He Was Always There.
William “Billy” Lee.
"Billy Lee, Portrait in Tar." 2016. Titus Kaphar, artist.
On the day he died, they did not carry him in state. No draped flags, no solemn procession. No cannon fired. But among the enslaved on the Mount Vernon estate—and there were hundreds—his death was noted, and spoken of, and remembered. “Billy Lee is gone,” they might’ve said. And in some quarters—quietly, carefully—it might've been said with more reverence than the general himself. Not because he had been born a great man, but because, for fifty years, he had stood beside one.
He had ridden with Washington in war, walked behind him in peace, and stood silently just beyond the glow of every oil lamp, every drawing room, every ceremony that remade a general into a president, and a man into a myth. And yet when they wrote the story of George Washington, they called it a story of solitary greatness—as though that greatness had not leaned on another man’s shoulder, had not accepted his boots or his bridled horse. As though the burden of building the republic had been carried alone.
To understand Billy Lee is to understand something deeper than loyalty. His life reveals what it meant to live just behind power. Not inside it—never truly inside—but close enough to feel its heat. Close enough to bear its weight. In the portraits, he stands just outside the frame. But in the actual moments that forged the Revolution—he was there.
There was something about him the other enslaved men remarked on even before the war. He had an ease in the saddle that rivaled the master’s. A bearing that wasn’t learned, but natural. He was strong—not just in frame, but in patience. And he had the uncanny ability to disappear in plain sight, to be moving, useful, necessary—without drawing attention. Washington chose him above all others. Chose him to ride at his side through battle, to wait outside tents where decisions were made, to manage the unglamorous machinery of command: the shaving basin, the clean coat, the message galloped through the night.
Image: A photograph of a historical reenactor portraying William Lee at Mount Vernon, providing a visual representation of his appearance and attire during the 18th century.
https://www.historicalwardrobe.com/
The duties were constant. Lay out the uniform. Strap the boots. Tie the hair in a black silk ribbon. Brush the coat. Deliver the letters. Saddle the horses. Tend the hounds. Ride hard through brush and tangled wood on his horse, leaping hedges at speeds that astonished even the most seasoned fox hunters. In Washington’s journals, family memoirs, military letters—Billy Lee appears, rarely speaking, always working.
When Washington traveled to Williamsburg for the House of Burgesses, Billy was there. When he surveyed the Ohio Valley in 1770, Billy was there. When he rode to Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress, Billy was there.
And when the war began—when the colonies declared they would rather die than submit—Billy Lee followed Washington into the field.
At Cambridge, when Washington took command. At Valley Forge, when their world seemed to be freezing to death. At Brandywine. At Monmouth. At Yorktown. In each place, there he stood—behind the general. Silent. Watchful. Holding the spare horse. The spyglass. The sword. Whatever was needed.
He was the only enslaved person to accompany Washington for the full duration of the war.
Eight years.
Eight years of mud, frostbite, starvation, gunfire, and glory. And when the war ended, when independence was won, Billy Lee returned to Mount Vernon—not as a citizen of the new republic, but still as property. A body. An asset. A man owned.
And he was breaking down.
If there was an image of Washington the world would come to know—calm in the saddle, erect, untouched by mud or fear—it was in part because of Billy Lee. Billy was the man who stood between the general and the world, the buffer who bore its weight so the general could appear untouchable. That, too, was part of the architecture of power. The Founders made a republic. But they made it while being served.
An Inauspicious Thing
Image: Fairfax (VA) Family Register Ledger (1739-1772), which probably contains the sale of William Lee, who Washington purchased in 1768.
The records are clinical, bloodless. “Mulatto Will,” the ledger calls him—just another name on a line, another figure in a transaction. But the ledger does not record that Billy was someone’s son. A mother, a father—never to be seen again. Brothers, sisters—names unknown, faces lost to history. Except for Frank, the younger brother purchased alongside him, Billy Lee entered Mount Vernon as so many enslaved children did: alone. Orphans in the world.
He was just a boy. No one marked the exact date, but he was likely between sixteen and eighteen when purchased—young enough to be impressionable, old enough to bear the weight of a man’s labor. He came into the world without property or inheritance, and into Mount Vernon without kin. Whatever he had of memory or meaning, he carried in silence.
And yet, those who later knew him remembered something else—not the ledger entry, but the boy himself. “He had a bearing,” one would say. Not in words, perhaps—Billy Lee rarely spoke publicly—but in presence. In how he moved, how he observed, how he endured. It was something George Washington noticed almost immediately. Not long after Billy’s arrival, he was brought into the house. Then, into the room. And before long, into the saddle.
Because that was where Billy Lee began to matter. The man who had been “Mulatto Will” on the ledger became something else in proximity to the General. He became a fixture, an extension almost—riding with him on every campaign, brushing his boots, holding his horse. But more than that, he learned the general’s silences, his habits, his temper. He learned to anticipate him. He rode through snow and smoke and long summer nights, always within a few feet of Washington, and always silent.
