Note 137 — Chapter XLI

This paragraph answers the question which has sometimes been asked, with an unfriendly spirit, “Why did not Washington manumit his slaves during his lifetime?” He was ever anxious to give them freedom, and to see the system abolished from the republic. In 1783, he wrote to Lafayette: “The scheme which you propose, as a precedent to encourage the emancipation of the black people in this country, from the state of bondage in which they are held, is a striking evidence of the benevolence of your heart. I shall be happy to join you, in so laudable a work.”

To Robert Morris he wrote in October 1786: “There is not a man living, who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery; but there is only one proper and effectual mode by which it can be accomplished, and that is, by legislative authority; and this, as far as my suffrage will go, shall never be wanting. But when slaves, who are happy and contented with their present masters, are tampered with and seduced to leave them; when masters are taken unawares by these practices; when a conduct of this kind begets discontent on one side and resentment on the other; and when it happens to fall on a man whose purse will not measure with that of the Society [Quakers], and he loses his property for want of means to defend it; it is oppressive in such a case, and not humanity in any, because it introduces more evils than it can cure.”

To John F. Mercer, of Virginia, he wrote, a few months later: “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 which slavery in this country may be abolished by law.”

In 1794, he wrote to Tobias Lear, his private secretary, then in England, endeavoring to negotiate the sale of some of Washington's wild lands, that one object he had in view in making sales was to place himself in a position to emancipate his slaves. “Another motive,” he wrote—"which is, indeed, more powerful than all the rest—is, to liberate a certain species of property, which I possess, very reluctantly to my own feelings, but which imperious necessity compels,” &c.

In 1797, he wrote to his nephew, Lawrence Lewis: “I wish, from my soul that the legislature of this state could see the policy of a gradual abolition of slavery. It might prevent much future mischief.”