| George
Washington Parke Custis’s
and Robert E. Lee’s Views on Slavery
In
the early 19th century, slavery engulfed the southern states in America.
Planters and farmers had slaves to do the gardening, cooking, building,
planting, harvesting, and other activities necessary to keep their properties
running. But their attitudes toward slavery and their treatment of African
Americans varied greatly. Many did not take good care of their slaves
and some even worked them to death. On the other hand, some masters
were sensitive and saw their slaves as human beings deserving of freedom.
Given this wide range of possible attitudes, one must examine the views
held by George Washington Parke Custis and his son-in-law, Robert E.
Lee to understand the experiences of slaves at Arlington. The different
approaches of these two men suggest that, in regards to the "peculiar
institution," a variety of factors influenced individual beliefs
and behaviors.
George
Washington Parke Custis
George Washington
Parke Custis likely developed his views on slavery at Mount Vernon, the
home of Martha and George Washington, his adopted parents. Custis came
to live there following the death of his father, John, Martha’s
son by her first marriage. Young Custis soon came to revere the former
president, who treated him as his own son. Since Washington always treated
his slaves with kindness, Custis resolved to do the same.
By 1802, Custis owned
some 200 slaves. Most of them worked on his plantations outside Richmond,
but 57 of them lived on the Arlington estate overlooking the Potomac River.(1)
Custis had inherited these slaves, later known as the Arlington people,
after Washington’s death in 1799. They not only built Arlington
House, where Custis and his family lived and displayed the Washington
hierlooms, but they tended the 1,000 acre plantation. Like other masters,
Custis provided his slaves with all basic necessities, such as shelter,
clothes, food, and medical care. The Arlington people occupied brick quarters
next to the main house or log cabins scattered across the estate.(2) One
slave, Charles Syphax, was their acknowledged leader. He received a substantial
two-story cabin in which to house his family.(3) While such generosity
was not typical of most slave owners, it was not out of the ordinary for
Custis.
Like Washington,
Custis believed that his slaves should ultimately be set free and he took
steps during his lifetime to prepare them for life after emancipation.
Most slave owners, fearful that African Americans would become too independent
and headstrong, prevented slaves from learning how to read and write.
Custis, by contrast, felt that African Americans should have the chance
to have the same things that white people had and be given the same opportunities
for advancement. For this reason, he allowed the Arlington people to be
educated even though Virginia laws forbade it. His wife, Mary, taught
them the basic skills they would need to be self-sufficient.(4) Children
were the primary students; unlike other planters, Custis believed that
all children should be able to grow up healthy and strong, and so he exempted
young slaves from performing manual labor.(5) Custis also encouraged them
to learn a trade so that they would be able to get good paying jobs in
the city once freed.(6) Finally, Custis had a chapel built on the estate.
It gave all of the slaves a place to worship and the children a place
to congregate during the day while their parents worked.(7)
The everyday tasks
on the Arlington estate divided the adults into two groups: those who
worked in the main house and those who worked in the fields. The house
slaves ensured that every room in Custis’s mansion was clean and
in order. Additionally, they prepared and served the daily meals to the
household, as well as to visiting friends and family. House slaves were
required to show hospitality and be nice to anyone that came to estate,
even if guests were rude to them.(8) They also had to wait on the Custises,
who relied on their slaves to provide whatever services they needed whenever
they needed them.
The majority of the
Arlington people, however, were field hands. Many Southerners believed
that slaves, like livestock, had only a limited number of productive years
and that it was imperative for an owner to work them as much as possible
in that time period if he hoped to reap the profit from his investment.
Custis disagreed. He believed that if slaves were overburdened and treated
inhumanely, then they would simply become exhausted and resentful, a condition
which benefited no one. Instead, Custis recognized that if he placed a
considerable amount of the responsibility for the daily routine into the
hands of his slaves, they would not only produce successful harvests,
but they would develop feelings of self-worth and accomplishment. These
feelings, in turn, would help ease their transition into free society.
Consequently, Custis put slaves in charge of maintaining the crops and
livestock. Their tasks included trying to develop an improved breed of
sheep, which Custis considered a better investment than tobacco, which
exhausted the soil. Custis had learned about agriculture and animal husbandry
from George Washington and helped develop the federal Department of Agriculture.(9)
He always shared his knowledge with his slaves in hopes of ensuring their
success as well as his estate’s.
