Washington [76]
Washington’s opposition to slavery took the form of a gradual awakening over many decades. He seldom uttered the word slavery, as if it grated on his conscience, preferring polite euphemisms such as “servants,” “Negroes,” “my people,” or “my family.” Like other slaveholders, the young Washington talked about slaves as simply another form of property. He was cold-blooded in specifying instructions for buying slaves, telling one buyer, as if he were purchasing a racehorse, that he wanted his slaves “to be straight-limbed and in every respect strong and likely, with good teeth and good countenances.”5 He favored adolescent females who could maximize the number of slave children, urging one planter who owed him money to sell some slaves in the fall “when they are fat and lusty and must soon fall of[f] unless well fed.”6 In this savage world, planters posted slaves as collateral for loans, and Washington upbraided one debtor for asking him to rely upon “such hazardous and perishable articles as Negroes, stock, and chattels.”7 With another debtor, he threatened that, without speedy payment, “your Negroes must be immediately exposed to sale for ready money after short notice.” In his diary, he often wrote of being “at home all day alone” when he was surrounded by slaves in the mansion and fields.
However horrifying it seems to later generations, abominable behavior toward dark-skinned people was considered an acceptable way of life. In 1767, when four slaves were executed in Fairfax County for supposedly colluding to poison their overseers, their decapitated heads were posted on chimneys at the local courthouse to act as a grim warning to others. Nobody protested this patent atrocity. At the same time, slave masters in the eighteenth century seldom rationalized or romanticized slavery as a divinely sanctioned system, as happened before the Civil War. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and other Virginia planters acknowledged the immorality of slavery, while confessing perplexity as to how to abolish it without producing mayhem and financial ruin. When denouncing British behavior on the eve of the American Revolution, Washington made clear the degrading nature of the system when he said that, if the colonists tolerated abuses, the British “will make us as tame and abject slaves as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.”8
The black population at Mount Vernon grew apace after Washington’s marriage as he purchased slaves aggressively to keep pace with his widening economic activities. During the first year of his marriage, he acquired 13 slaves, then another 42 between 1761 and 1773. Since he paid taxes on slaves older than twelve years of age, we know that he personally owned 56 slaves of working age in 1761, 62 in 1762, 78 in 1765, and 87 in 1770.
Whether from humane considerations or merely from regard for property, Washington was tireless in his medical treatment of slaves; his diaries are loaded with references to doctors, and even to Washington himself, tending sick slaves. During the frosty first winter of his marriage, he grew alarmed by the death of four slaves by late January, three of them dower slaves from the Custis estate. As in the army, whenever trouble struck, Washington didn’t shirk personal involvement. His direct management style became manifest that spring when smallpox cropped up at his western plantation on Bullskin Creek. At once he hastened off to Frederick County and was startled to find that two slaves, Harry and Kit, had already died, and that everything lay “in the utmost confusion, disorder and backwardness.”9 He rushed off to nearby Winchester to secure blankets and medical supplies, summoned a nurse, and instructed his overseer to quarantine slaves with smallpox. By the Revolutionary War, Washington made a regular practice of inoculating slaves against smallpox. The standard method was to scrape contaminated matter from the pustules