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1. A story about sitting Presidents (in this case, the first President, George Washington) being subject to the rule of law. It's drawn from this fantastic book by @ericaadunbar that just won the Frederick Douglass Prize. amazon.com/Never-Caught-W…
2. Washington spent most of his presidency in Philadelphia, the nation's capitol at the time. He brought several enslaved people with him from Virginia. But there was a problem. Pennsylvania had passed a gradual abolition law in 1780. phmc.state.pa.us/portal/communi…
3. That law stipulated that no enslaved person could be "retained in this State longer than six Months." This meant that if the Washingtons wanted to hold on to their human property, they would need to shuttle them across state lines once every six months. This is what they did.
4. The person who informed them of this was Edmund Randolph, also a Virginia slaveholder and the Attorney General. Randolph had learned of the 6 month rule the hard way, when 3 of his slaves informed him that they were now free because they'd been in PA more than 6 months.
5. Just to make this entirely clear here...three people enslaved by the US Attorney General (the Jeff Sessions of his day) quoted a Pennsylvania law to him, their enslaver, and said "tough sh*t buddy, we're free now and you can't do anything about it."
6. Pendleton, as a fellow enslaver, felt it was his duty to inform George Washington that the same thing could happen to him and that he should be careful to avoid Pendleton's fate.
7. And so the Washingtons set up an elaborate plan (which they tried to keep secret from the people they enslaved) to ensure that none of them would ever spend more than 6 months at a time in PA.
8. It seems to have never occurred to Washington, the most beloved and powerful man in the new nation, to just say "oh come on, I'm George F-ing Washington, Pennsylvania's not going to side with slaves over me." He instead assumed that he was subject to PA law like anyone else.
9. The weight of racism was on Washington's side. The weight of (white) public opinion was on Washington's side. He was the unanimous choice for the Presidency. Talk about a mandate. But still, he assumed that he had to strictly obey PA law.
10. This part of the book is merely background to a much more interesting and important story about how one of the people enslaved by George Washington, a young woman named Ona Judge, escaped her enslavers. I can't recommend the book highly enough.
11. As one responder has pointed out, it never occurred to Washington to do the right thing and just free his slaves and it's important to note that. This book offers a close look into Washington's life as a slaveholder. amazon.com/Imperfect-God-…
12. Washington freed his slaves in his will. This was more than what most of his fellow founders did, but by the standards of the hundreds of thousands of people enslaved at the time as well as many white people who opposed slavery, it was not nearly enough.
ugh..*Randolph* not Pendleton.
13. An addendum because it seems some folks are reading this thread as being a positive story about George Washington. It most definitely IS NOT. He worked every angle to retain his and Martha's human property. He's not the hero of this story.
14. This story speaks not to GW's greatness, but to the power that GW perceived enslaved people and their white PA allies to have in the 1790s. To keep his slaves, he had to go to expense and inconvenience like this.
15. Our first reaction is often to see "the law" as a tool the powerful use (and have used) to support their power. That's often the case. But in this case, the most powerful person in the nation perceived the law to be a threat to his power, and acted accordingly.
16. What made the law a threat to GW was the fact that enslaved people and their allies (both antislavery whites and free blacks) knew about the law and would seek to enforce it in PA courts staffed by judges who would obey that law, even if it hurt GW or Randolph's interests.
17. In other words, this thread was not a story about GW as much as it was a story about the inter-racial coalition of people who were fighting slavery in the 1780s and 1790s, folks who are not always included in our historical memory of abolition that too often begins in 1831.
18. And it also points to the difference that an imperfect 1780 PA abolition law made in the lives of enslaved people. That law was passed by an entirely white legislature in a state where very few black people could vote.
19. The law compromised with the interests of slaveholders in a host of ways. It didn't go far enough. But the lengths that it *did* go to created a lever that enslaved people could use to lift themselves out of slavery.
