Washington prided himself on being firm but fair-minded, leading his adopted granddaughter to say later, “He was a generous and noble master and [the slaves] feared and loved him.”²¹ His presidential secretary, Tobias Lear, said of Mount Vernon, “The negroes are not treated as blacks in general are in this country. They are clothed and fed as well as any laboring people whatever and they are not subject to the lash of a domineering overseer—but they are still slaves.”²² Several observers noted that Washington, with perfect self-control in public, could flare up with servants in private. During his presidency the wife of the British ambassador remarked that Washington “acquired a uniform command over his passions on public occasions, but in private and particularly with his servants, its violence sometimes broke out.”²³ One cabinet secretary talked of Washington’s reputation for “warm passion and stern severity” with his servants.²⁴ Another observer was taken aback by how gruffly the tactful president addressed his slaves, “as differently as if he had been quite another man or had been in anger.”²⁵ Still another Mount Vernon guest noted how exquisitely attuned the slaves were to the master’s moods: “His servants seemed to watch his eye, and to anticipate his every wish; hence, a look was equivalent to a command.”²⁶ It should be said that if Washington displayed an irritable style with his slaves, he could also be short-tempered with his military and political subordinates.

Slavery presented special challenges to a hypercritical personality like Washington, for the slaves had no earthly reason to strive for the perfection he wanted. However illogical it might seem, he expected them to share his work ethic and was perturbed when they didn’t follow his industrious example. Feeling entitled to extract the maximum amount of work from slaves, he advised one overseer that “every laborer (male or female)” should do “as much in the 24 hours as their strength, without endangering their health or constitution, will allow of.”²⁷ Not surprisingly, his letters contain frequent references to slaves whom he saw as indolent or prone to theft, and he never regarded such behavior as rational responses to bondage. Reproaching his slave carpenters, he said, “There is not to be found so idle a set of rascals.”²⁸ Of a slave named Betty who worked as a spinner in the mansion, he complained that “a more lazy, deceitful and impudent hussy is not to be found in the United States.”²⁹ He talked caustically about malingering slaves as if they were salaried workers who had failed to earn their wages—a blind spot he never entirely lost.

Fond of system and efficiency, Washington was stymied by his slaves’ inability to meet his high standards. Once in February 1760 he was dismayed to find that four slave carpenters had jointly hewn only 120 feet of poplar logs that day. Like a modern efficiency expert, he sat down, consulted his watch, and clocked them in a time-and-motion study. The master’s presence instantly stimulated the slaves to quadruple their output to 125 feet of timber apiece. Once he had solved the motivational mystery, Washington wondered about the material being used. “It is to be observed here that this hewing and sawing likewise was of poplar,” he wrote in his diary. “What may be the difference therefore between the working of this wood and [an]other some future observations must make known.”³⁰ It is easy to see how the methodical Washington, with his excellent business mind, would have found infuriating an economic system that naturally discouraged hard work.

Male slaves at the Mansion House enjoyed accommodations superior to those of slaves at the outlying farms. They likely had better quarters because they were often trained artisans and lived within eyeshot of family members and visitors. At a later period many inhabited a large brick building with glazed windows that was divided into four rooms and fitted out like an army barrack, with bunks lining the walls. In the four remote farms, slaves were jammed into small, one-room log cabins, crafted flimsily from sticks cemented with mud. A Polish nobleman who admired Washington was taken aback by these squalid hovels. “We entered one of the huts of the blacks, for one cannot call them by the name of houses. They are more miserable than the most miserable of the cottages of our peasants. The husband and wife sleep on a mean pallet, the children on the ground; [there is] a very bad fireplace, some utensils for cooking, but in the middle of this poverty, some cups and a teapot.”³¹

Each slave received one set of new clothes per annum—a woolen jacket, a pair of breeches, two shirts, a pair of stockings, and a pair of shoes—often made from a coarse brown linen called osnaburg. Slave women received an annual petticoat and smock. Some slaves also had Sunday outfits of dark coats with white vests and white breeches. Every day the slaves received approximately one quart of Indian cornmeal, and every month twenty salted herrings, which sounds like a terribly meager ration. “It is not my wish or desire that my Negro[e]s should have an ounce of meal more, nor less, than is sufficient to feed them plentifully,” Washington told his estate manager.³² Recent archaeological work at Mount Vernon has revealed that the slave diet was not entirely bleak. On Sundays Washington allowed slaves to borrow his large nets, or “seines,” to fish in the Potomac. At least one elderly slave named Father Jack kept a canoe on the river and supplied fish to others. Archaeologists have identified bones from sixteen types of fish in the cellar of the main slave residence. Washington also distributed to the slaves meat left over from his table, innards of hogs slaughtered on the estate, surplus fish from his fishery, and buttermilk left after the milk was churned.

The most intriguing archaeological find has been the discovery of lead shot and gun flints, showing that Washington allowed selected slaves to keep firearms and hunt wild game in the woods. The remains of fifty-eight animal species have been identified in the slave cellar. The slaves could either eat the game or sell it to the master’s table. Washington’s adopted grandson remembered how a slave named Tom Davis hunted duck on the Potomac with his Newfoundland dog and brought down with his musket “as many of those delicious birds as would supply the larder for a week.”³³ This made up part of a strictly limited market economy at Mount Vernon in which Washington allowed slaves to till their own garden plots, keep poultry, and sell eggs, chicken, fruits, and vegetables. On Sunday mornings he even permitted them to travel with passes to nearby Alexandria and peddle their wares in the open marketplace. This freedom of movement enabled Washington’s slaves to meet and marry slaves on other plantations.

That the slaves at Mount Vernon could move about without supervision runs counter to the common view of slavery as a system enforced only by the daily terror of whips and shackles. Like other major planters, Washington owned more slaves than his overseers could effectively monitor, and so the only way to control a captive population was to convince them that runaways would be severely punished. Virginia had perfected a system of terror for capturing fugitive slaves. Under a 1748 law, a master could seek out two justices of the peace and have them issue a proclamation against runaways. To give the slaves fair warning, the proclamation had to be posted on church doors throughout the county. If the slave still didn’t surrender, the law said that “it shall be lawful for any person . . . to kill and destroy such slaves by any ways or means, without accusation or impeachment of any crime for the same.”³⁴

If Washington, with few exceptions, avoided inflicting harm on captured runaways, he showed notable zeal in hunting them down, and the problem consumed considerable time. The scholar Philip Morgan has computed that Washington had forty-seven runaway slaves over the years, or 7 percent of the total population.³⁵ A year after his marriage Washington pursued a runaway named Boson and wound up paying a ten-shilling bounty to a slave from another plantation who recaptured him. Many slaves who fled were favorites of George and Martha Washington, who invariably reacted with a sense of shock and betrayal. In his diary for 1761, Washington recorded deep concern for the fate of a slave named Cupid, who had recently arrived from Africa, scarcely spoke English, and had contracted pleurisy. The master made a point of dropping in to inquire after Cupid’s health and in one diary entry wrote anxiously that “when I went to bed, I thought [Cupid] within a few hours of breathing his last.”³⁶ Notwithstanding this special care, Cupid subsequently ran away with three other slaves named Peros, Jack, and Neptune. On August 11, 1761, Washington placed a fugitive slave advertisement in the Maryland Gazette, noting that they had escaped “without the least suspicion, provocation, or difference with anybody, or the least angry word or abuse from their overseers.”³⁷