Dr. Wienick:  Could you please explain the "dower slaves" that Martha Custis Washington owned according to several accurate accounts( please see "The Diaries of George Washington" and other sources)that she brought to Mt. Vernon after her marriage to General Washington?  and I agree with you.  He did indeed grow to hate slavery. Phyllis Wheatley's poem written by her to honor Washington after he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army  plus her invitation to meet with him for a few minutes after his taking command of the Continental forces possibly led him to consider this situation in a more serious light.  Jane Steele.

-----Original Message-----
>From: Henry Wiencek <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Sep 4, 2007 7:48 PM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] GW's slaves? Mount Vernon confronts the issue
>
>In response to the article on GW and his slaves, I sent this letter to Newsweek:
>
>Michael Beschloss's article on George Washington (Washington Slept Here,
>Sept. 3, 2007) contains some significant errors. Washington was not
>"ambivalent" about slavery, he despised it, foresaw that it would destroy
>the union, and tried twice during his presidency "to liberate a certain
>species of property which I possess, very repugnantly to my own feelings."
>Washington saw that slavery had evolved from a labor system into a lucrative
>financial system, under which people were bought and sold like "cattle in
>the market." Beschloss makes a critical error when he writes, "Financially
>[Washington] knew that he and Martha could not run . . . his beloved estate
>Mt. Vernon in Virginia without their several hundred slaves." Yes,
>Washington knew that he needed labor--that the South needed labor--but he
>had become convinced that those laborers need not and must not be enslaved.
>His solution? Free the people, and hire them back on wages or shares.
>Washington tried to negotiate the manumission of all the Mount Vernon
>slaves--his own and those owned by Martha's family, the Custises--but he was
>rebuffed. His revolutionary emancipation plan is revealed in an unpublished
>1796 exchange of letters with a Custis heir, David Stuart, who refused to go
>along with it. For generations historians have ignored Washington's
>commitment to liberty for African-Americans in part because it puts the rest
>of the founders, notably Jefferson, in a very bad light indeed.
>
>Washington's will freed his 123 slaves not at his death, as Beschloss
>writes, but at Martha's death. Most of the slaves at Mount Vernon were owned
>by the heirs of Martha's deceased son, Jacky Custis; Martha owned no slaves
>herself until the very end of her life, when she owned one. The "decline" of
>Mount Vernon in the nineteenth century had nothing to do with the
>emancipation of Washington's slaves. The estate was inherited by Bushrod
>Washington, a Supreme Court justice who owned so many slaves that he was
>able to sell off a large number of them when they annoyed him by their
>disobedience.
>
>Henry Wiencek
>Author of "An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation
>of America."


Lillian Jane Steele