Father of His Country, Only - George Washington's affair with a slave

National Review, August 9, 1999 by Richard Brookhiser

George Washington faces a bad rap.

Mr. Brookhiser, an NR senior editor, is the author of Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington and, most recently, Alexander Hamilton, American.

Everyone carries a picture of George Washington in his wallet, but he has just made the news, thanks to a slave he may never have met. West Ford (1784?-1863) was owned by one of George's younger brothers, John Augustine Washington. Ford's mother was another one of John Augustine's slaves, named Venus. For several years, Ford's descendants have been trying to publicize the claim that his father was the Father of His Country. On July 7 they hit the jackpot. The New York Times ran a story by Nicholas Wade that was courteous, thorough-and highly skeptical of their claim. The networks seized on the article and flew two sisters, Linda Bryant of Aurora, Colo., and Janet Allen of Peoria, Ill., into New York for the morning talk shows. I met them, and their literary agent, when we shared a segment on CBS. As a Washington biographer, I too was highly skeptical, though we all were polite.

Washington has been a projective screen for American fantasies for over 200 years. I have been told that he was gay, Catholic, a pot-smoker, and a hermaphrodite. One of the oldest fairy tales, dating back to the Revolution, is that he was a woman. Why the interest in this story now?

The 42nd president has made political sex a hot topic. As the Clinton White House was fighting for its life in 1998 it smugly reminded Congress that Alexander Hamilton had also been at the center of a sex scandal (the Reynolds Affair). Clinton did it, Hamilton did it- everyone's the same. In fact, the scandals were different (for one thing, Hamilton told the truth), to say nothing of the careers, although now that Sen. Moynihan has endorsed Mrs. Clinton as his successor, they can spend their evenings at his Pindar's Corners farm discussing the similarities between the Report on Manufactures and midnight basketball.

The biggest boost to the West Ford story is given by the ongoing saga of Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. The claim that he fathered her children is an old one, first published in 1802, but historians tended to discount it, not least because of the bad faith of most of those who made it. Then in 1998 Nature published the results of DNA tests which showed that the descendants of Eston Hemings, Sally's last child, carried a Jefferson chromosome. (Such chromosomes are transmitted only along an unbroken line of males. The descendants of Sally's eldest son, Thomas-who represent the only other unbroken line available-did not show the Jefferson chromosome.) Jefferson's defenders pointed out that Eston's father did not have to be the president; any one of numerous Jefferson cousins or nephews could have done the deed. But the Jefferson family had been claiming, for over a century, that Sally's paramour was one of two nephews surnamed Carr. The researchers published by Nature had looked for Carr chromosomes, in vain. Now Jefferson supporters were in the somewhat Clintonian position of pointing to a new set of relatives. Perhaps they will turn out to be right, but the burden of proof shifted noticeably.

Jeffersonians also argued that their man was 65 years old when Eston Hemings was born-old enough to do Viagra ads, not father children. They read neither Page Six nor the Pentateuch, both of which record many babies sired by high-status oldsters.

If Jefferson did it, why not Washington?

The facts of the West Ford story suggest otherwise. Thomas Jefferson indisputably knew Sally Hemings-he owned her, and lived under the same roof with her for decades. There is no evidence to suggest that George Washington even met Venus during the time that West Ford was conceived. Until Christmas 1783 Washington was away from Virginia, winding up the Revolutionary War. Over the next few years he was restoring Mount Vernon, which had decayed in his absence, and receiving a flood of invited and uninvited visitors. Bushfield, John Augustine's plantation, was 95 miles, or a two-day ride, away. All available records indicate that Washington did not visit Bushfield, and that Venus was not taken to Mount Vernon, during this time.

An equal difficulty is the strong chance that George Washington was sterile. He and Martha had no children in the 41 years they were married, but during the seven years of Martha's first marriage (to Daniel Parke Custis) she gave birth four times. Washington brooded over his lack; in a discarded draft of his first inaugural address, he wrote that "Divine Providence hath not seen fit that my blood should be transmitted" (i.e., there could be no Washington Dynasty).

The final reason is psychological. By the time West Ford was born, Washington's views on slavery had already begun to change. He understood that, as a leader of a fight for freedom who owned slaves, he was in an anomalous position. He had commanded free black soldiers during the Revolution (they formed 8 percent of his troops at the Battle of Monmouth). After the war he stopped selling slaves, and rarely bought them. At the end of his life, in 1799, he wrote a will freeing all his slaves and setting aside money to support those too old or too young to work. An exploitative relationship of the kind that West Ford's descendants imagine runs counter to the direction he was moving in.