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“The warmest friends and the best supporters the Constitution has do not contend that it is free from imperfections; but they found them unavoidable and are sensible… I do not think we are more inspired, have more wisdom, or possess more virtue, than those who will come after us.”
— George Washington, Nov. 10, 1787, regarding the new Constitution
Just days after George Washington signed (on Sept. 17) the document that would serve as the basis of the new government of the United States of America, he set about selling it to the colonies in order to gain its ratification.
Washington was aware of the “imperfections” within the U.S. Constitution and the need to make changes to it in the future.
Washington’s wisdom in that regard was obvious.
But he was still at the center of this nation’s greatest paradox.
While he was the most famous warrior in the fight to establish freedom from England, and he was the first signer of the Constitution, which, in part claimed that it would “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” Washington still owned slaves.
The “Blessings of Liberty” he claimed he was securing didn’t extend to his own slave quarters.
Even on the very day the Declaration of Independence was approved in a closed session of Congress (July 2, 1776), Washington overlooked the irony of this statement: “The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves…,” he wrote in his general orders.
Historians claim that he had inherited 10 slaves when he was 11 years old. He would eventually own as many as 135 slaves. Although, I’ve found one procurement letter (dated May 15, 1783) in which he requests “200 (Dutch) Blankets for my Negroes.”
Yet, according to documents I’ve found on the web site of The Library of Congress, he had mixed feelings about the institution of slavery.
“I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it (slavery); but there is only one proper and effectual mode by which it can be accomplished, and that is by Legislative authority,” Washington wrote in a letter to Robert Morris on April 12, 1786.
But there is ample evidence Washington might have been adverse to the institution of slavery, but he still considered slaves no more than “savages.”
That letter he sent to Robert Morris on April 12, 1786, was really a tirade against the Society of Quakers in Philadelphia, which had been formed in an effort to free slaves.
Washington called such efforts “tyranny” and “oppression.” He also claimed the society was acting “repugnant to justice.”
Although slaves as part of that equation would not gain anything nearing real “justice” until the 13th Amendment to the Constitution outlawed slavery 79 years later.
Upon Washington’s death, and as part of his will, he released all of his slaves. He was the only Founding Father who did that.
Until his death, though, they were merely property that belonged to him — just like his landholdings he owned in Fayette County until he died.
I’ve found a number of requests for buyers of that property, which is now Perry Township.
“I avail myself of your obliging offer to dispose of the lands I hold in the counties of Fayette and Washington; hereby empowering you to sell the same on the terms which have been mentioned to you,” he said in a letter dated January 15th, 1795, to James Ross — and while he was the president.
That was one of many letters he wrote offering his Western Pennsylvania lands for sale — but to no avail.
I did find a rather humorous letter Washington sent to James Ross on Aug. 6, 1794, about a man who wanted to buy his Fayette County land.
The man (“whose name, nor place of abode I did not enquire”) asked the president, who was in a hurry at the time, for a price. “I had given you a power to sell it, and to you his application had best be made,” he told Ross. “Pressing still to know the price, I told him I could enter into no engagement, but supposed if the land was yet unsold he might obtain it at Six dollars an Acre,” Washington replied.
Perhaps Washington’s business acumen had suffered, because he had weightier matters-of-state on his mind.
“I am sorry I did not ask his name as he seemed much in earnest and had rid from Philadelphia to this place for the sole purpose of making the foregoing enquiries,” Washington added.
That proposed deal, you might imagine, never came to fruition.