"I never mean... to possess another slave by purchase": George Washington on the Abolition of Slavery

Among all the well known founders who were major slaveholders at the time of the Revolution - George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry - Washington was the only one who actually ended up freeing his slaves. But Washington was no fiery abolitionist, and he never spoke out publicly against the institution of slavery. Instead, he arrived at his conclusion that slavery was immoral and inconsistent with the ideals of the American Revolution gradually, privately, and with difficulty. And because of his realization that slavery violated everything the Revolution stood for, a realization expressed in his 1786 letter to John Francis Mercer, his painstaking awakening to the evil of slavery is all the more historically significant. Not only does it help us understand the way in which the Revolution transformed American attitudes toward slavery, but it also helps us appreciate why more was not done to end the institution.

Prior to the Revolution Washington, like most eighteenth-century Americans, and especially Virginians, took slavery very much for granted. Eighteenth-century society was composed of many degrees of inequality and unfreedom, and slavery seemed to be merely the most base and degraded status in a hierarchy of dependencies. Although we today can scarcely imagine one person owning another, that was certainly not the case in early eighteenth-century America. After all, slavery had existed for thousands of years without any substantial criticism, and this was still true in early eighteenth-century America as well.

On the eve of the Revolution all the colonies were implicated in African slavery in one way or another. Of the total American population of one and a half million in 1760, at least one-fifth - over 300,000 men, women, and children was enslaved. Washington's colonial Virginia had the most slaves - over 140,000 or 40 percent of its population. Although most of the slaves were held by southerners, slavery was not inconsequential in the North. Fourteen percent of the population of New York, for example, was enslaved. It was a national institution that seemed to be a natural part of the circumstances into which people were born. Aside from some conscience-stricken Quakers, few people in the early eighteenth century thought that slavery was wrong or required any explanation or apology. Southern planters, even educated and sensitive ones like William Byrd of Virginia, showed no feelings of guilt or defensiveness over their holding of hundreds of slaves on their plantations. It was a cruel and brutal age, and the life of the lowly everywhere seemed cheap.

The American Revolution changed all this. The American Revolutionaries did not need Dr. Johnson ("How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?") to tell them about the glaring inconsistency between their appeals to liberty and their owning of slaves. In their new republican society of equal citizens dedicated to liberty, slavery suddenly became an anomaly, a "peculiar institution," that if it were to continue, needed defending and justifying. It was no accident that the first anti-slavery society in the world was organized in Philadelphia in 1775. All of the Revolutionary leaders became aware of the excruciating contradiction between their revolution on behalf of liberty and American slavery. Washington was no exception.

But change came not suddenly and not easily. Washington struggled to reach the position expressed in his 1786 letter to John Francis Mercer, and that struggle makes this letter all the more historically important. It was no simple matter for Washington to come to question what hitherto he had unquestioningly accepted, or to challenge what was, after all, the very basis of his and Virginia's way of life. He was a southern planter deeply immersed in his society and its mores; before the Revolution his views on slavery were indistinguishable from those of other Virginia planters. As he sought to increase the wealth and productivity of Mount Vernon, he bought more and more slaves, selling some only on rare occasions. By 1774 the slaves on his plantation numbered over one hundred. Although he was a good master, constantly concerned with the health and welfare of his slaves, he did not agonize over his holding of human beings in bondage. When he criticized the institution, which he did on several occasions prior to the Revolution, he did so because he believed that slavery made his workers inefficient and lazy, not that it was immoral or inhumane. In 1774 he endorsed the Fairfax Resolves, which included a recommendation that no more slaves should be imported into the British colonies. Many Virginians wanted to end the slave trade because they had more slaves than they knew what to do with. Washington, however, was at the same time still purchasing additional slaves from the West Indies.

