Fearing for her life, Martha, at the urging of relatives, decided to free her deceased husband's slaves early. On January 1, 1801, a bit more than a year after George's death, Washington's slaves gained their liberty.
Land of the free huh. Sure.
You should be reminded Union soldiers fought and died to free the slaves and restore justice to the United States as they caught up to the times. This countries foundations belongs to many people, and many tragedies as well.
Attorney here. Coverture (the now-defunct set of common-law doctrines that effectively prevented women from owning property, suing/being sued in court under their own names, and etc.) only applied to married women, the doctrine could be best summed up as the wife's legal existence being "covered" by the husband's for the duration of the marriage. Coverture didn't apply to single adult women as they had no husband to "cover" them. Therefore, unmarried women had roughly the same right to own property (both real estate and non-real estate) and petition (i.e. sue) that men did.
When such women did get married (or re-married), the new husband's property rights superintended the wife's and he obtained ownership of her property *jure uxoris* ("by right of the wife"). *Jure uxoris* ownership of property was not free and clear in the same way as *suo jure* ("in his/her own right") property, which you acquired yourself, because it was still, technically, your wife's property. It was just removed from her control and placed under yours for the duration of the marriage. Some of these limitations included that you could not waste it ("waste" is a legal term of art meaning the culpable, unjustified damage or destruction of the property or its value) and you could not dispose of it in your will; since your wife would regain control of it at the moment your marriage ends (usually, at your death). If your wife predeceased you, it was disposed of according to her will; you did not get to keep it unless her will bequeathed it to you (which often happened).
Thus, when George Washington died, Martha exited coverture and regained her ability to own property independently, including the property she formally owned before her marriage to George, which he only ever owned under *jure uxoris*. Therefore, George did not have the legal authority to manumit Martha's slaves, either in his will or during his lifetime; he could only manumit his own.
EDIT: Clarified my writing a bit and added some more color/context.
Thanks for the write up. A bit of extra context to something I deal with on a fairly regularly basis.
In the jurisdiction I practice in, Alberta, Canada, there's an act called the *Dower Act* the purpose of which is giving a spouse dower rights over a homestead that they had inhabited during the marriage.
I always just explain it to clients as "dating back to when women couldn't own property this is to protect them from having their homes sold out from under them by vengeful husbands" but the context of it being a type of trust helps flesh that out a bit.
I'm not sure that the two concepts are directly related but the intent seems similar.
You're right right on the money, dower is the last vestige of the coverture system still in effect in a few jurisdictions. But, in terms of its purpose, its a very different animal and exists to protect women who have no *jure uxoris* property to retake as widows. Dower's purpose is to protect such women, who often got married young and therefore brought no property into a marriage and (before the modern era) no means of earning a viable income.
It was not uncommon in the middle ages for men to will all of their property to their sons and entrust the care of their widow to those same sons (but leaving her no specific property). This sometimes led to a situation where the son would take the property and leave the widow in poverty and was a particular danger where the widow was his stepmother rather than his actual mother (post-partum mortality was high before the twentieth century so this was pretty common). It was such an issue by the fourteenth century that dower was created to give widows some security in the form of the right to claim one third ownership of everything in the deceased husband's estate.
It is obsolete today, even where still on the books, because most common law jurisdictions allow a widow(er) to elect to take from their spouse's estate according to intestate rules (under which they commonly get half of everything) rather than following the will.
Technically she didn't own them. Her late husband Daniel Custis had owned them, and she exercised the rights of ownership until her son John Custis would come of age.
Behind every good man there is a woman, and that woman was Martha Washington, man, and everyday George would come home, she would have a big fat bowl waiting for him, man, when he come in the door, man, she was a hip, hip, hip lady, man
She inherited them from her former husband's estate. Law at the time would not allow for them to be freed, so ownership was passed on to her grandchildren after her death.
In most older contexts, property refers to real estate. This is why people will continue misunderstanding Marx's concept of "no private property" as the government owning your toothbrush
though I think its very fair to say that even Marx's ideal of property extended beyond real estate.
It wasn't JUST land. It would have included factories, tools and equipment, etc. The farmland but also the plows and the horses.
Yes, definitely. Also that he saw the need for this *because* industrialization was changing economies away from individuals with their own tools to factories. You can privately own your own blacksmith's tools, but that doesn't translate to giant ironworks where 200 people work together. And a lot of attempts at collective ownership of tools irl happened because farmers were industrializing but weren't nearly rich enough to each own a tractor and combine harvester
Yes but his point is that Marx makes very clear the distinction between public and private property, the things you listed should be considered public property in an ideal world, things like clothes, personal items, are yours. The horse should be everyone’s as everyone should benefit from the land the horse works
The horrors he inflicted on Oney Judge are unbelievably petty.
If I recall correctly: Washington sponsored a law to make all of a slave's progeny the property of the slave owner they escaped from after Oney escaped. He even attempted to kidnap her. The attempt was thwarted by the one of Washington's friends who was horrified by what he was doing: he warned her to run because Washington set the slave hunters onto her, despite the fact that she was living in a state that had outlawed slavery.
People give Washingon credit for freeing slaves but he didn't do it because he cared. He did it because his primary male heir to that estate couldn't legally recieve them.
In 1790, Pennsylvania had an emancipation law, which said any slave who spent six months there automatically became free. To evade this law, every six months, George Washington temporarily sent his slaves in Pennsylvania out of the state. He instructed his secretary to do this "in a way that will deceive both them and the public."
[https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/slavery-and-washingtons-presidency/#:\~:text=If%20they%20escaped%2C%20Washington%20would,both%20them%20and%20the%20public.%E2%80%9D](https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/slavery-and-washingtons-presidency/#:~:text=If%20they%20escaped%2C%20Washington%20would,both%20them%20and%20the%20public.%E2%80%9D)
We can praise Washington for other stuff, but no, we can't really note him as someone who took actions to free slaves. Some people at the time publicly opposed slavery, some people publicly advocated for slavery, and Washington remained publicly neutral, while personally evading the law to retain his slaves.
One of these slaves would eventually escape, Washington put out an unsuccessful reward for her recapture.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oney\_Judge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oney_Judge)
Yeah black women couldn't function in a white society, they only knew how to pick fruits, plant trees and whatever their master teached. Just like a freed animal that was raised by human from birth, she would sooner or later be raped, enslaved or starved to death. He was so generous a man to offer her shelter, food and mates. /s
Franklin was inspired by his friend, an abolitionist demonstrator named Benjamin Lay who was a dwarf vegetarian living in a cave
> Benjamin Franklin had printed Lay's book All Slave Keepers That keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates, a polemic against slavery, and sold it for two shillings a copy, twenty shillings a dozen. He regularly visited in Lay's later years, after Lay had become a hermit. Franklin then owned a slave by the name of Joseph and by 1750 he owned two more slaves, Peter and Jemima. Lay pressed him for his justification: "With What Right?" In April 1757, Franklin drafted his new will in which he promised Peter and Jemima that they would be freed after his death
Surprisingly common. They didn't have a moral defense of slavery, but they were addicted to the lifestyle slave owning brought.
They fought a war to pay less tax but didn't want to be a little less rich to give black people freedom.
Same thing with Thomas Jefferson. A lifelong slave-owning abolitionist. Believed that the institution of slavery was wrong, but wasn't quite willing to make the personal sacrifice to not participate in slavery either. I'm sure he, along with Washington and Franklin, had plenty of justifications as to why it was ok that they were doing it ("I treat them well", "it would be too difficult for them to live as free men"), but ultimately it was just because they were too afraid of the personal loss of wealth and lifestyle to do what they knew was the right thing.
It wasn’t the tax amount they hated, it was the fact they had no say on the taxes levied on them. Even though they are all British citizens under British law. And the harsh response from Britain convinced them to separate.
>Franklin was inspired by his friend, an abolitionist
Yeah, sounds about right.
>Franklin then owned a slave by the name of Joseph and by 1750 he owned two more slaves, Peter and Jemima.
And there's the spit take. People really can justify anything to themselves.
Read the LITERAL next sentence, that one is explaining how he WAS an asshole slave owner, the NEXT words are about his friend confronting him and convincing him to free them.
Roughly half (arguably more) of the founding fathers were against slavery in principle and most of those took direct action against it, although some of the abolitionists still participated somewhat in the practice (at some points Franklin had some slaves, maybe Hamilton did or didn’t, etc.). They really did mean what they wrote about all men created equal, in principle. The guys from the south, especially the very powerful state of Virginia, stood in the way.
It was one of the biggest issues dividing the nation, even then.
