“Calling himself William Lee”

In October 1767, George Washington bought two “Mulatto” boys named Will and Frank and two “Negro” boys named Adam and Jack from Mary Lee, widow of Col. John Lee of Westmoreland County.

John Lee (1724-1767) had married the young widow Mary (Smith) Ball in 1749. They had no children together before he died. Given how the enslaved mulatto boys were Col. Lee’s property and later took his surname, he’s the man most likely to have been their father. In any event, his widow sent them off with another master soon after the colonel’s death.

Mary went on to wed John Smith in August 1768, and Washington dined with that couple the day after their marriage. There were so many Smiths, Lees, and Balls in Virginia that I can’t tell if John or Mary Lee was related to Washington’s mother’s Ball family or the Lee family his descendants married into, but they were in the same social circle.

Washington paid £61.15s for Will and Frank, more than three times the £19 he paid for the other two youths. All four slaves were probably teenaged males with many productive years before them, but the brothers’ lighter skin made them particularly valuable as domestic servants.

The Washington Papers include lists of “tithables” on his lands each June for many years. High among the “Ho[use]. Servants” on those lists from 1768 to 1771 was “Billy.” On 8 Oct 1770, Washington wrote in his diary about “my boy Billy who was taken sick.”

In September 1771, however, Washington recorded paying for a “pair of Boots for Will.” The editors of the papers wrote that there were enslaved men named Will on different farms, but those boots mostly likely went to the house servant he had bought in 1767, now close to manhood.

After that point, Washington stopped referring to the young man as “Billy,” at least in writing (except indirectly in connection with one incident I’ll discuss tomorrow). On the tithables lists “Will” appeared starting in 1772. His brother “Frank” had arrived on those list of house servants in 1771, along with “Herculas,” most likely Hercules Posey.

When Washington rode off to war in 1775, he brought Will with him as a body servant. The young man, then probably in his twenties, was at the commander’s headquarters in Cambridge, where on 22 Feb 1776 the steward recorded this expense in his: “Paid Margaret Thomas for making three shirts for William.”

Ten years later, on 18 Feb 1786, Washington made a comprehensive list of his human property. At the top was “Will Val de Chambre,” followed by waiter “Frank” and soon after cook “Herculus.” In that decade Will suffered two falls that injured his knees badly so he was no longer able to wait on Washington as had trained to do. He became a shoemaker at Mount Vernon.

In his 1799 will, Washington granted freedom and a pension to “my Mulatto man William (calling himself William Lee)”—the first time he referred to his wartime companion with a surname.

In a memoir first extracted in the American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine in 1829, Washington’s step-grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, referred to “his huntsman, Will Lee.” But he also wrote that that servant “was better known in Revolutionary lore as Billy.”

Indeed, while Washington himself never wrote of his body servant as “Billy” after 1771, other people referred to him by that diminutive. For example, on 27 Apr 1789 Clement Biddle wrote to the new President from Philadelphia, “I have frequently called to see Billy.” William Lee continued to live at Mount Vernon until his death around 1824, and nineteenth-century articles and memoirs about visiting there, such as the one by Elkanah Watson, called him “Billy.”

Nineteenth-century authors therefore developed a new way of referring to Washington’s body servant Will—as “Billy Lee,” a combination of names the general himself never used in writing. That’s become a standard reference. It shows up in, for instance, this month’s History Channel series about Washington, at least from some commentators.

But is that how historians should refer to the man, especially during the war years? We don’t know what Gen. Washington called him in conversation, but in writing it was always “William” or “Will.” We also know that William Lee kept the surname of his first owner (and father?) more than thirty years after coming to Mount Vernon.

“Billy” is of course a diminutive, and American slaveholders and racists used such nicknames to belittle black men. Yet we also use such names for friends; it’s possible that Washington’s valet was happy to answer to that name from people he knew well. It’s also conceivable that when Will Lee became disabled, still only in his late thirties and enslaved, he was reduced to such a state of dependency that people started to infantilize him as “Billy” again.

All those are conjectural possibilities, however. We know from Washington’s will that in middle age his former valet was “calling himself William Lee,” and that’s the name I use.

Expanding the Extended Washington Family

Last month the Boston Globe ran an Associated Press dispatch about how two historic sites, Arlington House and Mount Vernon, were presenting the evidence that the Washington family—which is to say, Martha Washington’s descendants—included people of African ancestry.

This article focused on George Washington Parke (“Wash”) Custis, youngest son of John Parke (“Jack”) Custis, whom George and Martha Washington took in and raised from the early 1780s. (Wash Custis, shown here, is sometimes referred to as the first President’s adopted son, but I don’t think there was a formal adoption.)

The dispatch says:

[In 1797] George Washington Parke Custis was 16 and attending Princeton, one of several schools he bounced in and out of. Before long, he was back home at Mount Vernon, where he would be accused of fathering children with slaves.

Two centuries later, the National Park Service and the nonprofit that runs Washington’s Mount Vernon estate are concluding that the rumors were true: In separate exhibits, they show that the first family’s family tree has been biracial from its earliest branches. . . .

Outside the marriage, Parke Custis likely fathered children with two of his stepfather’s slaves: Arianna Carter and Caroline Branham, according to the exhibits at Arlington House and Mount Vernon. . . .

He said no new, definitive evidence has surfaced to prove Parke Custis fathered girls with slaves; rather, the recognition reflects a growing sense that African-American history cannot be disregarded and that Arlington House represents more than Lee’s legacy, he said.

In other words, we don’t need new evidence. We just need to take a clear-eyed look at the evidence we already have, recognizing that Wash Custis and his white relatives were very unlikely to make a formal admission of paternity. In 1826 Custis freed Arianna Carter’s daughter, Maria Syphax, with her children, and granted her seventeen acres of his land. That was about as much as we can expect from a prominent Virginia planter.

There’s also strong evidence of men in preceding generations of Martha Washington’s family having children with enslaved women as well. As Henry Wiencek detailed in An Imperfect God:

• John Custis (1678-1749) and his slave Alice had a son named Jack around 1739. Five years later he set “my dear black boy Jack” free through an action of the Virginia Council, which he sat on. There’s even a tradition that he toyed with rewriting his will to make Jack his heir instead of his legitimate son Daniel, who eventually became Martha’s first husband.
• Martha’s own father, John Dandridge (1700-1756), had a daughter by “a woman whose name is not known, of mixed white, Native American, and African blood.” That daughter, Ann, wasn’t manumitted until 1802.
• Martha’s son John Parke Custis (1754-1781) had a son by Ann Dandridge, his enslaved half-aunt, around 1780.

Thus, in having sex with women his family owned, Wash Custis was following the model of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather.

TOMORROW: John Parke Custis’s secret son.