George Washington and Slavery - Presidency

Presidency

Congress passed and President Washington signed the Northwest Territory Act that banned slavery in the Northwest Territory in 1789; it did not free slaves already in the territory. In 1790, Washington signed the Naturalization Act, providing a means for foreigners to become citizens. This act limited U.S. Citizenship to free white persons. At the time, these were Europeans. (In later years of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in tests of definitions by Asians seeking citizenship, those persons considered white were classified as Caucasian according to the terms of the time.)

In 1793, President Washington signed the Fugitive Slave Act. This act gave slave owners the right to capture fugitive slaves in any U.S. State. This act was done to allow the recapture of fugitive slaves who escaped into any "safe harbors" or slave sanctuaries.

According to the historian Alfred Hunt, Washington authorized $400,000 and 1,000 weapons to be given to slave owners of the French colony of Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) as emergency relief in 1793-1794 in order to put down a slave rebellion. The monetary relief and weapons counted as a repayment for loans granted by France to the Americans during the Revolutionary War. The slaves continued to rebel and gained independence and freedom as Haiti in 1804.

From 1790-1800, the capital was located in Philadelphia. In 1780 Pennsylvania was the first state to abolish slavery, through a program of gradual emancipation. Slaveholders were still allowed to bring slaves into the state, but if they became residents, the slaves would become free. Like other southern slaveholders serving in the city, Washington evaded the state's prohibition of slavery by maintaining that he was not a resident, and ensuring that neither he nor his eight or nine slaves stayed in the state for more than six months at a time. Two of his slaves escaped in Philadelphia. Acknowledging the city's Quaker abolitionist sentiment, he gradually replaced his slaves with German indentured servants.

Washington expressed other concerns over slavery's implications for the nation. In 1797, Washington is reported to have told a British guest: "I can clearly foresee that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union, by consolidating it in a common bond of principal." He told Edmund Randolph, according to Thomas Jefferson's notes, that if the country were to split over slavery, Washington "had made up his mind to move and be of the northern."

Since the discovery in 2001 of the foundations of the President's house and slave quarters on Independence Mall, exhibits about slavery and the republic were added to the nearby Liberty Bell Center, which opened in 2003. In addition, a public archeology project was undertaken on the site in 2007, and a commemorative exhibit has been constructed at the site. The President's House in Philadelphia: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation opened in 2010.