Washington [342]
So intent was Washington on extracting the full measure of work from slaves that he could be shockingly oblivious to their hardships. Perhaps the most agonizing work at Mount Vernon involved reclaiming swamps. Even in the iciest weather Washington didn’t relax his grip or halt this grueling outdoor labor. In January and February 1788 eastern Virginia suffered through a winter so frigid that the Potomac froze for five weeks and Mount Vernon lay “locked fast by ice,” as Washington told Henry Knox.42 As the temperature dipped to ten degrees, Washington often found it too cold to attend meetings away from home. Nevertheless, his hands spent more than a week taking ice from the frozen river and packing it into the icehouse.
During this deep freeze Washington refused to cancel any slave activities, and the heavy-duty field work went on unabated. On January 3 he noted that the thermometer stood at twenty-five degrees as he made the chilly rounds of his plantations. Nevertheless everyone was outdoors working. At Dogue Run, he wrote, “the women began to hoe the swamp they had grubbed in order to prepare it for sowing in the spring with grain and grass seeds.” At Muddy Hole, “the women, after having threshed out the peas, went about the fencing.” And at another farm, “the women were taking up and thinning the trees in the swamp, which they had before grubbed.”43 It is hard to imagine more brutal manual labor than women pulling up tree stumps in icy swamps in record-setting cold, but Washington seems not to have found this inhuman scene objectionable and in no way diminished the work. On February 5 the notably rugged Washington informed Knox that “the air of this day is amongst the keenest I ever recollect to have felt.”44 When he made the circuit of his farms the next morning, he introduced an unusual notation: “Rid out, but finding the cold disagreeable, I returned.”45 Despite this fierce cold, with nine inches of snow covering the ground, Washington kept everyone busy in the fields and noted approvingly in his diary, “Hands of all the places (except the men) working in the new ground” at the mansion house.46 It was as if Washington feared that even the slightest concession would lead to a raft of others, so he insisted on getting the daily quota of work from his slaves.
Like all other plantation owners, Washington had become so accustomed to slavery that the bizarre began to seem normal. He had always kept a strict separation between his social and professional lives and for a long time went foxhunting and toured his farms on separate days. Then on January 4, 1786, he began to mix these two incompatible tasks, riding to hounds and visiting field hands at the same time. “After breakfast, I rid by the places where my Muddy Hole and Ferry people were clearing,” he wrote in his diary. “Thence to the [grist] mill and Dogue Run plantations and, having the hounds with me, in passing from the latter toward Muddy Hole plantation, I found a fox, which, after dragging him some distance and running him hard for near an hour, was killed by the cross road in front of the house.”47 Thereafter he routinely combined foxhunting with tours of the outlying slave plantations. One can only imagine what thoughts passed through the minds of field hands who wearily lifted their heads from stoop labor, only to see the jolly master and his friends careering past them in the wintry landscape behind a pack of foxhunting hounds.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The Ruins of the Past
WHEN WASHINGTON CONSENTED IN 1783 to serve as first president of the Order of the Cincinnati, he imagined himself signing on to a fraternal organization that was charitable in intent and incontrovertibly good. So convinced was he of its virtue that he did not agonize over becoming president