April 12, 1786 – George Washington writes: There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery

On this day in history, George Washington wrote to Robert Morris, the former US Superintendent of Finance who worked closely with Washington during the Revolutionary War to help provide supplies to the Continental Army. In 1786 Morris was serving as a Pennsylvania delegate to the Second Continental Congress.

Washington wrote to Morris about a lawsuit respecting a Virginia man, Mr. Dalby, who brought his slave to Philadelphia, whereupon the Society of Quakers attempted to liberate the slave. In 1780, Pennsylvania had passed the Gradual Abolition Act, a law that freed people after they turned 28 and that automatically freed any slave who moved to the state and lived there for more than six months.

Washington had encountered the same problem himself when traveling to Philadelphia, which he resolved by rotating his slaves so they could not claim they lived there for that amount of time. Of course he kept his actions secret; he wrote to his personal secretary Tobias Lear in 1791: “I wish to have it accomplished under pretext that may deceive both them and the Public . . . I request that these Sentiments and this advise may be known to none but yourself & Mrs. Washington.”

Thus Washington was sympathetic to Mr. Dalby’s plight. He asked for Morris’s help for Dalby, but of course added the usual disclaimer:

I hope it will not be conceived from these observations, that it is my wish to hold the unhappy people who are the subject of this letter, in slavery. I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it—but there is only one proper and effectual mode by which it can be accomplished, & that is by Legislative authority: and this, as far as my suffrage will go, shall never be wanting.

But when slaves who are happy & content to remain with their present masters, are tampered with & seduced to leave them; when masters are taken at unawar[e]s by these practices; when a conduct of this sort begets discontent on one side and resentment on the other, & when it happens to fall on a man whose purse will not measure with that of the Society, & he looses his property for want of means to defend it—it is oppression in the latter case, & not humanity in any; because it introduces more evils than it can cure.”

You can read Washington’s entire letter here.

George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, 1797