The conversation with Washington reported by Lafayette to Josiah is imagined but does reflect the known views of each on slavery at that time. For example, in 1783, the same year as the eventful week at Newburgh, Lafayette sent a letter to Washington proposing that Washington join him in an effort to start removing the moral stain of slavery by buying an estate in the West Indies on which “we may try the experiment to free the Negroes.” Washington wrote in response that to “encourage the emancipation of the black people,” he would be “happy to join you in so laudable a work.” Lafayette, who admitted that it may be a “wild scheme,” apparently did not pursue the matter.
How we evaluate Washington (or any other historical figure) on the slavery issue depends on whether we evaluate him against the standards of his time or ours. Abraham Lincoln, when he was inaugurated as president in 1861, denied that he was an abolitionist. (We recognize the political pressures Lincoln was under and honor him for what he did a few years later.) Washington, seventy years before Lincoln’s inaugural speech, was already stating his support for the gradual abolition of slavery, including in his own state of Virginia.
In a 1786 letter to John Frances Mercer, Washington writes, “It being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted, by the legislature by which slavery may be abolished by slow, sure & imperceptible degrees.”
The evolution of Washington’s position on slavery is fascinating. He was born into a slaveholding family, inherited slaves, and in his early years and even later bought, sold, and recovered slaves. Something happened in his middle years, however, that distinguished him from his planter neighbors. Aside from realizing the economic inefficiency of slavery, he came to be repelled by the buying and selling of human beings, which he decided not to engage in, despite having an excess of slaves that for economic reasons he should have sold. Washington wrote of his refusal to buy or sell slaves “because I am principled against this kind of trafficking in the human species.”
The experiences during the war undoubtedly hastened Washington’s evolution on the slavery issue, exhibited by his implicit support of Laurens’s proposal to arm South Carolina blacks as well as his observations of the performance of free black troops from New England. While some of the northern units were all black, others, with Washington’s approval, remained mixed or integrated. I was surprised to find that the first integrated US army units came into being not after President Truman’s order in 1946, nor after President Eisenhower’s implementation of that order in 1953, but under General Washington during the Revolutionary War.
Washington’s actions, while not trumpeted around the land, were certainly known, particularly to the blacks affected. The best-known black intellectual and writer of the time, Phillis Wheatley, was a free Negro poet who had been published in London. Prior to her meeting with Washington described by Josiah in this chapter, a meeting which did indeed take place, Wheatley lauded America as “the land of freedom’s heaven-defended race!” and sent the General the following ode:
Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side,
Thy ev’ry action let the goddess guide.
A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine,
With gold unfading, Washington! Be thine.
After receiving the ode in 1775 outside of Boston, Washington apologized for his delay in responding and stated, “I thank you most sincerely for your polite notice of me in the Elegant lines you enclosed. And however undeserving I may be of Such encomium and panegyric, the style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your great poetical talents . . . If you should ever come to Cambridge or near headquarters, I shall be happy to see a person so favoured by the Muses and to whom nature has been so liberal and beneficent in her dispensations. I am with great respect your obedient humble servant.”
This is hardly the response that either a slave or a free black would expect from a Southern slaveholder in the eighteenth century, and it shows Washington’s evolution on the slavery issue. (See Ron Chernow, Washington, 220.)
That Martha Washington did not attend Washington’s meeting with Wheatley is conjecture on my part but quite likely. Lady Washington’s views on slavery were probably askew from her husband’s and undoubtedly affected the General’s last will so it only applied to his and not her slaves. (See Ellis, His Excellency, 260.) In a letter upon hearing of the death of a slave child, she wrote, “Black children are liable to so many accidents and complaints that one is hardly sure of keeping them. I hope you will not find him much loss. The Blacks are so bad in their nature that they have not the least gratitude for the kindness that may be shewed to them” (Helen Bryan, Martha Washington, 335). Based on Washington’s letters, orders, and transcripts by others of his conversations, we can say with confidence that these are words that would never have come out of the General’s mouth.
Washington has been criticized for not being consistent or public enough on the slavery issue. He did not, for example, fight to keep slaves from being returned from British control to their owners after the war. He did not make public declarations on the issue, at least until his will. While as president in 1794 he introduced into the Senate a Quaker petition from New England calling for the immediate abolition of American participation in the international slave trade, Washington, like some other Founding Fathers, seemed to rely on the 1789 constitutional provision calling for the abolition of the slave trade in 1808 to bring about the end of slavery.
Washington and Lafayette’s conversation about the former providing for the freedom and welfare of his slaves after his death is imagined, like the conversation on Lafayette’s proposed estate for free slaves, but again it is also perfectly plausible and consistent with Washington’s recorded views and his later actions prior to his death. Washington’s last will and testament is an extraordinary document. Not only did he provide the opportunity for freedom for his slaves, but, consistent with his belief that effective abolition must include education, he provided money—money not easily available to him—for his slaves’ education, training, and welfare if they chose freedom. And this at a time when Virginia law banned the education of blacks.