Oil on canvas. Galerie des Batailles, Chateaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles, France.
Generals comte de Rochambeau and George Washington give last orders before attacking the British in October 1781. Marquis de Lafayette is to the right of Washington. At the far-right is Washington’s slave-valet, Billy Lee, holding the commander’s horse.
Racial prejudice worked to perpetuate American slavery, even if it was not essential to sustain the institution. Slavery, serfdom, and peonage had existed elsewhere without racial connotations. Indeed, bondage had been so historically ubiquitous one might well ask why, by the 1760’s, it had come to trouble so many white Americans so much. The answer lies in part — and this part help explain why people like Mason did not act more aggressively on their concerns — in the reservations many whites felt about living alongside members of a supposedly inferior race, whether slave or free. The problem was inherent in American slavery, and emancipation, by undermining white control, would only make it worse.