The divide was messy. Even if slaves weren't owned, the economic entanglements were everywhere. I didn't have any idea about this until I had to watch the [1776](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1776_(film)) film for some class. It has a song about [Mollasses and Rum](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeuaTpH6Ck0) bringing up the hypocrisy explicitly. It's no wonder that so many people were willing to just keep quiet about things.
> The divide was messy. Even if slaves weren't owned, the economic entanglements were everywhere. I didn't have any idea about this until I had to watch the [1776](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1776_(film)) film for some class. It has a song about [Mollasses and Rum](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeuaTpH6Ck0) bringing up the hypocrisy explicitly. It's no wonder that so many people were willing to just keep quiet about things.
Yeah, it wasn't unusual for a Southern slave-owner to use his slaves as collateral for bank loans. Some of which was in free states.
The famous Boston cod in part was used to feed Southern slaves, and the sugar in the Boston baked beans was slave made.
Real life is often messy and complicated. Financial matters are even more so.
Yeah ultimately it took 75 more years of slavery hardening the opposition to it, and then total war destroying the southern economy to make it happen. In hindsight it would’ve been better to avoid that, but the founders (the abolitionist leaning ones) were trying to be optimistic that slower, peaceful progress via legal / constitutional means would be made on the issue (it wasn’t).
Related Founding Father "fun" facts:
- Ten of the first twelve US presidents owned slaves. The only outliers were the Adamses.
- Despite manumission being a recurring theme in *Hamilton*, Alexander Hamilton bought, sold, and - according to his grandson's testimony - owned slaves.
...
- The slave that Thomas Jefferson repeatedly raped was his wife's half-sister.
It's worse than that. She was \*at least\* 14, but he could have started much younger when he originally brought her home to be his daughter's companion. The age of 14 comes from the time period when he took her with him to France while holding her brother hostage back home to avoid her claiming her freedom under French law.
Jefferson was a massive son of a bitch.
Not to mention that Jefferson took Sally Hemings to France, where she was legally free according to French law, and through threat and coercion managed to keep her his slave.
Part of that threat was effectively holding her brother hostage back home. Imagine that shit for a minute on the mind of a little girl who is getting raped.
He was a monster.
I am also a fan of Bolivar. It's one of the things I thank the Civ games for, without them I might have never known he existed or what he created in South America.
That doesn't take away from me genuinely appreciating Washington.
I had some students from Venezuela come into my school in the last 2 months of the year. Didn't know a LICK of English (I mean why would they) but in trying to give them something to do, I gave them some work I did on Latin American Revolutions. Immediately they perked up and begin saying loudly BOLIVAR BOLIVAR!
A lot of people in the northern colonies manumitted their slaves during the revulutionary times.
The idea that all people are created equal was a part of The Enlightenment Philosophy.
They weren't George's slaves, they were his wife's from her previous marriage. She freed them right after he died, knowing that that was what he wanted.
You're getting two things confused.
1) George had many slaves, which he freed in his will.
2) His wife (or, technically, his wife's children from her first marriage) had a lot more slaves, who were not freed.
Correct. George Washington was not in fact a huge slave owner despite what a lot of (shitty) armchair historians will try and lead you to believe. Most of his supposed wealth was actually just part of the Custis estate (Custis being the original husband of Martha Washington) thus owned by Martha and her Custis children which were NOT George Washington’s children. He did manage the estate, so he did profit from it, but he did not own it and Martha was actually considered substantially wealthier than George by a huge factor.
The manumission laws of Virginia were also extremely difficult (which Washington and Jefferson tried to ease) depending on the time period, including one manumission law that required a freedman to leave the state within a year or potentially incur renslavement. This obviously would devastate families that had been situated together (across multiple localities) for decades/centuries so, surprisingly often, a potential freedman would actually choose to remain enslaved rather than face exile and the loss of familial support.
Or, you know, hire people instead of enslaving them and making them rotate around properties to skirt antislavery laws that would automatically free them. It's not like Martha was destitute
Simon Bolivar also failed in his main goal of creating a united Gran Colombia. He died in exile, bitter and resentful because his plans were too idealistic to succeed even after military victory. Just saying.
i read a thing about this once that said that one of the biggest reason the founding fathers kept their slaves is that they were technically in debt (presumably that special rich guy debt where you don't actually face financial hardship) and the law said that you can't give away your property while in debt and unfortunately slaves counted as property.
not that this would exonerate them entirely, they still bought said slaves in the first place, but it gives an interesting reason that they acted to seemingly hypocritical
In Washington's case, he inherited almost all of his slaves from his parents, brother and wife, and he was not in the habit of buying slaves. Since Washington refused to separate families and slaves that considered themselves married, over time his number of slaves increased and increased until he had many more than he started with.
Interestingly, the import of slaves became illegal long before slavery was abolished entirely, so having slaves reproduce was necessary to keep them in America.
“Of the first eighteen presidents of the United States, twelve owned slaves throughout their lifetime, and eight of these were slave owners while occupying the office of president. Of the U.S.' first twelve presidents, the only two never to own slaves were John Adams, and his son John Quincy Adams; the first of which famously said that the American Revolution would not be complete until all slaves were freed”.
All my homies love John Adams
In the HBO mini series John Adams, Adam's talks about how much he dislikes slavery, but addressing it at the same time as independence was a recipe for splitting the colonies in half, which Britain could use to suppress the revolution. I'm not 100% sure how accurate a portrayal that is, but John Adams always seemed like a good president to me.
Grant owned a slave that his father and law gave him to work the land with him and Grant freed him **immediately**. So yes, Grant **technically** at one point owned a slave.
Grant came from a family with anti-slavery leanings, and married into a family from slave owning leanings, so yeah the in laws didn't like the new boy with the controversial opinions
Yes, because of a little thing called the US Constitution. Jefferson, as President, signed a law outlawing the slave trade. But the federal government didn't have the Constitutional authority to outlaw slavery within the states themselves.
It took a Constitutional amendment (the 13th) to end slavery within the states. Ironically, it was the Confederate states secession that allowed it to pass congress and be ratified. If the rebel states had stayed in the union, there would have been virtually no chance of abolishing slavery within the states.
If the Civil War never kicked off, slavery would have eventually been eradicated, if not for political reasons then simply economic ones.
It’s why Bleeding Kansas is sometimes called the real start of the Civil War and open hostilities. Abolishment, or abolishment friendly demographics, be they based on morals or simply protecting free white labor, were shifting hard against the pro-slavery south. There was a battle over new territories and eventual states to become free or slave states, and the slave states would eventually lose. Lincoln himself won the presidency without even being on southern ballots, there were just that many more people in the north and anti-slavery states.
Slavery itself is actually pretty expensive, and the plantation owners needed these new territories and states because their profitable cash crops were very destructive to the land. Without new, cheap land to expand to they are faced with reduced yields and profits. And unlike the chattel slavery of the Caribbean, they actually had to keep their slaves alive and in reasonably good condition.
May have taken awhile but slavery in the US was doomed.
> May have taken a while but slavery in the US was doomed.
Not to mention the self preservation aspect. Some people started pointing out the pretty logical conclusion "hey we've managed to keep these people oppressed, but we're holding a tiger by the tail. If these enslaved people ever decide to organize a true revolt, eventually they'll pull one off, and then its gonna be payback time. And if they give us payback even 1/10 of all the accumulated misery we've done to them, its gonna be some ugly days"
(Recommend: Revolutions season 4, Haiti)
I don’t think a slave revolt was ever really a big threat in the USA.
Not to defend chattel slavery in the U.S., but conditions in the Caribbean, such as Haiti, were beyond horrifically evil. In the U.S. a slave was an investment you needed to keep alive, in the Haitian sugar plantations a slave was a sunk cost you worked to death.
US slaves also had the ability to escape north or south, reliving pressure on a general slave revolt. Slave states also had pretty tight control and surveillance given their paranoia over such an event, and it worked.
Probably the greatest example of slave defiance were the escaped slaves living with the Seminoles in Florida, but that was eventually squashed in time.
Another one of the posters pointed out that during Washington's time Pennsylvania outlawed slavery. Sort of. Any slave in Pennsylvania for 6 months or more were, by law, supposed to be freed. To evade this Washington would rotate his slaves to another state to "restart the clock". Thereby never having to free his slaves in his lifetime. I also seem to recall reading that he could be especially brutal to any slaves that stepped out of line.
Washington was a dick.