Although Custis ultimately
envisioned a racially integrated world, he understood that most white
Americans did not share his views. Overwhelmingly, whites in the South
insisted that skin color determined an individual’s place in society,
and they justified both the inhumane treatment of African Americans and
social distinctions between whites and blacks on the basis of the latter
group’s "inferior" biology.(10) Given such sentiments,
Custis emancipated his own slaves gradually and only if they were ready
and willing to leave his care.
White racism also
led him to support the work of the American Colonization Society, a Virginia-based
organization that promoted the resettlement of qualified former slaves
to Liberia, where they would help to establish a new democratic nation.
Cash poor himself, Custis and his wife raised money and gave it to the
ACS to help with the costs of purchasing slaves from their owners and
transporting them to Africa. The concerted ACS effort, which included
the donations made by the Custises, relocated 12,000 individuals, but
the plan soon failed.(11) There were simply too many slaves to buy and
too little money. Plus, the boats that took the former slaves to Liberia
were disease-ridden, and many people died at sea. More important, most
freedmen preferred to stay in the United States, the only homeland most
of them knew.
Since Virginia law
required that former slaves leave the state, some of Custis’s own
slaves went to Liberia after he freed them, but most tried to stay near
their family and friends. Maria Syphax, for example, received her freedom
in 1826 and lived with her husband and children on a 17-acre plot of land
within the bounds of the Arlington plantation. Several individuals moved
into Washington, D.C., where there was a sizeable free black population.
James Parks, who also lived at Arlington after his emancipation, recalled
that "We used to go to Washington ‘cross the Long bridge, or
we’d dress up and row across. People would look at us and say, ‘Who’s
these fine folks?’ Then some’d say, ‘They’s the
Custis coloreds. They have their own horses and cows an’ raise their
own stuff.’ Some owned houses in Washington when they were slaves."(12)
When and how these individuals came to buy property is unclear; most likely,
Custis allowed them to sell "their own stuff" at the city markets
or keep their wages when he hired them out. Parks’s comments also
suggest that the Arlington people knew that Custis’s benevolence
toward them was unusual. Perhaps some stayed near Arlington to remain
close to him--and stay under his protection.
Unlike his peers,
Custis revered the concepts of freedom and equality. He believed that
blacks should not be held in bondage and that slavery should never have
happened. In fact, he once called slavery "the mightiest serpent
that ever infested the world."(13) He blamed Southern greed and the
rapid growth of farming for the treatment blacks received from whites.
He also acknowledged his own complicity, and took steps before his death
in 1857 to reverse his own mistakes. His last act was to draw up a will
with specific provisions regarding the emancipation of his remaining slaves.
Custis’s will
stipulated that any slaves in his estate at the time of his death should
be freed following the payment of his debts or five years, whichever came
first. In addition, the slaves who were freed had his permission to live
on or near the estate until they had somewhere else to go. He further
indicated that he did not want any slaves sold or families separated;
he wanted them all to be treated like humans, not property. Unfortunately,
the executor of his will, Robert E. Lee, had different views on the matter.
Robert
E. Lee
Robert Edward Lee
was born in 1807, the fifth child of "a distinguished Virginia family
that had fallen on hard times." [perry, 59] His father, "Light
Horse Harry" Lee is well known to history: a Revolutionary War hero,
he served Virginia as a member of the House of Delegates, as a representative
to the Continental Congress, and as governor. He was also a gambler and
profligate spender who had squandered away most of his own inheritance
by 1793, the year he married his second wife and Robert’s mother,
Ann Carter. Consequently, the future Confederate general grew up largely
dependent on the charity of others, a condition that profoundly influenced
his views on all matters pertaining to wealth and property, including
slavery.
Lee became Arlington’s
master in 1857, when his wife, Mary, inherited it. He had never before
been in a position to run a plantation or manage slaves. There were three
reasons for this. First, most of the land and slaves associated with Stratford
Hall, the place of his birth, had been sold to pay debts, and after Light
Horse Harry fled to the Caribbean in 1813, the remaining property passed
to Lee’s elder stepbrother. [fellman, 8-9; perry, 60] Thus Lee spent
his youth in the city of Alexandria, Virginia, where he and his mother
and siblings occupied a cousin’s townhouse. Although several slaves
lived with them, they were Ann Carter Lee’s property and it was
she who directed their labors. Second, Lee seems to have developed early
the view that slaves were "a burden" he’d rather not have.
