Once when President word reached his ears that he was being criticized for not furnishing his slaves with sufficient food.  He hurriedly directed that the amount should be increased and added:  “I will not have my feelings hurt with complaints of this sort, nor lye under the imputation of starving my negros, and thereby driving them to the necessity of thieving to supply the deficiency.  To prevent waste or embezzlement is the only inducement to allowancing them at all—­for if, instead of a peck they could eat a bushel of meal a week fairly, and required it, I would not withold or begrudge it them.”

There is good reason to believe that Washington was respected and even beloved by many of his “People.”  Colonel Humphreys, who was long at Mount Vernon arranging the General’s papers, wrote descriptive of the return at the close of the Revolution: 

     “When that foul stain of manhood, slavery, flowed,
     Through Afric’s sons transmitted in the blood;
     Hereditary slaves his kindness shar’d,
     For manumission by degrees prepared: 
     Return’d from war, I saw them round him press
     And all their speechless glee by artless signs express.”

On the whole we must conclude that the lot of the Mount Vernon slaves was a reasonably happy one.  The regulations to which they had to conform were rigorous.  Their Master strove to keep them at work and to prevent them from “night walking,” that is running about at night visiting.  Their work was rough, and even the women were expected to labor in the fields plowing, grubbing and hauling manure as if they were men.  But they had rations of corn meal, salt pork and salt fish, whisky and rum at Christmas, chickens and vegetables raised by themselves and now and then a toothsome pig sequestered from the Master’s herd.  When the annual races were held at Alexandria they were permitted to go out into the world and gaze and gabble to their heart’s content.  And, not least of all, an inscrutable Providence had vouchsafed to Ham one great compensation that whatever his fortune or station he should usually be cheerful.  The negro has not that “sad lucidity of mind” that curses his white cousin and leads to general mental wretchedness and suicide.

Some of the Mount Vernon slaves were of course more favored than were others.  The domestic and personal servants lived lives of culture and inglorious ease compared with those of the field hands.  They formed the aristocracy of colored Mount Vernon society and gave themselves airs accordingly.

Nominally our Farmer’s slaves were probably all Christians, though I have found no mention in his papers of their spiritual state.  But tradition says that some of them at Dogue Run at least were Voudoo or “conjuring” negroes.