Pull up a chair, let’s talk history.

In July 1784, George Washington wrote from Mount Vernon to a Philadelphia merchant about a family matter that was not Washington’s own. William Lee, the man who had served as his valet throughout the Revolutionary War, wanted his wife brought to Virginia.

Washington identified her as Margaret Thomas, a free Black woman who had worked in his wartime household. He told Clement Biddle that he had not wished to see her again. Even so, he could not refuse Lee’s request because Lee had followed his fortunes through the war “with fidility.”¹

The misspelling belongs to Washington. So does the revealing combination of gratitude and command. William Lee had crossed the colonies with the Continental Army. He had attended the commander during years when cold, hunger, defeat, and uncertainty were common. Yet Washington still controlled whether Lee’s wife might join him at Mount Vernon.

That letter offers one way into Melchior Baltazar’s recent Commonplace essay, “Two Roads to Freedom: William Lee, Harry Washington, and Living the Paradox of the American Revolution.” Baltazar places Lee beside another man once enslaved by Washington. Harry Washington escaped Mount Vernon, reached the British, and eventually left the United States as a free man.²

Their lives do not provide two neat alternatives from which an enslaved person could freely choose. Slavery constrained the choices available to both men. Their experiences do, however, show how war disturbed ordinary authority and created openings that different people understood and used in different ways.

Washington purchased William Lee and his brother Frank in 1768. William became a household servant and accomplished horseman. When Washington left for the Continental Congress in 1775 and then assumed command of the army, Lee accompanied him. He served near the center of the Patriot war effort, caring for Washington’s clothing, equipment, and personal needs.³

Proximity gave Lee responsibilities and access that most enslaved people at Mount Vernon did not possess. It did not make him free. His labor remained compulsory, and his family life remained subject to decisions made by the man he served.

Harry Washington encountered the Revolution differently. Born in West Africa, he had endured capture and transportation across the Atlantic before being purchased for labor connected to Washington’s Great Dismal Swamp enterprise. He first escaped in 1771 and was recaptured. During the war he escaped again.⁴

The timing mattered. In November 1775, Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, declared that enslaved people belonging to rebels would be free if they were able and willing to bear arms for the Crown. Dunmore did not announce a general attack on slavery. His proclamation was a military measure aimed at weakening his opponents. It excluded people enslaved by Loyalists and tied its promise to British service.⁵

For an enslaved person considering escape, however, the governor’s motives were not the only question. The proclamation joined a promise of freedom to the presence of British forces capable of receiving fugitives. It altered the practical possibilities of the war.

Harry Washington reached British lines and served the Crown. By 1783, that decision had carried him to New York, where the British prepared to evacuate thousands of Black Loyalists. Officials recorded their names and circumstances in the document now called the Book of Negroes. Its entry for Harry identified him as a forty-three-year-old man formerly enslaved by General Washington and listed him for evacuation to Nova Scotia.⁶

That ledger deserves close attention. It was an administrative instrument, created so British officials could decide who qualified to leave. It reduced complicated lives to names, ages, physical descriptions, former owners, and certificates. Yet it also documented a political fact that Washington and other American slaveholders found difficult to accept. People they claimed as property had entered British protection and were departing as free persons.

Washington protested the evacuation. The provisional peace agreement barred the British from carrying away American property, and he regarded formerly enslaved people as falling within that clause. Sir Guy Carleton, the British commander, disagreed. He maintained that promises made to people who had reached British lines before the armistice had to be honored. The two sides arranged for a register so that disputed claims might later be considered.⁷

Here the Revolution’s language of liberty became an argument over records, treaties, and ownership. Harry Washington’s freedom depended partly upon his own decision to escape and partly upon British officials keeping a wartime promise when American representatives demanded the return of human beings.

William Lee remained enslaved after independence. Washington’s 1784 letter about Margaret Thomas acknowledged Lee’s long service but did not question Washington’s authority over him. Injuries later damaged both of Lee’s knees. He attempted to join Washington’s presidential household in New York, but his disability prevented him from resuming his former duties. He returned to Mount Vernon and worked as a shoemaker.⁸

In his will, dated July 9, 1799, Washington gave Lee immediate freedom and an annual allowance of thirty dollars. Lee was the only enslaved person Washington ordered freed immediately. The other enslaved people Washington legally owned were to be emancipated after Martha Washington’s death. Those provisions did not apply to the people held as part of the Custis estate, whom Washington did not legally own.⁹

Lee’s manumission recognized extraordinary service. It also arrived only through the will of the man who had held him in slavery for more than thirty years. Freedom came as a posthumous grant, framed as a reward for attachment and fidelity.

Harry Washington’s road led farther from Mount Vernon. Nova Scotia offered legal freedom, but Black Loyalists often received poorer land, smaller grants, or no grant at all. In 1792, Harry joined nearly twelve hundred Black settlers who sailed for Sierra Leone. Their migration placed them within another colonial experiment administered by a private company.

When settlers resisted taxes and company authority in 1800, Harry took part in the uprising. The company suppressed the resistance and banished him. His last known years remind us that freedom was not a single event completed when a person crossed British lines or appeared in an evacuation register. It required land, security, political standing, and the power to defend one’s claims.¹⁰

Baltazar’s comparison is strongest when it keeps both men in view. William Lee’s wartime service brought him close to the best-known American advocate of independence, but it did not secure his immediate freedom. Harry Washington obtained freedom by leaving the Patriot world and placing himself under British protection. Neither life fits comfortably within a national story that treats American victory as the natural fulfillment of liberty.

