Washington [337]
That May, Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury, two eminent Methodist ministers, brought to Mount Vernon an emancipation petition that they planned to introduce in the Virginia legislature. Although Washington refrained from signing it, he voiced “his opinion against slavery,” Asbury recorded in his diary, and promised to write a letter supporting the measure if it ever came to a vote.21 This typified Washington’s ambivalent approach to slavery in the 1780s: he privately made no secret of his disdain for the institution, but neither did he have the courage to broadcast his views or act on them publicly. After endorsing abolition, he shunted direct action onto other shoulders. Amid a blistering debate, the Coke-Asbury petition failed in the Virginia House of Delegates that November, with Madison reporting to Washington, “A motion was made to throw it under the table, which was treated with as much indignation on one side, as the petition itself was on the other.”22 Such fierce emotions must have given pause to Washington, if he harbored any unspoken thoughts about a future return to the political arena.
Washington’s quandary over slavery was thrown into high relief by a visit on April 9, 1786, from a local slave owner, Philip Dalby, who had recently traveled to Philadelphia with his slave, a mulatto waiter named Frank. After Frank was spirited away by a team of Quaker abolitionists, Dalby filed suit in the Pennsylvania assembly and, to drum up support, placed a shrill ad in the Alexandria newspaper, warning planters about the “insidious” work of Philadelphia Quakers.23 Incensed over the incident, Washington dashed off a strongly worded letter to his Philadelphia friend Robert Morris that expressed no sympathy for the Quakers, decrying instead their “acts of tyranny and oppression.”24 Unless these practices ceased, he warned, “none of those whose misfortune it is to have slaves as attendants will visit the city if they can possibly avoid it, because by so doing they hazard their property or they must be at the expense . . . of providing servants of another description for the trip.”25 This wasn’t the only time Washington talked of slavery as a curse visited on him rather than a system of privilege enforced by him.
At this point in the letter, Washington suddenly remembered that he opposed slavery and had to justify his righteous indignation about the Quaker actions: “I hope it will not be conceived from these observations that it is my wish to hold the unhappy people who are the subject of this letter in slavery. I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it [slavery], but there is only one proper and effectual mode by which it can be accomplished, and that by legislative authority. And this, as far as my suffrage will go, shall never be wanting.”26 Of course, Washington lacked a vote in the state legislature and took refuge in a position that was largely symbolic. The idea that abolition could be deferred to some future date when it would be carried out by cleanly incremental legislative steps was a common fantasy among the founders, since it shifted the burden onto later generations. It was especially