The Black Presidential Nightmare: African-Americans and Presidents, 1789–2016

By Christopher Brian Booker

The Black Presidential Nightmare is the only book that discusses the major events and social and political forces impacting each American president from the perspective of African American interests. Biographies of all the American presidents are presented within the context of the history that shaped their actions.

The Black Presidential Nightmare answers many long-standing questions of black history, including the following: What president has done the most to advance the rights and interest of black people? Which presidents had the most liberal racial attitudes toward African Americans? When and under what circumstances did blacks switch allegiance from the Republican Party of Lincoln to the Democratic Party? Which antebellum presidents were slave owners, and how did they square that with their other views on human rights and justice?

Long-standing controversies among historianssuch as Abraham Lincolns views on slavery, race, and civil rights, and Theodore Roosevelts role in the Brownsville Affairare illuminated.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524584542

Christopher Brian Booker

Christopher Brian Booker, born in Detroit, Michigan, has degrees from Wayne State University and the University of Michigan in sociology. His previous books include African-Americans & the Presidency (Franklin-Watts, 2000) and 'I Will Wear No Chain!': A Social History of African-American Males (Praeger, 2000). Currently he resides near Washington, DC and edits the African-Americans & the Presidency website.

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Copyright © 2017 by Christopher Brian Booker.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 03/31/2017

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Contents

Chapter One: The Founding Fathers and African Americans in the Post-Colonial Era

Chapter Two: John Quincy Adams, the Jackson Era and the Slave Power

Chapter Three: The Growing Crisis of Slavery and American Presidents (1840-1861)

Chapter Four: The Civil War and Reconstruction

Chapter Five: Vacillation and Disappointment in the Post-Reconstruction and Progressive Eras

Chapter Six:The Great Transformation: Black-Presidential Relations in Transition

Chapter Seven: The American Presidency and the Civil Rights Movement

Chapter Eight: The Presidencies of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford: White Backlash in the White House

Chapter Nine: Republican Retrenchment and Black Resistance: The Reagan-Bush Era

Chapter Ten: Bottoming Out With Bush: A Post-Civil Rights Nadir?

Chapter Eleven: The Victory of Barack Obama: An African-American Grasping the Presidential Wreath

Dedication

Dedicated to my late wife Portia James (1953-2015) whose love, beauty, strength, and intelligence always shone through and her mother, Jewell Yarbrough whose love and support were neverending.

-Chapter One-

The Founding Fathers and African Americans in the Post-Colonial Era

Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest. —Thomas Jefferson 1

The Great Fear

T he dreadful specter of black slave revolt was particularly evident among white Americans during the colonial period. The black struggle for freedom had quickened its pace as the new ideology of liberty, spawned by the American fight against British colonial rulers, permeated the thirteen colonies of North America. In the urban areas especially, Africans, enslaved and free, made conscious efforts to take advantage of both this new ideological atmosphere and the rupture in white unity. This stimulated an upsurge in actions aimed at gaining freedom. On January 6, 1773, Africans petitioned Governor Hutchinson of Massachusetts plainly protesting the fact that every day of their Lives [are] imbittered (sic) with this most intollerable (sic) reflection, that, let their behavior be what it will, nor their Children to all Generation, shall ever be able to do, or to possess and enjoy any Thing, no not even life itself… The enslaved blacks decried this legal and official social status which attempted to reduce them to the level of beasts. We have no property! We have no Wives! No Children! We have City! No Country!. . . 2 Reflecting their consciousness of the prevailing white hypocrisy, another letter to the representatives of the fledging House of Representatives let them know that black people expected much of people who stood so firmly against British attempts to enslave them. It asked, at the minimum that Africans… [be allowed] one day a week to work for themselves, to enable them to earn money with which they could buy their freedom from slavery. 3

In 1774, Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, the second United States’ president, wrote her husband expressing fears about a conspiracy of the negroes in town. This conspiracy involved petitioning the governor for freedom. 4 More anti-slavery than her husband, she expressed her heartfelt desire that there was not a slave in the province; it always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have. 5 Such statements make it clear, rare as they were, that at least a minority of colonial Americans were conscious of the moral magnitude of the evil of slavery. Merged with these feelings were profound fears of black vengeance which many, including Thomas Jefferson, occasionally stated felt would be justified. Jefferson and his Virginian contemporaries were aware of the consequences of the constant black thirst for freedom witnessed by scenes such as those which roiled nearby Alexandria where several white overseers died in 1767 after being poisoned by black slaves. 6

By the time the American struggle against the British had grown into one of revolutionary proportions, it had become abundantly clear that blacks hungered for freedom. While the consciousness of the hypocrisy of fighting for freedom while enslaving hundreds of thousands existed among the Founding Fathers to varying degrees, they endeavored by every conceivable means to invent a reasonable justification for this contradiction. Many were aware of the full extent that slavery and slaves were responsible for their prosperity and that this relative affluence was the basis of their own lofty social status was also clear to some who struggled with the very idea of it. Patrick Henry once stated that [E]very thinking honest man rejects slavery in Speculation, how few in practice? Would anyone believe that I am Master of slaves of my own purchase? I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living without them; I will not, I cannot justify it. 7 Others thought it strange too. How could Americans treat Negroes ‘as a better kind of cattle… while they are bawling about the Rights of human nature wondered one English official. 8 During the 1770s, Samuel Johnson wondered aloud, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes? 9

The answer to this oft-repeated question lies in the course of the American revolutionary movement for independence. The movement for independence from Britain quickened after the Stamp Act was passed and mass mobilization emerged in response to it followed by the subsequent emergence of the Sons of Liberty as a political force in several colonies. An inter-colony leadership was forged later through the experiences of the non-importation movement of 1768-70, and the resistance against the Tea Act a few years later. At the level of the masses, Boston’s lower classes and social segments rose up spontaneously throughout the 18th century in response to food shortages. Within this context, the British policy of impressment added an additional powerful irritant becoming a focal point for mass anger for decades prior to the American Revolution.

