Those among the “fathers” whose names are best known in England, Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and Hamilton, were all opponents of slavery.  These include the first four Presidents, and the leaders of very different schools of thought.  Some of them, Washington and Jefferson at least, had a few slaves of their own.  Washington’s attitude to his slaves is illustrated by a letter which he wrote to secure the return of a black attendant of Mrs. Washington’s who had run away (a thing which he had boasted could never occur in his household); the runaway was to be brought back if she could be persuaded to return; her master’s legal power to compel her was not to be used.  She was in fact free, but had foolishly left a good place; and there is no reason to suppose that it was otherwise with Jefferson’s slaves.  Jefferson’s theory was vehemently against slavery.  In old age he gave up hope in the matter and was more solicitous for union than for liberty, but this was after the disappointment of many efforts.  In these efforts he had no illusory notion of equality; he wrote in 1791, when he had been defeated in the attempt to carry a measure of gradual emancipation in Virginia:  “Nobody wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that Nature has given to our black brothers talents equal to those of the other colours of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing mainly to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa and America.  I can add with truth, that nobody wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body and mind to what it ought to be, as fast as the imbecility of their present existence and other circumstances, which cannot be neglected, will permit.”

When he felt at last that freedom was not making way, his letters, by which his influence was chiefly exercised, abounded in passionate regrets.  “I tremble for my country,” he wrote, “when I think of the negro and remember that God is just.”  But if he is judged not by his sentiments, or even by his efforts, but by what he accomplished, this rhetorical champion of freedom did accomplish one great act, the first link as it proved in the chain of events by which slavery was ultimately abolished.  In 1784 the North-West Territory, as it was called, was ceded by Virginia to the old Congress of the days before the Union.  Jefferson then endeavoured to pass an Ordinance by which slavery should be excluded from all territory that might ever belong to Congress.  In this indeed he failed, for in part of the territory likely to be acquired slavery was already established, but the result was a famous Ordinance of 1787, by which slavery was for ever excluded from the soil of the North-West Territory itself, and thus, when they came into being, the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin found themselves congenitally incapable of becoming slave States.