Washington [244]
As at Valley Forge, Washington wondered whether he could retain his restive officers, who had grown disenchanted as they saw civilians pocketing huge wartime profits while they lacked money to tide over their struggling families. “The large fortunes acquired by numbers out of the army affords a contrast that gives poignancy to every inconvenience from remaining in it,” Washington warned Congress. 36 To stem the wholesale defection of ordinary soldiers, he offered land, clothing, and bounties of up to two hundred dollars to keep his fragile army together.
Amid these fears of a shrinking force, Washington’s twenty-four-year-old aide John Laurens hatched an audacious plan to raise a black regiment of three thousand slaves from South Carolina and Georgia, who would win their freedom at the close of the contest. Laurens had been emboldened by the success in recruiting black soldiers from Rhode Island. At Valley Forge Washington had lent Laurens qualified support, telling him that “blacks in the southern parts of the continent offer a resource to us that should not be neglected.”37 Yielding to his son’s wishes, Henry Laurens had canvassed congressional support for a scheme that would allow blacks to fight in exchange for emancipation, but he returned a somber assessment: “I will undertake to say there is not a man in America of your opinion.”38 The idealistic John Laurens tabled the idea for a year, then revived it at Middlebrook.
Handsome, smart, and dashing, John Laurens was no ordinary advocate for emancipation. His father had traded slaves on an immense scale, importing between seven thousand and eight thousand captive souls from Africa. The younger Laurens had long meditated on ways to free these slaves and expunge the family taint, telling his father a year earlier, “I have long deplored the wretched state of these men.”39 No idle dreamer, John Laurens was prepared to free his family’s slaves as part of his program, which he saw as the prelude to general emancipation. In the aftermath of the overwhelming British victory at Savannah, Georgia, in late December 1778, John Laurens warned that South Carolina urgently needed a black force to avert “impending calamity.”40 On March 16 Henry Laurens wrote to Washington and accentuated the strategic utility of the concept, asserting that if the patriots had three thousand armed blacks in the Carolinas, “I should have no doubt of success in driving the British out of Georgia.”41
By this point, with a heavy influx of black soldiers from New England, the Continental Army had become a highly integrated force. But Washington knew that it was one thing to train and equip blacks from the northern states and quite another those from the South. He must have wondered whether such an action might someday sound the death knell for slavery at Mount Vernon. Like many southern slaveholders who were uncomfortable with slavery in principle, Washington hoped the institution would wither away on some foggy, distant day. By contrast, the Laurens plan was radical and immediate, with incalculable consequences. Washington found Laurens’s motives both “laudable” and “important,” but he had pointed reservations about his plan.42
On March 20 Washington sent Henry Laurens a letter that threw away a major historic opportunity. Although