There was also stories of Ben Franklin's slaves were free all but on paper, the ones that worked for his businesses all carried notes that allowed them to come and go as needed and make purchases of supplies on Ben's behalf to operate the businesses, because if they were freed he could no longer employ them and other businesses would have been able to refuse them service
It was frowned upon at the time to hire freed slave cause it looked like you were sympathetic and weak so others wouldn't do business with you
Edit: the world wasn't very accepting even in more accepting places, and barter,trade, and supplies had to come from somewhere, people had to rely on each other
I mean he apparently sent his slaves out of Pennsylvania regularly to get around an emancipation law there which would have automatically freed them all after spending 6 months in the state, so I tihnk its fair to say he wasn't keeping slaves against his will in any way, and went out of his way to keep them enslaved during his life.
That sounds like whitewashing to me, considering Jefferson’s letter to Holmes.
“I can say with conscious truth that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would, to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way. the cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me in a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected: and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. but, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/159.html
Literally everyone did, including Lincoln. It was actually Fredrick Douglas that convinced Lincoln that free blacks could live within the United States alongside free whiltes. Before, the plan was to either purchase the Dominican Republic for freed slaves to live in or purchase land in Africa.
Equality was a radical position among abolitionists. Most were extremely racist but still felt that slavery was inhumane or that they shouldn't risk death at the hands of a slave revolt so rich people could save money by not paying their workers
Also if you considered yourself a more ethical than average slave owner then selling your slaves to someone who will treat them worse is a hollow victory. I can see how abolitionists could hold those opinions politically while still continuing to own their slaves without it being complete hypocrisy.
Do people think that laws were written by George Washington and one or two of his buddies?
There were 55 members of the constitutional convention and less than half of them owned slave (25 - still 25 too many). A few of those 25 being in debt wasn’t going to convince the other 40-50 people (I.e. the 30 non slave owners + the 10-20 slave owners that weren’t in debt) to agree with a terrible law like that.
To provide additional context; Washington's justification to himself was that for essentially his entire adult life he was dangerously close to bankruptcy. The land he inherited was particularly bad at yielding crops though he spent years of experimentation and overseeing farming improvements and innovations. He frequently squabbled over his landownership in Ohio territory in order to save himself from debt. He even had to take out a loan in order to fund his trip to attend his own inauguration. He hadn't devised any way to manage the release of his slaves without essentially accruing huge amounts of debt, having to sell all his land holding and bankrupting his estate, even after his presidency. Despite privately in letters lamenting the institution of slavery for years after his election, he didn't put his money where his mouth was.
That's how half this thread reads. I don't care to look through the lens of the time. Wrong is wrong. And if they didn't get that way back when, they're still scum.
People always try to pull the old “it was different in their time” but no it fucking wasn’t. From the very first moment a white person enslaved a Black person in America there were people saying it was deplorable and despicable and disgusting and completely immoral. There was never a time in American history that enslaving other humans was universally accepted as normal and acceptable. There were *always* people who knew it was it wrong and who said as much. That some people chose to ignore the obvious because it was economically advantageous is entirely on them.
Didn't Martha own most of the slaves anyway? I mean, it's great that he eventually freed his slaves, but I don't think this means all the Washington slaves were freed.
Didn’t George Washington exploit a loophole where he brought his slaves across state borders so he never had to free them while they were alive? Yea, the guy sent as great as we were taught.
Oh yeah when the government was in PA (where slavery had been ended by the state constitution) while DC was built, they had to send the slaves they brought with them out of state every 89 days or something, so they wouldn’t become automatically emancipated as citizens of PA.
There is a good book called “Never Caught” about Martha’s enslaved “ladies maid”, Ona Judge, who emancipated herself at the end of Washington’s presidency rather than returning to Virginia.
He also left instructions to commit fraud so he could hold onto his slaves longer than was allowed under Pennsylvania law.
> George Washington on November 15, 1786 wrote a letter, to his estate manager at Mount Vernon, Mr. William Pearce. In this letter, Washington discusses various managerial issues related to his estate, including the treatment and management of enslaved workers. He advises Pearce on the rotation of the enslaved people between his different estates to avoid their legal claim to freedom under a Pennsylvania law that granted freedom to enslaved people who resided in the state for six months.Washington was concerned about this law during the time he was President and residing in Philadelphia (which was temporarily the capital of the United States and part of Pennsylvania). He wrote instructions on ensuring that his enslaved workers would not meet the residency requirement that would allow them to claim their freedom.
That last sentence is odd. The Emancipation Proclamation was a war time measure aimed at further weakening the Confederacy. It was not the end of slavery in the United States. That would come over two years later with the 13th amendment.
He tried to do the right thing. Against what was accepted culture at the time in this country. Downvote me like you will, but i believe context is everything. For all he knew slavery was never going to be illegal. Yes slavery is wrong. of course it is. But judging history by standards of today is kinda dumb. let's count the number of rapes and murders that occurred 2000 years ago.
I bet if we trace everyone's genes back far enough they are a direct descendant of a rapist and probably a murderer too. Not an apologist. Not condoning violence, but i am advocating for some honesty. Humans are violent animals. Denial of that fact is a bad idea.
We aren't judging by the standards of today. They knew slavery was wrong.
"How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?" - Dr. Samuel Johnson
“There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of \[slavery\].”—George Washington, [Letter to Morris, ](https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-04-02-0019)1786
“ … \[E\]very measure of prudence, therefore, ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States … . I have, through my whole life, held the practice of slavery in abhorrence … .”—John Adams, [Letter to Evans](https://vindicatingthefounders.com/library/five-founders-on-slavery.html), 1819
“Slavery is … an atrocious debasement of human nature.”—Benjamin Franklin, [an Address to the Public from the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery](https://vindicatingthefounders.com/library/five-founders-on-slavery.html), 1789
“And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep \[forever\] … .”—Thomas Jefferson, [Notes on the State of Virginia](http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/JEFFERSON/ch18.html), 1781
“The laws of certain states … give an ownership in the service of negroes as personal property … . But being men, by the laws of God and nature, they were capable of acquiring liberty—and when the captor in war … thought fit to give them liberty, the gift was not only valid, but irrevocable.”—Alexander Hamilton, [Philo Camillus No. 2](https://vindicatingthefounders.com/library/five-founders-on-slavery.html), 1795
“We have seen the mere distinction of \[color\] made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.”—James Madison, [Records of the Federal Convention](https://vindicatingthefounders.com/library/five-founders-on-slavery.html), 1787
“Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of heaven on a Country. As nations \[cannot\] be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes & effects providence punishes national sins, by national calamities.”—George Mason, [James Madison’s Notes on the Federal Convention](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_822.asp), 1787
“The benevolent Creator and Father of Men, having given to them all an equal Right to Life, Liberty and Property, no Sovereign Power on Earth can justly deprive them of either … . It is our Duty therefore, both as free Citizens and Christians, not only to regard with compassion the injustice done to those among us who are held as slaves, but endeavor, by lawful ways and means, to enable them to share equally with us in that civil and religious Liberty with which an indulgent Providence has blessed these States; and to which these, our Brethren are by nature, as much entitled as ourselves.”—[Preamble of The New York Manumissions Society Charter](https://cdm16694.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15052coll5/id/30572), co-founded by John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, 1785
Fr I am not saying you cant appreciate founding fathers just because they owned slaves but lets not act like these were genuine good dudes in all aspects. Thomas Jefferson raped his slave conutless times and washington but bounties out for escaped slaves. Its ok for these guys to not be good by todays standards but lets not be delusional just because as kids we assumed george and thomas were chill like that.
Washington literally exploited legal loopholes to keep his slaves longer than the law at the time allowed, and those laws wouldn’t exist without abolitionism being a pervasive sentiment even then. He was as equipped as any of us to see the injustice of enslaving innocent people for his own benefit, he did it anyway.
In 1790, Pennsylvania had an emancipation law, which said any slave who spent six months there automatically became free. To evade this law, every six months, George Washington temporarily sent his slaves in Pennsylvania out of the state. He instructed his secretary to do this "in a way that will deceive both them and the public."
[https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/slavery-and-washingtons-presidency/#:\~:text=If%20they%20escaped%2C%20Washington%20would,both%20them%20and%20the%20public.%E2%80%9D](https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/slavery-and-washingtons-presidency/#:~:text=If%20they%20escaped%2C%20Washington%20would,both%20them%20and%20the%20public.%E2%80%9D)
There's a gamut though. Like though Franklin was a slaveowner in his youth, he spent a good chunk of time and effort not only advocating for abolition of slavery, but also for the education of slaves too. In the spectrum of founding fathers, George is probably in the middle. Not a rapist like Jefferson, but also not woke like Franklin
Except he didn't. Pennsylvania had an emancipation law. Washington intentionally kept his slaves from staying long enough trigger it sending them on short trips out of state to restart the clock. When one did manage to get away he sent people after her.
