Yet all the slaves he saw seemed gay and light-hearted and on Sundays played at pitching the bar with an activity and zest that indicated that they managed to keep from being overworked and found some enjoyment in life.

To our Farmer’s orderly and energetic soul his shiftless lazy blacks were a constant trial.  In his diary for February, 1760, he records that four of his carpenters had only hewed about one hundred twenty feet of timber in a day, so he tried the experiment of sitting down and watching them.  They at once fell to with such energy and worked so rapidly that he concluded that each one ought to hew about one hundred twenty-five feet per day and more when the days were longer.

A later set of carpenters seem to have been equally trifling, for of them he said in 1795:  “There is not to be found so idle a set of Rascals.—­In short, it appears to me, that to make even a chicken coop, would employ all of them a week.”

“It is observed by the Weekly Report,” he wrote when President, “that the Sowers make only Six Shirts a Week, and the last week Caroline (without being sick) made only five;—­Mrs. Washington says their usual task was to make nine with Shoulder straps, & good sewing:—­tell them therefore from me, that what has been done shall be done by fair or foul means; & they had better make a choice of the first, for their own reputation, & for the sake of peace and quietness otherwise they will be sent to the several Plantations, & be placed at common labor under the Overseers thereat.  Their work ought to be well examined, or it will be most shamefully executed, whether little or much of it is done—­and it is said, the same attention ought to be given to Peter (& I suppose to Sarah likewise) or the Stockings will be knit too small for those for whom they are intended; such being the idleness, & deceit of those people.”

“What kind of sickness is Betty Davis’s?” he demands on another occasion.  “If pretended ailments, without apparent causes, or visible effects, will screen her from work, I shall get no work at all from her;—­for a more lazy, deceitful and impudent huzzy is not to be found in the United States than she is.”

“I observe what you say of Betty Davis &ct,” he wrote a little later, “but I never found so much difficulty as you seem to apprehend in distinguishing between real and feigned sickness;—­or when a person is much afflicted with pain.—­Nobody can be very sick without having a fever, nor will a fever or any other disorder continue long upon any one without reducing them.—­Pain also, if it be such as to yield entirely to its force, week after week, will appear by its effects; but my people (many of them) will lay up a month, at the end of which no visible change in their countenance, nor the loss of an oz of flesh, is discoverable; and their allowance of provision is going on as if nothing ailed them.”

He not only deemed his negroes lazy, but he had also a low opinion of their honesty.  Alexandria was full of low shopkeepers who would buy stolen goods from either blacks or whites, and Washington declared that not more than two or three of his slaves would refrain from filching anything upon which they could lay their hands.