Washington owned slaves and lived his life under the institution of slavery, but he loved it not.  He was too honest and keen-minded not to realize that the institution did not square with the principles of human liberty for which he had fought, and yet the problem of slavery was so vast and complicated that he was puzzled how to deal with it.  But as early as 1786 he wrote to John F. Mercer, of Virginia:  “I never mean, unless some particular circumstances should compel me to it, to possess another slave by purchase, it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery in this country may be abolished by law.”  The running away of his colored cook a decade later subjected him to such trials that he wrote that he would probably have to break his resolution.  He did, in fact, carry on considerable correspondence to that end and seems to have taken one man on trial, but I have found no evidence that he discovered a negro that suited him.

In 1794, in explaining to Tobias Lear his reasons for desiring to sell some of his western lands, he said:  “Besides these I have another motive which makes me earnestly wish for these things—­it is indeed more powerful than all the rest—­namely to liberate a certain species of property which I possess very repugnantly to my own feelings; but which imperious necessity compels, and until I can substitute some other expedient, by which expenses, not in my power to avoid (however well I may be disposed to do it) can be defrayed.”

Later in the same year he wrote to General Alexander Spotswood:  “With respect to the other species of property, concerning which you ask my opinion, I shall frankly declare to you that I do not like even to think, much less to talk of it.—­However, as you have put the question, I shall, in a few words, give my ideas about it.—­Were it not then, that I am principled agt. selling negroes, as you would cattle at a market, I would not in twelve months from this date, be possessed of one as a slave.—­I shall be happily mistaken, if they are not found to be a very troublesome species of property ere many years pass over our heads.”

“I wish from my soul that the Legislature of the State could see the policy of a gradual abolition of slavery,” he wrote to Lawrence Lewis three years later.  “It might prevent much future mischief.”

His ideas on the subject were in accord with those of many other great Southerners of his day such as Madison and Jefferson.  These men realized the inconsistency of slavery in a republic dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, and vaguely they foresaw the irrepressible conflict that was to divide their country and was to be fought out on a hundred bloody battle-fields.  They did not attempt to defend slavery as other than a temporary institution to be eliminated whenever means and methods could be found to do it.  Not until the cotton gin had made slavery more profitable and radical abolitionism arose in the North did Southerners of prominence begin to champion slavery as praiseworthy and permanent.