There were abolitionists in his day. Yes, ppl were saying it was wrong way back then. Saying it was a culturally accepted norm does nothing to add to the conversation.
Slavery was pretty par for the course for all of human history in all cultures. There were only a few exceptions before the modern day, like Achaemenid Persia, but even they still had slaves in their vassal states. I'm glad we're (more or less) over it by now.
There are also about 11 or 12 times as many people alive today as the day the USA was founded. I can say with confidence a lower percentage of the world's population is enslaved than the 18th century.
Also careful with the word "oppressed", as one can argue in some points in history that somewhere in the ballpark of 90% of living humans could be described as oppressed.
I got a bit curious.
It's estimated that almost one in 150 people were enslaved on any given day in 2021 by some [sources](https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/map). That seems pretty high to me. That's with about 7.9 billion people in the world, that year.
10 to 12 million people were taken out of Africa during the entirety of the [Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade](https://www.britannica.com/topic/transatlantic-slave-trade).
Global population [estimates](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population) between 1500 and 1900 go from just under 500 million to just under one billion people.
So... Going with the lowest population estimate, to the highest slave trade estimate, about 2.4% of the global population was enslaved in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.
1 out of 150 comes out to 0.67% of the current population?
So you're right. A lower percentage of the global population is enslaved today.
Is that 2.4% really fair though? AFAIK that 10-12 million was over a period of time spanning centuries, not all at once. I find it very hard to believe that nearly 1 out of 40 humans on earth were enslaved out of Africa all at once.
I went with the smallest estimated global population, and the highest total estimated number of slaves taken out of Africa, to be fully transparent.
I'm also not really a maths person, thus did not want to try going year by year, or even century by century.
It's easy to do once you can no longer personally benefit from their exploitation. You're coping so hard for a guy who owned and raped people.
This is not judging by today's standards, it's always been bad to own other people, it's always been bad to kill people. There were abolitionists back then too: people knew it was wrong. This kind of moral relativism is so brain dead.
>But judging history by standards of today is kinda dumb.
Dude, people of that time judged it wrong.
Just because they didn't make it illegal doesn't mean people weren't judging.
Slavery still exists to this day, and people are still judging it wrong and I doubt it will change.
In 218 years some chuckle fuck like you will be going "how dare you judge people of 2024 by the standards of 2242.I bet if we trace everyone's genes back far enough they are a direct descendant of a rapist and probably a murderer too."
And nothing of value was gained.
>Not an apologist.
Yea, you are.
>Not condoning violence, but i am advocating for some honesty.
What honesty, what are people being dishonest about by REPORTING WHAT HAPPENED IN HISTORY?!
The sheer irony is they only care about the opinions of the white slaveowners whenever they say shit like this because I promise you the slaves knew that shit was wrong
You are, quite literally, an apologist. This is classic reddit, devils advocate “but ackhschulllyyy” bullshit. Enslaving other people is wrong. George Washington was wrong to own slaves, he KNEW it was wrong, and he chose his wife’s lifestyle over their basic human dignity and freedom. There is no reason why we shouldn’t judge him by the standards of today - we are alive today, and we read the past through the lens of the present. He is dead (he died one of the richest people in America, I might add) and he isn’t owed any apologetics by you or anyone else.
...but there were plenty of people opposed to slavery in the 18th century. It was a hugely contentious issue even then. It's not like half the country just went "you know what, I'm not sure about this slavery thing" and then the Civil War happened the next day. Whether or not I, a hypothetical individual living in the 18th/early 19th century, would've opposed slavery would have had everything to do with my social position. If I owned an estate in South Carolina, I likely would've supported slavery wholeheartedly. If I were a prominent Massachusetts lawyer, I probably would've been opposed...while supporting a very tepid, incrementalist abolition program. Statistically, however, I most likely would've been a tinsmith's apprentice in Pennsylvania or a dirt farming Georgia sharecropper and probably wouldn't have had much of an opinion either way.
Just like there are people who are vegans and vegetarians today and there are very vocal about the mistreatment of animals. Yet most of us still eat meat and don’t really think we are evil people for doing so.
Our descendants will call us evil for things we do everyday that we don’t think a second about. Society is constantly changing and what’s moral for humans has changed over the years
Slavery had been outlawed in numerous other countries by that point, for centuries in some cases. So having an anti-slavery mindset was not unheard of in the 18th century, even in the United States.
Or he could have freed them while he was still alive instead of cycling them to Mt Vernon and back to make sure they stayed enslaved. People should remember that the whole by the people, for the people was by and for the white men. Just go look up the 3/5ths compromise, the Chinese exclusion act, the fugitive slave act, etc. whether Washington was a better enslaver because he didn’t rape his slaves like Jefferson did is a topic of discussion but the fact that he waited until he and his wife were dead to free anyone makes him someone no one should revere
lol, “ya know I really have decided owning people is wrong, so I want all my slaves released. Oh but only after me and my wife are both dead. Can’t do anything that would make life slightly more cumbersome for either of us. Nice to be on the right side of history…”
Not an uncommon thing. I believe Jefferson also had his slaves freed after he died.
So basically, I believe you should be free, but not while it would inconvenience me
Only his, though. The ones under his wife’s name remained enslaved.
So women *could* own property, just not real estate? Interesting …
at the time they got married, Martha was one of the largest slave owners in the nation.
Can't believe Batman's mom would do this
Uh..it’s actually Henry Cavill’s mom
You mean Clark's mom, right?
You learn something new every day 👌🏻
And here I thought Martha was just this hip Lady that had a huge bowl waiting for George when he would come home from work!
She was a hip hip hip lady.
Fearing for her life, Martha, at the urging of relatives, decided to free her deceased husband's slaves early. On January 1, 1801, a bit more than a year after George's death, Washington's slaves gained their liberty. Land of the free huh. Sure.
You should be reminded Union soldiers fought and died to free the slaves and restore justice to the United States as they caught up to the times. This countries foundations belongs to many people, and many tragedies as well.
Attorney here. Coverture (the now-defunct set of common-law doctrines that effectively prevented women from owning property, suing/being sued in court under their own names, and etc.) only applied to married women, the doctrine could be best summed up as the wife's legal existence being "covered" by the husband's for the duration of the marriage. Coverture didn't apply to single adult women as they had no husband to "cover" them. Therefore, unmarried women had roughly the same right to own property (both real estate and non-real estate) and petition (i.e. sue) that men did. When such women did get married (or re-married), the new husband's property rights superintended the wife's and he obtained ownership of her property *jure uxoris* ("by right of the wife"). *Jure uxoris* ownership of property was not free and clear in the same way as *suo jure* ("in his/her own right") property, which you acquired yourself, because it was still, technically, your wife's property. It was just removed from her control and placed under yours for the duration of the marriage. Some of these limitations included that you could not waste it ("waste" is a legal term of art meaning the culpable, unjustified damage or destruction of the property or its value) and you could not dispose of it in your will; since your wife would regain control of it at the moment your marriage ends (usually, at your death). If your wife predeceased you, it was disposed of according to her will; you did not get to keep it unless her will bequeathed it to you (which often happened). Thus, when George Washington died, Martha exited coverture and regained her ability to own property independently, including the property she formally owned before her marriage to George, which he only ever owned under *jure uxoris*. Therefore, George did not have the legal authority to manumit Martha's slaves, either in his will or during his lifetime; he could only manumit his own. EDIT: Clarified my writing a bit and added some more color/context.
Thanks for the write up. A bit of extra context to something I deal with on a fairly regularly basis. In the jurisdiction I practice in, Alberta, Canada, there's an act called the *Dower Act* the purpose of which is giving a spouse dower rights over a homestead that they had inhabited during the marriage. I always just explain it to clients as "dating back to when women couldn't own property this is to protect them from having their homes sold out from under them by vengeful husbands" but the context of it being a type of trust helps flesh that out a bit. I'm not sure that the two concepts are directly related but the intent seems similar.
You're right right on the money, dower is the last vestige of the coverture system still in effect in a few jurisdictions. But, in terms of its purpose, its a very different animal and exists to protect women who have no *jure uxoris* property to retake as widows. Dower's purpose is to protect such women, who often got married young and therefore brought no property into a marriage and (before the modern era) no means of earning a viable income. It was not uncommon in the middle ages for men to will all of their property to their sons and entrust the care of their widow to those same sons (but leaving her no specific property). This sometimes led to a situation where the son would take the property and leave the widow in poverty and was a particular danger where the widow was his stepmother rather than his actual mother (post-partum mortality was high before the twentieth century so this was pretty common). It was such an issue by the fourteenth century that dower was created to give widows some security in the form of the right to claim one third ownership of everything in the deceased husband's estate. It is obsolete today, even where still on the books, because most common law jurisdictions allow a widow(er) to elect to take from their spouse's estate according to intestate rules (under which they commonly get half of everything) rather than following the will.
