Bushrod Washington and The Mount Vernon Slaves

Gerald T. Dunne

His name was Bushrod Washington, but he would have been better off had it been Bushrod Smith. The dominant circumstance of his entire life was his station as George Washington's favorite nephew, and it was a circumstance which literally outlasted life itself for he was buried by the great man's side. To be sure, the relationship was not without its pleasant side, for George Washington was something of a second father, and persisted in affording counsel, advice, and guidance to the younger man. But paternalism has its limits, and this association showed them clearly. Overall it must be said that Bushrod Washington gave far more than he got. He suffered from that most insidious form of injustice–a patron's leaning backwards to give the appearance of fairness.

Yet, in his way, Bushrod Washington was a man of immense ability and would have gone far–perhaps farther–had his name been Bushrod Smith and his relationship to George Washington non-existent. Charter member of Phi Beta Kappa, cited for service as a private of dragoons in the Revolution, member of the Virginia ratification convention, Bushrod Washington studied law under James Wilson, his predecessor on the Supreme Court, made an outstanding record at the Virginia bar, and was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1799 by President John Adams, far more on his own merits than on his distinguished name. And in his thirty-one years on the Court, he made a record which was the subject of favorable appraisal by critics as demanding and diverse as Justice Joseph Story in the nineteenth century and Justice Felix Frankfurter in the twentieth.[1]

To be sure, he was not very much to look at, ''a little, sharp–faced gentleman with only one eye and a profusion of snuff distributed all over his face."[2] Yet there was steel beneath the nondescript surface, and associates were constantly aware of it. Indeed Henry Clay became the envy of Washington when he once paused in the course of argument and took a pinch of snuff from Washington's open snuff box. "I do not believe," said an observer, "that there is an-other man in the United States who could have done that. . ."[3]

But the steel was also, and more appropriately, displayed on great occasions. Justice Washington showed it when, sitting as a lonely Virginian in tumultuous Philadelphia, he sent a Pennsylvania militia general to jail for obstructing federal process.[4] He showed it when he contributed his vote in favor of state insolvency laws on an otherwise evenly divided court and sent John Marshall into dissent on a constitutional question for the one and only time in the great Chief Justice's tenure.[5] Yet it was not a concern for debtors that prompted such action. Indeed Washington's only formal dissent in thirty-one years on the Supreme Court came when he insisted that states could not retroactively abolish imprisonment for debt.[6] And perhaps his own hard-headed sense of rectitude, whatever its popularity or other consequences, was summed up in an opinion which he knew would provoke bitter criticism:

We hold ourselves accountable to God, our consciences, and our country to decide this question according to our best judgment be the consequences what they may.[7]

But there was more than steel in him. "There was," said his colleague, Justice Story, "a daily beauty in his life, which won every heart. He was benevolent, affectionate and liberal, in the best sense of the terms."[8] Particularly touching was his unfailing care and devotion to his half-mad wife whom an associate with nineteenth century delicacy styled "a valetudinarian in body and mind."[9]

Like the converging elements in a Greek tragedy, these qualities met in the affair of the Mount Vernon slaves which, at one level threw Justice Washington's basic benevolence into conflict with his hard-headed response to any suggestion of being pushed, and in a larger perspective luminously set out the dilemma of a thoroughly decent man caught in a web of. circumstances which was not made by him and which was beyond his control.

In a sense the episode began with the direction in George Washington's will that his slaves be freed upon Martha Washington's death and that this direction be "religiously fulfilled ... without evasion, neglect, or delay."[10] Needless to say, as his uncle's executor (and probably the draftsman of the document) Bushrod Washington saw that the directed emancipation was carried out. He did not regard the action as a model for himself, but he was concerned enough about slavery to be one of the organizers and the lifetime president of the American Colonization Society.

