Washington [80]
The most intriguing archaeological find has been the discovery of lead shot and gun flints, showing that Washington allowed selected slaves to keep firearms and hunt wild game in the woods. The remains of fifty-eight animal species have been identified in the slave cellar. The slaves could either eat the game or sell it to the master’s table. Washington’s adopted grandson remembered how a slave named Tom Davis hunted duck on the Potomac with his Newfoundland dog and brought down with his musket “as many of those delicious birds as would supply the larder for a week.”33 This made up part of a strictly limited market economy at Mount Vernon in which Washington allowed slaves to till their own garden plots, keep poultry, and sell eggs, chicken, fruits, and vegetables. On Sunday mornings he even permitted them to travel with passes to nearby Alexandria and peddle their wares in the open marketplace. This freedom of movement enabled Washington’s slaves to meet and marry slaves on other plantations.
That the slaves at Mount Vernon could move about without supervision runs counter to the common view of slavery as a system enforced only by the daily terror of whips and shackles. Like other major planters, Washington owned more slaves than his overseers could effectively monitor, and so the only way to control a captive population was to convince them that runaways would be severely punished. Virginia had perfected a system of terror for capturing fugitive slaves. Under a 1748 law, a master could seek out two justices of the peace and have them issue a proclamation against runaways. To give the slaves fair warning, the proclamation had to be posted on church doors throughout the county. If the slave still didn’t surrender, the law said that “it shall be lawful for any person . . . to kill and destroy such slaves by any ways or means, without accusation or impeachment of any crime for the same.”34
If Washington, with few exceptions, avoided inflicting harm on captured runaways, he showed notable zeal in hunting them down, and the problem consumed considerable time. The scholar Philip Morgan has computed that Washington had forty-seven runaway slaves over the years, or 7 percent of the total population.35 A year after his marriage Washington pursued a runaway named Boson and wound up paying a ten-shilling bounty to a slave from another plantation who recaptured him. Many slaves who fled were favorites of George and Martha Washington, who invariably reacted with a sense of shock and betrayal. In his diary for 1761, Washington recorded deep concern for the fate of a slave named Cupid, who had recently arrived from Africa, scarcely spoke English, and had contracted pleurisy. The master made a point of dropping in to inquire after Cupid’s health and in one diary entry wrote anxiously that “when I went to bed, I thought [Cupid] within a few hours of breathing his last.”36 Notwithstanding this special care, Cupid subsequently ran away with three other slaves named Peros, Jack, and Neptune. On August 11, 1761, Washington placed a fugitive slave advertisement in the Maryland Gazette, noting that they had escaped “without the least suspicion, provocation, or difference with anybody, or the least angry word or abuse from their overseers.”37
Washington’s description of the four slaves showed that he didn’t see them as an indistinguishable mass but as a collection of distinct individuals. Of Peros he said that he was thirty-five to forty years old, had a “yellowish complex[ion] with a very full round face and full black beard,” and wore “a dark colored cloth coat, a white linen waistcoat, white breeches and white stockings.”38 He added that the runaway slave spoke decent English, had shed much of his African dialect, and was “esteemed a sensible, judicious Negro.”39 Of Cupid, Washington noted that “the skin of his face is coarse and inclined to be pimply.”40 Two of the slaves showed recent African ancestry, having been scarified by their tribes. Jack had