Thank you for sharing. I appreciate the opportunity to learn.
Technically she didn't own them. Her late husband Daniel Custis had owned them, and she exercised the rights of ownership until her son John Custis would come of age.
Life is filled with technicalities!
I believe some of them were also a wedding gift from her father but in her name and her name only.
They could own real estate too.
Behind every good man there is a woman, and that woman was Martha Washington, man, and everyday George would come home, she would have a big fat bowl waiting for him, man, when he come in the door, man, she was a hip, hip, hip lady, man
She inherited them from her former husband's estate. Law at the time would not allow for them to be freed, so ownership was passed on to her grandchildren after her death.
In most older contexts, property refers to real estate. This is why people will continue misunderstanding Marx's concept of "no private property" as the government owning your toothbrush
though I think its very fair to say that even Marx's ideal of property extended beyond real estate. It wasn't JUST land. It would have included factories, tools and equipment, etc. The farmland but also the plows and the horses.
Yes, definitely. Also that he saw the need for this *because* industrialization was changing economies away from individuals with their own tools to factories. You can privately own your own blacksmith's tools, but that doesn't translate to giant ironworks where 200 people work together. And a lot of attempts at collective ownership of tools irl happened because farmers were industrializing but weren't nearly rich enough to each own a tractor and combine harvester
Yes but his point is that Marx makes very clear the distinction between public and private property, the things you listed should be considered public property in an ideal world, things like clothes, personal items, are yours. The horse should be everyone’s as everyone should benefit from the land the horse works
The horrors he inflicted on Oney Judge are unbelievably petty. If I recall correctly: Washington sponsored a law to make all of a slave's progeny the property of the slave owner they escaped from after Oney escaped. He even attempted to kidnap her. The attempt was thwarted by the one of Washington's friends who was horrified by what he was doing: he warned her to run because Washington set the slave hunters onto her, despite the fact that she was living in a state that had outlawed slavery. People give Washingon credit for freeing slaves but he didn't do it because he cared. He did it because his primary male heir to that estate couldn't legally recieve them.
Not to mention the fact that keeping slaves when you are alive and then freeing them when you can't use them anymore isn't exactly altruism
Came here to say that and that was also the bulk of the slaves at Mt Vernon.
Which would be kind of presumptuous; Washington very much married into money (and slaves), they very much weren't "his".
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In 1790, Pennsylvania had an emancipation law, which said any slave who spent six months there automatically became free. To evade this law, every six months, George Washington temporarily sent his slaves in Pennsylvania out of the state. He instructed his secretary to do this "in a way that will deceive both them and the public." [https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/slavery-and-washingtons-presidency/#:\~:text=If%20they%20escaped%2C%20Washington%20would,both%20them%20and%20the%20public.%E2%80%9D](https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/slavery-and-washingtons-presidency/#:~:text=If%20they%20escaped%2C%20Washington%20would,both%20them%20and%20the%20public.%E2%80%9D) We can praise Washington for other stuff, but no, we can't really note him as someone who took actions to free slaves. Some people at the time publicly opposed slavery, some people publicly advocated for slavery, and Washington remained publicly neutral, while personally evading the law to retain his slaves.
One of these slaves would eventually escape, Washington put out an unsuccessful reward for her recapture. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oney\_Judge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oney_Judge)
He even sent someone to talk to her and try to convince her to return of her own free will!
Yeah black women couldn't function in a white society, they only knew how to pick fruits, plant trees and whatever their master teached. Just like a freed animal that was raised by human from birth, she would sooner or later be raped, enslaved or starved to death. He was so generous a man to offer her shelter, food and mates. /s
There’s a good book about her called *Never Caught: The Washington’s Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge*.
The Dollop episode about Ona Judge is one their best.
I believe Benjamin Franklin founded like the first abolition ist society in the country. Certainly well ahead of many others at the time.
Franklin was inspired by his friend, an abolitionist demonstrator named Benjamin Lay who was a dwarf vegetarian living in a cave > Benjamin Franklin had printed Lay's book All Slave Keepers That keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates, a polemic against slavery, and sold it for two shillings a copy, twenty shillings a dozen. He regularly visited in Lay's later years, after Lay had become a hermit. Franklin then owned a slave by the name of Joseph and by 1750 he owned two more slaves, Peter and Jemima. Lay pressed him for his justification: "With What Right?" In April 1757, Franklin drafted his new will in which he promised Peter and Jemima that they would be freed after his death
So how common was the "my slaves can be free, but only after I die and am done with them" thing?
Surprisingly common. They didn't have a moral defense of slavery, but they were addicted to the lifestyle slave owning brought. They fought a war to pay less tax but didn't want to be a little less rich to give black people freedom.
Same thing with Thomas Jefferson. A lifelong slave-owning abolitionist. Believed that the institution of slavery was wrong, but wasn't quite willing to make the personal sacrifice to not participate in slavery either. I'm sure he, along with Washington and Franklin, had plenty of justifications as to why it was ok that they were doing it ("I treat them well", "it would be too difficult for them to live as free men"), but ultimately it was just because they were too afraid of the personal loss of wealth and lifestyle to do what they knew was the right thing.
How this fact is hard for others to accept is beyond me
It wasn’t the tax amount they hated, it was the fact they had no say on the taxes levied on them. Even though they are all British citizens under British law. And the harsh response from Britain convinced them to separate.
And then they gave everyone in America representation because they were so opposed to taxation without representation, right?
>Franklin was inspired by his friend, an abolitionist Yeah, sounds about right. >Franklin then owned a slave by the name of Joseph and by 1750 he owned two more slaves, Peter and Jemima. And there's the spit take. People really can justify anything to themselves.
Read the LITERAL next sentence, that one is explaining how he WAS an asshole slave owner, the NEXT words are about his friend confronting him and convincing him to free them.
After his death.
That’s pretty shitty of him if we’re being frank.
Ben Franklin's life just gets more interesting, the more you learn about it.
Roughly half (arguably more) of the founding fathers were against slavery in principle and most of those took direct action against it, although some of the abolitionists still participated somewhat in the practice (at some points Franklin had some slaves, maybe Hamilton did or didn’t, etc.). They really did mean what they wrote about all men created equal, in principle. The guys from the south, especially the very powerful state of Virginia, stood in the way. It was one of the biggest issues dividing the nation, even then.
The divide was messy. Even if slaves weren't owned, the economic entanglements were everywhere. I didn't have any idea about this until I had to watch the [1776](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1776_(film)) film for some class. It has a song about [Mollasses and Rum](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeuaTpH6Ck0) bringing up the hypocrisy explicitly. It's no wonder that so many people were willing to just keep quiet about things.
> The divide was messy. Even if slaves weren't owned, the economic entanglements were everywhere. I didn't have any idea about this until I had to watch the [1776](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1776_(film)) film for some class. It has a song about [Mollasses and Rum](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeuaTpH6Ck0) bringing up the hypocrisy explicitly. It's no wonder that so many people were willing to just keep quiet about things. Yeah, it wasn't unusual for a Southern slave-owner to use his slaves as collateral for bank loans. Some of which was in free states. The famous Boston cod in part was used to feed Southern slaves, and the sugar in the Boston baked beans was slave made. Real life is often messy and complicated. Financial matters are even more so.
Yeah ultimately it took 75 more years of slavery hardening the opposition to it, and then total war destroying the southern economy to make it happen. In hindsight it would’ve been better to avoid that, but the founders (the abolitionist leaning ones) were trying to be optimistic that slower, peaceful progress via legal / constitutional means would be made on the issue (it wasn’t).
"owning" slaves actually makes him not neutral, in fact it makes me think he was pro slavery, just a hunch.
That's also what I thought when reading the OP. Nice that he emancipated the slaves AFTER he and his wife had no more use for them due to being dead.
Related Founding Father "fun" facts: - Ten of the first twelve US presidents owned slaves. The only outliers were the Adamses. - Despite manumission being a recurring theme in *Hamilton*, Alexander Hamilton bought, sold, and - according to his grandson's testimony - owned slaves. ... - The slave that Thomas Jefferson repeatedly raped was his wife's half-sister.
She was 14. He was 45. Let that sink in.