The conservative ideological basis of the emerging revolutionary movement was loosely termed Real Whiggery or Real Whig ideology taking its inspiration from the British Revolution of 1688-89. 10 This philosophy, which emphasized a well-ordered society of laws, was hardly an ideal breeding ground for the emergence of abolitionist ideas. Yet, the imposition of the Stamp Act gave rise to an inter-colonial movement, the Sons of Liberty, that attracted a broad segment of society to its ranks. 11 Fully prepared to use violent resistance to ensure that the Stamp Tax would fail to be heeded, they vowed to not be enslaved by any power on Earth, without opposing force to force. 12 Meanwhile, the stationing of a standing army of British soldiers in the American colonies after 1763 grated on the colonists nerves and pride setting the stage for further conflict, on one hand, and, on the other, the specter of abolitionism weighed heavily on colonial rulers’ minds in the wake of the Somerset decision. 13

Within this context of turmoil, the Great Fear reasserted itself among the colonists. A 1775 measure introduced into the House of Commons by Edmund Burke to emancipate all slaves in North America had the effect of inducing panic among colonists reinforcing the feeling that the mother country would engage in the most dastardly act they could conceive. The tremendous anxiety was due the fear that the conflict would give rise to a slave rebellion as well as call into question their slaveownership. Their justification and fear of slave rebellion was tied into the view of Sam Adams and other revolutionaries view that a people cannot be reduced to slavery without deserving it–a view that also resonated with many contemporary black leaders. Despite the perception that blacks collectively accepted slavery, an element in their web of misperceptions that justified slavery, the nightmare of the American revolutionaries was that a massive slave uprising would lead to their defeat. 14 Merged with their views that blacks were not to be trusted, this prepared them for their anger and outrage at Lord Dunmore’s Declaration months later as well their fear of armed blacks participating into the revolutionary struggle. 15

Crispus Attucks who eventually became a celebrated symbol of the American Revolution is an example of this suspicion. Attucks, whose free name was Michael Johnson stood six-feet-two inches, a relatively tall height for the era, and was widely recognized in town, was eventually whitewashed by the revolution’s propagandists. Early on, however, he was vilified in a manner more typical of the colonial era’s attitude toward individual blacks. One minister commented upon seeing his funeral procession that Attucks was altogether rowdy and should have been strangled long before he was born. 16 Samuel Adams’ Gazette made use of popular racial stereotypes and displayed the anti-black attitudes typical of the era. Adams wrote warily of the allegiance of blacks to the colonists’ cause: It is well known that the Negroes of this town have been familiar with the soldiers; and that some of them have been tampered with to cut their master’s throats… . 17 At the same time, Adams’ paper was silent on the petitions presented to the Assembly where he himself presided. Future president John Adams and the others felt that the unity between the northern and southern colonies would wither if anti-slavery measures were adopted. One Boston radical wrote to John Adams in 1771 that if the Assembly passed an anti-slavery measure, it should have a bad effect on the Union of the Colonies. 18

James Madison was nothing if not consistent over the course of his long career in his advocacy of silence on the question of slavery. Writing to his best friend, William Bradford, Jr. in 1774, Madison described a recent Virginia slave conspiracy to revolt spurred by the prospect of the arrival of the British army. Madison wrote Bradford that, It is prudent such things should be concealed as well as suppressed. 19 He was alarmed since he believed that black slaves were the colonists’ Achilles heel. Madison wrote:

It is imagined our Governor has been tampering with the Slaves & that he has it in contemplation to make great Use of them in case of a civil war in this province. To say the truth, that is the only part in which this Colony is vulnerable; if we should be subdued, we shall fall like Achilles by the hand of one that knows that secret… . 20

Historian Patricia Bradley wrote in this regard:

Both by formal action in colonial legislatures and by informal self-censorship in the colonial press, patriots sought to mute the news of slave insurrection lest the contagion of liberty be misinterpreted by bondsmen and women as having something to do with them… 21

Hardly the enlightened obfuscation described by some observers, Madison’s attitudes and actions directly clashed with African American interests that slavery be abolished at the earliest date possible. 22 How could African-American interests or those of the American nation as a whole be advanced when Madison and the other southern representatives enforced the silence on slavery? Madison, Jefferson, and the Virginia slaveowners in general, stood opposed to the international slave trade in large part because Virginia had become a profitable slave breeding state. They and their fellow breeders stood to reap tens of thousands from breeding and selling human beings for the internal slave trade.

An Era of African-American Progress

A fter two delegations of Quakers presented petitions to Congress in early February 1790 calling for the immediate end to the African slave trade, congressmen were stunned. This intrusion was met with overwhelming resentment by the congressmen as it put certain slaveowning politicians in an especially awkward position. Southern representatives shared Madison’s attitude that anything directly involving slavery should not be brought up—the whole issue should never be raised. Representative James Jackson of Georgia, however, spoke with emotion as he maintained that slavery was part of God’s will. Citing several biblical passages, he nevertheless stressed the South’s economic dependence on slavery. 23 Madison, sympathetic to the feelings underlying Jackson’s pro slavery statements nevertheless strongly felt that the Georgian was shamefully indecent preferring his more discreet strategy of silence. 24 Madison’s view was that Jackson was overreacting to the Quaker petitions contending that a better strategy would be to hear them but then dump them into a committee’s black hole where they would languish and eventually die. If the petitions were quietly shelved, no controversy would occur, and, as Madison stated, no notice would be taken of it out of doors. 25 Madison’s contribution on this issue was that he consistently found ways to try to maintain the unity of the white Americans by avoiding any confrontation over the issue of slavery.