When Lee and his siblings inherited their mother’s slaves in 1829,
for example, he indicated a preference to hire them out. Because he couldn’t
imagine freeing them, Lee never considered selling the slaves, but by
hiring them out, he could reap the profits without actually having to
deal with them. In fact, however, most of them were ultimately sold anyway,
their proceeds paying back taxes the family owed.[Fellman, 63] Finally,
Lee’s choice of a military career meant that he had little need
for slave labor. After his graduation from West Point, Lee traveled to
a variety of posts. Letters indicate that he usually took with him at
least one slave who served as his valet and cook. When his wife and children
moved with him, as they did to St. Louis, Baltimore, and Brooklyn, additional
hands were necessary. These slaves, however, like Cassius and ? , belonged
to Mary Custis Lee, and always returned with her to Arlington.[Perry,
68] Ironically, the man who led the Confederacy’s armies during
the Civil War never actually owned slaves in his own right.
In fact, Lee believed
that slavery’s end was inevitable, but unlike his father-in-law,
he believed that emancipation could not be engineered by human means.
Like other Southerners (and most Northerners, for that matter), Lee considered
blacks a separate, inferior race. As such, they could not be expected
to live successfully as free citizens in the United States and, as the
ACS’s efforts showed, repatriation back to Africa was impossible.
However, Lee felt strongly that God would ultimately reveal a solution.
In the meantime, he concluded, slavery was a "necessary evil,"
which had to be continued—for the benefit of the slaves themselves--in
the absence of a "plausible alternative." [fellman, 73]
This attitude explains
why, in a much-quoted 1859 letter, Lee said that Custis had left him "an
unpleasant legacy."(14) When Lee took over Arlington’s management
in 1857, there were 196 slaves living there. Never a working plantation,
the house and its grounds were instead an elegant showplace for the Washington
treasury, a collection of artifacts associated with the first president.
But Custis had entertained lavishly and often, and his finances were in
serious disarray at the time of his death. In fact, Lee believed that
the three major provisions of Custis’s will were contradictory:
the estate was so deeply in debt that there seemed to be no way for Lee
to pay off Custis’s creditors, give a $10,000 cash bequest to each
of his daughters, and free all the slaves within five years. In frustration,
Lee asked the local circuit court to decide whether he was legally obligated
to honor Custis’s deadline.[murray] When the justices answered yes,
Lee determinedly set about fulfilling his obligations, and he did so by
ordering the Arlington people to work harder and longer than they ever
had before. The slaves naturally resisted.(15) They knew that Custis’s
will guaranteed their freedom, and their behavior, to a man who preferred
not to deal with slaves under the best of circumstances, made Lee’s
legacy "unpleasant" indeed.
For Lee, at this
point a lieutenant colonel in the U. S. Army, insubordination was an affront
requiring swift punishment. Yet he disliked open confrontations and found
the use of physical force distasteful. When verbal admonishments failed
to cow the slaves, he decided to hire out eleven of the worst offenders,
six men and five women. Lee intended this act to isolate them from the
rest of the community and teach all of the Arlington people the need for
servility. It didn’t work. On the contrary, three of the men simply
ran away from their new masters and returned home to their families. Lee
described the events in a letter to his son, Rooney: "Reuben, Parker,
and Edward, in the beginning of the previous week, rebelled against my
authority . . . & said they were as free as I was, etc., etc. I succeeded
in capturing them however, tied them & lodged them in jail. They resisted
till overpowered & called upon the other people to save them."[fellman,
65] According to historian Michael Fellman, the jail referenced was in
Alexandria, and Lee had the men whipped by the county sheriff, who routinely
carried out such punishments for the local gentry. Over the next year,
Lee hired other slaves out, as well, and two of these also ran away and
were caught. Though it lasted only two years, Lee’s tenure as Arlington’s
master was fraught with strife.
On December 29, 1862,
Lee appeared before a justice of the peace in Richmond and signed a document
manumitting all of the Arlington people.(16) The Civil War was well underway
by this date. Lee had command of the Army of Virginia, Union troops occupied
his home and its grounds, and his family had become refugees.(17) Given
this context, it is unclear whether Lee was simply honoring the terms
of Custis’s will, which stipulated that the slaves be freed that
year, or whether felt forced to free them by extenuating circumstances.
