His Excellency_George Washington by Joseph J. Ellis

Author:Joseph J. Ellis [Ellis, Joseph J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: military, United States, History, Generals, Colonial Period (1600-1775), Presidents - United States, Historical, General, Washington; George, Presidents & Heads of State, Biography, Revolutionary Period (1775-1800), Presidents, Generals - United States, Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781400032532
Amazon: 1400032539
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2005-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

THIS SPECIES OF PROPERTY

IN DECEMBER 1785, Washington received a letter calculated to focus his mind on another worrisome association even more damaging to his abiding public image than the Society of the Cincinnati. It came from Robert Pleasants, a Virginia Quaker who had recently emancipated all eighty of his own slaves and minced no words in instructing Washington to do the same: “How strange then it must appear to impartial thinking men, to be informed, that many who were warm advocates for that noble cause during the War, are now sitting down in a state of ease, dissipation and extravigence on the labour of slaves? And most especially that thou . . . should now withold that inestimable blessing from any who are absolutely in thy power, & after the Right of freedom, is acknowledged to be the natural & unalienable Right of all mankind.” Pleasants somewhat gratuitously suggested that Washington had probably been too preoccupied with the inevitable details of his retirement routine to think about “a subject so Noble and interesting,” because once he did think about it, his response must be as self-evident as those truths that Jefferson had enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

Pleasants did not stop there. He concluded with a little lecture designed to strike Washington, otherwise invulnerable, in his most vulnerable spot. If he acted decisively at this propitious moment by freeing his slaves, it would crown his career and assure his place in the history books. But if he faltered and lost this opportunity, the failure would haunt his reputation forever: “For not withstanding thou art now receiving the tribute of praise from a grateful people, the time is coming when all actions shall be weighed in an equal balance, and undergo an impartial explanation.” How sad it would then be to read that the great hero of American independence, “the destroyer of tyranny and oppression,” had failed the final test by holding “a number of People in absolute slavery, who were by nature equally entitled to freedom as himself.”28

Washington did not answer Pleasants’s letter. He was not accustomed to being the butt of lectures, especially from strangers dripping with moral superiority, and most especially from Quakers, whose pristine consciences had obliged them to sit out the war as spectators. Nevertheless, the letter could not be summarily dismissed as a mere irritation. It linked the subject Washington cared about most, posterity’s judgment, with the subject he had come to recognize as the central contradiction of the revolutionary era. Which is to say that Pleasants was incorrect in assuming that Washington had given little thought to the question of slavery. To be sure, the subject remained the proverbial ghost at the banquet, so obviously and ominously a violation of all the Revolution stood for that no one felt free to talk about it openly, lest the guests at the table transform the polite conversation into a shouting match. Despite the code of silence and circumspection, there is considerable evidence that slavery was very much on Washington’s mind during his retirement.

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