Historian Roger Wilkins acknowledged the limitations of Madison’s achievement:

In a superficial sense, Mason and Madison had succeeded: the words slave and slavery did not sully the nation’s basic charter. The founding fathers had their fig leaf of decency. But the underlying reason for their reticence–their shame–endured. Their political genius had failed to address the enormous horror of the massive theft of life, hope, and labor that had provided a substantial part of the wealth, bravery, and brainpower that made their freedom possible… 26

Slaveholders and their representatives vainly tried to respond to the rapidly changing situation by aggressively proclaiming themselves as enlightened revolutionaries. Virginia’s George Mason of Gunston Hall, styling himself as a progressive revolutionary despite his slaveownership, was charged with the drafting of a declaration of rights. The first section of the draft contained the paragraphs: That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. At least one individual in Virginia’s slave society recognizing the contradiction, Robert Nicholas, the colony’s treasurer, noted that if this passed it would imply a break with slavery. To him this would throw society into desperate straits, including convulsions and upheaval. Nicholas proposed inserting a clause that would subtly exclude blacks from this formulation. Only those who entered into a state of society would enjoy these rights. Later, the Virginia House of Delegates considered a plan to offer a slave for any man who enlisted in the Virginia armed forces. The slaves would be expropriated from large slaveowners who would be given an IOU. Madison strenuously objected to this plan arguing that it would be better to free slaves to be soldiers in the revolutionary army. In addition, he argued that this was something that would be consistent with the principles of the revolution, It wd. certainly be more consonant to the principles of liberty which ought never to be lost sight of in a contest for liberty. 27

Virginians established a network of slave patrols to prevent blacks from reaching Dunmore’s forces. Still, some one thousand slaves dodged colonialist patrols to reach the British where, tragically, smallpox drastically reduced their numbers. 28 As did southerners some eight decades later, slaveholders registered shock upon witnessing the favorable response Dunmore’s proclamation received from blacks after having deluded themselves that blacks were content in slavery. 29 Yet, the American colonists freely spoke of the horror of being reduced to slavery by the British. John Dickinson, the largest slaveowner in Philadelphia in 1768 termed taxation without representation a force making white Americans slaves. 30 Another prominent early American, Joseph Quincy, lamented in 1774 with grief that Britons are our oppressors… we are slaves. George Washington himself, who knew much about slavery, said that the British were endeavoring by every piece of art and despotism to fix the shackles of slavery upon us. 31

The men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution could not consider the question of slavery without pondering the very basis of their political and social status. Some of the significance of race during the American Revolution can be vividly seen in the very manner of recruitment into the Revolutionary Army. White men were enticed to join by the promise of the gift of an enslaved African via Sumter’s Law, a practice which helped to broaden the direct white interests in perpetuating black slavery. 32

Another prominent American of the era, Pierce Butler, who arrived in America in 1767 from Ireland, benefited from the generosity accorded white settlers. Obtaining a plentiful supply of African slaves from marriage and purchase, Butler took full advantage of a pre-Revolutionary War policy of the South Carolina colony that granted 50 acres of land for each member of settler families. Since slaves were legally considered family Butler received some 500 acres as he had eight slaves and a wife. 32 The slaveowner, who branded his slaves with his initials in accordance with the prevailing custom of the day, was politically active and aware of the current developments that impacted upon slavery. In 1787, he took his most keen interest, maintaining the enslavement of blacks, to the Constitutional Convention as a delegate from South Carolina. 33

Following the outbreak of the Revolution, Butler and his fellow South Carolina slaveowners were too fearful of slave revolt to fulfill the state’s manpower obligations to provide troops to join the fight against the British. Pierce Butler deemed it improper to leave his plantation without sufficient number of white men to put down black revolts. Soon Butler and the other slaveowners had another worry, Britain’s Lord Dunmore (John Murray, Earl of Dunmore), following a series of threats and countermeasures by the colonists, issued a proclamation that caught Africans’ interest. He promised freedom for all blacks who would fight with the British. Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment was formed by hundreds of Virginian blacks who had flocked to the British. This new reality dramatically increased the fear that haunted early Americans.

What was perceived as a betrayal of racial unity on the part of Lord Dunmore fired the anger of self-stated anti-slavery slaveholders such as the revolutionary Patrick Henry who termed the proclamation fatal to the publick Safety, and called for stricter steps to keep blacks from fleeing or rising. 34 Edward Rutledge told the Continental Congress that the proclamation of Dunmore was the factor forcing an eternal separation between Great Britain and the colonies 35 For young James Monroe, Dunmore’s move angered him so much he dropped out of school and joined the Virginia Infantry. In South Carolina, rumors that the British had delivered muskets at Charles Town’s harbor for an insurrection amongst the slaves led to the hanging and burning of a free black pilot, Thomas Jeremiah. 36 Gerald Horne noted that his execution by rebels was an unmistakable indicator that Africans generally would not be embraced by the new republic… .

Events in 1763 added to the increasing lack of confidence in the British with regard to American colonist interests. That year, marked by riots in London, heightened Indian resistance under the leadership of Pontiac and the use of smallpox as a weapon against it, led to the proclamation of George Grenville closing the trans-Appalachian West to white settlement. Indians’ advances. 37

In the mind of the Americans the British were not responding to their most crucial needs especially the great fears embodied in Indian resistance and black revolt, and, in some instances, on some issues, betraying their interests and collaborating with their enemies. The divide between the colonists and Britain was widened by the Stono revolt in 1739, the Battle of Cartagena in 1741, and other events that highlighted the low status of the white colonials in the British rulers perception and their lack of commitment to slavery in North America. The Somerset case’s impact, the British role in the struggle against Spanish-black encroachment from Florida and, relatedly, the subsequent failure of the creation of Georgia as a white buffer state heightened the hostility of the colonists against the British. In addition, there were financial factors involved that served to widen the gulf between American colonists and the British. A number of the Americans were heavily in debt to British firms, particularly those who dealt in the purchase and sale of slaves. Moreover, in the aftermath of the seven years war, Britain made it more difficult for white settlers to settle in western lands infuriating speculators especially those in Virginia that included Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. 38

