George Washington and Slavery - Revolutionary Period

Revolutionary Period

Before the American Revolution, Washington expressed no moral reservations about slavery, but by 1778 he had stopped selling slaves because he did not want to break up their families. The historian Henry Wiencek speculates that Washington's slave buying, particularly his participation in a raffle of 55 slaves in 1769, may have initiated a gradual reassessment of slavery. According to Wiencek, his thoughts on slavery may have also been influenced by the rhetoric of the American Revolution, the example of the thousands of blacks who enlisted in the army to fight for independence, the anti-slavery sentiments of his idealistic aide John Laurens, and his knowledge of the ability of the enslaved black poet Phillis Wheatley, who in 1775 wrote a poem in his honor.

Wiencek also notes that in 1778, while Washington was at war, he wrote to his manager at Mount Vernon that he wished to sell his slaves and "to get quit of negroes", since maintaining a large (and increasingly elderly) slave population was no longer economically efficient. Washington could not legally sell his wife's "dower slaves" and, because they had long intermarried with his own slaves, he dropped the plan for sales in order to avoid breaking up families, which he had resolved not to do.