George Washington: His Troubles with Slavery

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It was probably with a strong sense of relief that George Washington wearily made his way to his second-floor bedchamber on the evening of July 9, 1799. A self-described old man at 67 years of age and with little more than five months of life ahead of him, Washington had just completed a task that seemingly resolved an issue that had troubled him for decades. It was on that day that the former president finished writing his last will and testament, which spelled out his directions for freeing the more than 100 enslaved human beings that he personally owned. Much more than just a functional legal instrument, the will served as Washington’s final message to his country, and the manumission clause represented one of the most symbolic acts of his long and distinguished career in public service.

Given the nature of this type of document, Washington addressed a range of personal matters in dividing his estate among his heirs. Debts owed to him by family members were forgiven; personal items, such as the many swords and canes that he had acquired over the course of his public career, were distributed as cherished mementos; and the thousands of acres that Washington had acquired so assiduously over the years were parceled out among a substantial number of relatives. Because Washington had no offspring of his own, his estate was passed on to the children of his siblings, to the Custis family relations he gained by marriage, to a select few old friends and to his wife, Martha Dandridge Custis Washington.

The former president also made clear statements on other topics that were aimed at a much wider audience. He took this opportunity to reinvigorate his one-man campaign for the creation of a national university by authorizing a portion of his estate to help endow it. But the clause in the will to which Washington probably devoted far more attention than any other — and which he hoped would send an unmistakable message to his countrymen — dealt with the issue of slavery. With the stroke of a pen, Washington set in motion the apparatus intended to free 123 enslaved African-American men, women and children.

While Washington acted to manumit those slaves that he owned in his own right, more than 150 other enslaved workers living at Mount Vernon were the legal property of the heirs to the estate of Daniel Parke Custis, Martha Washington’s first husband, and they remained in bondage. Under Virginia law, the Custis (or ‘dower’) slaves could not be freed without payment of compensation to the heirs. At an estimated average value of 40 pounds sterling per slave, this would have amounted to a payment of more than 6,000 pounds. By comparison, the total profit Washington received from all of his plantation operations for the year 1797 was calculated at just less than 900 pounds sterling.

Many of the dower slaves were the spouses and children resulting from the intermarriage of Custis and Washington slaves. George Washington elected to honor the marital status of the Mount Vernon slaves, even though unions among the enslaved had no legal standing in Virginia. He followed through on his conviction by consistently working to keep the families from being dispersed, even when doing so would have been in his own financial best interest. He repeatedly declined to sell unneeded slaves if it meant that family members would be separated. In a 1786 letter, Washington emphasized his unwillingness to carry out any such transactions, stating that ‘it is…against my inclination…to hurt the feelings of those unhappy people by a separation of man and wife, or of families.’

It was this quandary — the desire to free his slaves, balanced against the sorrow that would result from being able to liberate some but not all of the Mount Vernon slaves — that was at the heart of Washington’s thoughtful deliberations over the provisions of his will. In the end he arrived at a compromise: He stipulated that those slaves he owned were to be freed, but only after the deaths of both himself and his wife. All the careful planning was needed in order to avoid witnessing the ‘painful sensations’ that were sure to result from the enforced separation of the intertwined families.

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Tags: African American History, American History, Historical Figures, Social History

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