Colonial society’s collective and individual perception of blacks was heavily impacted by the early events of the American Revolution, especially the offer of freedom issued by Lord Dunmore. It was proceeded by a series of escalating confrontations between the British and the colonists in Virginia. 39 Gary Nash noted an incident during American Revolution when in November 1775 after issued his famous decree guaranteeing freedom to slaves and indentured servants who left their masters and joined the British armed forces. Reportedly, this news travelled so quickly that within a week the behavior of blacks in Philadelphia was influenced by it. A local newspaper reported that the remarks of one white ‘gentlewoman,’ who felt insulted by a passing black man. A few days later, the Evening Post reported that a white gentlewoman walking near Christ Church who responded to a perceived insult by a passing black man only to receive an even more disrespectful retort, Stay you d[amne]d white bitch ’till Lord Dunmore and his black regiment come, and then we will see who is to take the wall." He was chased by two white men who overheard his brief but angry tirade, but he escaped into the darkness. 40 The desperate act by Lord Dunmore was seen as a fortunate once-in-a-lifetime opportunity by the era’s African-Americans. Almost immediately eight of the twenty-seven slaves who were held at the elegant Williamsburg mansion of Peyton Randolph, the speaker of the Virginia House of Burgesses, escaped. 41

Richard Henry Lee declared that except for a few Scotch Lord Dunmore’s outrageous betrayal had united every man in the Colony. 42 From Mount Vernon Lund Washington wrote to his uncle George Washington after Dunmore issued what the former described as his much dreaded proclamation. His fears and insecurities were palpable. . . . What effect it will have upon those sort of people I cannot tell… . Lund Washington was, however, fully prepared to deal with those slaves who chose to try to reach Dunmore. . . .(H)owever I am determined, that if any of them Create any confusion to make & [an] example of him, Sears who is at worck here says there is not a man of them, but woud leave us, if they believe’d the coud make there Escape–Tom Spears Excepted–& yet they have no fault to find [.] Liberty is sweet. 43

But the British returned in force in April 1781 and entered Mount Vernon and left with seventeen valuable African American slaves. The Marquis de Lafayette who was the commander of American troops in Virginia at the time wrote a letter to Washington on April 23, 1781 writing, [W]hen the enemy came to your house many Negroes deserted to them… . What troubled Lafayette was not this but the welcome Lund Washington gave the British, he fed them. 44 Lund Washington also ventured aboard the British vessel to ask that they surrender, in George Washington’s words, my Negroes. About one-half of the people were recaptured by Washington. 45

For the nine months that some ten to twelve thousand British and Hessian troops occupied Philadelphia merely approaching British soldiers stationed on their block could be the ticket to liberty for the enslaved. 46 Others in the nearby countryside made their way into the city to join the British forces. The feeling was not only that the British offered the individual slave liberty, the widespread opinion among local blacks was that a British victory would mean the downfall of slavery in the American colonies. Thus, joining the British seemed, for a brief period, tantamount to joining an army of liberation. Given the charged political and social atmosphere, where the concepts of liberty and freedom flowed freely, this seemed a reasonable expectation. 47 By the spring of 1778, Later several thousand African-Americans fled with the fleeing British troops as they evacuated the city. By 1783 only four hundred Philadelphia blacks remained enslaved as over twice as many either secured their freedom or fled during the previous six years. 48

For African-Americans it was an age of a general and searching inquiry into the equity of old and established customs, a period when a moral earthquake had awakened the slumber of ages, according to an 1862 interview of William Douglass the first historian of the African Church. 49 The embryonic black institution, allowed a degree of independence, was resented by many of the city’s white leaders. Benjamin Rush’s aid to the black church was criticized while even local Quakers revealed that they would rather directly help blacks themselves rather than see blacks develop the institutional capacity to help themselves. 50 Interestingly, both Thomas Jefferson and George Washington contributed funds to build the African Church of Philadelphia which, following an arduous campaign to raise funds led by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, finally opened its doors in 1794. 51

Such was the thrust for black freedom in the Revolutionary Era that historian Gary Nash terms it the largest slave uprising in our history. Those liberated then worked to lay the basis in the north for the development of the African American national community. 52 Prophetically, Absalom Jones himself warned America of the impending doom that would result from the perpetuation of slavery. Five years after the ratification of the Constitution the same Jones and Allen pointed to the raging war of insurrection in what was then called St. Domingue and warned that the sin of slavery would bring rivers of blood if not corrected and appealed: If you love your children, if you love your country, if you love the God of love, clear your hands from slaves, burden not your children or country with them… . 53 Some sixty-nine years later, within the lifetimes of many of those living, the Civil War broke out.

Increasing political and military conflict between Americans and Britain created new opportunities for blacks within the colonies to obtain their freedom. During this period the degree of unity among Africans in America increased as the result of the multiplying efforts to overthrow the slave system and as old ethnic African divisions evaporated. Acculturation in America created over the generations a core of African American culture that the enchained newcomers could readily embrace. 54 Social status divisions, already levelled amid the general enslavement of Africans, faded. Political organization and the development of social institutions accompanied a rise of black consciousness in the urban areas that fueled a growing determination to smash slavery in the early American nation. Liberating their enslaved brethren became a sacred cause of the first leaders of this new emergent people, African-Americans, as they confronted slaveholder-politicians who also boasted a rhetoric of freedom and democracy. Early American presidents reflected the contemporary state of the young nation’s economy, social system, and political landscape all shaped by the ongoing technological progress and the struggles making for the American Revolution. It is important to remember that their individual presidencies occurred as rapid technological, demographic and social changes were transforming the initial states and territories that now form the United States.

President George Washington and Slavery

W hile George Washington played with black slave children on his father’s Northern Neck Virginia plantation, he and his playmates were separated when he became older in order that he could become accustomed to his future role as slavemaster and they their future role as lifelong slaves. 55 In comparison to other settlers, most of whom were European-born, the child’s American roots were deep. His great-great-grandfather, an Anglican clergyman, was stripped of his parish during the Puritan Revolution and, later, religious persecution led his great-grandfather, John Washington, to leave England for America. Later, George Washington’s father, Augustine received a modest inheritance by contemporary standards of the settler elite, eleven thousand acres, taking advantage of the huge land grants given to well-connected members of the contemporary elite. During a period when land was intermittently taken from the indigenous population, huge land grants to politically-favored members of the settler elite were not uncommon. Marrying Jane Butler, the 16-year-old daughter of another wealthy settler, he was well prepared to enhance his wealth from an early age. By speculating in land, acquiring sinecures (appointments to government offices that had nominal salaries), raising tobacco, and working slaves, and, discovering iron ore on his land, he grew even more wealthy. 56

After Augustine married again following his first wife’s death, George Washington was born February 22, 1732 to Mary Ball, the daughter of another wealthy Virginia planter. In a manner fitting for one destined to become the first United States president, Washington grew up in a prosperous, upwardly mobile family that took full advantage of the forced labor of slaves and the rapidly expanding pool of available land. By Washington’s birth, his family owned roughly twenty slaves and possessed several thousand acres of land. Despite this, the family lived in a small two-room house until during George’s early childhood the family moved to more comfortable living quarters. Tragedy struck, however, when his father Augustine died at the relatively young age of forty-nine. Young George was raised by his brother Lawrence, who also died young leaving Washington Mount Vernon. Later he was heavily influenced by his powerful neighbors, the Fairfax family headed by Lord Fairfax.

