“I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America if I could have conceived that thereby I was founding a land of slavery.”
-Marquis de Lafayette
“[Washington] privately made no secret of his disdain for the institution [of slavery], but neither did he have the courage to broadcast his views or act on them publicly. After endorsing abolition, he shunted direct action onto other shoulders.”
-Ron Chernow
“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 by legislative authority.”
-George Washington in a letter to an abolitionist
“The idea that abolition could be deferred to some future date when it would be carried out by cleanly incremental legislative steps was a common fantasy among the founders, since it shifted the burden onto later generations. It was especially attractive to Washington, the country’s foremost apostle of unity, who knew that slavery was potentially the country’s most divisive issue.”
-Ron Chernow
“The unfortunate condition of the persons whose labor in part I employed has been the only unavoidable subject of regret. To make the adults among them as easy and as comfortable in their circumstances as their actual state of ignorance and improvidence would admit, and to lay a foundation to prepare the rising generation for a destiny different form that in which they were born, afforded some satisfaction to my mind and could not, I hoped, be displeasing to the justice of the Creator.”
-George Washington (and yet he still did not free his slaves, now totaling 216)
History Schmistory 