Betsy Foote Washington's piety would be shown in her prayer journals as well as household devotions which included slaves.
However, when a veteran with a large family attempted to visit Lund Washington in his final years, he refused to see him, having heard a report years earlier that his son John had been killed fighting Native Americans.
[7] That nephew Lund Washington (in that same unpublished manuscript) also characterized the President's testamentary emancipation of his slaves as "the ... worst act of his public life.
[12] Considerable correspondence between the two exists, particularly as Lund Washington supervised renovations of the manor house and slave quarters during the conflict.
[13] However, he aroused his cousin's ire in April 1781, in the war's closing days, when three British warships anchored in the Potomac River after torching several plantations on the Maryland shore and demanded foodstuffs and other supplies.
[25] Also John Fairfax and his brother Hezekiah served as overseers for several years in the mid-1780s, before establishing their own estates and farming using enslaved labor, with John Fairfax crossing the Appalachian Mountains and also serving in the Virginia House of Delegates.
[26] Lund Washington became blind before his death in 1796, survived by his widow, to whom he had bequeathed his entire estate.