Colonel or Lord Fairfax became his mentor and patron during a period when Fairfax possessed some six millions acres of land and often doled it out to favored settlers. George was an adolescent when Fairfax offered to support his effort to obtain a commission in the Royal Navy, but the Washington family decided against it. 57 Later, his opportunity to launch his military career came after Governor Dinwiddie received orders from England to send a messenger who would lead an armed force to the Lake Erie region to inform the French that the territory belonged to the British. Washington volunteered to be that messenger that would stop the displacement of British settlers from the area. At age twenty-one, the lanky youth took the task and achieved a measure of fame by writing a narrative of his adventures in Indian territory that was published in several newspapers in America and Britain. Washington’s force constructed a fort in the area and prepared for an undeclared war against the French. During this initial combat, Washington found the sound of whistling bullets, charming proudly taking on a name his great-grandfather had earned from Indians during the Indian War of 1676, Conotocarious, which meant town-taker or devourer of villages. 58 The Washington-led forces, however, were later decisively defeated by the French. After his surrender, the French generously allowed Washington to depart for Virginia. At age twenty-two had he not been politically connected, this disaster would have spelled the end of his military and political career.

Master Washington: A Typically Cruel Slavemaster Increasingly Conscious of his Global Image

G eorge Washington relied upon tried and true methods of slave management prior to the Revolution and prospered financially as a result of their use. Later, however, the impact of his celebrity and image as a world-class democratic liberator helped transform him into a slaveholder whose actions were tempered by the fear of negative publicity. An internationally-renown figure, he became conscious of his role as a symbol of the American Revolution and the young American nation. Washington’s effort to transform himself into a humane slaveholder eventually ran aground as he reaffirmed for himself and others of his class the notion that a kinder and gentler slaveholder would soon encounter financial difficulty. With the fear of beatings and the threats of being shipped far away from their family and friends removed, the system of forced labor broke down. 59

By the end of his life, Washington vacillated between trying to be a considerate and moderate slaveholder and the one he was raised to be, the typical profit-driven slaveowner who fully accepted the routine cruelty of the system. At the time of his return to civilian status Washington owned forty-nine slaves, a modest number by the standards of the slaveowning elite of the time. 60 In 1752, roughly a quarter century before the American Revolution, he gained possession of the 2,650-acre Mount Vernon estate after the death of his half-brother Lawrence. 61 In 1759 his marriage to Martha Dandridge Custis proved beneficial to his property holdings. The wealthiest widow in all of Virginia, Martha Custis, had inherited one hundred slaves and six thousand acres from her planter husband. This dramatically expanded the number of slaves under his ownership and management. 62 Washington, who had a reputation for extravagance, was at least in part attracted to Martha Custis because of her fabulous wealth. 63

Washington constantly sought to augment his workforce of slaves during the late colonial period. He often travelled to the Maryland side of the Potomac to purchase slaves for the least expensive price possible. Washington paid taxes on forty-nine slaves in 1760, seventy-eight in 1765, eighty-seven in 1770, one hundred thirty-five in 1775, and two hundred sixteen in 1786. By 1799, Washington had three hundred seventeen slaves spread over five plantations. 64

Although Washington played with black slaves as a child, he displayed a marked callousness toward blacks, regarding them as property to be bought and sold for the highest profit. Any hint of a desire for liberty among the Africans that Washington claimed ownership over was severely punished. One slave Tom was sent to the West Indies to be sold. Washington’s letter to Captain Josiah Thompson read:

Sir, with this letter comes a Negro (Tom) which I beg the favor of you to sell, in any of the Islands you may go to, for whatever he will fetch, and bring me in return from him:

1 hoghead of best molasses

1 barrel of limes, if good and cheap

1 pot of tamarinds containing about ten pounds

2 small ditto of mixed sweetmeats, about five pounds each.

And the residue, much or little, in good old spirits 65

Washington described his African captive as both a rogue and a runaway, commenting that he was by no means unique in this respect, indicating his awareness of the strength of the drive for liberty among the human beings he enslaved. Washington was solely concerned with the price his captive would command on the market stressing that Tom was exceedingly strong and healthy, and good at the hoe, having management skills as a foreman. He warned Captain Thompson, however, that he should be sure to keep him handcuffed until he reached the sea. 66

Early in his slaveholding career, there is scant evidence that Washington’s conscience concerning slavery troubled him. Indeed, his anxieties centered more on the profits he would be able to earn through slave labor, slave purchase, and slave sales. There is little evidence that he was especially kind to his slaves, and he complained occasionally of their insolence and general resistance. Washington’s behavior toward the slaves he owned was not exceptional but within the range of ordinary practices of slaveowners of the era. In the middle of at least one winter, for example, black children on the Washington plantation did not have shirts to wear. Often the blacks on his plantation were without blankets in freezing weather, unless Washington calculated that their illness could significantly reduce his earnings from their labor.

