(light music) - Hi my name is Daniella
and I'm in sixth grade and I go to Riverside Elementary, and my question is why did
George Washington have slaves if he was against slavery? - Yeah, so it can seem like
a contradiction that somebody like Washington who was opposed to slavery could actually be a slave owner himself and that was a contradiction
that Washington recognized during his lifetime, he was quite aware that there was some hipocracy involved in that and there are a few reasons
why Washington remained a slave owner throughout his life. The first is that, Washington
didn't become opposed to slavery until later on,
after the Revolutionary War. Before that point, he had
purchased a large number of enslaved people to grow his plantation and by the 1780's, as he is
growing opposed to slavery and really seeing the
evils of the institution, he at that point owns several
hundred enslaved people. So the question becomes, what is he going to do with those people? What is the solution
that is going to get him out of this institution? And he had two choices essentially, he could sell them, or he could free them. At that point he was opposed
for moral reasons to selling enslaved people so he turned towards looking to emancipate them. Some of the barriers that
Washington encountered as he looked into freeing
his slaves were financial. As a plantation, Mount Vernon
operated with enslaved labor and that was the really
fundamental system for the economy in this entire region. And Washington new that if
he were to free his slaves, he would have to find another
way to operate his plantation and another way to provide income for himself and for his family. And that might have
necessitated really changing the way that he lived and
potentially sacrificing a lifestyle that he had
become accustomed to. So, Washington, as he's
considering freeing his slaves, doesn't seem to be willing to make a huge financial sacrifice in order to do so. We also know that an
emancipation would have been fairly expensive for Washington. There was a law in Virginia
that required slave owners to provide financial support
to freed slaves who were too old or too young
to support themselves. And this was so that those
people didn't become burdens on their local communities. And so, if he were to free his slaves, Washington would have to
provide a large amount of money in order to support those individuals and Washington while he was quite wealthy in terms of land and other property, he actually didn't have a lot of cash and so he would have had
to come up with some way to get the money to
finance an emancipation. He did look into several
ways of doing that, by either renting or
selling some of his land, but he wasn't able to find a solution that he really found acceptable. So, that was another barrier. And finally, there was another reason why Washington delayed an emancipation, and that was the fact that
he actually didn't own about half of the enslaved people who were here at Mount Vernon. They were actually owned by the estate of Martha Washington's first husband. And they were called dower slaves. And when Martha's first husband had died, as his widow, she received lifetime use of one third of his property,
including slaves. And many of those people had come with her here to Mount Vernon. In the 40 years that she lived
here with George Washington, they had married many
of Washington's slaves and had families and children. So, when Washington is
considering freeing his slaves, he knows that he doesn't
have the legal authority to free the dower slaves
and he knew that separating families was one of the
worst evils of slavery and he's very concerned about
the fact that those families would be separated if he chose
to emancipate his own slaves. So, Washington was opposed
to separating families and he was very wary
of that consequence of emancipating his own slaves. Ultimately, Washington chose
to free his slaves in his will where he put a provision that would emancipate them at Martha's death. And waiting until after
both he and his wife died, solved his financial issue, because it meant that his estate could provide for the freed slaves. It didn't solve the issue of
family separation however, as the dower slaves remained
in bondage after Martha died, even as their Washington
family members went free. So, as you can see, Washington
really grappled with a lot of issues has he was growing
more opposed to slavery over the course of his life. He did make efforts to remove himself from the institution of slavery
and he considered freeing his slaves before he died
but he wasn't able to come up with a solution he was happy
with until after his death. (light music)
