You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington

by Alexis Coe

Most modern accounts of Washington’s will are fairly forgiving, even sometimes congratulatory. Mount Vernon, now a museum and presidential library, summarizes it thus: “At the end of his life Washington made the bold step to free all his slaves in his 1799 will—the only slave-holding Founding Father to do so.”8 The often repeated statement lacks crucial details and context: the slaves’ manumission was not immediate and other slave-owning founders, including Benjamin Franklin, didn’t emancipate their slaves in their wills because they had already done so while they were alive. After Franklin returned from France in 1785, he freed his slaves. In 1790, he petitioned Congress to abolish slavery—while Washington was president, three years before he signed the Fugitive Slave Law. “If his countrymen in Washington’s state of Virginia had followed his example in freeing their slaves as quickly as practicable,” writes Ashley Bateman, a teacher, “who knows the impact it could have had on the South.”9 Bateman ignores that Virginians already had in-state models to follow. Prominent Virginian Robert Carter III (whom Washington may have known through his eldest half brother Lawrence) manumitted over four hundred and fifty slaves in his lifetime. Like Washington, Carter had hoped gradual emancipation would pass the Virginia legislature in his lifetime, but unlike Washington, when it seemed clear it would not, he began to do so himself in 1791.