section_path: Personal life/Slavery/Abolition and manumission
section_name: Abolition and manumission
paragraph_text: Abolition and manumission
  
  Based on his private papers and on accounts from his contemporaries, Washington slowly developed a cautious sympathy toward abolitionism that eventually ended with his will freeing his long-time valet Billy Lee, and then subsequently freeing the rest of his personally owned slaves outright upon Martha's death. As president, he remained publicly silent on the topic of slavery, believing it was a nationally divisive issue that could undermine the union.
  
  During the Revolutionary War, Washington's views on slavery began to change. In a 1778 letter to Lund Washington, he made clear his desire "to get quit of Negroes" when discussing the exchange of slaves for the land he wanted to buy. The next year, Washington stated his intention not to separate enslaved families as a result of "a change of masters". During the 1780s, Washington privately expressed his support for gradual emancipation. In the 1780s, he gave moral support to a plan proposed by Lafayette to purchase land and free slaves to work on it, but declined to participate in the experiment.
  
  Washington privately expressed support for emancipation to prominent Methodists Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury in 1785 but declined to sign their petition. In personal correspondence the next year, he made clear his desire to see the institution of slavery ended by a gradual legislative process, a view that correlated with the mainstream antislavery literature published in the 1780s that Washington possessed. He significantly reduced his purchases of slaves after the war but continued to acquire them in small numbers.
  
  In 1788, Washington declined a suggestion from a leading French abolitionist, Jacques Brissot, to establish an abolitionist society in Virginia, stating that although he supported the idea, the time was not yet right. Historian Philip D. Morgan wrote that Washington was determined not to risk national unity. Washington never responded to any of the antislavery petitions he received, and the subject was not mentioned in either his last address to Congress or his Farewell Address.
  
  The first clear indication that Washington seriously intended to free his slaves appears in a letter written to his secretary, Tobias Lear, in 1794. Washington instructed Lear to find buyers for his land in western Virginia, explaining in a private coda that he was doing so "to liberate a certain species of property which I possess, very repugnantly to my own feelings". The plan, along with others Washington considered in 1795 and 1796, could not be realized because he failed to find buyers for his land, his reluctance to break up slave families, and the refusal of the Custis heirs to help prevent such separations by freeing their dower slaves at the same time.
  
  On July 9, 1799, Washington finished making his last will; the longest provision concerned slavery. All his slaves were to be freed after the death of his wife. Washington said he did not free them immediately because his slaves intermarried with his wife's dower slaves. He forbade their sale or transportation out of Virginia. The provision also provided that old and young freed people be taken care of indefinitely; younger ones were to be taught to read and write and placed in suitable occupations. Washington emancipated 123 slaves, one of the few large slave-holding Virginians during the Revolutionary Era to do so.
  
  On January 1, 1801, one year after George Washington's death, Martha Washington signed an order to free his slaves. Many of them, having never strayed far from Mount Vernon, were reluctant to leave; others refused to abandon spouses or children still held as dower slaves by the Custis estate and also stayed with or near Martha. Following Washington's instructions in his will, funds were used to feed and clothe the young, aged, and infirm slaves until the early 1830s.