Washington [78]
We know that Mary Washington was tightfisted in treating slaves; one neighbor remembered her as “more given to housewifery, and to keeping their servants at their proper business and in their proper places than to any unnecessary forms of etiquette.”16 Thomas Jefferson thought that Washington had inherited that autocratic style. “From his childhood, [Washington] always ruled and ruled severely,” Jefferson was later quoted as saying. “He was first brought up to govern slaves, he then governed an army, then a nation.”17 For the most part, Washington dealt with slaves through overseers whom he prodded to “be constantly with your people . . . There is no other sure way of getting work well done and quietly by negroes, for when an overlooker’s back is turned, the most of them will slight their work or be idle altogether.”18
Under Virginia law, slaveholders could freely abuse or even murder their slaves in punishing misbehavior and still avoid legal repercussions. Washington believed that whipping slaves was counterproductive and tried to restrain such brutality. As he lectured one estate manager, it “oftentimes is easier to effect [change] by watch-fulness and admonition than by severity and certainly must be more agreeable to every feeling mind in the practice of them.”19 Overseers were required to issue warnings to wayward slaves before flogging them. In theory, they couldn’t apply the lash to slaves unless they first secured written permission from Washington, but due to his extended absences from Mount Vernon, the rule wasn’t always obeyed. “General Washington has forbidden the use of the whip on his blacks,” a French visitor to Mount Vernon later averred, “but unfortunately his example has been little emulated.”20 He wanted his overseers to be strict, not cruel. Whether on the plantation, in the army, or in government, he stressed the need to inspire respect rather than affection in subordinates, a common thread running through his vastly disparate managerial activities.
Washington insisted that overseers track slaves closely during workdays that could stretch up to sixteen hours in summertime. He constantly reprimanded them for being drunk, lazy, or inattentive to their duties. Often feeling burdened by the expense and difficulty of dealing with white overseers, he turned to slave overseers, and at one point blacks supervised three of his five farms.
Washington prided himself on being firm but fair-minded, leading his adopted granddaughter to say later, “He was a generous and noble master and [the slaves] feared and loved him.”21 His presidential secretary, Tobias Lear, said of Mount Vernon, “The negroes are not treated as blacks in general are in this country. They are clothed and fed as well as any laboring people whatever and they are not subject to the lash of a domineering overseer—but they are still slaves.”22 Several observers noted that Washington, with perfect self-control in public, could flare up with servants in private. During his presidency the wife of the British ambassador remarked that Washington “acquired a uniform command over his passions on public occasions, but in private and particularly with his servants, its violence sometimes broke out.”23 One cabinet secretary talked of Washington’s reputation for “warm passion and stern severity” with his servants.24 Another observer was taken aback by how gruffly the tactful president addressed his slaves, “as differently as if he had been quite another man or had been in anger.”25 Still another Mount Vernon guest noted how exquisitely attuned the slaves were to the master’s moods: “His servants seemed to watch his eye, and to anticipate his every wish; hence, a look was equivalent to a command.”26 It should be said that if Washington displayed an irritable style with his slaves, he could also be short-tempered with his military and political subordinates.
Slavery presented special challenges to a hypercritical personality like Washington, for the slaves had no earthly reason to strive for the perfection he wanted. However illogical it might