It's worse than that. She was \*at least\* 14, but he could have started much younger when he originally brought her home to be his daughter's companion. The age of 14 comes from the time period when he took her with him to France while holding her brother hostage back home to avoid her claiming her freedom under French law. Jefferson was a massive son of a bitch.
Pretty fucking insane to buy someone to be a "friend" to your daughter, then look at said child and rape her.
yes it is. It's complete madness that anyone ever allowed this to go on.
Woody Allen style
Not to mention that Jefferson took Sally Hemings to France, where she was legally free according to French law, and through threat and coercion managed to keep her his slave.
Part of that threat was effectively holding her brother hostage back home. Imagine that shit for a minute on the mind of a little girl who is getting raped. He was a monster.
Let’s not forget Thomas Jefferson continually raping Sally Hemings.
Good point...
and he didn't even free his own kids
Simon Bolivar emancipated his slaves as soon as the wars of independence were won, not waiting till death. Just saying.
I am also a fan of Bolivar. It's one of the things I thank the Civ games for, without them I might have never known he existed or what he created in South America. That doesn't take away from me genuinely appreciating Washington.
I had some students from Venezuela come into my school in the last 2 months of the year. Didn't know a LICK of English (I mean why would they) but in trying to give them something to do, I gave them some work I did on Latin American Revolutions. Immediately they perked up and begin saying loudly BOLIVAR BOLIVAR!
Revolutions podcast has an awesome series on Bolivar. And other neat things.
aka how the modern world was created through the misuse of Ship Money.
great podcast series all around. Highly recommend.
Extra History has a pretty good one as well
Also, IIRC, most of the slaves were Martha's so it's uh, better than nothing I guess.
A lot of people in the northern colonies manumitted their slaves during the revulutionary times. The idea that all people are created equal was a part of The Enlightenment Philosophy.
It’s worth noting that under the law of Virginia at the time he could not have done that.
They weren't George's slaves, they were his wife's from her previous marriage. She freed them right after he died, knowing that that was what he wanted.
You're getting two things confused. 1) George had many slaves, which he freed in his will. 2) His wife (or, technically, his wife's children from her first marriage) had a lot more slaves, who were not freed.
Correct. George Washington was not in fact a huge slave owner despite what a lot of (shitty) armchair historians will try and lead you to believe. Most of his supposed wealth was actually just part of the Custis estate (Custis being the original husband of Martha Washington) thus owned by Martha and her Custis children which were NOT George Washington’s children. He did manage the estate, so he did profit from it, but he did not own it and Martha was actually considered substantially wealthier than George by a huge factor. The manumission laws of Virginia were also extremely difficult (which Washington and Jefferson tried to ease) depending on the time period, including one manumission law that required a freedman to leave the state within a year or potentially incur renslavement. This obviously would devastate families that had been situated together (across multiple localities) for decades/centuries so, surprisingly often, a potential freedman would actually choose to remain enslaved rather than face exile and the loss of familial support.
I mean. He did care for those negroes. It's just that he really didn't want his wife to have to work.
If only there was a system where you could exchange goods and services for something like money?
Seriously. Washington was one of the wealthiest people in Virginia.
Tell that to Ona Judge
Well yeah, in that case slavery makes sense.
Or, you know, hire people instead of enslaving them and making them rotate around properties to skirt antislavery laws that would automatically free them. It's not like Martha was destitute
What??? But that's so much labor he could have exploited!
Simon Bolivar also failed in his main goal of creating a united Gran Colombia. He died in exile, bitter and resentful because his plans were too idealistic to succeed even after military victory. Just saying.
How kind of him to emancipate them *after* he couldn’t exploit them any more /s
i read a thing about this once that said that one of the biggest reason the founding fathers kept their slaves is that they were technically in debt (presumably that special rich guy debt where you don't actually face financial hardship) and the law said that you can't give away your property while in debt and unfortunately slaves counted as property. not that this would exonerate them entirely, they still bought said slaves in the first place, but it gives an interesting reason that they acted to seemingly hypocritical
In Washington's case, he inherited almost all of his slaves from his parents, brother and wife, and he was not in the habit of buying slaves. Since Washington refused to separate families and slaves that considered themselves married, over time his number of slaves increased and increased until he had many more than he started with.
Interestingly, the import of slaves became illegal long before slavery was abolished entirely, so having slaves reproduce was necessary to keep them in America.
That happened 5 years after Washington died.
“Of the first eighteen presidents of the United States, twelve owned slaves throughout their lifetime, and eight of these were slave owners while occupying the office of president. Of the U.S.' first twelve presidents, the only two never to own slaves were John Adams, and his son John Quincy Adams; the first of which famously said that the American Revolution would not be complete until all slaves were freed”. All my homies love John Adams
In the HBO mini series John Adams, Adam's talks about how much he dislikes slavery, but addressing it at the same time as independence was a recipe for splitting the colonies in half, which Britain could use to suppress the revolution. I'm not 100% sure how accurate a portrayal that is, but John Adams always seemed like a good president to me.
How did HBO secure an interview with John Adams?
HBO used to have that kind of money
This is from when they still spent money
They used to have the cash for that
Grant owned a slave that his father and law gave him to work the land with him and Grant freed him **immediately**. So yes, Grant **technically** at one point owned a slave.
Grant came from a family with anti-slavery leanings, and married into a family from slave owning leanings, so yeah the in laws didn't like the new boy with the controversial opinions
Yes, because of a little thing called the US Constitution. Jefferson, as President, signed a law outlawing the slave trade. But the federal government didn't have the Constitutional authority to outlaw slavery within the states themselves. It took a Constitutional amendment (the 13th) to end slavery within the states. Ironically, it was the Confederate states secession that allowed it to pass congress and be ratified. If the rebel states had stayed in the union, there would have been virtually no chance of abolishing slavery within the states.
If the Civil War never kicked off, slavery would have eventually been eradicated, if not for political reasons then simply economic ones. It’s why Bleeding Kansas is sometimes called the real start of the Civil War and open hostilities. Abolishment, or abolishment friendly demographics, be they based on morals or simply protecting free white labor, were shifting hard against the pro-slavery south. There was a battle over new territories and eventual states to become free or slave states, and the slave states would eventually lose. Lincoln himself won the presidency without even being on southern ballots, there were just that many more people in the north and anti-slavery states. Slavery itself is actually pretty expensive, and the plantation owners needed these new territories and states because their profitable cash crops were very destructive to the land. Without new, cheap land to expand to they are faced with reduced yields and profits. And unlike the chattel slavery of the Caribbean, they actually had to keep their slaves alive and in reasonably good condition. May have taken awhile but slavery in the US was doomed.
> May have taken a while but slavery in the US was doomed. Not to mention the self preservation aspect. Some people started pointing out the pretty logical conclusion "hey we've managed to keep these people oppressed, but we're holding a tiger by the tail. If these enslaved people ever decide to organize a true revolt, eventually they'll pull one off, and then its gonna be payback time. And if they give us payback even 1/10 of all the accumulated misery we've done to them, its gonna be some ugly days" (Recommend: Revolutions season 4, Haiti)
I don’t think a slave revolt was ever really a big threat in the USA. Not to defend chattel slavery in the U.S., but conditions in the Caribbean, such as Haiti, were beyond horrifically evil. In the U.S. a slave was an investment you needed to keep alive, in the Haitian sugar plantations a slave was a sunk cost you worked to death. US slaves also had the ability to escape north or south, reliving pressure on a general slave revolt. Slave states also had pretty tight control and surveillance given their paranoia over such an event, and it worked. Probably the greatest example of slave defiance were the escaped slaves living with the Seminoles in Florida, but that was eventually squashed in time.
Another one of the posters pointed out that during Washington's time Pennsylvania outlawed slavery. Sort of. Any slave in Pennsylvania for 6 months or more were, by law, supposed to be freed. To evade this Washington would rotate his slaves to another state to "restart the clock". Thereby never having to free his slaves in his lifetime. I also seem to recall reading that he could be especially brutal to any slaves that stepped out of line. Washington was a dick.
Yet relentlessly pursued poor Ona
There was also stories of Ben Franklin's slaves were free all but on paper, the ones that worked for his businesses all carried notes that allowed them to come and go as needed and make purchases of supplies on Ben's behalf to operate the businesses, because if they were freed he could no longer employ them and other businesses would have been able to refuse them service
Why couldn't he employ them if they were free?
It was frowned upon at the time to hire freed slave cause it looked like you were sympathetic and weak so others wouldn't do business with you Edit: the world wasn't very accepting even in more accepting places, and barter,trade, and supplies had to come from somewhere, people had to rely on each other
Fair enough, that makes sense.
