Washington’s most commendable side was the respect he accorded to slave marriages, which enjoyed no standing under Virginia law. In April 1787, needing a bricklayer, he bought a slave named Neptune from a John Lawson. When Neptune showed up at Mount Vernon, Washington was dismayed to learn that he was distraught at being separated from his wife. Washington at once informed Lawson that he was “unwilling to hurt the feelings of anyone. I shall therefore, if agreeable to you, keep him a while to see if I can reconcile him to the separation (seeing her now and then), in which case I will purchase him; if not, I will send him back.”³⁶ Taking matters into his own hands, Neptune escaped from Mount Vernon and returned to Lawson’s plantation and a reunion with his wife. Interestingly enough, Neptune wasn’t punished for this misbehavior and agreed to a compromise whereby he was hired out to Washington on a monthly basis.

The most striking case of Washington’s respect for the inner life of slaves was his constant solicitude for Billy Lee, whom he endowed with the fancy title “Valet de Chambre” after the war.³⁷ Lee may be the dark-skinned slave standing off in the shadows of Edward Savage’s famous painting The Washington Family, completed during the 1790s. In the group portrait, Washington sits at a table with Martha, unfurling a map of the new federal city of Washington, while Nelly and Washy stand beside them. Off to the right, the nameless slave is a dignified presence in a gray jacket with one hand thrust into a red waistcoat, his black hair falling straight over his collar. If Lee is the slave depicted, it would certainly attest to his special place in the Washington household.

During the war Lee had entered into a romantic liaison with Margaret Thomas, a free black or mulatto cook on Washington’s staff, and they considered themselves married. Six months after returning to Mount Vernon, Lee sank into a funk because of his separation from Thomas, who resided in Philadelphia. Under prodding from Lee, Washington agreed to reunite them. The all-powerful Washington didn’t care for Thomas but submitted to the pleas of the one slave he found it hard to deny. Contacting his Philadelphia friend Clement Biddle, he laid out the situation, explaining that Margaret Thomas had been “in an infirm state of health for some time and I had conceived that the connection between them had ceased, but I am mistaken. They are both applying to me to get her here, and tho[ugh] I never wished to see her more, yet I cannot refuse his request (if it can be complied with on reasonable terms) as he has lived with me so long and followed my fortunes through the war with fidelity.”³⁸ Washington asked Biddle to track down Thomas, then living with a free black couple, Isaac and Hannah Sills, who also worked as cooks in Philadelphia. Biddle was instructed to pay Thomas’s passage to Virginia by coach or ship. We don’t know what happened to Margaret Thomas, and no evidence exists that she ever made it to Mount Vernon. Without question, a free black or mulatto woman would have dreaded traveling alone to a slave state such as Virginia, even under the auspices of George Washington. At the very least, as a Mount Vernon cook, she would have been forced to live and work with slaves, while retaining the rights of a free person—hardly a comfortable situation for all involved. One wonders exactly how Washington planned to negotiate this delicate situation. Did he expect Billy Lee to continue as a slave while married to a resident cook and free woman? And how would the other Mount Vernon slaves have reacted to the subversive presence of a free woman of color, wedded to Washington’s favorite slave?

What we do know is that, by the standards of master-slave relationships, Washington remained uncommonly attentive toward Billy Lee. In April 1785 he was surveying land with Lee, who was carrying one of the chains when he slipped and broke his knee, an injury so severe that Washington had to order a sled to transport him home. Three years later Lee tripped again and broke the second knee, turning him into a cripple. We know that Lee had an alcohol problem, but we don’t know whether it was the cause or an effect of these injuries. When two broken knees left Lee incapacitated, Washington converted him into a cobbler and sometime overseer of other slaves. In later years the outgoing Lee was reputedly a loquacious storyteller as he greeted veterans and exhibited his affection for Washington. Despite his servitude, he reminisced nostalgically about the war, even wearing a cocked hat to emphasize his earlier service. Of course, it is impossible to know, as Lee rambled on, what obscure hurts he concealed at being denied the status of a full-fledged soldier.

One also wonders to what extent Washington’s attachment to Lee influenced his later determination to emancipate his slaves. His proximity to a single slave during many years of war must have made it harder for him to believe that slaves were inferior beings and that their bondage could be justified. Lee was not only an expert hunter and horseman but also an energetic raconteur with a vibrant personality and rich emotional life that shines through in the smattering of stories about him. On the other hand, there’s no sense that Washington confided in Lee or treated him as anything like a peer.

While Washington was never sadistic or abusive toward slaves, he could be a demanding boss with minimal patience for error. When English farmer Richard Parkinson visited Virginia in 1798, he picked up scuttlebutt from local planters that Washington “treated [his slaves] with more severity than any other man.”³⁹ Washington’s temperamental outbursts likely stemmed in part from his unrelenting money problems. He also suffered from a conceptual blind spot about slavery, tending to regard it as a fair economic exchange: he clothed and fed his workers, and “in return, I expect such labor as they ought to render.”⁴⁰ He could never seem to understand why his slaves might regard this tacit bargain as preposterous. Any slaves who shirked work, he believed, were cheating him, and he wouldn’t stand for it. In 1785 he conducted a frosty exchange with a slave whose arm was injured and in a sling. Washington didn’t see why the man couldn’t work. Grasping a rake in one hand and thrusting the other in his pocket, he proceeded to demonstrate one-handed raking. “See how I do it,” Washington said. “I have one hand in my pocket and with the other I work. If you can use your hand to eat, why can’t you use it to work?”⁴¹ Similarly, Washington expected pregnant women and elderly slaves to work, albeit at less strenuous jobs closer to home.

So intent was Washington on extracting the full measure of work from slaves that he could be shockingly oblivious to their hardships. Perhaps the most agonizing work at Mount Vernon involved reclaiming swamps. Even in the iciest weather Washington didn’t relax his grip or halt this grueling outdoor labor. In January and February 1788 eastern Virginia suffered through a winter so frigid that the Potomac froze for five weeks and Mount Vernon lay “locked fast by ice,” as Washington told Henry Knox.⁴² As the temperature dipped to ten degrees, Washington often found it too cold to attend meetings away from home. Nevertheless, his hands spent more than a week taking ice from the frozen river and packing it into the icehouse.

During this deep freeze Washington refused to cancel any slave activities, and the heavy-duty field work went on unabated. On January 3 he noted that the thermometer stood at twenty-five degrees as he made the chilly rounds of his plantations. Nevertheless everyone was outdoors working. At Dogue Run, he wrote, “the women began to hoe the swamp they had grubbed in order to prepare it for sowing in the spring with grain and grass seeds.” At Muddy Hole, “the women, after having threshed out the peas, went about the fencing.” And at another farm, “the women were taking up and thinning the trees in the swamp, which they had before grubbed.”⁴³ It is hard to imagine more brutal manual labor than women pulling up tree stumps in icy swamps in record-setting cold, but Washington seems not to have found this inhuman scene objectionable and in no way diminished the work. On February 5 the notably rugged Washington informed Knox that “the air of this day is amongst the keenest I ever recollect to have felt.”⁴⁴ When he made the circuit of his farms the next morning, he introduced an unusual notation: “Rid out, but finding the cold disagreeable, I returned.”⁴⁵ Despite this fierce cold, with nine inches of snow covering the ground, Washington kept everyone busy in the fields and noted approvingly in his diary, “Hands of all the places (except the men) working in the new ground” at the mansion house.⁴⁶ It was as if Washington feared that even the slightest concession would lead to a raft of others, so he insisted on getting the daily quota of work from his slaves.