Three years earlier, when it came time for Washington to announce his decision to forego a third term as president, he had expressed his views on a variety of topics, but conspicuously avoided mentioning slavery. Instead, he maintained silence on the issue. Undoubtedly he viewed this most troubling of all problems as having the potential to destroy the fragile union that was his life’s work and chief political legacy. For both Congress and the president, silence signified that for the time being this most controversial topic had been laid to rest.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in American History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

But to conclude that George Washington’s highest priority was to ensure the future of the nation at virtually any cost — and that potentially divisive issues such as slavery could not be allowed to threaten that goal — is to let Washington and the other founders off much too easily from the charge of hypocrisy. At the same time, it minimizes the struggle that Washington and many of his contemporaries experienced in arriving at their decision. George Washington may have had more depth and breadth of experience than any other man of his generation in dealing with the thorny questions associated with slavery. To examine the circuitous route by which Washington arrived at his parallel decisions — public inaction on the one hand, his personal motivation to resolve the specific issue of the disposition of the Mount Vernon slaves on the other — is to cast light on the difficult questions that had to be addressed.

Born into a world where slavery was considered a normal part of life, George Washington initially appears to have felt no qualms about following along the same slaveholding path taken by his father, by his many relatives and by virtually every other man of wealth and status whom he knew and respected. At the age of 11, George Washington inherited 10 slaves from his father’s estate. Just as he was ever eager to expand his landholdings, to improve the productivity of his farms and to win election to public office, he steadily acquired more slaves during the next two decades. Along with marrying well, another arena in which Washington was enormously successful, these achievements were the main components of the tried-and-true formula for acquiring wealth and social prominence in colonial Virginia.

Over the course of his lifetime Washington’s attitudes toward slavery seem to have undergone a marked transformation. From his initial unquestioning support for slavery as an economic institution and a wholehearted commitment to it as a core element of his personal prosperity, through time he became increasingly frustrated at dealing with its inherent inefficiencies, and he also grew troubled by the degrading effects it had on anyone who was deeply involved with it. This change of heart is evident at least by 1778, when he remarked that ‘every day [I] long more and more to get clear of [Negroes].’ At the same time Washington became convinced that continuing to own slaves would be a mistake, he decided to discontinue selling them. He commented, ‘The advantages resulting from the sale of my Negroes, I have very little doubt of…[but] my scruples arise from a reluctance in offering these people at public vendue.’ Some years later Washington expressed his opinion on the topic even more candidly, remarking, ‘Were it not then, that I am principled ag[ains]t selling Negroes, as you would Cattle in the market, I would not, in twelve months from this date, be possessed of one as a slave.’

Washington was caught in a conundrum from which he would never really find a way to extricate himself. By 1786 his thinking had progressed to the next level, marked by his statement that ‘I never mean to possess another slave by purchase; it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by the Legislature, by which slavery in this Country may be abolished by slow, sure and imperceptible degrees.’

These developments in Washington’s thoughts stemmed from the evolution, begun long before, of his disillusionment with the American colonies’ subservient role within the British mercantile system. Washington’s changing attitude toward Britain was influenced greatly by his dismay over his own steadily declining fortunes in navigating the tobacco export trade, which was the first of many steps he made along the path to his commitment to the cause of American independence. Just as Washington’s misgivings over America’s place in the British empire initially were related to his own economic concerns, the basis for his questioning the viability of slavery also first seems to have been related to financial considerations.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to