goes from fighting a revolution to setting up a working government.  This exploration weighs the accomplishments of the Founding Fathers and their two great failures.   Ellis felt that the American Revolution succeeded, while the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions failed, because the American leadership was made up of many different players with many different beliefs.  The diversity of the American leaders helped the United States from devolving into a one-man despotism, like Napoleon in France, Lenin in Russia, and Mao in China. 

Ellis felt that the revolutionary generation succeeded in many areas.  The Americans won the first colonial war for independence in the modern era, defeating the most powerful military in the world.  They established the first nation sized republic and the first secular state.  They created political parties as institutional channels for ongoing debate, permitting dissent as a legitimate voice.  And for Ellis, the most important thing was that the United States was able to reconcile two competing and contradictory political impulses.  The first impulse, as represented by the Declaration of Independence, was a radical document that locates sovereignty in the individual and depicts rebellion against government as a natural act.  The second impulse was represented by the U.S. Constitution, and it located sovereignty in the collective state, making government an essential protector of the people and not its enemy, and valuing social balance over personal liberation. 

With these achievements, Ellis notes two great failures of the founding of our nation.  The first was the failure of the nation to end slavery, or at least adopt a plan to gradually emancipate the slaves.   Most of the Founding Fathers were against slavery, and some of the leaders, notably Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, tried to get legislation to end slavery and the slave trade.  They were unsuccessful in their attempts to end slavery, though, and they realized that the existence and expansion of slavery would eventually lead the nation into civil war.   The other failure of the Founding Fathers was to find a way to implement a just settlement with the Native Americans.  Like with slavery, most of the leaders acknowledged that the Native Americans had a legitimate claim to their land.  They never successfully were able to come up with a just plan for the indigenous people of this country.

Gordon Woods is another historian who has gained a reputation for his insights on the Revolutionary period.  His book, Revolutionary Characters:  What Made the Founders Different, explores 8 of our revolutionary leaders and asks what it was about them that made them different from leaders of succeeding generations.  The leaders that he explores, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Thomas Paine, and Aaron Burr, were of different temperements and political beliefs, but most of them (with the exception of Aaron Burr) were united by their aspirations to be disinterested gentlemen, a sort of moral ideal of a leader with the 18th century virtues of politeness, grace, good taste, learning, and character.    Most of the leaders were the first in their families to attend college or attain social status, and they deeply believed in a leadership that was gained through talent and not heredity.   Aaron Burr was the one leader who didn’t aspire to the 18th century idea of the gentleman politician.  He seemed to always act upon political expediency instead of worrying about the public good, and this eventually lead to his famous duel with Alexander Hamilton.

Each of the founders were very different men with different beliefs and personalities.  Washington did his best to live up to the gentlemanly virtue of civility, and this led him to many of the decisions that garnered respect among his colleagues:  his decision to surrender his position as commander in chief to the Congress in 1783 rather than pursue greater power;  his decision not to run for a third term as President;  his decision to free his slaves after he dies.  Franklin’s sense of public service led him to be ambassador to England and France, where he helped the colonies victory by securing French support.  Jefferson’s belief in the ability of the people to make the right decisions lead him to fight for greater public education, for the separation of church and state, and the abolishment of slavery, all in an attempt to educate enlightened citizens in Jefferson’s idea of a perfect republic.  John Adams, Jefferson’s close friend and frequent political foe, believed in a natural aristocracy of merit, and believed in a balanced government between the aristocracy and the common people.  Alexander Hamilton believed that government should exploit the self interest of the influential class at the top of the society to harness their talents for the benefit of the rest of society.  James Madison believed in a government of clashing interests that neutralized each other, allowing liberally educated rational men to decide questions of the public good.  Woods considers Thomas Paine the first public intellectual who wrote Common Sense and his other radical tracts specifically for the average person in the taverns and guilds of the city.  

In his book, The American Revolution, Gordon Woods wrote:

“The history of the American Revolution, like the history of the nation as a whole, ought not to be viewed as a story of right and wrong or good and evil from which moral lessons are to be drawn.  No doubt the story of the Revolution is a dramatic one:  Thirteen insignificant British colonies huddled along a narrow strip of the Atlantic coast three thousand miles from the centers of Western civilization, becoming in fewer than three decades a huge, sprawling republic of nearly 4 million expansive-minded, evangelical, and money-hungry citizens is a spectacular tale, to say the least.  But the Revolution, like the whole of American history, is not a simple morality play;   it is a complicated and often ironic story that needs to be explained and understood, not celebrated or condemned.  How the Revolution came about, what its character was, and what its consequences were- not whether it was good or bad- are the questions this brief history seeks to answer.”

In this Fourth of July, I’m grateful for the work of these historians for giving me different views of the founding of our nation.  From Howard Zinn, I learned that the revolution was not just the story of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson.  It is also the story of the merchants, the small farmers, the slaves, the freed blacks, and the Native Americans.  Zinn reminds us of the gap between the high idealism of the Declaration of Independence and the realities of the people in the margins of our society and that true social change only occurs when those marginalized people feel empowered to agitate for change.  From Joseph Ellis, I’ve learned to appreciate the accomplishments of the leaders in building a government that allowed debate to take place and didn’t degenerate into a one person dictatorship.  Ellis also reminds us though of the failures of the founders, of their inability to resolve the issues of slavery and the just treatment of Native Americans.  From Gordon Wood, I learned to appreciate the founders as individuals, with their own beliefs and personalities and gifts.  Each were united in trying to live to the 18th century idea of the virtous gentleman leader and this seperated them from future generations who lived up to different models of leadership.  Each historian gives us a different and more whole view of the American experience, one that shows the ideas and the people who helped shape who we are today.