I've posted excerpts of Wiencek's article on George Washington and Slavery.
He fed, clothed, and housed his slaves poorly, candidly admitting that some of the dwellings he provided were so miserable that a white person would never consent to live in them. As a matter of routine, Washington separated husbands and wives, housing male artisans close to the mansion,
while keeping their wives and children on his outlying farms, miles away. Though women and girls worked in the mansion household as seamstresses, cooks, and maids, the historian Lorena S. Walsh found that about 65 percent of Washington's field slaves were women doing hard labor under the overseers, such as collecting and spreading manure, clearing stumps, making fences, cleaning stables, and breaking ground with hand tools
Clothing shortages occasionally became acute. An overseer reported one December that the children on an outlying farm had no clothes at all. Washington complained about a seamstress making long pants rather than the regulation short breeches because he didn't want to use extra cloth. He was also very sparing of blankets. Mothers received one for each newborn, but slaves had to wait years to get a fresh blanket.
Washington ordered the slaves to use their blankets to gather leaves for livestock beds: "Let the People, with their blankets, go every evening … to the nearest wood and fill them with leaves." This had to be done, he said, "for the comfort of the Creatures … Make the Cattle lay warm and comfortable. The hogs also in pens must be well bedded in leaves."
The Washingtons followed elite Virginia custom and staffed their household with mulatto, or mixed-race, servants. A foreign visitor to Mount Vernon encountered a small boy "whose hair and skin color were so like our own that if I had not been told, I should never have suspected his [African] ancestry. He is nevertheless a slave for the rest of his life."
Descendants of the slave West Ford have long claimed that George Washington was his father, but a compelling argument can be made that Ford's father was the general's nephew Bushrod Washington. Ford's mother, Venus, lived on the Westmoreland County plantation owned by George Washington's brother John Augustine Washington Jr. When Bushrod Washington, an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, inherited Mount Vernon, he made Ford his manager. In his will, he bequeathed 160 acres of land to Ford, who had been manumitted at the request of Bushrod Washington's mother, Hannah Bushrod Washington. While George Washington may not have been Ford's father, there is little doubt that, through Bushrod Washington, he had black kin. Martha Washington, meanwhile, owned a half-sister, her slave Ann Dandridge.
Washington's will decreed that all 123 of his slaves be freed upon the death of his wife. This action was made possible by a Virginia law passed in 1782 that allowed slaveholders to manumit their slaves at will, without government approval. Washington conspicuously noted that it was not "in my power" to manumit the Mount Vernon slaves owned by the Custis heirs, perhaps urging the Custis family to follow his example and manumit the dower slaves themselves. Washington never articulated any other strategy for freeing the dower slaves, but some scholars speculate that Washington could have followed Virginia law and financially compensated the Custis estate for the slaves' manumission (with one historian estimating the total cost to Washington as 6,000 pounds sterling). Pointing out that his slaves had intermarried with Custis slaves, Washington predicted that his manumission would cause "the most painful sensations"—the forced breakup of long-established families—unless the Custis heirs joined him in freeing their property, which they did not do.
Martha Washington chose to enact the will's manumission instructions a year after Washington's death, but the Custis slaves did indeed remain enslaved.
Washington's public actions as president did nothing to dismantle southern slaveholding society, including his signing of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act
Ten years before his death, Washington told David Humphreys that, with the proper opportunities, "the rising generation" of slaves could create for themselves "a destiny different from that in which they were born"
- Wiencek, H. George Washington and Slavery. (2015, March 25). In Encyclopedia Virginia. Retrieved from http://www.EncyclopediaVirginia.org/Washington_George_and_Slavery.
