The Question of George Washington and His Slaves

My line on slavery is the same as my line on conquest and plunder.  Slavery Does Not Pay. 

And that is why we don't have slavery any more. Not because we are moral giants but because we can calculate profit and loss.

But then I read an interesting biography George Washington, Entrepreneur: How Our Founding Father's Private Business Pursuits Changed America and the World, by John Berlau.

Did you know that George Washington started work as a surveyor at age 14? His dad had died and the kids from dad's first marriage got all the money. So the father of our nation had to get a job.

When Washington married his Martha, he was marrying money, for Martha was rich from her first marriage. Lots of slaves and all.

Here's the deal: Washington had a few slaves personally, and when he died he freed them all. This was considered a bit radical in 1799.

But the big thing for me was that George Washington, and a number of other slave-owners, had determined not to buy and sell slaves if it broke up the slave families.

In other words, he experienced his slaves as people, rather than commodities. But, when you experience your slaves as people there are all kinds of other issues, like what do you do about slaves that are too old to work.

That is where the Does Not Pay comes in.

The thing about slaves is that while you get work out of them -- if you are lucky -- you are also responsible for housing and feeding them. And clothing them and I know not what. 

OK, here are the details. In his will Washington stipulated after the death of his wife Martha all his slaves should be freed, and that former slaves unable to support themselves due to advanced age or disability should be clothed and fed by his heirs. And he provided for the education of "many of the former slave children." And no slaves were to be sold.

So if you actually care about them as people, they could cost you a bundle.

In other words, as soon as you start to care about slaves as people, Slavery Does Not Pay.

Do you see how free labor might appeal to the business class? If you are a good guy like George Washington the care and feeding of your slaves is going to cost a bundle. But if you free them and give them wages in return for their work then the responsibility for the care and feeding falls on the now-freed slaves.

So now it occurs to me that my line that conquest and plunder and slavery went out because They Do Not Pay has an important qualification.

If you do not care about the Other as people, then conquest and plunder and slavery are cool. If you conquer and kill, nobody cares about the widows and orphans of the conquered. If you plunder the conquered of all their grain, who cares if they all die of starvation. If you enslave the conquered, who cares if half of them die on the Middle Passage, or the voyage from Kaffa in the Crimea to the harems of the Middle East.

But once you do start to care about the Other as people, then everything changes. And all of a sudden the cost of treating people like people starts to come into view.

So you tell me the answer to this moral dichotomy: which is moral, to have people as virtual slaves and thralls and accept the responsibility to look after them? Or to employ them as free labor and just have to worry about the work they do and how much you pay them?

So, in our welfare state we have struck a middle course. We expect people to get a job, but we also look after the people that fall by the wayside. Is that a middle course, or a muddle? You decide.

Here's an interesting way to look at it. Our wokey friends divide the world up into oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors. Makes life pretty easy, don't it? You care about the "oppressed peoples" and the "allies" -- who are people like us wokies. The "white oppressors," whoever they are, can go hang.

Here's my take on morality. It's a lot more complicated than you think.