The Society attracted a variety of members who joined for a variety of reasons. In retrospect, its basic goal–the elimination of slavery from American life by voluntary emancipation of the slaves resettling them in Africa–was logistically and politically impossible. Nonetheless, it had widespread popular support. To some, it was a device to be rid of the free Negro. To others, it meant that the black man, slave or otherwise, had no place or allowance in the country. Another point of view approved the Society as the first step in rousing the slave-holder conscience. To yet another, it was a hoax and delusion, an impossible scheme lulling the conscience and preventing more fundamental reform to the extent that the epithet "colonizationalist"[11] became almost the most pejorative epithet in the abolitionist vocabulary.

If his connection with the Colonization Society was one of the less favorable developments in Justice Washington's career, his inheritance of Mount Vernon must have ranked as about the worst. The house came to him in poor condition; only one room was liveable and it was unfurnished thanks to the personal property having been disposed of by sale or legacy. But even worse was the basic economic malaise– the estate could not support its staff. Indeed just a few months before his death, George Washington had put his finger on the dilemma:

To sell the overplus I cannot, because I am principled against this kind of traffic in human species. To hire them out is almost as bad . . . What must be done? Something must or I shall be ruined.[12]

At least George Washington was a countryman and planter, but Bushrod Washington was neither; during the first twenty years of the latter's occupancy the accounts went into the red from $500 to $1,000 a year, and visiting in 1821 Justice Story commented on the "general symptoms of decay . . . (and) little effort to repair the silent ravages of time."[13] But in addition to the basic problem of costs and productivity, the Justice had to struggle with a problem that the General never had to face, and in a sense, caused–a rising insubordination on the part of the Mount Vernon slaves.

In explaining why this condition was prevalent at Mount Vernon and not at other plantations in the neighborhood, Justice Washington noted that the estate "has at times been visited by some unworthy persons; who have condescended to hold conversations with my negroes, and to impress upon their minds the belief that as the nephew of General Washington, or as president of the Colonization Society, or for other reasons, I could not hold them in bondage, and particularly that they would be free at my death."[14]

The implications of the latter phrase, even though made ten years before Nat Turner, prompted the Justice to call the slaves together in March of 1821 and tell them that he had no intention of freeing any one of them, either before or after his death. While there had been difficulty at the estate earlier including suspected arson₅ events now took a new turn as the slaves took the next word in the dialogue with their master. Three escaped during the late spring ("one₅ a valuable cook") with one making it to the northern states and two being taken on their way to Pennsylvania but at a cost to Justice Washington of $250.00.

This started an escape game that Washington could not win, and the Justice's response was the same steely inflexibility he had previously shown both Chief Justice Marshall and the Pennsylvania militia general–he arranged to sell for $10,000 the -active core of the estate work force, some 54 of around 90, to the dread destination "down the river," in this case the Red River in faraway Louisiana. Yet even here he showed how some decencies might survive the brutalities of a system for he demanded assurances from his buyers that the slaves would be kept together and moreover went to some expense in a partially successful effort in keeping families together.

And in extraordinary yet characteristic action, Justice Washington made a speech to the slaves who had been sold, and as would be the case in any group, there were those who found it politic to publicly agree with him. These were not the young for youth and insubordination seemed to run together, but "the elders (who) admitted the necessity which compelled me to part with them, and confiding in the assurances made to them by the respectable gentlemen to whom they had been sold, expressed their belief their situation would be improving."[15] Then, as the Justice saw the situation, the group moved off cheerfully and proved their unconcern by their behavior during a two-day layover in Alexandria where "an almost unlimited license (was) allowed them by their new masters."

