• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 25741 0

seem, he expected them to share his work ethic and was perturbed when they didn’t follow his industrious example. Feeling entitled to extract the maximum amount of work from slaves, he advised one overseer that “every laborer (male or female)” should do “as much in the 24 hours as their strength, without endangering their health or constitution, will allow of.”27 Not surprisingly, his letters contain frequent references to slaves whom he saw as indolent or prone to theft, and he never regarded such behavior as rational responses to bondage. Reproaching his slave carpenters, he said, “There is not to be found so idle a set of rascals.”28 Of a slave named Betty who worked as a spinner in the mansion, he complained that “a more lazy, deceitful and impudent hussy is not to be found in the United States.”29 He talked caustically about malingering slaves as if they were salaried workers who had failed to earn their wages—a blind spot he never entirely lost.

Fond of system and efficiency, Washington was stymied by his slaves’ inability to meet his high standards. Once in February 1760 he was dismayed to find that four slave carpenters had jointly hewn only 120 feet of poplar logs that day. Like a modern efficiency expert, he sat down, consulted his watch, and clocked them in a time-and-motion study. The master’s presence instantly stimulated the slaves to quadruple their output to 125 feet of timber apiece. Once he had solved the motivational mystery, Washington wondered about the material being used. “It is to be observed here that this hewing and sawing likewise was of poplar,” he wrote in his diary. “What may be the difference therefore between the working of this wood and [an]other some future observations must make known.”30 It is easy to see how the methodical Washington, with his excellent business mind, would have found infuriating an economic system that naturally discouraged hard work.

Male slaves at the Mansion House enjoyed accommodations superior to those of slaves at the outlying farms. They likely had better quarters because they were often trained artisans and lived within eyeshot of family members and visitors. At a later period many inhabited a large brick building with glazed windows that was divided into four rooms and fitted out like an army barrack, with bunks lining the walls. In the four remote farms, slaves were jammed into small, one-room log cabins, crafted flimsily from sticks cemented with mud. A Polish nobleman who admired Washington was taken aback by these squalid hovels. “We entered one of the huts of the blacks, for one cannot call them by the name of houses. They are more miserable than the most miserable of the cottages of our peasants. The husband and wife sleep on a mean pallet, the children on the ground; [there is] a very bad fireplace, some utensils for cooking, but in the middle of this poverty, some cups and a teapot.”31

Each slave received one set of new clothes per annum—a woolen jacket, a pair of breeches, two shirts, a pair of stockings, and a pair of shoes—often made from a coarse brown linen called osnaburg. Slave women received an annual petticoat and smock. Some slaves also had Sunday outfits of dark coats with white vests and white breeches. Every day the slaves received approximately one quart of Indian cornmeal, and every month twenty salted herrings, which sounds like a terribly meager ration. “It is not my wish or desire that my Negro[e]s should have an ounce of meal more, nor less, than is sufficient to feed them plentifully,” Washington told his estate manager.32 Recent archaeological work at Mount Vernon has revealed that the slave diet was not entirely bleak. On Sundays Washington allowed slaves to borrow his large nets, or “seines,” to fish in the Potomac. At least one elderly slave named Father Jack kept a canoe on the river and supplied fish to others. Archaeologists have identified bones from sixteen types of fish in the cellar of the main slave residence. Washington also distributed to the slaves meat left over from his table, innards of hogs slaughtered on the