Jurretta writes, "I cannot see any large-scale alternative" to slavery. But
George Washington could. The alternative can be found in letters between
Washington and David Stuart, a Custis heir, which were published for the
first time in my book. The letters show that while Washington was president
he tried to free all the slaves at Mount Vernon, including the slaves owned
by Martha's family, the Custis heirs. The bare outline of Washington's
alternative to slavery was – we will free them, and hire them right back on
wages or shares. So the plantations would not have lost their labor and
farming operations would continue. (Sharecropping, by the way, was already
well established in Virginia. In Washington's youth, most of the white
laborers on the Northern Neck were sharecroppers.) The key is, Washington
had come to the conclusion that he had no right to the ownership of human
souls, thus he did not expect to be compensated for the "loss" of this human
capital. But to Stuart and to other large slaveholders who had surpluses of
slaves, the slaves were a portfolio, assets they could mortgage, sell,
bequeath, or hire out at great profit. They had monetized slaves. Slavery
had evolved beyond being a simple labor system to being a complex and highly
lucrative financial system. Washington railed against this business of
regarding people as if they were "cattle in the market," but that's what
they had become. Stuart and his type were delighted that newly emerging
markets for surplus humans gave them increasing liquidity. Winthrop Jordan
wrote that by the end of the 1790s slavery "had taken on new dimensions." It
was a bonanza--that's what they did not want to give up.

Henry Wiencek