Free A Disease in the Public Mind by Thomas Fleming Page B

Abigail’s dislike of the institution had been visible in her letters to John even in 1776, when he was persuading the Continental Congress to vote for independence. 10
    Martha Washington’s reaction revealed that emancipating slaves could be a complex business. Martha and most of her grandchildren (her four children were dead) did not agree with Washington’s decision. Only her grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, honored Washington’s example and freed his slaves at his death.
    This disagreement was the reason for the tone of command in the emancipation pages of Washington’s will. Even if Martha had agreed with her husband, she could not have freed her slaves. Under the terms of her first husband’s will, they belonged to her only during her lifetime. At her death these “dower slaves” were to be handed on to her Custis descendants. 11
    George Washington’s inability to convince the people closest to him, above all his beloved wife of forty years, was an ominous omen for the future of black freedom in the South. The second Emancipation Proclamation was as ignored and forgotten as the first one.
    Fifty-eight years later, Washington’s example would have an ironic resurrection. When George Washington Parke Custis died in 1857, the man who was responsible for freeing his slaves was his son-in-law, Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee. The impact of the experience on this already famous soldier became a tragic turning point in American history.

CHAPTER 6
    Thomas Jefferson’s Nightmare
    In 1800, the year after George Washington died, Thomas Jefferson was elected third president of the United States. One of the new chief executive’s early visitors was Louis-André Pichon, the affable young chargé d’affaires of the new French republic. Jefferson greeted him warmly as the spokesman for a country that had long stirred his deepest political emotions.
    Chargé Pichon asked what the president would do or say if Paris sent an army to the rebellious island of Saint-Domingue to restore it to French control. For over a century France had owned a third of the island. The Spanish, who owned the larger slice, called it Santo Domingo—the name that most Americans used.
    The French section’s sugar, coffee, and indigo plantations had made it France’s most valuable overseas possession until the 1789 revolution in Paris triggered a civil war that had wrecked the economy. For American merchants, Saint-Domingue had been a prime customer. In 1790, U.S. exports to the island, mostly food and lumber, amounted to $3 million, second only to the $6.9 million in similar products that the Americans shipped to England.
    The French Revolution’s cry of liberty, equality, and fraternity had reached Saint-Domingue early in the 1790s. The precarious social mixture of royal officials, rich creole planters, middle class storekeepers and craftsmen, and free mulattoes was sitting on a potential volcano of 500,000 black slaves, whose toil on the plantations created the island’s wealth. The mulattoes were almost as numerous as the whites and frequently as wealthy. They owned an estimated 100,000 slaves. But they were forbidden to dress like white men. They could not marry a white woman. They could not carry guns. If a mulatto struck a white man, his hand would be amputated. A white man could strike a mulatto and risk nothing but a fine.
    The black slaves, called noirs, were kept under control with unspeakable brutalities. This cry of rage from a man who spent half his life as a noir is a grisly summary of French slave owners’ tactics.
    Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to eat shit? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms or on anthills or lashed them on stakes in the swamps to be devoured by