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 His revolutionary emancipation plan is revealed in an unpublished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."