Washington’s letter to Lund Washington on Feb 24, 1779 strongly suggests that he was, at that point hardly an enlightened and humane slaveowner. The following illustrates that, despite occasional lapses, the post-revolutionary Washington continued to view blacks chiefly as a means of acquiring wealth through agriculture. In a relatively enlightened antebellum racial epoch, Washington seemed unchanged stating coldly that it would be very little consequence to me, whether my property is in Negroes, or loan office Certificates… . His decision revolved around whether it would be most to my interest, in case of a fortunate determination of the present contest, to have negroes, and the Crops they will make; or the sum they will now fetch and the interest of the money… . 67 While he expressed a reluctance to separate husband and wife, and Parents and children, he instructed Lund Washington to ascertain where the highest prices Negroes sell at, in different parts of the Country… 68

Washington’s strategy to manage his plantations relied on the range of routine intimidating strategies, collective violence and punishment common to the institution of slavery. While he did not want his overseers, mostly whites, to be completely devoid of mercy, he did desire that they provide sufficient incentive for blacks to work as hard as their physical beings would allow. If a house slave was thought to be malingering he or she was to be threatened with being made into a common hoe negro, a field slave. In other cases, such as Tom noted above, they were threatened with being sent to the West Indies. If he felt it was necessary, Washington had his slaves whipped. Like other slaveowners the mere thought of overt resistance or rebellion made his emotions stir. In such cases he would respond brutally as runaway blacks were hunted down with dogs and severely whipped when captured. 69 Men and women alike were subject to Washington’s and his overseer’s whims.

For Washington, the standard slaves would be measured by was the extent to which they worked day and night for him and exhibited perfect obedience and loyalty. Anything less was unacceptable and would likely be met with violence. 70 In a document entitled, A View of the work at the several Plantations in the year 1789, and general directions for the Execution of it these were instructions to John Fairfax an overseer at Mount Vernon. He wrote:

To request that my people may be at their work as soon as it is light–work ’till it is dark–and be diligent while they are at it can hardly be necessary, because the propriety of it must strike every manager who attends to my interest, or regards his own Character–and who on reflection, must be convinced that lost labour can never be regained–the presumption being, that every laborer (male or female) does as much in the 24 hours as their strength, without endangering their health, or constitution, will allow of. 71

His method ideally was to be present among the slaves for the maximum amount of time to ensure a steady flow of production. When Washington himself was unable to play this role he expected his overseers to maintain this constant presence. 72 Warning that when an Overseer’s back is turned the most of them will slight their work, or be idle altogether, he maintained that the damage to slave psychology was permanent. Even correction, whipping and sundry physical violence, would not be able to recreate the previous ideal situation for the slavemaster. He complained that while correction was unable to repair the damaged master-slave relationship and that it often produces evils which are worse than the disease, there was not any other mode but this to prevent thieving and other disorders, . . . 73

Washington’s stated desire not to purchase persons tied to families was a rational business decision since from experience he had learned that to purchase blacks and separate them from their families would create a situation in which they would be forced to run away to merely visit their families. In other ways, also, this would tend to increase the resistance he faced in attempting to implement his ideal of squeezing the slave for the maximum amount of labor he or she was physically and mentally capable of. Washington also seemed to use a professed distaste to purchase additional slaves as a bargaining tactic in order to lower his perceived interest in the transaction and to psychologically prime the other party to be more interested in carrying through the deal.

In 1792, Washington had coldly ordered his subordinates not to waste money on sick slaves considered too unproductive to be useful to him. It is true that Washington displayed a slightly different attitude and behavior toward certain house slaves. Yet, as the cases of Oney Judge and Hercules illustrate, Washington never was able to understand and feel the enormity of the moral and social harm slavery inflicted on even to its most privileged victims. Instead, he worried about slavery’s inefficiencies and waste, and, like many others, its harmful and dehumanizing effects on whites. He felt that white overseers, for example, tended to sink to the same level with blacks becoming slovenly. 74 In the final analysis, however, the basis of his income and wealth was in African slaves and he would not seriously entertain any notion that threatened his extravagant lifestyle.

Washington was unable to understand why enslaved blacks displayed such little regard and, often, barely suppressed contempt for white property. 75 He complained that blacks used their dogs to circumvent his orders and rules and was amazed at the control they exerted over them in order to supplement their diets secretly acquiring the goods and products denied them. That blacks regarded any product as fair game was appalling to local slaveholders who were convinced that a considerable portion of these stolen goods were sold to poor whites in Alexandria and other localities. 76 Washington himself was convinced that the poor whites who lived beyond the boundaries of his vast land holdings survived by encroaching upon his property and by taking advantage of their ties to the enslaved blacks he owned. 77 Thomas Jefferson, blinded by bias in many respects, once reasoned that men in whose favor no laws of property exist, probably feels himself less bound to respect those laws made in favour of others therefore could not the slave justifiably take a little from one, who has taken all from him? 78

Although Washington worked his slaves from sun-up to sundown this was not unusual as he shared the widespread belief and practice of working slaves to the limits that their physical being would tolerate. Desiring blacks on his plantations to work as if they were the owners, he ordered his slaves to work from daybreaking until it is dusk. Fearing that they would be ruined by idleness, he ordered his managers to let them be employed in any manner… that will keep them out of idleness and mischief… . He was inclined to believe that they were feigning illness when they complained of being sick contending that their ailments derive from their propensity to night walk which rendered them unfit for the duties of the day. 79

Blacks were in Washington’s view shiftless, lazy, ignorant, clumsy, immoral, thieving, and natural liars. Of his favored house slaves he wrote that he knew . . . of no black person about the house that is to be trusted. His wife Martha, not surprisingly, shared his views in this respect and went further to stress how ungrateful blacks were. After lending a slave to a niece, she wrote that she hoped . . . you will not find in him much sass. [T]he Blacks are so bad in their nature that they have not the least gratitude from the kindness that may be showed to them. 80 Later in Washington’s career as a slaveowner he was visited by an English traveler who concluded that the former president wasn’t of a humane disposition. 81 Likewise, when the Polish revolutionary Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz visited Mount Vernon he was appalled by the misery he found among the slaves. 82 Describing the housing for the slaves as more miserable than the most miserable of the cottages of our peasants, he nevertheless concluded that Washington’s treatment of his slaves was better than that of the other slaveholders in the area. 83

