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George Washington, first president of the United States, was born on Feb. 22, 1732. His birthday was made a federal holiday in 1879, only to have that holiday shifted to the third Monday in February in the 1970s, and unofficially transformed by marketers into “Presidents Day” during the 1980s.
I’m not and never will be a celebrant of Washington’s birth. I will never forget that he was a slaveholder. Eleven other U.S. presidents also enslaved people during their lifetimes; Washington, along with seven others, enslaved people while president.
I have written frequently about my feelings towards Washington, starting with 2014’s “George Washington is not my ‘Great White Father.” Washington biographers are quick to find ways to excuse his slave ownership, always pointing out that “he freed his slaves in his will,” which isn’t exactly the real story.
It wasn’t until recently that I learned that Washington had connections to the Caribbean. His only travel outside of what would become the United States was to Barbados as a boy, and his home there is now a museum.
The Museum at George Washington House uses artifacts such as iron collars that were used for restraint and punishment, visual representations of aspects of daily life experienced by the enslaved, and interactive quizzes about slavery in Virginia and Barbados. Also included are life-like models of slaves on the auction block, and an important eyewitness account of the middle passage of a slave ship and the events that transpired on arrival at Bridgetown.
The “models” of enslaved people are striking.
History professor Erica Johnson Edwards described the museum for The Age of Revolutions Journal.
Washington was nineteen years-old when he went to Barbados with his half-brother Lawrence in 1751. There is a museum inside the bright yellow house where they resided during their stay in Barbados. The first floor is set up to show what his life would have been like when there, with staged bedrooms and a large dining room. While there are exhibits upstairs showing dining ware and other daily items from the eighteenth century, most of the second-floor content is about the trade of enslaved people and enslavement. One display case includes items used to restrain enslaved peoples during the trade, such as reproductions of a coiled-neck collar and an original manacle and chain (each found in Barbados). An exhibit highlights the similarities and differences between Barbados and Virginia, where Washington and his wife enslaved people at Mount Vernon.[3] One section reads, “In Virginia, up until the late 1700s, there were fewer slaves than masters. In Barbados, the opposite prevailed, with four slaves to every one white inhabitant, resulting in much harder methods of subjugation and discipline by Barbadian slave owners.” This comparative element between Barbados and Virginia is intriguing, as scholars are more likely to study Barbados relative to South Carolina, because colonists from Barbados were among the earliest settlers in South Carolina. However, Washington’s connection to both places offers a lens through which historians can view enslavement in Barbados and Virginia.
The National Humanities Center’s Humanities Moment Project posted this “moment” from educator Kristen Fallon, who visited the museum and had her perception of Washington as “a strong, moral, and noble leader who is the epitome of what it means to be a patriot and an American” transformed.
While I was at the George Washington House, I saw a small display about the use of enslaved labor on the plantation. The display’s artifacts consisted mostly of informational readings, but it also had a set of mannequins representing an enslaved man and child as well as a display case of chains, shackles, and tools for punishment. By the time I reached this small corner of the exhibit, I had been observing and exploring the property for nearly two hours. This was the first reference I saw that discussed the use of enslaved people on the plantation. Based on other historical records, we know that the plantation economy of the Colonies and Barbados were dependent on slave labor, so I couldn’t help but wonder why there was no mention or recognition that this household’s status and legacy is based almost entirely on one of the darkest institutions humanity has ever created.
In the Fall 2017 edition of “The Washington Papers,” which publishes the first president’s correspondence, assistant editor Lynn Price wrote “Slavery in Barbados and Virginia: A Cross-Cultural Exchange.”
The sugar revolution in Barbados demanded a steady workforce, leading the island to become the first English-American colony to replace indentured servants with African slaves. It gained a reputation as a harsh environment for the enslaved. For plantation owners, on the other hand, Barbados became a highly profitable venture, earning the status of Britain’s most valuable colony.
Even as the much larger island of Jamaica surpassed Barbados in sugar production in 1720, the industry continued to thrive, as did the institution of slavery. Virginia—with a climate that precluded sugar production—remained a tobacco colony and, like Barbados, transitioned from indentured servants to slaves.
Barbados influenced slavery in Virginia. In 1661, the island government passed an “Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes,” making Barbados the first English colony to extensively legislate slavery. Among other things, the act covered issues relating to punishment, fugitive slaves, and masters’ authority over slaves versus over servants. Jamaica copied the law in 1664, and South Carolina did the same in 1696. Although Virginia passed several laws regarding indentured servitude and slavery prior to 1705, that year saw passage of “An act concerning Servants and Slaves,” a compilation similar to the Barbados act.
The more brutal form of slavery that George Washington would have encountered during his weeks on Barbados was described in horrifying terms by a visitor to the island in the 1760s. That observer saw “the heads of slaves, fixed upon sharp pointed stakes, while their unburied carcases were exposed to be torn by dogs and vultures on the sandy beach.” After a 1756 visit to Barbados, sailor Edward Thompson declared, “The cruel tyranny exercised over slaves, is shocking to humanity.”
