"What made [George] Washington unique was that he became a great man while..."

... not abandoning being a good man. Long before the stirrings of the abolitionist movement awoke New England, Washington the Virginian foresaw slavery's end. According to Wood, "By the time he returned to Mount Vernon at the end of the war, he had concluded that slavery needed to be abolished ... because it violated everything the Revolution was about." This may not surprise historians as much as the lay public since Washington had already displayed an open mindedness towards race in his having "led a racially integrated army composed of as many a five thousand African American soldiers."

What does surprise was the sentiment behind the general's views toward slavery, views which deviated starkly from the merely political. During his presidency in 1794, Washington mulled over liberating "a certain species of property which I possess, very repugnantly to my own feelings." Going beyond a flawed, politically correct analysis of such turn of phrase, one has to wonder as to why the President felt so.

Over sixty years before the Dred Scott case recognized African Americans as non-citizens, the most powerful man in the nation privately, and we can only assume honestly, was asserting the injustice of slavery. This feeling can perhaps be best explained by a sense of virtue within the President, virtue which enabled him to see the vice inherent in bondage, and which prodded him to act on his conviction. Six months before his death, Washington in the writing of his will, laid provisions to free his three hundred slaves at the point of his wife's passing. In this action, Wood stressed "he did not just throw his slaves out into the world." Instead, Washington made clear that juvenile and elderly slaves ought to be provided for by means of literacy, and vocational training.

For all of these reasons, Washington appears closer and closer to the Aristotelian ideal, as he does to the republican Roman. It should not go unmentioned here that Aristotle was no champion of abolition himself, believing that some men were by their natures slaves. Yet the Greek, like his predecessors Socrates and Plato, saw that the most pathetic form of slavery was when one was without virtue, and thus a slave to himself. Washington certainly did not fall into this category.

— From the essay, "Out of Virtue, Greatness: Washington as Aristotle's Magnanimous Man", by Dr. Jose Yulo, on Ignatius Insight.