Enslaver and American Colonization Society president
The contrast in his treatment of two groups of enslaved people would later become an issue. At the request of his mother, Hannah Bushrod, before her death, Bushrod and his brothers freed an enslaved mulatto man named West Ford. Ford was likely their brother or nephew, born in Westmoreland County in 1784, and who would become the overseer of enslaved domestic workers at Mount Vernon. Ford would help protect George Washington's house and tomb from the British during the War of 1812 (and from many visitors before and after the conflict), alongside a man named Oliver Smith, who had been raised alongside Bushrod Washington as his personal servant, as was the custom of the time.
There are discrepancies among scholars about the paternity of West Ford, some of it based on the oral history of Ford's descendants, that West Ford may have been fathered either by George Washington, or Bushrod Washington, but there is no direct evidence for either. Although Ford's mother was Venus, a woman enslaved by Bushrod's mother, who died in 1801 and freed him in her will, the precise identify of his white father is unknown, only that his grandson, George W. Ford, born in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1847 would become a Buffalo soldier and the first African American national cemetery superintendent. Bushrod Washington's will also gave land to West Ford.
The Mount Vernon estate did not include much cash, and Washington would not support elderly formerly enslaved people as required by his late uncle's will. Washington instead maintained the plantation's mansion on the proceeds from the property and his Supreme Court salary. Over time, Washington sold many enslaved people, stating that he could thereby support the main house, property, and elderly formerly enslaved people.
Justice Joseph Story said the mansion appeared deteriorated when he visited his colleague. However, other visitors to the American South also noticed many examples of property deterioration there, especially compared to the Northern States, including Philip Fithian (who tutored the children of Councilor Robert Carter in Westmoreland County in 1773–1774, but whose letters were not published until the 20th century), Alexis de Tocqueville (who toured the county in 1831 and wrote about the subject in 1835 and again in 1855) and Frederick Law Olmsted (who toured the South from 1852 until 1857, publishing dispatches in the New York Daily Times which were collected and republished in 1856, 1857 and 1860). For many years, Bushrod Washington and his cousin Lawrence Lewis administered George Washington's estate. In fact, the estate would not be closed until more than a decade after Bushrod Washington's death.
Meanwhile, Bushrod Washington helped found the American Colonization Society (ACS) to encourage and support the migration of freeborn people of color and emancipated slaves to the continent of Africa at the Davis Hotel in Washington, D.C., on December 21, 1816. He became its national president (lending the prestige of the Washington name to its fundraising) and remained so until he died in 1829. His decades-long friend, Chief Justice John Marshall, joined the organization as a life member shortly after its founding and became president of its Richmond branch. In the 1810 census, the Mount Vernon plantation included 71 enslaved people, and one of his nephews of the same name also enslaved people in Fairfax County. A decade later, Bushrod Washington enslaved 83 people at Mount Vernon. His practice of selling enslaved people to support Mount Vernon's upkeep or his lifestyle angered abolitionists, who questioned why the ACS president could not set an example by freeing the people he enslaved, as had his uncle George Washington. Some believed that Washington should have sent them to Liberia.
In particular, Hezekiah Niles in his nationally distributed Weekly Register questioned Washington's sale of 54 enslaved people from Mount Vernon in 1821 and reprinted a letter Washington had sent to the editor of a Baltimore federalist paper on the subject, as well as an August article in a Leesburg, Virginia, paper that noted that a "drove of 100 negroes" were walked westward through the town the previous Saturday. Washington responded in print several times, advising that he had sold 54 enslaved people the previous March for $10,000 for use on plantations in Louisiana's Red River area, and the contract promised that families would not be broken up. Niles questioned the justice of the action, insisted that he was not disrespecting Washington, and did not discuss the economics of shipping from the port of Alexandria compared to the lengthy foot journey the coffle was undertaking. Washington insisted the sale was justified by the economics of plantation management, insubordination of the enslaved people, and the likelihood that more would escape northward.