We are left to ponder the reaction of a young George Washington, whose diary of his visit to Barbados remains silent on the issue.
Washington’s Mount Vernon estate is one of the most-visited tourist sites in the United States. Over the years, there has been public pressure from Black activists and descendants to tell the stories of the Black people enslaved there—and the conditions they faced.
The Zinn Education Project’s 2015 longread “Time to Tell the Truth About Slavery at Mount Vernon” is very informative, as is 2021’s “What to the slave is George Washington’s Mount Vernon?” from the Black Catholic Messenger.
The Mount Vernon website now documents the “Resistance and Punishment” of the presidential plantation’s enslaved people.
Washington’s punishment of last resort was to sell enslaved people to other plantations, usually when they kept trying to run away. He sold at least three men to the West Indies: Tom in 1766, Will Shagg in 1772, and Jack in 1791. Even after stating his opposition to selling enslaved people, Washington did sell those he deemed troublesome.
For Tom, Will, and Jack, being sold meant never seeing family or friends at Mount Vernon again. Given the treacherous conditions and high mortality rate on Caribbean sugar plantations, their sales may have been death sentences.
[Paid] for the passage of Negroe Jack sent…to the West Indies to be disposed of…
–GEORGE WASHINGTON’S LEDGER, 1791
The Mount Vernon website provides a bit more detail on those men who were sold as punishment.
A foreman on Mount Vernon’s River Farm, Tom had been inherited by George Washington from his elder half-brother Lawrence in 1754. Twelve years later, the enslaved man made a failed attempt to flee the plantation. In a letter to Joseph Thompson, captain of the Swift, Washington declared Tom a “rogue and a runaway” and directed that he be sold in the West Indies. Washington commented that Tom was “exceedingly healthy, strong, and good at the Hoe,” and “he may . . . sell well, if kept clean and trim’d up a little.”1
[…]In 1772 Will Shag, a thirty-one-year-old field-worker on one of the Custis properties in York County, Virginia, engaged in repeated conflicts with an overseer and twice attempted to run away. Washington paid £13.11s.6d to a ship captain to transport Shag to Port-au-Prince in exchange for molasses.3 By the 1780s Washington had stated his opposition to buying and selling slaves, but this did not stop him from selling Jack, a wagon driver, to the West Indies in 1791 “to be disposed of,” as a secretary wrote in Washington’s ledger.4
Dr. Karl Watson summarized “Slavery and Economy in Barbados” for the BBC.
It is estimated that between 1627 to 1807, some 387 000 Africans were shipped to the island against their will, in overcrowded, unsanitary ships, which made the Middle Passage a synonym for barbaric horror. Over time, many of these individuals were re-exported to other slave owning colonies, either in the West Indies or to North America. However, and this is especially true for the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the high mortality rate among slaves working on the sugar plantations necessitated a constant input of fresh slaves in order to maintain a work force.
It isn’t easy to find commentary or histories that don’t excuse or whitewash Washington’s slave ownership. In 2021, New African Woman magazine editor Regina Jane Jere examined his personal history, including his support for quelling the Haitian fight for independence. (Ironically, Haitians joined the American fight to throw off British rule—then we turned our backs on them.)
Jere’s headline says so much: “Shocking! How George Washington – treated his slaves –some as young as one year old!“
If Washington still had any doubts concerning reaction in the United States to the spectre raised by the question of emancipation, public reaction towards the slave revolt in the French colony of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) in 1791, may have helped confirm his determination to avoid pursuing the issue at all costs.
[Historian Dorothy] Twohig writes: “The horrors of the revolt of the slaves on Saint Domingue against their French masters were immediately apparent, although less understood in the United States were the appalling conditions that had inspired the revolt. “Daily reports appeared in American newspapers on the insurrection. The revolution struck Americans on two fronts. It played to their views of the sanctity of property, which to most Americans was part of the basic natural rights for which they had fought Britain for nine long years, and it fed the fear, bordering on paranoia, in the deep south of slave insurrections.”Washington responded by writing to Jean Baptiste de Ternant, the French minister, promising to provide money and arms requested by the French government to quell the revolt.
“I am happy in the opportunity of testifying how well disposed the United States are to render every aid in their power to our good friends and allies, the French, to quell ‘the alarming insurrection of the Negroes in Hispanola’ and of the ready disposition to effect it, of the executive authority thereof,” Washington wrote to Ternant.
Therefore, to this day, Washington’s occasional comments on slavery expressing his desire to see it disappear are mired in confusion and contradictions.
[…]Today his ownership of slaves and his failure to speak out publicly against slavery is still, to many, a hard fact to take in.
The generally accepted argument of forgive and forget, because Washington was born and lived in an era when slavery was “acceptable” holds no water. Acceptable to whom and for what?
I’ll answer Jere’s question. Slaveholding will never be acceptable to me. Neither will George Washington.
So on this anniversary of his birth, I’ll be celebrating my ancestors who managed to survive enslavement—remembering all those who didn’t.