When Washington became Commander in Chief of the Continental Army, he was forced by military circumstances to change his original view that blacks not be recruited as soldiers. In 1778 he allowed Rhode Islanders to raise a battalion of black soldiers. In 1779 he cautiously approved a plan to grant slaves their freedom in return for military service; but as a leader who knew the prevalence of self-interest in human nature and understood only too well the deeply rooted fears and prejudices of his fellow southerners, he was not surprised when the plan failed. Although he never spoke out publicly against slavery, all the while he was Commander in Chief he was slowly and quietly rethinking the issue of slavery.

When he returned to Mount Vernon at the end of the war in 1783, he had concluded that slavery needed to be abolished, not simply because it was an inefficient labor system, but more important, because it violated everything that the Revolution was about. Yet slavery had become even more important to the running of Mount Vernon, and by the mid-1780s the number of his slaves had doubled to more than two hundred. Reluctant as he was to speak out on issues, he said nothing publicly against slavery. But privately, as his letter to Mercer reveals, he had come to hope against hope that some plan could be adopted by which slavery could be eliminated "by slow, sure & imperceptible degrees." He realized that any other kind of plan would be politically impossible.

No one understood human nature better or was more realistic about the world than Washington. He knew that even his fellow Virginians were probably unwilling to make the sacrifices required for abolishing slavery, not to mention the planters of the deep South. He knew too that the Union was so fragile that any national attempt to end the institution would break the United States apart. Like many of his colleagues, he hoped that Congress's promise to end the slave trade in 1808 would eventually cause slavery to wither away. In the meantime he was determined to do what he could personally to abolish the institution by declaring in his will that his slaves would be freed upon his death. That George Washington, the most revered figure in all America during the first half of the nineteenth century, took this step meant that American slaveholders could never again take what became the "peculiar institution" for granted.

Gordon S. Wood
Alva 0. Way University Professor of History
Brown University

Mount Vernon 9 Sep 1786

Dear Sir,

Your favor of the 20th. ulto. did not reach me till about the first inst. It found me in a fever, from which I am now but sufficiently recovered to attend to business. I mention this to shew that I had it not in my power to give an answer to your propositions sooner.

With respect to the first. I never mean (unless some particular circumstances should compel me to it) to possess another slave by purchase; it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by [inserted: the Legislature by] which slavery in this Country maybe abolished by slow, sure, & imperceptable degrees. With respect to the 2d., I never did, nor never intend to purchase a military certificate; I see no difference it makes with you (if it is one of the funds allotted for the discharge of my claim) who the the [sic] purchaser [2] is. If the depreciation is 3 for 1 only, you will have it in your power whilst you are at the receipt of Custom - Richmond - where it is said the great regulator of this business (Greaves) resides, to convert them into specie at that rate. If the difference is more, there would be no propriety, if I inclined to deal in them at all, in my taking them at that exchange.

I shall rely on your promise of Two hundred pounds in five Weeks from the date of your letter. It will enable me to pay the workmen which have been employed abt. this house all the Spring & Summer, (some of whom are here still). But there are two debts which press hard upon me. One of which, if there is no other resource, I must sell land or negroes to discharge. It is owing to Govr. Clinton of New York, who was so obliging as to borrow, & become my security for £ 2500 to answer some calls of mine. This sum was to be returned in [3] twelve months from the conclusion of the Peace. For the remains of [struck: this sum], about Eight hundred pounds york Cy. I am now paying an interest of Seven pr. Ct., but the high interest (tho' more than any estate can bear) I should not regard, if my credit was not at stake to comply with the conditions of the loan. The other debt, tho' I know the person to whom it is due wants it, and I am equally anxious to pay it, might be put of [sYc] a while longer. This sum is larger than the other.

I am. D[ea]r Sir
Y[ou]r Most Obed[ien]t H[onora]ble Ser[vant]
Go: Washington

GLC 3705. George Washington to John Francis Mercer, September 9, 1786.

Editors: James G. Basker, President, Gilder Lehrman Institute; Sandra Trenholm, Associate Director, Gilder Lehrman Collection; and Kathleen Barry, Coordinator of Special Projects and Publications, Gilder Lehrman Institute.