April 1781: Seventeen Choose the British

On an April night in 1781, with a British warship anchored in the Potomac and Lund Washington negotiating on the bank, seventeen enslaved people at Mount Vernon made the most consequential decision of their lives. They walked away from the estate. They went aboard the HMS Savage. They chose the British.

We know their names from Washington's later attempts to recover them: Gunner and his wife Esther, Lewis and Lil; Deborah and Frederick; Peter and several others. Some were skilled workers. Some were household servants. They had, between them, decades of service to Washington's estate and no share in the liberty Washington was fighting to establish.

Lund Washington's account of the episode is the primary source. He went aboard the ship to negotiate — hoping, apparently, to retrieve the enslaved people and possibly recover livestock the British had taken. He brought food and supplies. The negotiations failed in the sense that none of the seventeen were returned. The British kept their word: they did not attack the estate.

Washington's reaction, in the letter to Lund, focuses almost entirely on the provisioning of the enemy ship. He was furious about that: "to go on board their vessels; carry them refreshments; commune with a parcel of plundering Scoundrels." He mentions the enslaved people who left in a single sentence, noting that he had taken steps to try to recover them. He seems less exercised about the departures than about the political embarrassment of his estate manager feeding British sailors.

Of the seventeen, most died within a few years of smallpox and other diseases that decimated the thousands of enslaved people who sought freedom with the British. Washington tracked at least one, Deborah, to Philadelphia after the war, but could not recover her. She and the others had chosen a freedom that cost many of them their lives. The cost of staying, of another lifetime of unpaid labor, had simply seemed higher.