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By Root 26007 0

the remainder knew that the second Martha died, they could cast off their shackles. Unnerved by the situation, Martha admitted to a confidant that she “was made unhappy by the talk in the [slave] quarters of the good time coming to the ones to be freed as soon as she died.”46 For all his thoroughness, Washington had committed this one glaring oversight, thrusting Martha into a nightmarish situation. On a visit to Mount Vernon, Abigail Adams observed Martha’s extreme distress as she confided that “she did not feel as though her life was safe in [the slaves’] hands,” since many of them “would be told that it was their interest to get rid of her.”47 A suspicious event may have settled things for Martha. “There had been at least one alarming incident, when Judge Bushrod Washington was urgently called from the circuit court . . . because there had been an attempt to set fire to Mount Vernon,” writes biographer Helen Bryan. “It was widely believed that some of the Mount Vernon slaves were implicated.”48 To quiet his aunt’s fears, Bushrod Washington recommended that she get “clear of her negroes” by freeing them at once, and she decided to heed his advice.49

A year after George Washington’s death, on January 1, 1801, Martha Washington signed an order freeing his slaves. Even this move did not entirely end her troubles, since at least one dower slave tried to escape by portraying himself as one of Washington’s freed slaves. Many of the emancipated slaves, having never strayed far from Mount Vernon, were naturally reluctant to try their luck elsewhere. Some refused to abandon spouses or children still held as dower slaves and stayed at or near the estate. Following Washington’s instructions, funds were used to feed and clothe the young, aged, and sickly slaves until the early 1830s.

Even though he had received his freedom and an annuity under Washington’s will, Billy Lee stayed on at Mount Vernon, residing in his own house, working as a shoemaker, and emerging as something of a local tourist attraction. He remained a voluble raconteur about the war and its generals, and when one British baronet stopped by, Lee inquired “very earnestly after Lord Cornwallis.” 50 Despite his apparent drinking problem, Lee managed to survive until 1810.

Politically, Martha had become a vocal Federalist and kept up her husband’s antipathy to Thomas Jefferson. Even as he sat in the Senate chamber in a chair cloaked in black, Jefferson nursed private grievances against Washington and stayed away from the memorial service for him in December 1799, an action that may have embittered Martha. In private, Jefferson predicted a “resuscitation” of the “republican spirit” because the Federalists would no longer be able to hide behind Washington’s stature and popularity.51

In early January 1801 Jefferson made a pilgrimage to Mount Vernon to see Martha, a visit with an unspoken political agenda. A few weeks earlier it had become clear in the presidential race that Aaron Burr would tie him in the Electoral College, throwing the race into a House of Representatives dominated by Federalists. Jefferson may have thought a well-publicized trip to Mount Vernon would curry favor with Federalist congressmen. If he did, he got precious little thanks from Martha, who fully shared her husband’s cynicism about Jefferson. A friend recalled, “She assured a party of gentlemen, of which I was one . . . that next to the loss of her husband, [the visit] was the most painful occurrence of her life. He must have known, she observed, that we then had the evidence of [Jefferson’s] perfidy in the house.”52

Taking the high road in his first inaugural address, President Jefferson named Washington as “our first and greatest revolutionary character, whose preeminent services had entitled him to the first place in his country’s love.”53 Martha Washington was not assuaged. “Her remarks were frequently pointed and sometimes very sarcastic on the new order of things and the present administration,” wrote Manasseh Cutler. “She spoke of the election of Mr. Jefferson, whom she considered as