William Lee: The Man at Washington's Side

William Lee was at every major battle of the Revolutionary War. He was at Boston when the British evacuated, at Trenton when Washington crossed the Delaware in the winter dark, at Valley Forge through the brutal winter of 1777–1778, at Yorktown when Cornwallis surrendered. He carried Washington's spyglass. He held Washington's horse. He slept in the same tent. He dressed and undressed the commander-in-chief every day for eight years.

He was enslaved. He could not leave. He received no pay. His presence at every major moment of the Revolution was not a choice — it was a condition of his legal status — and yet he chose, within that condition, how to carry himself.

The documentary record of William Lee is fragmentary but real. He appears in portraits of Washington — standing slightly behind the general, holding the horse, present in the frame but not the subject of it. He appears in Washington's letters: Washington purchased silk for his coat, directed Lund to obtain specific items for his use, mentioned him by name in ways that suggest genuine regard, or at minimum a recognition of his usefulness.

Washington's will named him first among the enslaved people to receive freedom: immediate, unconditional, with an annual pension of thirty dollars. No other enslaved person received anything like this. Washington wrote that the bequest was "a testimony of my sense of his attachment to me, and for his faithful services during the Revolutionary War." It is the most direct statement Washington ever made about their relationship.

What Lee thought about any of this — about the war, about Washington, about the freedom that came only after Washington's death and his own knees had been destroyed by years of hard riding — the record does not say. He remained at Mount Vernon after Washington's death, cobbling shoes in a room near the kitchen, until he died around 1810. He is buried in the cemetery with Mount Vernon's other enslaved people, in ground that for most of two centuries bore no marker.