George Washington and Slavery - Postwar Conditions

Postwar Conditions

In 1782 the Virginia legislature made manumissions easier, while requiring documentation. Slaveholders were allowed to free any adult slave under the age of forty-five, either by executing a deed or adding provisions to a will. So many slaveholders freed slaves in the next two decades that the percentage of free blacks went up to 7.2 percent of all blacks in Virginia by 1810, from less than one percent when the bill was passed.

With the rise in demand for slaves after the invention of the cotton gin at the end of the century and the end of importation of slaves in 1808, Virginia changed its laws to make manumission more difficult. By the 1820s, it required legislative approval for each act of manumission. After 1810 manumissions dropped sharply.

After the war, Washington often privately expressed a dislike of the institution of slavery. In 1786, he wrote to a friend that "I never mean ... 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 slow, sure and imperceptible degrees." To another friend he wrote that "there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see some plan adopted for the abolition" of slavery. He expressed moral support for plans by his friend the Marquis de Lafayette to emancipate slaves and resettle them elsewhere, but he did not assist him in the effort.

He held more slaves than he needed at Mount Vernon, making the operation unprofitable. The changes from tobacco to mixed-crop production lowered the labor needs. Washington wrote, "It is demonstratively clear that on this Estate (Mount Vernon) I have more working Negroes by a full than can be employed to any advantage in the farming system." Washington could have sold his "surplus" slaves and immediately have realized a substantial revenue. The historian James Truslow Adams wrote, "One good field hand was worth as much as a small city lot. By selling a single slave, Washington could have paid for two years all the taxes he so complained about." Washington acknowledged the profit he could make by reducing the number of his slaves, declaring, "alf the workers I keep on this estate would render me greater net profit than I now derive from the whole."