Reflections on a Field Trip to George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate

Near the very beginning of our self-guided tour, it became apparent that slavery weighed heavily on my mind.  (I should have expected this, given that I had seen a promotional screening of Amazing Grace: the William Wilberforce Story the prior evening.)  Avoiding the long line to enter the estate’s mansion, we started our tour at the outer buildings, including the stable, dung repository (not the crowd favorite you might expect it to be), wash house, smokehouse, storehouse, etc.  Each outer building bears a sign with a brief paragraph describing its role in the estate’s functioning.  Strikingly, nearly all of the signs included a description of the slaves who worked at or used the building and what their tasks were.  For example:  “Six slaves worked” at the stable, feeding and grooming the animals, collecting manure and so on.  According to the wash house sign:

Vina and Dolsey were two of the slave women who worked as many as six days a week washing the laundry that belonged to the Washingtons, their guests, and some farm managers.  They boiled water in a hot-water stove and plunged the laundry into the steaming water.  . . .  It was a hot, dangerous, and difficult job;  the slaves had to carry twenty-five to thirty buckets of water for each load of laundry.

While preparing his will in 1799, just five months before his death, Washington took a complete census of the Mount Vernon slaves.  At that time, there were 316 human beings living and working in bondage at Mount Vernon – their lives consigned to the economic prosperity of what had become an 8,000-acre plantation, with five separate farming operations and three fisheries.  (Official Guidebook to Mount Vernon)

The Official Guidebook defends Washington the slaveholder as best it can, which is to say, not very well.  The authors observe that Washington “grew up in a world where slavery was part of the accepted order of things” (p.107).  He was a “land-owner and planter in colonial Virginia” (id.);  naturally, the authors suggest, he also was a slaveholder.  Moreover, despite living in a society in which slavery was legitimate, the authors argue that Washington’s “attitude [about slavery] underwent a reversal over his lifetime”: 

About the time of the Revolution, he resolved never to purchase or sell a slave, [and] by the end of his life he had concluded that slavery had no place in the American democracy, writing I wish from my soul that the Legislature of this State could see the policy of a gradual Abolition of Slavery.

The authors appeal finally to the fact that Washington’s will provided for the emancipation of the slaves he owned.  One slave, William Lee, was to be emancipated upon Washington’s death, “for his faithful services during the Revolutionary War” (p.108).  The others were to be freed at the passing of Mrs. Washington.  To her credit, Mrs. Washington freed the slaves a year later, while she still lived.

With the story of William Wilberforce fresh in my mind, it is more difficult to see virtue in the claimed “reversal” in Washington’s attitude about slavery.  Wilberforce, a British contemporary of Washington, lived in a culture no friendlier to abolition than Washington’s.  The slave trade in Britain was “part of the accepted order of things” and perhaps the principal economic engine of the entire empire.  Nonetheless, Wilberforce chose to take on the powerful interests of the trade, campaigning nonstop from 1787 to 1807 for its abolition throughout the British Empire. 

Washington, in contrast, held fast to the beaten path of cultural conformity.  (Of course, George Washington, as a leader in the American Revolution, hardly can be characterized as a man generally prone to choosing conformity for its own sake.  But he was no revolutionary about slavery.)  While Washington’s views of slavery, as evidenced by his writings, may have improved during his lifetime, it is less clear that this change of heart had any positive effect on his actions.  From 1754 to 1799, Washington increased the number of slaves living at Mount Vernon from about twenty to 316, a damning trend in terms of direction and magnitude.  Moreover, it would seem no great sacrifice – indeed, no personal sacrifice at all – for General Washington to provide for the emancipation of his slaves following his death.  This final act by Washington could be interpreted as revealing a deeper flaw in his character:  even though he believed slavery was immoral, he did not have the courage of his conviction when choosing how to live his life.

I do not claim that I would have fought bravely against slavery, were I in George Washington’s place.  Nor do I claim that his great service to this country is unworthy of admiration due to his moral failure as a slaveholder.  On the contrary, even more forcefully than before, I would encourage parents to teach their young children about our great first president, take them to the Washington Monument, share with them the National Portrait Gallery’s Washington exhibit, and so on.  Then take them to Mount Vernon where, amid the tranquil beauty of this colonial estate, they can see vivid (yet not explicit) images of the scourge of slavery that stained not just this great man’s life and legacy but our nation itself at its birth.  Through studying perhaps our greatest hero, our children can be reminded of the truth that there “is no one righteous, not even one” (Romans 3:10), that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (v.23).