Washington [488]
The most momentous aspect of the plan concerned the destiny of the 170 to 180 slaves confined on the four farms. It was Washington’s fervent hope that the new owner would free the slaves and then rehire them “as he would do any other laborers which his necessity w[oul]d require him to employ.”41 Emancipating slaves was a startling innovation for any major Virginia planter to contemplate, especially if he was president of the United States. The scheme harked back to the plan that Lafayette had proposed for his experimental farm in French Guiana. In disclosing the idea to Lear, Washington explained that he had a motive “more powerful than all the rest, namely to liberate a certain species of property which I possess, very repugnantly to my own feelings, but which imperious necessity compels.”42
From the timing of his decision, one suspects that Washington’s disgust with slavery owed something to pure principle but also much to the pure fatigue of trying to wrest profits from an intractable workforce held in bondage. The realistic and idealistic sides of George Washington both conspired to rebel against the peculiar institution. Interestingly enough, when he mentioned possible obstacles to his plan, he talked of the difficulty of mingling white workers with black, but he never mentioned a far more glaring problem: a political backlash in the South against such a courageous move by the country’s foremost citizen.
As always, Washington had manifold reasons for his actions, and his response to slavery was shaped by a complex blend of impulses. On November 23, 1794, he wrote a revealing letter to his nephew Alexander Spotswood that dealt with his views on slavery—a subject, Washington admitted, that “I do not like to even think, much less talk of.”43 Washington suggested that the main hindrance to emancipating his slaves related to his fear of auctioning them off indiscriminately and breaking up families: “Were it not, then, that I am principled ag[ains]t selling Negroes, as you would cattle in the market, I would not, in twelve months from this date, be possessed of one as a slave.”44 He went on to say that he feared trouble might be brewing with the slave population and that a day of reckoning might soon be at hand: “I shall be happily mistaken if they are not found to be a very troublesome species of property ’ere many years pass over our heads.”45
The anxious foreboding about slave revolts was immeasurably heightened by the massive slave revolt in the French colony of St. Domingue (modern-day Haiti), led by Toussaint Louverture starting in August 1791. This, the largest slave revolt in history, had led to thousands of deaths among rebel slaves and white masters, fomenting hysterical fears among American planters. When Charles Pinckney worried about the impact of these events on southern slaves, Washington shared his alarm: “I feel sincerely those sentiments of sympathy which you so properly express for the distresses of our suffering brethren [the slave owners] in that quarter and deplore their causes.”46 It seemed a terrifyingly vivid realization of the nightmares of slaveholders who feared the hatred that simmered deep inside their slaves. In response, Virginia enacted more stringent rules against slave gatherings as well as an “act against divulgers of false news.”47
President Washington extended money and arms to the French government to combat the insurrection and also made a personal donation of $250 to relieve the affected white colonists. By July 1793 thousands of white refugees from St. Domingue had streamed into American ports, where they retailed hideous tales of rape and mass killings by enraged slaves. That month Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Monroe, saying that the situation of these fugitive