washington and slavery -- 4/21/25

21 Apr 2025

washington and slavery -- 4/21/25

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Today's selection-- from Washington at the Plow by Bruce A. Ragsdale. Washington rarely spoke openly about slavery, expressing discomfort with the subject, but he constantly managed and relied on enslaved labor at Mount Vernon. His agricultural ambitions deeply shaped the lives of those he enslaved.

“When a friend asked for advice about an investment in slaves, Washington in 1794 confided that with regard to that ‘species of property,’ ‘I do not like even to think, much less talk of it.’ Washington's written comments on the institution of slavery were infrequent and terse, but, in fact, he thought almost continuously about the management of enslaved labor and about the work of enslaved individuals. In the various records of farming at Mount Vernon, Washington left the most detailed documentation of his engagement with slavery and his conflicted attitudes toward the institution. The record of labor management at Mount Vernon, probably the most detailed for any Chesapeake estate in the second half of the eighteenth century, also describes Washington's frequent interaction with individual laborers. His agricultural ambitions defined the daily work and much about the personal lives of the enslaved at Mount Vernon, and his records of farming and labor offer the most complete, if always imperfect, portrait of enslaved individuals on the estate.

“Washington's successive schemes for agricultural improvement anticipated widespread efforts of slaveholders to apply enslaved labor to diversified farming as tobacco markets declined following Independence and again when demand for American grain soared in the 1790s. His adaptation of enslaved labor to new crops and crafts occurred during a period of relative stability in the enslaved population following the closing of the slave trade from Africa and before the rise of an organized internal slave trade forced many enslaved laborers in Virginia to the states to the southwest. During Washington's management of his estate, the enslaved population throughout the Chesapeake grew by natural increase, and the enslaved, including those at Mount Vernon, were able to establish remarkably strong families. As the agricultural economy shifted, enslaved laborers in the Chesapeake became skilled in an increasing variety of tasks.

The Revolution profoundly changed slavery in ways that went far beyond the eclipse of Virginia's colonial agricultural economy. During the war, the incursion of British troops offered thousands of enslaved people in Virginia the opportunity to escape bondage, and the many more who remained enslaved at plantations learned of a language of freedom and examples.of resistance. By the time Washington returned to Mount Vernon after his resignation from the Continental Army, he had witnessed the rise of an antislavery movement that called for the extension of the revolutionary principles of liberty to the enslaved. Even in Virginia, where antislavery sentiment was relatively weak, the assembly prohibited the external slave trade and enacted the first law permitting individual acts of manumission.

“While he relied more extensively on enslaved labor after the Revolutionary War, Washington implicitly acknowledged the new critique of slavery and the inherent contradiction between a British ideal of farming intended to usher in an era of peaceful prosperity and a system of labor that rested on coercion and a denial of individual freedom. As he presented his farms as a public example, Washington introduced protections for the minimal welfare of the enslaved in an attempt to reconcile his reliance on forced labor with his pursuit of improved agriculture and his aspiration to be recognized as an enlightened and humane estate owner. His efforts to balance those ultimately irresolvable tensions explain much about Washington's conflicted attitude toward slavery during the same years in which he privately offered his first support for the principle of gradual abolition.

Washington out on the plantation, with Mount Vernon in the background, an 1851 portrait by Junius Brutus Stearns

“An exploration of Washington's lifelong experience as a manager of agricultural labor and a focus on his efforts to apply enslaved labor to the course of British husbandry after 1785 offer a new perspective on Washington's eventual decision to free by the terms of his will the slaves under his ownership. Among the founders, Washington was the only large slaveholder to provide for the freedom of all the slaves he owned, but he offered no explanation of his motives or of his expectations. As several historians have recognized, Washington experienced or at least acknowledged no single turning point or revelation leading to his decision to free the slaves, and even after writing his will, he continued to search for new ways to organize enslaved labor more productively. At his death, he was planning to transfer a large number of laborers to cultivate his lands in the West. The path to emancipation was never direct, and it never met the expectations of either the antislavery advocates who appealed directly for Washington's support or of later generations who searched for the moral or humanitarian basis of his decision. Washington's criticisms of the institution of slavery were always complicated by his continuing demands for the labor of the enslaved in support of his agricultural vision.

“During the same years in which Washington implemented the full system ofBritish husbandry and designed an ostensibly more rational and humane management of enslaved labor, he faced persistent calls to free the slaves he owned and to endorse a general emancipation as a fulfillment of his role as the champion of American liberty. Following the Revolutionary War, abolitionists in the United States, Great Britain, and France directly appealed to Washington to use his influence and example to advocate for the extension of personal freedom to the enslaved. Whether the entreaties came from close friends, like Lafayette, or antislavery leaders who approached him for the first time, Washington could not escape the implication that his ownership of slaves violated many of the fundamental principles of the American Revolution on which his reputation rested, just as his reliance on coerced labor challenged his identity as an enlightened estate owner, esteemed by British agriculturalists. Among the founders, Washington was the unique object of these antislavery appeals, and their coincidence with significant changes in his management of agricultural labor suggest the many ways in which Washington's concern for reputation drove his decisions about the ownership of slaves.”