The Pole’s conclusions were supported by evidence. For example, during one fall season Washington grew irritated over the repeated requests for blankets by his slaves who later suffered tragic deaths that winter as he himself admitted in its aftermath that he had lost more Negroes last winter than he had in years. 84 During the period in which he resided in Philadelphia, a domestic slave of his, Oney Judge, regarded as pampered and spoiled by the General and his wife, apparently fled in desperation from him. Washington’s fervent efforts to recapture her were rebuffed by northern anti-slavery forces aided by the growing strength of the urban black community. The fact that the young woman, Oney Judge while toiling as a relatively privileged slave with the Washingtons was still unable to marry and have a family must have weighed heavily upon her psyche. That this constituted a serious infringement upon her ability to realize any degree of happiness and satisfaction in life was incomprehensible to them—-such was the strength and power of their racial perceptions and self-interest. Other Washington slaves also found ways to flee and circumvent the plans of this powerful figure to enchain them in a lifelong slavery. 85

In 1791, Washington began to fear that having lived in Philadelphia for many years, that his ownership of the slaves who resided with him was in jeopardy. Over and beyond the question of his legal right to ownership, he anxiously feared that they would be enticed away. Even without their active efforts to escape, Washington feared that any chance of their freedom might ruin them, making them insolent in a state of slavery. 86 Hence, Washington ordered that his domestic slaves be spirited back to his Mount Vernon, Virginia plantation where they would be secure in slavery. Fortunately he acted too late. Hercules, a cook, fled while in Philadelphia. In his absence Washington suffered having been completely dependent on the slave’s food preparation. Torn between risking his reputation in order to recapture Hercules and finding a replacement, Washington finally hired a white cook. The problem of his slaves escaping, however, was one that would not go away Christopher, who stood at the foot of Washington bed all day on the day the former president died, had earlier attempted to flee with his wife on a boat docked in Alexandria. 87

Aware of the possibility that history would judge his humanity and his principles of liberty as fatally flawed by his ownership and behavior toward slaves, Washington tried to put the best face on it. Using such benign and misleading terms such as the persons whose labors in part I employed, for his slaves, Washington nevertheless portrayed his aims as noble:

The unfortunate condition of the persons whose labors in part I employed has been the only unavoidable subject of regret. To make the adults among them easy and comfortable as their actual state of ignorance and improvidence would admit: and to lay a foundation to prepare the rising generation for a destiny different from that in which they were born, afforded some satisfaction to my mind and could not, I hoped, be displeasing to the justice of the Creator. 88

Washington had innumerable opportunities to demonstrate the sincerity of his oft-noted, but rare, anti-slavery remarks. Irritated in 1786 by abolitionist efforts to emancipate an African held by one of his Alexandria neighbors, he said that his opposition to this Quaker action didn’t mean that I wish to hold these unhappy people… in slavery maintaining that no man living wishes more sincerely than I do to see the abolition of it. 89 Earlier, after Washington expressed enthusiasm for Lafayette’s plan to buy an estate to experiment with free African labor, he put the plan off and nothing ever came of it. 90 Washington could also be evasive. When two visiting English Methodist evangelists urged him in May 1785 to sign a petition for gradual emancipation, Washington indicated that he would provided the Virginia legislature demonstrated a minimum of interest in it. He knew that the slaveowner-dominated assembly would never show any interest in any plan that would gradually erode the basis of their wealth and power. 91

What sympathy and good will Washington had towards blacks was displayed by his brief relationship with Phillis Wheatley who had astounded many prominent Americans of the era with her high quality poetry. After receiving a letter from the young poet in October 1775, Washington wrote her in response and commended her on the striking proof of your great poetical talents. He invited her to visit him at his headquarters as he would have be happy to see a person favored by the Muses. 92 After visiting Washington in April 1776 and meeting with him alone for a half hour, Wheatley pinned a poem in his honor that ended with this final couplet:

Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side, Thy ev’ry action let the goddess guide. A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine, With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! Be thine. 93

However this single incident might be interpreted, its significance pales by comparison with the weight of the day-to-day activities Washington as a slaveowner was involved in.

Douglas Egerton terms William Lee, Washington’s personal slave, the single most recognized slave in Revolutionary America. Lee’s privileged status as a slave, however, still came at a costly price for his heath, spirit, and overall well-being. George Washington Parke Custis, Martha Washington’s grandson, described with admiration the prowess of William Lee his prime. He was perceived as a fearless horseman’ who galloped ‘at full speed, through brake or tangled wood.’ and physically sturdy and muscular. Washington and Lee hunted three times a week but Washington’s legendary coldness coupled with the gulf in racial status, he remained aloof from his slave. By about age 38, however, the coddled and pampered Lee was hobbled by bad knees and was unable to perform any task that required mobility, and could only make shoes and entertain guests to Mount Vernon with stories of the former times. Emancipation for Washington’s African-American slaves would come with his wife’s death. The first president’s will immediately emancipated his Mulatto man, William Lee specifying that the slave could remain on the plantation if he desired citing the accidents that have befallen him. Lee was also given a $30 annuity for his retirement. 94 For those too old to work, the former president provided that they shall comfortably cloathed (sic) & fed by my heirs while they live. The younger slaves shall be bound by the Court until they were 25 years of age having gained literacy and learned a trade. 95

John Adams: Non-Slaveholding President

T he Federalist Party’s John Adams, the second president, was the only non-slaveholder among the early presidents of the United States. Born in Braintree, Massachusetts, Adams grew up in an atmosphere charged with the fear of Native Americans, then desperately resisting efforts to expel them from the eastern part of the continent. Since Adams was not involved in daily efforts to extract labor from Africans and did not live in an area dependent upon the slave economy, he did not enjoy the extensive contacts with blacks other early presidents experienced. As a consequence, very little of Adams’ actions or writings directly touched on blacks or slavery. Another cause of his relative silence in this respect can be attributed to the implicit code of behavior expected of early American public officials and leaders. Adams and other leading politicians who were somewhat critical of the actions of the southern slaveholders, and who opposed slavery to some degree, were silenced by the great premium they themselves placed upon unity whites against the twin threats of Indians and Africans.