For one thing, Lee had returned to active duty in February 1860, and,
since Arlington was still in debt then, it could not have been debt-free
in 1862.[Perry 209] That Lee waited so late in the year to act raises
additional questions about the sincerity of his intentions. Moreover,
Abraham Lincoln had just that fall signed the Emancipation Proclamation,
which declared that all slaves in rebel territory would be freed on January
1, 1863 if their masters did not surrender. Technically, the Arlington
people were already contrabands, that is, they had been "confiscated"
as rebel property by Union troops and were likely to be freed anyway.
[Although Lee had no way of knowing how long the war would last, he probably
understood that his chances of returning to Arlington were nonexistent.]
Conclusion
That all Southerners
were slaveholders and all Northerners abolitionists remains a popular
misconception. While true that, for most of the 19th century, African
Americans in the southern states were often treated inhumanely, some white
Southerners tried to alleviate the burdens that slavery inflicted upon
them, and some went to great lengths to free them. Geography, alone, is
simply not a good predictor of an individual’s views on the "peculiar
institution;" in fact, when comparing Custis and Lee, the masters
of Arlington House, place seems to have mattered very little. Instead,
upbringing, finances, social status, education, and religion all factored
into the equation, and a comparison of two prominent white Northerners
would reveal a similar diversity of opinion on matters of freedom and
race. Recognizing this point is important because the "line"
that divided Americans during the Civil War has not disappeared. Racism
and prejudice still exist and many people persist in their bigoted behavior
because they just can’t imagine a "plausible alternative."
But others learn from their mistakes and strive to create a future where
all humans live together in harmony. The challenge for Americans today
is to minimize the former latter with the .
Works
Cited
Arlington County
Bicentennial: Voices of Arlington, http://www.arlingtonhistory.org/voices1801.htm.
Retrieved on October 15, 2002.
"Arlington House." Arlington: National Park Service, Undated.
Gallagher, Gary W., ed. Lee: The Soldier. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1996.
Grimsley, Mark and Brooks D. Simpson. The Collapse of the Confederacy.
Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.
Kennedy, Roger, "Arlington House, a Mansion that was a Monument,"
newspaper clipping. Arlington: Smithsonian, Oct. 1985.
Long, A.L. Memoirs of Robert E. Lee. New York: J.M. Stoddart & Company,
1886.
Robert E. Lee, http://www.uta.edu/student.orgs/kao/lee.html. Retrieved
on October 20, 2002.
"The African-American Story," undated newspaper clipping, Arlington
House Vertical File, Virginia Room, Arlington County Public Library. Arlington,
VA.
Thomas, Emory E. Robert E. Lee. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995.
1) "The African-American Story," undated newspaper
clipping, Arlington House Vertical File, Virginia Room, Arlington County
Public Library, Arlington, VA.
2) "Arlington House" (National Park Service, n.d.), 1-2.
3) Mark Jones, "The Syphax Family" in Arlington House: The Robert
E. Lee Memorial
4) "The African-American Story"
5) Ibid.
6) "Arlington House," (Arlington: National
Park Service. Undated), 1-2.
7) "African American Story"
8) Emory E. Thomas, Robert E. Lee (New York: W.W. Norton
& Company. 1995), 144.
9) Arlington County Bicentennial: Voices of Arlington, http://www.arlingtonhistory.org/voices1801.htm,
Retrieved on October 15, 2002.
10) Mark Grimsley and Brooks D. Simpson, The Collapse of the Confederacy
(Lincoln, Nebraska:University of Nebraska Press, 2001).
11) "African American Story".
12) U.S. Army, Military District of Washington, "Black
History at Arlington National Cemetery," www.mdw.army.mil/FS-A10.htm
(July 2003).
13) Roger Kennedy, "Arlington House, a Mansion that
was a Monument," newspaper clipping, (Arlington: Smithsonian: Oct
1985), 165.
14) Thomas, 178.
15) Thomas, 177.
16) Deed of Manumission (26 December 1862), Robert E.
Lee Papers, Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia, transcribed
by Annette E. Wetzel
17) <http:ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/va/kingwilliam/deeds/leemanu.txt>
(2 June 2003). Gary W. Gallagher, ed., Lee: The Soldier (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press. 1996), 20.
|
George
Washington Parke Custis
Robert
E. Lee
Conclusion
Works
Cited |
