George Washington, known throughout the ages as the “Father” of his country, was a Southern planter who owned and relied on slaves.27 Washington punished his slaves by whipping or selling them, divided their families so they would work more efficiently, and provided them with as little means as tolerable.28 He also raffled off the slaves of those bankrupt slaveholders who owed him money.29 Washington’s most gruesome act as a slave owner came in 1784, five years before he became President of the United States. In that year, Washington hired a dentist to extract nine teeth from the mouths of his slaves, and implant them into his own mouth.30
During his presidency (1789 to 1797), Washington lived at the President’s House in Philadelphia. In 1780, Pennsylvania had passed “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery,” which prohibited nonresidents from holding slaves in the state longer than six months. In an attempt to circumvent this law, Washington and his wife, Martha Dandridge Custis Washington, neither a permanent resident of Pennsylvania, rotated their slaves in and out of Pennsylvania so that none of them established continuous residency for six months. This practice violated the Pennsylvania Act, but the Washingtons were never prosecuted under it.
During the Revolutionary War, however, Washington’s attitude toward African-Americans was markedly different. Washington recruited free blacks into the Continental Army, and by the time of the Battle of Yorktown, African-Americans constituted 25 percent of the Army.31 By 1786, Washington promised never to buy another slave. By the time of his death, Washington found slavery morally wrong, and freed his slaves in his will, upon the death of his wife, Martha.32 He even expressed a desire to have his freed slaves educated.33
Like Jefferson, however, Washington, did not seek to abolish slavery swiftly, or with any type of urgency. Despite not purchasing a slave after 1786, and eventually freeing his slaves, Washington believed slavery would be abolished by “slow, sure and imperceptible degrees.”34
A Less Perfect Union
The Founding Fathers overtly defended slavery and racism in the United States Constitution. Protecting the institution of slavery was necessary to gain the South’s support for a new, centralized federal government. It is important to realize that our Constitution legitimized the ownership of some human beings by other human beings. This was, of course, directly opposed to the Natural Law values of the Declaration of Independence, which asserted that the rights of “all Men” come from our “Creator” and are thus “unalienable,” absent due process. The Constitution contained express provisions recognizing slavery’s existence, protecting it as a legal institution, and insulating it from regulation or interference by the federal government.
Three provisions of the Constitution implicitly recognize the existence of slavery: the Fugitive Slave Clause (Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3), the Importation Clause (Article I, Section 9, Clause 1), and the Three-Fifths Clause (Article I, Section 2, Clause 3). The Fugitive Slave Clause provides that “[n]o Person held to Service of Labour in one State” shall be discharged from such labor if he or she escapes into another State. This clause essentially required the States to return fugitive slaves who escaped into their territory. The courts interpreted this clause as providing slaveholders with a right to their slave property that no state where slavery was prohibited could qualify, control, or undo.
The Importation Clause in the Constitution forbade Congress from outlawing the “importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper” until 1808. This clause permitted the international slave trade until at least 1808. The United States discontinued the international slave trade in that year when President Jefferson signed legislation prohibiting it.
The “Three-Fifths Compromise” was the clearest example of the delegates who wrote the Constitution abandoning ethical and moral standards, and even core values, in order to construct a new federal government. The Northerners wanted apportionment for the House of Representatives to be based solely on the population of free persons living in each state, whereas the Southerners wanted their slaves to count as whole persons, thus increasing Southern representation in Congress. The infamous and despicable Three-Fifths Clause emerged from the debate. It provides that apportionment be determined by the “whole number of free Persons” in each state, minus the number of “Indians not taxed,” plus “three fifths of all other Persons.” Therefore, the Constitution counted slaves (“other Persons”) only as 60 percent of free, white persons.
In Their Defense . . .
Regardless of their faults, many of the Founding Fathers did not own slaves and recognized slavery’s inherent immorality. Benjamin Franklin, for example, called slavery “a source of serious evils” and “an atrocious debasement of human nature.”35 In 1774, two years before signing the Declaration of Independence, Franklin and his fellow Founding Father, Benjamin Rush, formed the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting Abolition of Slavery.36 John Jay, an author of The Federalist Papers and President of a comparable society in New York, as well as the first Chief Justice of the United States, declared that “[t]he honour of the states, as well as justice and humanity . . . loudly call upon them to emancipate these unhappy people. To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused.”37
James Madison owned slaves, yet deemed slavery “the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.”38 Madison noted that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention “thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.”39 In The Federalist, No. 54, Madison
