"
Particularizing as to the members of his staff, Washington described their
several characteristics: Stuart was intelligent and apparently honest and
attentive, but vain and talkative, and usually backward in his schedule;
Crow would be efficient if kept strictly at his duty, but seemed prone to
visiting and receiving visits. "This of course leaves his people too much
to themselves, which produces idleness or slight work on the one side and
flogging on the other, the last of which, besides the dissatisfaction
which it creates, has in one or two instances been productive of serious
consequences." McKay was a "sickly, slothful and stupid sort of fellow,"
too much disposed to brutality in the treatment of the slaves in his
charge; Butler seemed to have "no more authority over the negroes ... than
an old woman would have"; and Green, the overseer of the carpenters, was
too much on a level with the slaves for the exertion of control. Davy, the
negro foreman at Muddy Hole, was rated in his master's esteem higher than
some of his white colleagues, though Washington had suspicions concerning
the fate of certain lambs which had vanished while in his care. Indeed the
overseers all and several were suspected from time to time of drunkenness,
waste, theft and miscellaneous rascality.
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