Then the storm broke. A report from a Lees-burg paper on August 21, 1821, had it that:

"(on) Saturday last a drove of negroes, consisting of about 100 men, women, and children passed through this town for a southern destination. Fifty-four of the above unhappy wretches were sold by Judge Washington of Mount Vernon, president of the Colonization Society.[16]

A letter to a Baltimore paper added further details:

I was at Mount Vernon a few days since, and was told by some of the slaves, whose countenances were remarkably indicative of despondency, and dejection, that, more than fifty of their companions.., had been sold but a week before... One would have the poor creatures who were left, the aged and blind, had lost every friend on earth. I inquired the reason. They answered that husbands had been torn from their wives and children and that many relations were left behind. I asked an old slave if he were living at Mount Vernon when George Washington died. His answer was "no sir, nor so lucky–I should not be a slave now if I had. The reader ought to know that George Washington set all his slaves free at his death, and that Judge Washington is his nephew.[17]

Hezikiah Niles, of the Washington Weekly Register, reprinted the two reports and added his own comment: "Judge Washington, certainly, has as much right to sell his slaves as any other . . . but there is something excessively revolting in the fact that a herd of them should be driven from Mount Vernon, sold by the nephew and principal heir of GEORGE WASHINGTON, as he would dispose of so many hogs or horned cattle; violating every tie that fastens on the human heart, and dissolving the connection of husband and wife, mother and child! We do hope that there is some mistake about the matter."[18]

Washington was not a man to take these judgments in silence, and quickly accepted an offer of the Baltimore Federal Republican "for the purpose of refuting certain illiberal remarks which have appeared in other journals of the day." While irritated at what he regarded as the covert attack on the Colonization Society, his basic response involved a more fundamental point where he regarded the Register as containing an "implied censure" of his conduct:

I take the liberty, on my own behalf and on that of my southern fellow citizens, to enter a solemn protest against the propriety of any person questioning our right; legal or moral, to dispose of property which is secured to us by sanctions equally valid with those by which we hold every other species of property . . . I acknowledge, at the same time that if in the exercise of it, I have disregarded the dictates of humanity, or unnecessarily given pain to those who were affected by it, my conduct is justly open to public reprehension.[19]

He then passed to particulars and was particularly incensed with what he saw as the gratuitous intermeddling which he regarded as the cause of all his troubles:

How correct it was, in the person who made the statement, to visit Mount Vernon

in my absence and there to hold conversations with my negroes upon such delicate topic... I submit.., to the public judgment to decide. But I surely have a right to complain, that he not only gave credit himself to the assertions of such informers but that he would publish them to the world as facts, without first applying to me to admit, deny, or explain them.

He then gave his principal explanation–that he had not "voluntarily" separated families and detailed his efforts and expenses to keep families together. Unfortunately, his explanations of dollars-and-cents were not calculated to lull criticism and still less were his irate and insensitive asides–that the United States was in large part a nation of immigrants to which the parting of parent and child and even of husband and wife were matters of daily instance. Still less was his sarcastic rejoinder that "I have never heard a sigh or a complaint from the parents of two of the most valuable servants I ever owned, that their sons had abandoned them, and my service, and sought new habitations in the northern states, where they now are."

Then noting and laying to one side, "the insinuation that, because General Washington thought it proper to free his slaves, his nephew ought to do likewise," the Justice got to the three reasons for his decision–the losing economics of Mount Vernon, the insubordination of the slaves, and the "last motive"–an anticipation of the escape to the north of any slaves who were able to do so.

Niles denied any censure of the Justice by implication or otherwise, pointing out that the bulk of the reports in his own paper, including the current story were but reprints from other publications. He found it pleasant to observe that Justice Washington did not think himself superior to a trial at the bar of public opinion, or "if he has succeeded in vindicating himself from the charges preferred against him, as many think he has (considering his peculiar situation), no one will rejoice at it more than myself, on account of the name which he bears and as the proprietor of Mount Vernon–where the ashes of the father of his country repose."

Yet this ambiguous comment was preceded by an equally equivocal one which might be taken as a disclaimer for the content of reprinted material or, possibly on the Justice's action in selling the slaves. For after noting that Justice Washington "though a Judge, he has not rendered justice," Niles also asserted, "I am not a little surprised that the Judge did not act upon the facts as presented to him; but it only goes to show the truth of what I always believed, that even judges of the Supreme Court of the United States may commit errors."[20]

Endnotes