Washington’s apparent willingness to sell off thousands of acres of land to finance his manumission plan suggests that he had come full circle in respect to the status of the Mount Vernon slaves. If much of Washington’s initial ambivalence toward holding hundreds of black workers in bondage was due to financial issues, this plan suggests that his moral concerns now were dominant. Freeing his slaves, even at great cost, had become the highest priority, and Washington was apparently willing to suffer a major reduction to his personal fortune to make that happen.

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Just how far Washington had traveled in his odyssey from unabashed slave master to committed opponent of slavery is hinted at in a letter he wrote to Lear in 1794. Washington outlined the benefits that he hoped he would obtain from the plan, which included reducing his expenses to the point where he could support himself through occupations less onerous than farming. But he elaborated further in an aside marked private. ‘I have another motive,’ he wrote, that ‘is indeed more powerful than all the rest, namely to liberate a certain species of property which I possess, very repugnantly to my own feelings; but which imperious necessity compels.’

Unfortunately, Washington received only a few serious inquiries in response to his advertisements to sell his western lands and to sell or rent the Mount Vernon farms. As a consequence, nothing came of his plan to free the dower slaves. Although he never seems to have expressed his thoughts on the topic in writing, his disappointment must have been acute. When he wrote out his last will and testament, Washington was left with the unpleasant task of devising a final plan for the future of Mount Vernon’s slaves to ensure their freedom without forcing families to break up.

When Washington developed his compromise, which stipulated that his slaves would not be freed until the death of his wife, he was fully aware of the impact of his decision. Clearly uncomfortable with the knowledge that the freedom of so many depended on her death, after her husband died Martha Washington decided to implement the clause of his will to manumit her husband’s slaves. This was authorized on December 15, 1800 (to take effect the following January 1), just a year after George Washington’s death and almost 18 months before Martha Washington herself died. While there is no record of the reactions of the Mount Vernon slaves to this event, either on the part of those freed or those who remained in bondage, it must have been the cause of much sadness as well as joy.

With the failure of his land sales and rental scheme, Washington simply did not have the ready money needed to compensate the Custis estate for the value of the dower slaves. But although the legal wrangling to accomplish it may have ultimately proven unsuccessful — and such an act undoubtedly would have been unprecedented — it seems that George Washington might still have found a way to free the Custis slaves if he had been willing to devote a considerable portion of his estate to that end. As he had apparently seriously considered divesting himself of much of his landholdings just a few years earlier, hoping to pay for freeing the dower slaves, it is puzzling that Washington did not make one final attempt. Or maybe the final decision to give up on the effort to free the dower slaves simply reflects the exhaustion of an old, worn-out man. Whatever the reason, the decision indicates that there was an upper limit that even George Washington placed on the value of his principles. Unfortunately, there is no doubt that this was a condition shared by the vast majority of his slaveholding contemporaries. Nevertheless, Washington’s serious attempt to free all of the Mount Vernon slaves demonstrates his commitment to the principle of emancipation at a time when most of the founding generation of slaveholders were avoiding the issue entirely.

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