[Illustration:  %Washington’s flute and Miss Custis’s harpsichord at Mount Vernon%]

Even the houses of the well to do were much less comfortable places than are such abodes in our day.  There were no furnaces, no gas, no bathrooms, no plumbing.  Wood was the universal fuel.  Coal from Virginia and Rhode Island was little used.  All cooking was done in “Dutch ovens,” or in “out ovens,” or in the enormous fireplaces to be found in every household.  Wood fuel made sooty chimneys, and sooty chimneys took fire.  In every city, therefore, were men known as “sweeps,” whose business it was to clean chimneys.

[Illustration:  %Earthenware stove—­Moravian%]

[Illustration:  %Dutch oven%[1]]

[Footnote 1:  The bread, or meat, to be baked was put into the pot, and hot coals were heaped all around the sides and on the lid, which had a rim to keep the coals on it.]

[Illustration:  a foot stove]

Washington was a farmer, yet he never in his life beheld a tomato, nor a cauliflower, nor an eggplant, nor a horserake, nor a drill, nor a reaper and binder, nor a threshing machine, nor a barbed wire fence.

[Illustration:  Kitchen in Washington’s headquarters in Morristown, N.J.[1]]

[Footnote 1:  This shows a fine specimen of the old-fashioned fireplace.  Notice the andirons, the bellows, the lamp, the spinning wheel, the old Dutch clock, and the kettles hanging on the crane over the logs.]

[Illustration:  A plow used in 1776]

His land was plowed with a wooden plow partly shod with iron.  His seed was sown by hand; his hay was cut with scythes; his grain was reaped with sickles, and threshed on the barn floor with flails in the hands of his slaves.

%195.  Negro Slavery.%—­No living person under thirty years of age has ever seen a negro slave in our country.  When Washington was President there were 700,000 slaves.  When the Revolution opened, slavery was permitted by law in every colony.  But the feeling against it in the North had always been strong, and when the war ended, the people began the work of abolition.  In Massachusetts and New Hampshire the constitutions of the states declared that “all men are born free and equal,” and that “all men are born equally free,” and this was understood to abolish slavery.  In Pennsylvania, slavery was abolished in 1780.  In Rhode Island and Connecticut gradual abolition laws were passed which provided that all children born of slave parents after a certain day should be free at a certain age, and that their children should never be slaves.  The Ordinance of 1787 had prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory.  But in 1790 New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and all the states south of these were slave states. (See map on the next page.)