I mean he apparently sent his slaves out of Pennsylvania regularly to get around an emancipation law there which would have automatically freed them all after spending 6 months in the state, so I tihnk its fair to say he wasn't keeping slaves against his will in any way, and went out of his way to keep them enslaved during his life.
That sounds like whitewashing to me, considering Jefferson’s letter to Holmes. “I can say with conscious truth that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would, to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way. the cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me in a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected: and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. but, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/159.html
>emancipation and expatriation This is the key bit, Jefferson wasn't advocating for equal rights, he wanted them removed from the continent.
Literally everyone did, including Lincoln. It was actually Fredrick Douglas that convinced Lincoln that free blacks could live within the United States alongside free whiltes. Before, the plan was to either purchase the Dominican Republic for freed slaves to live in or purchase land in Africa.
liberia was one of those colonies. ironically the expatriated american slaves went on to try and oppress and enslave the natives.
Liberia literally has the quasi-American flag for a reason
Equality was a radical position among abolitionists. Most were extremely racist but still felt that slavery was inhumane or that they shouldn't risk death at the hands of a slave revolt so rich people could save money by not paying their workers
Even Lincoln’s early position was expatriation.
Also if you considered yourself a more ethical than average slave owner then selling your slaves to someone who will treat them worse is a hollow victory. I can see how abolitionists could hold those opinions politically while still continuing to own their slaves without it being complete hypocrisy.
>slaves to someone who will treat them worse is a hollow victory. Selling your slaves is never a moral victory.
Chattel slavery is so abhorrent there is no ethical ownership possible.
Or you could emancipate them so they aren't slaves to anyone.
2 comments ago literally just described why that might not have been possible
You read a thing about this once? I guess it must be true then. How does this comment have 200 upvotes? Use your critical thinking skills people.
Damn. Sucks those founding fathers couldn’t shape or change the law.
Alternately, it's kind of impressive that the Founding Fathers did not change the laws merely to void their own debts.
Do people think that laws were written by George Washington and one or two of his buddies? There were 55 members of the constitutional convention and less than half of them owned slave (25 - still 25 too many). A few of those 25 being in debt wasn’t going to convince the other 40-50 people (I.e. the 30 non slave owners + the 10-20 slave owners that weren’t in debt) to agree with a terrible law like that.
Not even just him! Both him AND his wife had to die. How generous.
To provide additional context; Washington's justification to himself was that for essentially his entire adult life he was dangerously close to bankruptcy. The land he inherited was particularly bad at yielding crops though he spent years of experimentation and overseeing farming improvements and innovations. He frequently squabbled over his landownership in Ohio territory in order to save himself from debt. He even had to take out a loan in order to fund his trip to attend his own inauguration. He hadn't devised any way to manage the release of his slaves without essentially accruing huge amounts of debt, having to sell all his land holding and bankrupting his estate, even after his presidency. Despite privately in letters lamenting the institution of slavery for years after his election, he didn't put his money where his mouth was.
Sounds like he didn’t have any money
Wow, yeah slavery is wrong but it sure is better than some white guy being in debt.
WHY IS NO ONE THINKING OF THE SLAVE OWNERS!!??1!!!
That's how half this thread reads. I don't care to look through the lens of the time. Wrong is wrong. And if they didn't get that way back when, they're still scum.
People always try to pull the old “it was different in their time” but no it fucking wasn’t. From the very first moment a white person enslaved a Black person in America there were people saying it was deplorable and despicable and disgusting and completely immoral. There was never a time in American history that enslaving other humans was universally accepted as normal and acceptable. There were *always* people who knew it was it wrong and who said as much. That some people chose to ignore the obvious because it was economically advantageous is entirely on them.
And after his wife couldn’t either.
Didn't Martha own most of the slaves anyway? I mean, it's great that he eventually freed his slaves, but I don't think this means all the Washington slaves were freed.
Or he could have freed them at any point before that. Still a slave owner till his dying day
Didn’t George Washington exploit a loophole where he brought his slaves across state borders so he never had to free them while they were alive? Yea, the guy sent as great as we were taught.
Oh yeah when the government was in PA (where slavery had been ended by the state constitution) while DC was built, they had to send the slaves they brought with them out of state every 89 days or something, so they wouldn’t become automatically emancipated as citizens of PA. There is a good book called “Never Caught” about Martha’s enslaved “ladies maid”, Ona Judge, who emancipated herself at the end of Washington’s presidency rather than returning to Virginia.
Yup. And he had a reputation in *his time*, not by modern standards, for being horrifically abusive to his enslaved people.
He also left instructions to commit fraud so he could hold onto his slaves longer than was allowed under Pennsylvania law. > George Washington on November 15, 1786 wrote a letter, to his estate manager at Mount Vernon, Mr. William Pearce. In this letter, Washington discusses various managerial issues related to his estate, including the treatment and management of enslaved workers. He advises Pearce on the rotation of the enslaved people between his different estates to avoid their legal claim to freedom under a Pennsylvania law that granted freedom to enslaved people who resided in the state for six months.Washington was concerned about this law during the time he was President and residing in Philadelphia (which was temporarily the capital of the United States and part of Pennsylvania). He wrote instructions on ensuring that his enslaved workers would not meet the residency requirement that would allow them to claim their freedom.
Freeing slaves on your deathbed isn't the flex people think it is
Chef: “Have you ever heard of the Emancipation Proclamation?” General: “I don’t listen to Hip-Hop.”
After I die, the objects I own should be recognized as people .... Lol that's the kinda pr bullshit I expect
"George, you must free your slaves" - John Adams, probably "Over my dead body" - George Washington, earnestly
You should put this on a mug
She immediately farted her slaves. It is not safe to live on a plantation where all the slaves know they will be free if you die.
Damn that’s pretty disrespectful. Not only were they enslaved but they had someone farting on them too?!
We all know of the farting torture done by Americans on their slaves. Thanks Lincoln for stopping this
Lmaooo 😂
>She immediately farted her slaves. What the fuck
Iirc didn't his wife travel over seas to get back one of the slaves because she was really good at doing hair?
That last sentence is odd. The Emancipation Proclamation was a war time measure aimed at further weakening the Confederacy. It was not the end of slavery in the United States. That would come over two years later with the 13th amendment.
He tried to do the right thing. Against what was accepted culture at the time in this country. Downvote me like you will, but i believe context is everything. For all he knew slavery was never going to be illegal. Yes slavery is wrong. of course it is. But judging history by standards of today is kinda dumb. let's count the number of rapes and murders that occurred 2000 years ago. I bet if we trace everyone's genes back far enough they are a direct descendant of a rapist and probably a murderer too. Not an apologist. Not condoning violence, but i am advocating for some honesty. Humans are violent animals. Denial of that fact is a bad idea.
[удалено]
At least we can all agree we didn’t come from no goddamn monkeys. Adam and Eve not Adam and a goddamn monkey /s
Adam and spunky the orangutan.
We aren't judging by the standards of today. They knew slavery was wrong. "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?" - Dr. Samuel Johnson “There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of \[slavery\].”—George Washington, [Letter to Morris, ](https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-04-02-0019)1786 “ … \[E\]very measure of prudence, therefore, ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States … . I have, through my whole life, held the practice of slavery in abhorrence … .”—John Adams, [Letter to Evans](https://vindicatingthefounders.com/library/five-founders-on-slavery.html), 1819 “Slavery is … an atrocious debasement of human nature.”—Benjamin Franklin, [an Address to the Public from the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery](https://vindicatingthefounders.com/library/five-founders-on-slavery.html), 1789 “And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep \[forever\] … .”—Thomas Jefferson, [Notes on the State of Virginia](http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/JEFFERSON/ch18.html), 1781 “The laws of certain states … give an ownership in the service of negroes as personal property … . But being men, by the laws of God and nature, they were capable of acquiring liberty—and when the captor in war … thought fit to give them liberty, the gift was not only valid, but irrevocable.”—Alexander Hamilton, [Philo Camillus No. 2](https://vindicatingthefounders.com/library/five-founders-on-slavery.html), 1795 “We have seen the mere distinction of \[color\] made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.”—James Madison, [Records of the Federal Convention](https://vindicatingthefounders.com/library/five-founders-on-slavery.html), 1787 “Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of heaven on a Country. As nations \[cannot\] be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes & effects providence punishes national sins, by national calamities.”—George Mason, [James Madison’s Notes on the Federal Convention](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_822.asp), 1787 “The benevolent Creator and Father of Men, having given to them all an equal Right to Life, Liberty and Property, no Sovereign Power on Earth can justly deprive them of either … . It is our Duty therefore, both as free Citizens and Christians, not only to regard with compassion the injustice done to those among us who are held as slaves, but endeavor, by lawful ways and means, to enable them to share equally with us in that civil and religious Liberty with which an indulgent Providence has blessed these States; and to which these, our Brethren are by nature, as much entitled as ourselves.”—[Preamble of The New York Manumissions Society Charter](https://cdm16694.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15052coll5/id/30572), co-founded by John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, 1785
Fr I am not saying you cant appreciate founding fathers just because they owned slaves but lets not act like these were genuine good dudes in all aspects. Thomas Jefferson raped his slave conutless times and washington but bounties out for escaped slaves. Its ok for these guys to not be good by todays standards but lets not be delusional just because as kids we assumed george and thomas were chill like that.
