#rather than continue living by standards that old me set up unquestioningly | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

philly-osopher · 7 years

Text

Washington’s slaves

okay, look. i thought the idea of Washington as a “good” slaveowner had been debunked so thoroughly that i would have nothing further to contribute. but the other day i saw a post cross my dash that made me realize that there are a lot of bad, poorly-supported arguments out there. i can’t replicate the post, since OP has deleted it, and i’m not interested in responding to OP in particular, but rather to all the misconceptions i saw. hopefully this will be useful in correcting those! many thanks are due to @herowndeliverance for editing help :)

here are some misconceptions re: George Washington and slavery + debunkation:

“he was actually nice to his slaves!”

completely and utterly false. first of all, the simple act of enslaving someone is NOT NICE. the notion that there can be a “benign slaveowner” is utterly absurd. slaves’ entire lives were stolen from them. their labor made Washington’s fortune and gave him his social position. the ~300 slaves at Mount Vernon did often backbreaking work six days a week under extreme coercion, were kept purposefully uneducated and illiterate, and had no legal recourse if they were treated cruelly--which they were. we have direct, textual evidence that Washington encouraged his overseers to beat and whip slaves who he deemed were misbehaving, defiant, or shirking work.

worst of all, if Washington had a slave whom he considered particularly problematic, he would sell them to the West Indies. Mount Vernon’s website is a great source of info on most of this, but here all they say is that this was a way of “ensuring that the person would never see their family or friends at Mount Vernon again.” this is an almost comical understatement. anyone who’s read the Chernow biography of Hamilton knows what a hellscape the West Indian sugar plantations were; life expectancy was about eight years once a slave started work. since Washington visited the sugar islands as a young man, he wasn’t ignorant of conditions there. but if a slave inconvenienced him too much, he sent them anyway.

was Washington an especially cruel master by the standards of his day? probably not. was he nice? the whole concept of “nice” can’t apply to this situation, but even if it could, Washington wouldn’t be it.

“freeing slaves would have been cruel... for the slaves”

slaves tried to escape Mount Vernon fairly frequently. one very famous case is that of Ona Judge, one of Martha Washington’s slaves, who escaped Philadelphia just before the end of Washington’s second term as President. even though the Washingtons contacted her and asked/ berated/ threatened in attempts to bring her back, Ona refused point blank to return. she spent her whole life as a fugitive in the woods in New Hampshire rather than go back to life as a slave. and it’s worth noting that she was Martha Washington’s favorite-- she had the relatively fortunate position of working in the house. another slave who escaped the Washingtons, Hercules, was a very skilled chef, and also had a relatively “soft” job.

A short time after the cook’s escape, a visitor to Mount Vernon asked one of Hercules’s young daughters if she was upset that she would never see her father again. Her answer surprised him: “Oh! Sir, I am very glad, because he is free now.” (citation)

i should note that nobody was able to find out what happened to Hercules. he could have been killed on the journey north, kidnapped and sold back into slavery (more on this later) or he could have gotten away. being an escaped slave was dangerous business. yet Ona Judge and other escaped slaves preferred a lifetime of poverty and marginalization to even the least physically taxing slavery, and Ona Judge affirmed her preference for freedom in multiple newspaper interviews at the end of her life.

furthermore, southerners lived in constant fear of slave rebellions. the possibility of a slave rebellion was one of the reasons South Carolina couldn’t muster an adequate militia during the Revolution. slaves actively resisted being slaves and many risked their lives for the possibility of freedom.

so let’s put it this way: if emancipating slaves would truly have been so cruel to them... why did they have to be brutally coerced into staying slaves? why did so many try to escape or rebel in spite of that? the actions that slaves took really speak for themselves to debunk the argument that freedom would have been somehow cruel to them.

“slavery was normal at the time, so Washington didn’t know any better”

first of all, not all people who were raised when slavery was normal continued to hold those ideas throughout their lives. this included people whom Washington knew and liked. John Laurens, son of a man who made his fortune off of slavery, is one obvious example. another is Ben Franklin, who accepted slavery unquestioningly as a younger man, in fact owning slaves, but completely changed his mind later in life, directly petitioning Congress to abolish slavery. the Quakers, with a strong presence in the national capital of Philadelphia, also lobbied for an end to slavery. it was far from a universally-accepted practice in Washington’s day.

okay, so clearly SOME people realized slavery was wrong. but that didn’t mean a world without slavery was something a person of average intellectual/ moral vision could conceive of, right? (notice how little credit Washington apologists have to give him here? he was just a victim of his times! he could see a way to free America from Britain but by golly, freeing his own slaves was just too much of a stretch for his poor conventional brain to make) except the idea that slavery was normal everywhere is, again, totally wrong.

during the Washington administration the American seat of government was in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania had passed an Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in 1780-- during the Revolution, way before Washington assumed the Presidency in 1789. the law stated that any slave who stayed in Philadelphia for six continuous months would be freed. this meant that the Washingtons had to set up a rotation system, taking their slaves back to Virginia or just across the river to New Jersey (everything is legal in New Jersey) to restart the clock. the slaves were perfectly aware this was going on. we don’t have record of what they thought about it-- but let’s be real, it must have been the most agonizing, infuriating process in the world. technically Washington wasn’t breaking the law, but he was certainly using a loophole to within an inch of its life.