Image: George Washington and William Lee. John Trumbull. 1780.
If he flinched when the bullets flew, no one recorded it. If he hungered when rations thinned, or froze in his thin clothes, or fell asleep sitting upright on horseback, no one wrote it down. And if he grieved—for his brother, who may have died in one of the same camps, or for the mother he never saw again—he did it quietly. The war left few records of him. But he was always there.
The Dispensable Man
In the mid-1780s, while riding with Washington on a surveying expedition, Billy Lee suffered a brutal fall and shattered one of his knees. The damage was permanent. A few years later, he injured the other. He could barely walk. The man who had once leapt hedges on horseback, who had ridden through storm and cannon fire, now struggled to cross a room. His body, after years of service—service that spanned continents and revolutions—had begun to fail.
But when Washington traveled to Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Billy insisted on going with him. And when Washington was elected president and moved to New York, Billy—crippled, limping, proud—insisted again.
Washington allowed it. Not because it was sensible. Not because it was necessary. But because, as his secretary wrote, “He has been an old and faithful Servant. This is enough for the President to gratify him in every reasonable wish.”
Billy Lee collapsed on the journey north. In Philadelphia, doctors fitted him with a steel brace. He made it, finally, to the Executive Mansion. But the body could no longer serve the role it once had. He could not lift boots, could not ride, could not follow the general across cobblestones or carpets. The limbs that had carried Washington’s burdens now gave way beneath their own weight.
He was sent home. Back to Mount Vernon. No longer the valet, no longer the right hand, no longer the visible extension of power. He was assigned a new trade—shoemaking. In a small cobbler’s shop behind the greenhouse, the man who had followed Washington into battle now mended the boots of those still in bondage.
Image: Cobbler’s work area, Mount Vernon estate.
During the war, he had married a free Black woman named Margaret Thomas—a seamstress in Philadelphia who had worked for Washington’s household. After the war, Billy asked the general to bring her to Mount Vernon. Washington grumbled that he “never wished to see her more,” but relented. Whether from affection, habit, or guilt is impossible to know. The correspondence suggests she was ill. There is no record of her ever arriving. She may have died before or just after the journey.
Someday your head will be as low as ours
Billy Lee’s body was ruined. His marriage, unfulfilled. His freedom, still denied.
And then, in 1799, George Washington died.
Image: George Washington's bedchamber, Mount Vernon, Mount Vernon Ladies' Association.
On his deathbed, he asked Martha to bring two wills from his study. He read them both. He chose one. The other, he discarded. Martha burned it.
In the chosen will, Washington ordered that the 123 enslaved people he personally owned be freed—but not immediately. Their liberty would come only after Martha’s death. It was the first act of manumission by a major Founding Father. But only one name stood apart. Only one person was freed the moment Washington died.
William Lee.
Image: George Washington’s Will. Courtesy of Fairfax County Circuit Court.
Washington also granted him a pension: thirty dollars annually, for the remainder of his life. He wrote that this sum was “a testimony of my sense of his attachment to me, and for his faithful services during the Revolutionary War.”
He gave him nothing else. Not land. Not property. Not even a marked grave.
Lee lived the rest of his life at Mount Vernon. A freeman, yes, but bound still to the only home he had known since boyhood. He worked as a cobbler—quiet, disabled, mostly alone. Visitors came from time to time, asking to see “the famous servant.” And he would meet them, limping from his bench, sometimes silent, sometimes speaking in short, distant tones. “The general,” he told one guest, “was a good man.” That is all the record gives us.
Image: Interior of the Greenhouse Slave Quarters, Mount Vernon Ladies' Association.
Image: A Cabin for an enslaved family at Mount Vernon. This small cabin would have between 8-12 family members in it.
He died in 1810. His burial was quiet. He was placed in the enslaved cemetery at Mount Vernon, a small rise of earth tucked beyond the formal gardens, near the tree line. No headstone marked the site. No plaque bore his name. More than 150 others lie there with him—men, women, children—none remembered, all essential.
He was always there. And yet, somehow, he is never quite seen.
Because what do we do with the man who helped build the myth—but never benefited from it? What do we make of the slave who followed liberty into war, and waited a lifetime for its promise?
William “Billy” Lee was not just the body-servant of George Washington.
He was the witness.
He was the contradiction.
He was the price of greatness, unpaid.
Until death.
And even then—never fully repaid.
Image: Dedication ceremony at the Mount Vernon Slave Memorial (Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association).
Sources
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Ambrose, Katy. “Unlocking the Past: William Lee and The Rodenbostel Horn at Mount Vernon.” The Horn Call 51, no. 2 (February 2021): 49–52.
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Kahn, Eve. “George Washington Really Slept Here. So Did His Slave.” The New York Times, August 25, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/25/arts/george-washingtons-relationship-to-his-slaves.html.
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