MDDM: Washington's views toward slavery

[Doug Millison]

Washington appears to have been quite  pragmatic re slavery:


"[...] During the pre-Revolutionary years Washington's views toward slavery
were conventional, reflecting those of a typical Virginia planter of his
time. If he was perhaps more concerned than some planters with his slaves'
welfare, his principal interest was still their contribution to the
economic life of the plantation.

[...] even though families often worked on separate plantations, they were
not separated by sale or purchase. There are such occasional exceptions as
Washington's acceptance in 1775, in settlement for a debt, of a slave in
Maryland who put up a spirited resistance to being separated from his
family.

[...] Except for his long absences during the war and the presidency,
Washington managed his own plantations and was well acquainted with the
strengths and weaknesses of individual slaves. He was not impressed with
them as a labor force. There are frequent comments in his correspondence
with his managers on their irresponsibility and indolence, although he
believed their poor work habits to be a result of the system itself. As
early as 1778 his correspondence indicates his disillusion with the system.
Writing his manager Lund Washington from White Plains during the
Revolution, he expressed his hope to exchange slaves for land. "I had
rather give Negroes--if Negroes would do. for to be plain I wish to get
quit of Negroes." It was, he felt, a system that prevented the best use of
new farming methods and machinery and hindered agricultural progress. His
correpondence with his white managers contains stern instructions
concerning the role slaves were to play in specific aspects of the farming
of the estate and on the dire consequences of dereliction of duty. But on
his journeys home, especially during the presidency, it is evident that
personal appeals and complaints from his slaves frequently mitigated his
demands. Indeed, Washington's eratic mixture of sternness and indulgence
inevitably created a certain amount of chaos in plantation management.

[...]  in 1772 Washington himself purchased five additional slaves for use
on his plantations. When he assumed command of the army at Cambridge in
June 1775, Washington for the first time faced the necessity of creating
some kind of public policy regarding slaves, free blacks, and the
recruiting policies of the Continental army. Like most southerners he had
strong objections to using blacks as soldiers. And, again like most
southerners, he was too conscious of the possibility of slave revolts to
look easily upon the distribution of guns into the hands of slaves. His
initial reluctance was bolstered by a long colonial tradition of
prohibiting slaves to bear arms. On November 12, 1775, he signed orders
excluding blacks together with underage boys and old men as recruits for
service since they would be "unfit to endure the fatigues of the campaign."
After Lord Dunmore's proclamation of November 7, 1775, encouraging
indentured servants and free blacks to enlist in British service, Virginia
blacks began to flee to British lines in the mistaken belief that British
views on slavery differed from those of the slaves' Virginia masters. Most
slaves and free blacks who fled to the British continued to be employed in
a service capacity, chiefly working as military laborers. The emergence of
Dunmore's plan to enlist slaves and offer them their freedom and
Washington's own desperate need for men in the aftermath of failed
recruiting policies and massive desertions forced him and Congress to
reconsider their initial positions at least in regard to free blacks. In
fact, early in the war an important distinction came to be made in
recruiting policies between slaves and free blacks. By the end of December
1775, Washington had altered his views to accommodate the situation,
issuing orders that because "Numbers of free Negroes are desirous of
inlisting, he gives leave to the recruiting Officers, to entertain them,
and promises to lay the matter before the Congress, who he doubts not will
approve of it." By 1778 Washington went so far as to permit Joseph Varnum
of Rhode island to raise a battalion of African-Americans. Washington
continued to use former slaves in a number of more menial capacities during
the course of the war. That he retained his prewar opinions on the
unreliability of slave labor is indicated by his suggestion to Congress
that although blacks should be hired to solve the difficulty of obtaining
waggoners, the recruits should be freemen and not slaves, which "could not
be sufficiently depended on. It is to be apprehended that they would too
frequently desert to the enemy to obtain their liberty; and for the profit
of it, or to conciliate a more favorable reception, would carry off their
waggon-horses with them."

[...] At the end of the war, Washington made halfhearted efforts to send
back slaves who had run away from their masters to enlist and to order
courts of inquiry for those who were now claimed by their masters. In 1783
when the British embarked from New York, he objected to British plans to
take with them bondsmen who had served with the king's army, arguing that
the provisional articles of peace prohibited such removal. He did on
occasion exhibit some care that blacks enlisted in Continental and state
regiments not be summarily repossessed by unscrupulous former owners. On
the other hand,  he approached one of the agents overseeing the embarkation
of the British from New York, contending that some of his own slaves and
those of his wartime manager Lund Washington might be in New York, and
enlisted the agent's aid in seeking their return.

[...] Washington cut back sharply on his purchases of slaves during the
Confederation years, but he occasionally continued to acquire them. In 1786
he accepted five slaves in payment for a debt owed him by the Mercer
family, even though, as he wrote Mercer, "I have great repugnance to
increasing my slaves by purchase." A little later he wrote Henry Lee
requesting him to purchase a bricklayer for him because "I have much work
in this way to do this Summer."

[...] Washington was aware organized opposition to slavery had never come
from a wide spectrum of the population. Postwar clerical arguments against
slavery had made little headway and less impact on southern owners.
Certainly such mainstream questioning of the validity of the institution as
did exist tended to center on the contention that slavery had been foisted
by Great Britain on unwilling colonies who now had to deal with the
resulting evils. Washington, like many others of his post-Revolutionary
generation, still blamed Britain for hanging slavery around colonial necks.
Even the opposition itself was fragmented. Most of the opponents of slavery
were Quakers and members of other benevolent religious groups, and slavery
was only one of their interests. Early in the eighteenth century Quaker
opponents of slavery had concentrated their efforts on the conditions of
slavery and on the sect's religious duties toward the slaves. Not until the
late l760s and early 1770s was there strong opposition to the foreign and
domestic slave trade, and recent research has suggested serious conflicts
among Quakers regarding the freeing of slaves. Quakers generally shared
Washington's strongest objection to the institution--that the buying and
selling of slaves broke up families. The fact that by the end of the
Revolution slaveholders had an enormous economic stake in the preservation
of the institution while advocates of abolition had nothing to lose was
certainly not lost on Washington.

Washington shared the determination of most of his own generation of
statesmen not to allow slavery to disturb their agenda for the new
Republic. Antislavery sentiment came in a poor second when it conflicted
with the powerful economic interests of proslavery forces. To Washington as
to many Americans, even some whose opinions on slavery were far more
radical than his own, the institution had become a subject so divisive that
public comments were best left unsaid. Washington himself was far from
being an egalitarian. In spite of the Revolution's rhetoric, the United
States was still a society of deference and Washington never seriously
questioned the political and social validity of the prevailing ideas of
rule by an elite any more than he questioned his own position in such a
society. [...] "

http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/articles/slavery/
"That Species of Property"
Washington's Role in the Controversy Over Slavery
by Dorothy Twohig



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