Nevertheless, even figures of the American Revolution such as Adams were affected by Africans and the institution of slavery. Massachusetts had approximately five thousand African slaves during the late colonial era. 96 Sam Adams, the future president’s brother, had at least one domestic slave and it is likely that John Adams was personally connected to slavery in other ways.

After entering Harvard in 1751, Adams embarked upon a career that saw him rise to become one of the most prominent Founding Fathers of the new nation. After Crispus Attucks, an Afro-Indian fugitive from slavery, was slain in the Boston Massacre he was celebrated as a martyr, the first life sacrificed in the cause of the American Revolution. Attucks had been at sea as a sailor and was to be in Boston only temporarily. Attucks had a stick of cordwood in his hand when he was at the head of a crowd on King Street angrily confronting the British soldiers, and loudly declared that the way to get rid of these soldiers is to attack the main guard and strike at the root; this is the nest. When the crowd pushed forward Attucks took two bullets in the chest from the British Redcoats. He and three others were slain in the tumultuous event that marked the beginning of the surge in activity that led to the American Revolution.

John Adams was charged with the task of prosecuting the case for the British crown. Adams charged that Attucks knocked down a Redcoat and provoked the soldiers into firing adding that the blacks’ very looks was enough to terrify any person. 97 Attucks, he said, was a hooligan and a part of a a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and molattoes (sic), Irish teagues and outlandish jack tarrs… 98 Attucks was celebrated and declared a heroic martyr as his coffin was carried to Faneuil Hall and a public funeral attended by some 10,000 in Boston. 99 Clearly, if isolated Adams’ early actions against the movement for American independence would have made him quite an unpopular figure.

Not surprisingly, given his great political ambition, after the the movement for independence gained momentum Adams switched sides to oppose the British. Only a year after his actions on behalf of the British colonizers Adams did not hesitate to sign a protest note he authored to Governor Thomas Hutchinson in 1773, Crispus Attucks. The name of the martyr Attucks then had powerful symbolic importance for the independence movement. 100 Adams had conservative tendencies as he admired royalty and took a dim view of the French Revolution’s egalitarianism. Adams held that every man should know his place, and be made to keep it. 101 During the post-Revolutionary period, Adams had occasion to put his repressive views into practice, jailing writers and dissidents who harbored political views different than his own. 102 Not only did Adams’s later repressive measures helped sour his close friendship with Thomas Jefferson but the issues of British versus French loyalties and democratic versus monarchical values also played an important role. Adams, sympathetic to the institution and lifestyle of the British monarchy, drew Jefferson’s scorn. In turn, Adams was critical of Jefferson’s ownership of slaves and his admiration for the French and their revolution. Morally disapproving of slavery, he seemed to recognize that its existence profoundly undermined the strength of the powerful example of the accomplishments of the American Revolution. After John Adams heard the James Otis’ statement in 1764 that colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black he admitted that he shuddered due to its recognition of the black right to freedom and liberty. 103

James Otis was not the only American partisan that recognized the black right to liberty. Thomas Paine arrived in America in November 1774 enthusiastic with the notion that he would shake the conscience of Americans and alert them to the contradiction involved in self-consciously struggling for liberty against the British while holding hundreds of thousands of blacks as slaves. In March 1774 Paine’s article in the Pennsylvania Journal and the Weekly Advertiser attacked this inconsistency along with the slave trade and slavery itself. 104 African Americans continually pointed this glaring contradiction in the ideology and outlook of the colonists. A letter to the Massachusetts Spy from A Son of Africa in early 1774 contrasted American problems with the British with black problems with Americans. A Son of Africa asked: are not your hearts also hard, when you hold men in slavery who are entitled to liberty by the law of nature, equal as yourselves? 105 Those in the mainstream of the American establishment barely heard these arguments. Henry Laurens’s Negroes had mimicked their betters in crying Liberty sending anxious slaveholders into a state of readiness against black insurrection. Suddenly, the evils of the Stamp Act did not seem as pressing as the need for security against an internal enemy. 106

While the legacy of nonslaveholding patriots such as John Adams are not tainted by a direct connection to the institution, they remain tarnished by the compromises with slavery they engaged in. John Adams’ Puritan heritage attuned him to certain objectionable moral effects of slavery and this colored his response to the public revelation or allegation of the sexual nature of the Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings relationship. He didn’t doubt the veracity of Callender’s account and attributed Jefferson’s moral lapse to the institution of slavery. He said this was a natural and almost unavoidable consequence of that foul contagion in the human character–Negro slavery. 107

The Founding Fathers were divided in their views on the institution of slavery. Apart from those who derived their wealth, social status, and political prominence from slavery, the remainder varied widely in their views on the subject. For many leading American intellectuals during the American Revolution era, the concept of virtue occupied a key place. Indeed, true Republicanism was inconceivable to them in the absence of virtue. James Madison held that [T]o suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. 108

While a portion of the early American intellectuals held ideas that blacks were devoid of virtue and believers in the most gross form of idolatry, others, such as Benjamin Rush maintained that . . . All the vice which are charged [to] the negroes in the southern colonies… such as Idleness, Treachery, Theft, and the like, are the genuine offspring of slavery… 109 Rush, who held that Africans’ blackness was the result of leprosy, did criticize the hypocrisy he witnessed in the sight of men just emerging from a war in favor of liberty fitting out vessels to import their fellow creatures from Africa to reduce them afterwards to slavery. Unfortunately, it was six long years after this that he manumitted his only African captive. 110 Rush was hardly unique in his slave ownership. Benjamin Franklin, who once was a slavetrader and slaveowner, progressed to the point of writing for the Philadelphia Abolition Society. 111

During the American Revolution, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson fought side by side against the British under the banner of Liberty and Property. 112 In his 1800 presidential campaign against Thomas Jefferson, Adams’ supporters reflexively used racist terms in depicting their opponent. Not only did they charge that Jefferson was a thief, coward, and a cheat, they also termed him a mean spirited, low lived fellow, the son of a half breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father… . 113 Jefferson’s defeat of Adams, seventy-three electoral votes to sixty-five, was based upon the three-fifths clause of the Constitution that magnified the power of the Southern voter by every slave held in the state. Without this bolstered southern