Washington remained a man of unusual physical stamina who was still strong, manly, and youthful, while Martha had aged more quickly. One telling difference was that while George still loved to dance, especially with lovely young women, Martha had renounced the practice. In November Washington had expressly asked Nathanael Greene to have his young wife, Caty, come to the winter camp, and she duly arrived with her little boy, George Washington Greene. At a dance in February to celebrate the first anniversary of the French alliance, Washington danced first with the obese Lucy Knox. Having done his social duty, he then indulged in an experience that recalled happier times: he danced all evening with Caty Greene. “His Excellency and Mrs. Greene danced upwards of three hours without once sitting down,” Nathanael Greene wrote. “Upon the whole we had a pretty good frisk.”34 Perhaps it was the aftereffect of the social whirl of Philadelphia, but Washington now seemed more attentive to women. “It is needless to premise that my table is large enough to hold the ladies; of this they had ocular proof yesterday,” he told one correspondent, echoing a famous line from Othello. Henry Knox also arranged a splendid fireworks show for the celebration and boasted of the fashionable spectators who sat on a specially erected stage. “We had about seventy ladies, all of the first ton [French for breeding or manners] in the state, and between three and four hundred gentlemen.”35

As at Valley Forge, Washington wondered whether he could retain his restive officers, who had grown disenchanted as they saw civilians pocketing huge wartime profits while they lacked money to tide over their struggling families. “The large fortunes acquired by numbers out of the army affords a contrast that gives poignancy to every inconvenience from remaining in it,” Washington warned Congress. 36 To stem the wholesale defection of ordinary soldiers, he offered land, clothing, and bounties of up to two hundred dollars to keep his fragile army together.

Amid these fears of a shrinking force, Washington’s twenty-four-year-old aide John Laurens hatched an audacious plan to raise a black regiment of three thousand slaves from South Carolina and Georgia, who would win their freedom at the close of the contest. Laurens had been emboldened by the success in recruiting black soldiers from Rhode Island. At Valley Forge Washington had lent Laurens qualified support, telling him that “blacks in the southern parts of the continent offer a resource to us that should not be neglected.”37 Yielding to his son’s wishes, Henry Laurens had canvassed congressional support for a scheme that would allow blacks to fight in exchange for emancipation, but he returned a somber assessment: “I will undertake to say there is not a man in America of your opinion.”38 The idealistic John Laurens tabled the idea for a year, then revived it at Middlebrook.

Handsome, smart, and dashing, John Laurens was no ordinary advocate for emancipation. His father had traded slaves on an immense scale, importing between seven thousand and eight thousand captive souls from Africa. The younger Laurens had long meditated on ways to free these slaves and expunge the family taint, telling his father a year earlier, “I have long deplored the wretched state of these men.”39 No idle dreamer, John Laurens was prepared to free his family’s slaves as part of his program, which he saw as the prelude to general emancipation. In the aftermath of the overwhelming British victory at Savannah, Georgia, in late December 1778, John Laurens warned that South Carolina urgently needed a black force to avert “impending calamity.”40 On March 16 Henry Laurens wrote to Washington and accentuated the strategic utility of the concept, asserting that if the patriots had three thousand armed blacks in the Carolinas, “I should have no doubt of success in driving the British out of Georgia.”41

By this point, with a heavy influx of black soldiers from New England, the Continental Army had become a highly integrated force. But Washington knew that it was one thing to train and equip blacks from the northern states and quite another those from the South. He must have wondered whether such an action might someday sound the death knell for slavery at Mount Vernon. Like many southern slaveholders who were uncomfortable with slavery in principle, Washington hoped the institution would wither away on some foggy, distant day. By contrast, the Laurens plan was radical and immediate, with incalculable consequences. Washington found Laurens’s motives both “laudable” and “important,” but he had pointed reservations about his plan.42

On March 20 Washington sent Henry Laurens a letter that threw away a major historic opportunity. Although surrounded by staunch abolitionists such as Laurens, Hamilton, and Lafayette, he couldn’t break loose from the system that formed the basis of his fortune. With his darkest fears as a planter trumping his hopes, he cast doubt on prospects for the Laurens plan and advanced the dubious argument that, if Americans armed their slaves, the British would simply retaliate in kind—an odd statement, since Lord Dunmore had already raised American hackles with his Ethiopian Regiment. Then Washington broached a still more deeply rooted fear: that a black regiment in South Carolina might foment dangerous thoughts of freedom among slaves everywhere. As slaves saw their black brethren marching off in arms, it might “render slavery more irksome to those who remain in it.” Trying to wriggle free of this topic, which he obviously found exceedingly unpleasant, Washington ended on a disingenuous note. “But as this is a subject that has never employed much of my thoughts, these are no more than the first crude ideas that have struck me upon the occasion.”43

Overcoming doubts from southern delegates, Congress approved a resolution on March 29 that might have paved the way for abolishing southern slavery: “That it be recommended to the states of South Carolina and Georgia, if they shall think the same expedient, to take measures immediately for raising three thousand able-bodied negroes.”44 The resolution proposed that masters would be compensated at a rate of $1,000 per slave, while armed slaves would be liberated at the conclusion of the war. Because John Laurens was a member of the South Carolina legislature, Washington allowed him to head home and argue his case in person. But that assembly, dominated by slaveholders, was scandalized by the Laurens plan and rejected it resoundingly, despite the security it might have afforded against a British invasion. In a postmortem, Washington told Laurens, “I must confess that I am not at all astonished at the failure of your plan. That spirit of freedom, which at the commencement of this contest would have gladly sacrificed everything to the attainment of its object, has long since subsided and every selfish passion has taken its place.”45

What Washington couldn’t acknowledge was that he himself had been lukewarm about the plan for self-interested reasons. Whatever his reservations about slavery, he never showed courage on the issue in public statements, restricting his doubts to private letters. Even before the war Washington had felt burdened by slavery, not so much on moral grounds, but as a bad economic system that saddled him with high fixed costs from a large, sullen, and inefficient labor force. Washington prided himself on being a progressive, up-to-date farmer and thought that human bondage mired him in an antiquated system. Two months before being chosen as commander in chief, he made a revealing comment about notices for the sale of indebted estates that appeared daily in Virginia gazettes. Without “close application,” he said, Virginia estates were forever doomed to lapse into debt “as Negroes must be clothed and fed [and] taxes paid . . . whether anything is made or not.”46