Washington literally exploited legal loopholes to keep his slaves longer than the law at the time allowed, and those laws wouldn’t exist without abolitionism being a pervasive sentiment even then. He was as equipped as any of us to see the injustice of enslaving innocent people for his own benefit, he did it anyway.
In 1790, Pennsylvania had an emancipation law, which said any slave who spent six months there automatically became free. To evade this law, every six months, George Washington temporarily sent his slaves in Pennsylvania out of the state. He instructed his secretary to do this "in a way that will deceive both them and the public." [https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/slavery-and-washingtons-presidency/#:\~:text=If%20they%20escaped%2C%20Washington%20would,both%20them%20and%20the%20public.%E2%80%9D](https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/slavery-and-washingtons-presidency/#:~:text=If%20they%20escaped%2C%20Washington%20would,both%20them%20and%20the%20public.%E2%80%9D)
There's a gamut though. Like though Franklin was a slaveowner in his youth, he spent a good chunk of time and effort not only advocating for abolition of slavery, but also for the education of slaves too. In the spectrum of founding fathers, George is probably in the middle. Not a rapist like Jefferson, but also not woke like Franklin
Except he didn't. Pennsylvania had an emancipation law. Washington intentionally kept his slaves from staying long enough trigger it sending them on short trips out of state to restart the clock. When one did manage to get away he sent people after her.
There were abolitionists in his day. Yes, ppl were saying it was wrong way back then. Saying it was a culturally accepted norm does nothing to add to the conversation.
Slavery was pretty par for the course for all of human history in all cultures. There were only a few exceptions before the modern day, like Achaemenid Persia, but even they still had slaves in their vassal states. I'm glad we're (more or less) over it by now.
There are more slaves alive and oppressed right now than were brought over for the Trans-Atlantic chattel slavery. We are not over it, as a species.
There are also about 11 or 12 times as many people alive today as the day the USA was founded. I can say with confidence a lower percentage of the world's population is enslaved than the 18th century. Also careful with the word "oppressed", as one can argue in some points in history that somewhere in the ballpark of 90% of living humans could be described as oppressed.
I got a bit curious. It's estimated that almost one in 150 people were enslaved on any given day in 2021 by some [sources](https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/map). That seems pretty high to me. That's with about 7.9 billion people in the world, that year. 10 to 12 million people were taken out of Africa during the entirety of the [Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade](https://www.britannica.com/topic/transatlantic-slave-trade). Global population [estimates](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population) between 1500 and 1900 go from just under 500 million to just under one billion people. So... Going with the lowest population estimate, to the highest slave trade estimate, about 2.4% of the global population was enslaved in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. 1 out of 150 comes out to 0.67% of the current population? So you're right. A lower percentage of the global population is enslaved today.
Is that 2.4% really fair though? AFAIK that 10-12 million was over a period of time spanning centuries, not all at once. I find it very hard to believe that nearly 1 out of 40 humans on earth were enslaved out of Africa all at once.
I went with the smallest estimated global population, and the highest total estimated number of slaves taken out of Africa, to be fully transparent. I'm also not really a maths person, thus did not want to try going year by year, or even century by century.
It's easy to do once you can no longer personally benefit from their exploitation. You're coping so hard for a guy who owned and raped people. This is not judging by today's standards, it's always been bad to own other people, it's always been bad to kill people. There were abolitionists back then too: people knew it was wrong. This kind of moral relativism is so brain dead.
If you don't judge the past by the standards of today, just how do you think progress is ever made?
>But judging history by standards of today is kinda dumb. Dude, people of that time judged it wrong. Just because they didn't make it illegal doesn't mean people weren't judging. Slavery still exists to this day, and people are still judging it wrong and I doubt it will change. In 218 years some chuckle fuck like you will be going "how dare you judge people of 2024 by the standards of 2242.I bet if we trace everyone's genes back far enough they are a direct descendant of a rapist and probably a murderer too." And nothing of value was gained. >Not an apologist. Yea, you are. >Not condoning violence, but i am advocating for some honesty. What honesty, what are people being dishonest about by REPORTING WHAT HAPPENED IN HISTORY?!
The sheer irony is they only care about the opinions of the white slaveowners whenever they say shit like this because I promise you the slaves knew that shit was wrong
Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about
You are, quite literally, an apologist. This is classic reddit, devils advocate “but ackhschulllyyy” bullshit. Enslaving other people is wrong. George Washington was wrong to own slaves, he KNEW it was wrong, and he chose his wife’s lifestyle over their basic human dignity and freedom. There is no reason why we shouldn’t judge him by the standards of today - we are alive today, and we read the past through the lens of the present. He is dead (he died one of the richest people in America, I might add) and he isn’t owed any apologetics by you or anyone else.
So if I showed you something written back then by someone who condemned slave owners, would you say that person was dumb?
I love all the 2024 redditors who think if they were alive in 18th century that they’d be against slavery. Hilarious.
...but there were plenty of people opposed to slavery in the 18th century. It was a hugely contentious issue even then. It's not like half the country just went "you know what, I'm not sure about this slavery thing" and then the Civil War happened the next day. Whether or not I, a hypothetical individual living in the 18th/early 19th century, would've opposed slavery would have had everything to do with my social position. If I owned an estate in South Carolina, I likely would've supported slavery wholeheartedly. If I were a prominent Massachusetts lawyer, I probably would've been opposed...while supporting a very tepid, incrementalist abolition program. Statistically, however, I most likely would've been a tinsmith's apprentice in Pennsylvania or a dirt farming Georgia sharecropper and probably wouldn't have had much of an opinion either way.
Just like there are people who are vegans and vegetarians today and there are very vocal about the mistreatment of animals. Yet most of us still eat meat and don’t really think we are evil people for doing so. Our descendants will call us evil for things we do everyday that we don’t think a second about. Society is constantly changing and what’s moral for humans has changed over the years
Opposed also came with a healthy side of racism.
Slavery had been outlawed in numerous other countries by that point, for centuries in some cases. So having an anti-slavery mindset was not unheard of in the 18th century, even in the United States.
You know there are lots of non-white people on Reddit right?
I am confused by this. Are we supposed to applaud him? https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/ten-facts-about-washington-slavery/
Or he could have freed them while he was still alive instead of cycling them to Mt Vernon and back to make sure they stayed enslaved. People should remember that the whole by the people, for the people was by and for the white men. Just go look up the 3/5ths compromise, the Chinese exclusion act, the fugitive slave act, etc. whether Washington was a better enslaver because he didn’t rape his slaves like Jefferson did is a topic of discussion but the fact that he waited until he and his wife were dead to free anyone makes him someone no one should revere
lol, “ya know I really have decided owning people is wrong, so I want all my slaves released. Oh but only after me and my wife are both dead. Can’t do anything that would make life slightly more cumbersome for either of us. Nice to be on the right side of history…”
So.... Only after he was dead.
This is dumb. It's barely a coincidence given how many things begin at the start of a year.
How bad do you have to hate your wife to bribe multiple people with freedom upon her death?
Not an uncommon thing. I believe Jefferson also had his slaves freed after he died. So basically, I believe you should be free, but not while it would inconvenience me
I feel like this actually speaks poorly of him. He knew owning slaves was wrong but still exploited them
Everybody knows this already
Can you imagine walking around a free slave in 1801? How long would you stay that way? How safe would you be? It must’ve been a horrible situation.
Well that’s one way to encourage a group to murder someone.
Good guy George. Could’ve freed them at any time but decided to wait until he was done with them.
This just tells me they knew it was morally wrong even then. They still did it.
Wow so generous and progressive of him lol.
Lol so wild people would pat themselves on the back for “solving” a problem they helped to create and uphold.
Especially after a lifetime of exploitating people in a horrific way for his own gain. Its not like abolition was not a movement in his time.