Despite efforts to simplify or ignore it, Washington’s involvement with slavery was complicated. He enslaved more people than any of his fellow founders, and he was actively, intimately involved in every aspect of the institution. Yet Washington also privately expressed uneasiness over his entanglements with slavery, and a desire to see it gradually abolished, though he never shared those views publicly.
On his deathbed, Washington used his last will and testament to free the people he enslaved. Although that emancipation came with conditions, it remains true that at the end of his life, Washington freed 123 people from slavery.
This ambiguous legacy as both enslaver and emancipator has troubled Americans ever since.
Even during his lifetime, Washington faced criticism for holding slaves. In 1775, British essayist Samuel Johnson criticized America’s founders, many of whom held slaves: “How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”
In 1797, British abolitionist Edward Rushton wrote a letter directly to Washington, crying “Shame! Shame! That man should be deemed the property of man, or that the name of Washington should be found among such proprietors.” Yet Rushton also understood why many Americans couldn’t recognize Washington’s hypocrisy: “Man does not readily perceive defects in what he has been accustomed to venerate.”
Shortly after Washington’s death in 1799, it was Richard Allen—a preacher born into slavery who later became the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal church—who first told Americans that Washington had freed the people he enslaved. Weeks before the will became public, Allen urged his Philadelphia congregation to mourn Washington’s passing, praising him for having “dared to do his duty, and wipe off the only stain with which man could ever reproach him.”
Yet even as Washington’s will was published hundreds of times in pamphlets and newspapers and the nation learned of its remarkable emancipation provisions, few Americans highlighted it in the way Allen had. In the dozens of biographies of Washington published in the decade after his death, few bothered to mention slavery at all. This silence opened space for future generations to cherry-pick from Washington’s history with slavery as they saw fit.
Indeed, few of today’s comments about Washington and slavery are more vitriolic than the criticisms levied by his nineteenth-century critics. In 1841, for example, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison reminded Americans that Washington was “a slaveholder to the day of his death,” a charge other antislavery activists repeated frequently in both speeches and print.