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surrounded by staunch abolitionists such as Laurens, Hamilton, and Lafayette, he couldn’t break loose from the system that formed the basis of his fortune. With his darkest fears as a planter trumping his hopes, he cast doubt on prospects for the Laurens plan and advanced the dubious argument that, if Americans armed their slaves, the British would simply retaliate in kind—an odd statement, since Lord Dunmore had already raised American hackles with his Ethiopian Regiment. Then Washington broached a still more deeply rooted fear: that a black regiment in South Carolina might foment dangerous thoughts of freedom among slaves everywhere. As slaves saw their black brethren marching off in arms, it might “render slavery more irksome to those who remain in it.” Trying to wriggle free of this topic, which he obviously found exceedingly unpleasant, Washington ended on a disingenuous note. “But as this is a subject that has never employed much of my thoughts, these are no more than the first crude ideas that have struck me upon the occasion.”43

Overcoming doubts from southern delegates, Congress approved a resolution on March 29 that might have paved the way for abolishing southern slavery: “That it be recommended to the states of South Carolina and Georgia, if they shall think the same expedient, to take measures immediately for raising three thousand able-bodied negroes.”44 The resolution proposed that masters would be compensated at a rate of $1,000 per slave, while armed slaves would be liberated at the conclusion of the war. Because John Laurens was a member of the South Carolina legislature, Washington allowed him to head home and argue his case in person. But that assembly, dominated by slaveholders, was scandalized by the Laurens plan and rejected it resoundingly, despite the security it might have afforded against a British invasion. In a postmortem, Washington told Laurens, “I must confess that I am not at all astonished at the failure of your plan. That spirit of freedom, which at the commencement of this contest would have gladly sacrificed everything to the attainment of its object, has long since subsided and every selfish passion has taken its place.”45

What Washington couldn’t acknowledge was that he himself had been lukewarm about the plan for self-interested reasons. Whatever his reservations about slavery, he never showed courage on the issue in public statements, restricting his doubts to private letters. Even before the war Washington had felt burdened by slavery, not so much on moral grounds, but as a bad economic system that saddled him with high fixed costs from a large, sullen, and inefficient labor force. Washington prided himself on being a progressive, up-to-date farmer and thought that human bondage mired him in an antiquated system. Two months before being chosen as commander in chief, he made a revealing comment about notices for the sale of indebted estates that appeared daily in Virginia gazettes. Without “close application,” he said, Virginia estates were forever doomed to lapse into debt “as Negroes must be clothed and fed [and] taxes paid . . . whether anything is made or not.”46

Even as he brooded about the Laurens proposal, Washington contemplated a drastic plan to sell all his slaves and invest the proceeds in interest-bearing loan office certificates to help finance the war effort. Perhaps this made him reluctant to press a plan that involved emancipating blacks. On February 24, 1779, Washington sent a chilling letter to Lund Washington in which he pondered aloud a liquidation scenario. If America lost the war, he noted, “it would be a matter of very little consequence to me whether my property is in Negroes or loan office certificates, as I shall neither ask for, nor expect, any favor from his most gracious Majesty . . . the only points therefore for me to consider are . . . whether it would be most to my interest, in case of a fortunate determination of the present contest, to have negroes and the crops they will make, or the sum they will now fetch and the interest of the money.”47 Clearly