Philadelphia also had the nation’s largest free black community as a result of this law-- there were several thousand free blacks in the city and only a few hundred slaves. the Washingtons were the exception to the rule the whole time they were there.

furthermore, Washington probably violated the tissue-thin protections granted fugitive slaves in his own Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 when he tried to bring Ona Judge back. the law required the slaveowner or his agent to bring a fugitive slave before a court, affirm it was really them, and get the judge’s okay before bringing them back to a life of slavery. Washington twice attempted to end run around this process-- Ona refused to play ball.

citation for most of the previous two paragraphs: Never Caught, by Erica Armstrong Dunbar, and this podcast where she talks extensively about the book and the research she did for it. [note the podcast seems to be aimed at old white dudes, so they do spend time on some arguments that are pretty damn obvious to anyone who’s taken a race/ gender studies class. but it still has lots of good information.]

also, there’s a Drunk History on Ona Judge that is quite good

“he couldn’t legally emancipate his slaves”

okay, that’s partially true. about 2/3 of the Mount Vernon slaves, and Ona Judge, were Martha’s. “Martha’s” slaves were actually Custis estate “dower slaves” left over from her first marriage, and held in reserve for her grandchildren. it was all legally very tied up. but the fact remains that Martha did emancipate a lot of George’s slaves (not her own) after George’s death-- not out of the goodness of her heart, mind you, but because he’d stipulated they’d be freed after she died, and she didn’t want to give them all incentive to kill her. so, George and Martha did have the legal power to free at least George’s slaves, around 100 people. the circumstances under which Martha freed them are not to her moral credit. i want to keep this focused on George because it’s already so long, but Martha benefited just as much or more from slavery as him, and respecting her as someone with her own moral agency requires we acknowledge her failings as her own.

all of this debate about treatment of individual slaves really misses the point, however. arguing about how Washington personally treated his own slaves ignores his political actions. Washington signed into law the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 while he was President.

what’s that?

here’s some things the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 (full original text here) did:

made it so that slaves escaping from slave states into free states were still legally considered slaves

made it legal for masters or their representatives to arrest suspected fugitive slaves in free states, take them before a judge, and, upon proving their identity “by oral testimony or affidavit,” (a.k.a. “yes, this is my slave, pinky swear”-- needless to say, this clause meant slave-staters could basically legally kidnap and enslave any free black person, even from a free state) return them to slavery

fined people who knowingly helped fugitive slaves

furthermore, slavery was inherited based on the mother’s legal status-- so, if a woman escaped slavery, went to a free state, and had children, her children were legally speaking slaves to her old master. this is what happened to Ona Judge. this is why she and her children were still in hiding in the woods in New Hampshire in the 1850s-- Martha’s granddaughter was still alive. legally, she owned them all.

as President, Washington’s power to do harm to slaves was far greater than as a private individual. he used that power to legally entrench slavery, extending the power of slave states to enforce slave laws even in free states.

some argue that Washington’s priority was preserving the Union/ keeping southern states happy, and that doing so required a soft stance on slavery. people who are better-qualified historians than i am can debate that point. however, even IF a conciliatory approach to the south on a policy level was necessary for Washington to get his political priorities accomplished, that still says something about what his priorities were (e.g. certainly not with helping slaves). AND, we also have to think about the example that Washington’s prominent use of slave labor as President set for the rest of the country. his personal conduct and decisions about his own household weren’t subject to the same considerations as his political actions. and yet, Washington’s choice to use slaves not only in Mount Vernon but also in New York and Philadelphia was a powerful (if implicit) pro-slavery signal.

Americans idolized Washington-- his personal conduct was seen as exemplary for the whole nation. what kind of message did it send to the nation that the Washingtons brought slaves to Philadelphia-- a free city-- during their administration? it sent the message that slavery was not just normal, but morally okay. it sent the message that slavers subverting the laws of free states was not just normal, but morally okay.

Washington’s life was enormously consequential for this country. he was a complicated person--like we all are!-- and he did make some choices that were really, really good for America, like trying to stay above political parties, and dealing effectively with the crises of his administration, and setting the precedent of retiring after two terms. his terrible treatment of slaves and his work to reinforce and normalize slavery don’t erase the good he did. but nor does the good he did excuse the bad. we simply cannot pretend that what Washington did-- towards his slaves personally, and regarding slavery politically-- is just an artifact of his upbringing. he chose to act the way he did, and if we’re going to understand the USA and the depth of the historical injury done to America’s black community by slavery, Washington’s moral failings are a critical part of the story.

#American slavery #George Washington #Ona Judge

588 notes · View notes