Washington [437]
Also setting out for Philadelphia in the fall of 1790 was the adolescent slave Christopher Sheels, who would eventually replace Billy Lee as Washington’s body servant. A third-generation Mount Vernon slave, the fifteen-year-old Sheels was separated from his mother, Alice, a spinner, and his grandmother Doll, a cook. The mulatto slave Austin, separated from his wife at Mount Vernon, arrived in Philadelphia by stagecoach along with Hercules. Martha also brought along her two dower slaves, Moll and the teenage Ona Judge, for her personal entourage. As the person who dressed Martha’s hair and laid out her clothes, Ona Judge held a special place in the presidential household.
In early April 1791 Attorney General Edmund Randolph delivered a startling piece of news to the Washingtons. Under the 1780 Pennsylvania statute, any adult slaves resident in the state for six consecutive months were automatically free. Three of Randolph’s own slaves had served notice that they planned to claim their freedom. Bizarrely, the attorney general of the United States urged the president and first lady to evade this local law. Coaching them how to do so, he noted that once slaves were taken out of Pennsylvania and then brought back, the clock was reset, and another six months needed to elapse before they could demand their freedom. At first Washington imagined, wrongly, that federal officials in the capital were exempt from the law. Still, he fretted to Tobias Lear that people in “the practice of enticing slaves” might not make such fine distinctions.31 With paternalistic certitude, he doubted that, even if any of his slaves opted for freedom, they would be “benefitted by the change, yet the idea of freedom might be too great a temptation for them to resist.”32 Washington was especially alarmed about this prospect, since all of his slaves in Philadelphia, except Hercules and Paris, were dower slaves, meaning that Washington would have to reimburse the Custis estate if they fled his household.
Not taking any chances, Washington decided to shuttle his slaves back to Mount Vernon for brief stays before their six-month time limits expired. As minors, Christopher Sheels, Richmond, and Ona Judge were all debarred from seeking their freedom. To keep the adult slaves in bondage, Washington resorted to various ruses so they would not know why they were being sent home temporarily. As he said bluntly, “I wish to have it accomplished under pretext that may deceive both them [i.e., the slaves] and the public.”33 This was a rare instance of George Washington scheming, and Martha Washington and Tobias Lear connived right along with him. In April Martha sent Austin back to Mount Vernon under the pretext of honoring a promise that he could return periodically to see his wife. In writing to Fanny about the visit, Martha showed how coolly she could lie, saying that Austin’s stay at Mount Vernon “will be short, indeed. I could but illy spare him at this time, but to fulfill my promise to his wife.”34 That spring, when Martha took a short excursion to Trenton, she deliberately took two slaves across state lines. In a similarly duplicitous vein, Washington advised her to return