Washington [334]
Perhaps nothing better illustrated Washington’s pioneering farm work than his development of the American mule, a hardy animal representing a cross between a male donkey (also called a jack) and a female horse. Mules were less fragile than horses but more docile than donkeys and cheap to maintain. Before Washington championed these creatures, they had hardly existed in the country. He started breeding them when he received a gray jack from the king of Spain called Royal Gift and a black jack called Knight of Malta from Lafayette. Royal Gift was big and lumbering but lacking in animal spark, whereas Knight of Malta was small but lusty. Washington cunningly bred the two animals and ended up with a jack known as Compound that merged the size of Royal Gift with the feisty nature of Knight of Malta. After some early difficulties, the resulting donkeys settled down and performed their duties, producing fifty-seven mules at Mount Vernon by century’s end and enabling Washington to realize his hope to “secure a race of extraordinary goodness that will stock the country.”27 In addition to his better-known title of Father of His Country, Washington is also revered in certain circles as the Father of the American Mule.
CHAPTER FORTY
Devil’s Bargain
FOR ALL THE TALK of agricultural modernity at Mount Vernon, there was something unreal about the entire topic for a plantation economy premised on that most antiquated and repressive of systems: slavery. As the most glaring negation of the American Revolution’s ideals, slavery was bound to ignite controversy after the war. All the talk of liberty clashed with the reality of widespread bondage. Slavery posed the supreme challenge to the ideas that Washington had imbibed during the war and tested the pronouncements about peace and understanding that permeated his postwar correspondence. For the Marquis de Lafayette, the notion that an independent America would tolerate slavery was more than a contradiction in terms: it was anathema to everything he believed. As he told British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, “I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America if I could have conceived that thereby I was founding a land of slavery.”1 So profoundly in earnest was Lafayette that Clarkson called him “as uncompromising an enemy of the slave trade and slavery as any man I ever knew.”2
As early as February 5, 1783, Lafayette made it overwhelmingly clear in a letter to Washington that his idol couldn’t evade this touchy subject: “Permit me to propose a plan to you which might become greatly beneficial to the black part of mankind. Let us unite in purchasing a small estate where we may try the experiment to free the Negroes and use them only as tenants.”3 As he pointed out, Washington’s sterling reputation could make this revolutionary act “general practice” in the United States.4 As impulsive as Washington was cautious, Lafayette gloried in his iconoclasm. “If it be a wild scheme,” he maintained, “I had rather be mad that way than to be thought wise on the other tack.”5 Lafayette’s abolitionism may have been influenced by his wartime association with James Armistead, a slave who served under him in Virginia and operated as a valuable spy, infiltrating the British lines under the guise of being an escaped slave.
When Washington received Lafayette’s letter, the war was winding down and he was dwelling on his impaired finances. His economic well-being depended on slavery, so that whatever his theoretical sympathy with Lafayette’s idea, he could not have been thrilled by the timing. Not wanting to disillusion his worshipful protégé, he replied the way a fond father might write to an ardent but impractical son: “The scheme, my dear Marq[ui]s, which you propose as a precedent to encourage the emancipation of the black people of this country . . . is a striking evidence of the benevolence of your heart. I shall be happy to join you in so laudable a work, but will defer going into detail of the business till I have the pleasure of seeing you.”6 This was Washington’s canny way of crediting