We should also be careful with what the evidence can establish. Washington’s long association with Lee may have contributed to his changing thoughts about slavery. The surviving documents show dependence, familiarity, gratitude, and eventual manumission. They do not allow us to measure Lee’s influence on Washington’s private reasoning with confidence. Nor can we turn Lee’s service into uncomplicated devotion. As the Mount Vernon account observes, the records do not tell us whether attachment, calculation, necessity, or some mixture of motives shaped his conduct.¹¹

The same caution applies to Harry Washington. The documentary trail is clearest at moments when governments needed to classify him: a runaway advertisement, a military record, an evacuation ledger, a settler list, or a record of rebellion. Those sources tell us a great deal about what he did. They reveal much less about the private reasoning behind each decision.

That limitation is not a reason to leave either man at the margins. It is a reason to build the history around choices we can document and structures we can explain.

William Lee and Harry Washington both recognized that the Revolution changed the conditions under which slavery operated. One remained beside the commander of the Continental Army and eventually received freedom through Washington’s will. The other escaped the same plantation, joined Washington’s enemies, and carried his freedom through Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone.

Their stories bring the Revolution down from declarations to lived decisions. They ask us to consider who could claim liberty, what risks that claim required, and which authorities possessed the power to recognize it. They also remind us that independence and emancipation were not the same achievement. For many Black people in the Revolutionary era, the struggle for freedom crossed national lines and continued long after the shooting stopped.

Until next time,

Notes

1. George Washington to Clement Biddle, July 28, 1784, Founders Online, National Archives, transcribed by Encyclopedia Virginia, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/primary-documents/letter-from-george-washington-to-clement-biddle-july-28-1784/.
2. Melchior Baltazar, “Two Roads to Freedom: William Lee, Harry Washington, and Living the Paradox of the American Revolution,” Commonplace, September 2026, https://commonplace.online/article/two-roads-to-freedom/.
3. “William (Billy) Lee,” George Washington’s Mount Vernon, accessed September 17, 2026, https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/william-billy-lee.
4. Cassandra Pybus, “Washington’s Revolution: Harry That Is, Not George,” Early American Studies 5, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 247-63; Baltazar, “Two Roads to Freedom.”
5. John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, “Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation,” November 7, 1775, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/the-georges-at-war/articles-and-essays/war-and-peace/lord-dunmores-proclamation/.
6. “Inspection Roll of Negroes, Book No. 1,” 1783, Miscellaneous Papers of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789, National Archives, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/17337716; Baltazar, “Two Roads to Freedom.”
7. George Washington to Guy Carleton, May 6, 1783, Founders Online, National Archives, transcribed by Encyclopedia Virginia, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/primary-documents/letter-from-george-washington-to-guy-carleton-may-6-1783/.
8. “William (Billy) Lee,” Mount Vernon.
9. George Washington, “Last Will and Testament,” July 9, 1799, quoted and linked in “William (Billy) Lee,” Mount Vernon.
10. Baltazar, “Two Roads to Freedom”; Pybus, “Washington’s Revolution,” 247-63.
11. “William (Billy) Lee,” Mount Vernon.

Bibliography

Baltazar, Melchior. “Two Roads to Freedom: William Lee, Harry Washington, and Living the Paradox of the American Revolution.” Commonplace. September 2026. https://commonplace.online/article/two-roads-to-freedom/.

Murray, John, Earl of Dunmore. “Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation.” November 7, 1775. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/the-georges-at-war/articles-and-essays/war-and-peace/lord-dunmores-proclamation/.

National Archives. “Inspection Roll of Negroes, Book No. 1.” 1783. Miscellaneous Papers of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/17337716.

Pybus, Cassandra. “Washington’s Revolution: Harry That Is, Not George.” Early American Studies 5, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 247-63.

Washington, George. “Last Will and Testament.” July 9, 1799. Founders Online. National Archives. Cited in “William (Billy) Lee,” George Washington’s Mount Vernon. https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/william-billy-lee.

Washington, George. Letter to Clement Biddle. July 28, 1784. Founders Online. National Archives. Transcribed by Encyclopedia Virginia. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/primary-documents/letter-from-george-washington-to-clement-biddle-july-28-1784/.

Washington, George. Letter to Guy Carleton. May 6, 1783. Founders Online. National Archives. Transcribed by Encyclopedia Virginia. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/primary-documents/letter-from-george-washington-to-guy-carleton-may-6-1783/.

“William (Billy) Lee.” George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Accessed September 17, 2026. https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/william-billy-lee.

Image Bibliography

Fairfax Circuit Court Historic Records Center. George Washington’s Will. July 9, 1799. Manuscript. Fairfax Circuit Court Historic Records Center, Fairfax County, Virginia. GovDelivery

Murray, John, Earl of Dunmore. By His Excellency the Right Honourable John Earl of Dunmore . . . A Proclamation. Norfolk, Virginia, 1775. Broadside. Printed Ephemera Collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress. The Library of Congress

Book of Negroes. 1783. Guy Carleton, 1st Baron Dorchester: Papers, PRO 30/55/100. The National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom. Harry Washington entry, p. 90. Gotham City History

Trumbull, John. George Washington and William Lee (George Washington). 1780. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Bequest of Charles Allen Munn, 1924, 24.109.88. Public domain.