Meeting George Washington

George Washington rides out.

We've parked our rig on a hill overlooking the capital. We took advantage of our location to visit the home of George Washington at Mount Vernon in Virginia. And we took, among other things, a slave tour. We were left in awe about this rich farmer who managed more than 300 slaves by the end of his life. Our tour guide, a Virginia gentleman named Allen Sandler, did a super job of shining light into the darkness of slave life.
George, like nine other presidents of the U.S., first inherited his father's slaves when the old man died when George was aged 12. When he married Martha, a widow of one of the richest men in the the commonwealth, he picked up about 200 slaves through her dead husband's estate. Interesting to us was that he did not have any right to sell the slaves he had acquired through marriage.
After the war that resulted in independence for the colonies he began to rethink the moral issues of owning other men and women. He decided he never would sell his slaves on the auction block. And that, in itself, created a huge problem for him. It meant he had to feed and clothe these people as their number increased. Remember, when a slave got to be too old for work, you had to effectively put them out to pasture but still feed and clothe them. At one point he complained that the number of slaves could bankrupt him. The entire slave culture was a no-win situation. You had totally unmotivated workers who spent more time trying to figure how to avoid work instead of trying to accomplish tasks. They also spent much of their time trying the cheat and steal from their master because morale was not at highest priority. Then you had to have a class of overseers to push and prod them.
He actually included in his will that his slaves would be freed upon the death of Martha, assuming she outlived him. She in fact lived for more than two years after he died and told her friends that she lived in fear because so many slaves were awaiting her death. Could she really trust Lilly, the cook, for example, or the black ladies who cleaned her house?
We met up with a black re-enactor who was George Washington's riding aide. He did a grand job of explaining his life at the side of his master. I asked him why he felt loyalty to his master and he made an elegant and moving response about believing that his master's leading of the fight for freedom was like a small snowball at the top of the mountain. He said many of the slaves believed this snowball's fall down the mountain would eventually encompass the needs of the slaves. He said he and they didn't realize it would take 63 years after his master's death before the Emancipation Proclamation would be signed by President Lincoln.
We wandered through Mount Vernon, a sprawling home that is quite spectacular. Washington designed it and redesigned through the years. It looks as though it is built of stone, the blocks being beveled and snugly placed row upon row. It turned out, however, that the huge home is built of wood. The wood was cut and beveled and then was varnished and painted. While the paint was still wet, sand was sprinkled on the wood resulting in the fake stone look.
It is situated on a bluff overlooking the Potomac River. It sits on around 5,000 acres. The land mostly was used to grow tobacco – the only crop that could be exported to Europe back then. But George changed that over to wheat and grains because he built a distillery and he could supply his own ingredients for the booze.
But it was labor intensive to farm that many acres in those good old days before the tractor. Hence the need for the Africans.
He also brought in many white indentured servants and Mr. Lee, his riding aide, made it very clear that these indentured servants were similar in many ways to slaves. They signed a contract that paid their passage over and they agreed to work for the master for seven years. But, once here, you began to owe your life to the company store and that, along with transgressions, extended the contract year after year. So the Irish and the Scots who worked his farm were there, effectively, for life.
George brought in a gardener from Scotland and he oversaw a large number of slaves because the master liked fancy gardens and kept a substantial vegetable patch. He also had trees planted, some of which stand majestically along the approach to the house to this day.
His greatest contributions, I think, were twofold. After winning the war of independence he resigned his commission instead of following the advice of some of his officers who suggested he should name himself king of the colonies. And, when he was elected the first president, he ran for only two terms. This set the precedent for all other presidents.
Jo was most impressed with a small exhibit in one of the museums. Inside a low-light room, inside a circular case, were his false teeth. They were not made of wood, despite the circulated myth. These fine choppers were made from human teeth, along with pieces of bone from a cow. They were set in a plate of lead so it is a bit of a miracle that the lead didn't affect his brain.