Born into a world where slavery was considered a normal part of life, George Washington initially appears to have felt no qualms about following along the same slaveholding path taken by his father. When Washington inherited 10 slaves from his father’s estate; Just as he was ever eager to expand his landholdings, to improve the productivity of his farms and to win election to public office, he steadily acquired more slaves during he next two decades

Supported slavery when younger, and used slaves on his plantation, but freed his slaves in his will, and though it was an unworkable situation. It was on the day that the former president finished writing his last will and testament, which spelled out his direction for freeing the more than 100 enslaved human beings that he personally owned; the will served as Washington’s final message to his country

Over the course of his lifetime, Washington’s attitudes toward slavery seem to have undergone a marked transformation. From his initial unquestioning support for slavery as an economic institution and a wholehearted commitment to it as a core element of his personal property, through time he became increasingly frustrated at dealing with its inherent inefficiencies and he also grew troubled by the degrading effects it had on anyone who was deeply involved in it.

While Washington acted to manumit (free his slaves) those slaves that he owned in his own right, more than 150 other enslaved workers living at Mount Vernon, where Washington lived, were the legal property of the heirs to the estate of Daniel Parke Custis, Martha Washington’s first husband, and they remained in bondage.

Many of the dower slaves (the part of or interest in the real estate of a deceased husband given by law to his widow during her life) were the spouses and children resulting for the intermarriage of Custis Washington slaves, George Washington elected to honor the marital status of the Mount Vermont slaves, even though unions among the enslaved had not legal standing in Virginia.

Washington repeatedly declined to sell unneeded slaves if it meant that family members would be separated. Washington stipulated that those slaves he owned were to be freed, but only after the deaths of both himself and his wife.

By 1786, Washington’s thinking had progressed to the next level, marked by his statement, “I never mean to possess another slave by purchase; it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by the Legislature, by which slavery in this Country may be abolished by slow, sure and imperceptible degrees.”

Thomas Jefferson was a consistent opponent of slavery throughout his life. He considered slavery contrary to the laws of nature that decreed that everyone had a right to personal liberty. He called the institution of slavery an “abominable crime,” a “moral depravity,” a “hideous blot,” and a “fatal stain” that deformed “what nature had bestowed on us of her fairest gifts.”

Early in his political career Jefferson took actions that he hoped would end in slavery’s abolition. He drafted the Virginia law of 1778 prohibiting the importation of enslaved Africans. In 1784 he proposed an ordinance banning slavery in the new territories of the Northwest. From the mid-1770s he advocated a –plan of gradual emancipation, by which all born into slavery after a certain date would be declared free.

After 1785, Jefferson made no public statements on American slavery nor did he take any significant public action to change the course of his state or of the Nation. Not even freed his own slaves after his death. Jefferson believed in the inferiority of blacks, coupled with their presumed resentment of their former owners, made their removal from the United States an integral part of Jefferson’s emancipation scheme.

Jefferson considered himself as the “father” of “children” who needed his protection. Jefferson wrote in 1814, “…brought up from their infancy without necessity for thought or forecast, [they] are by their habits rendered as incapable as children of taking care of themselves,” he thus saw himself as the benevolent steward of the African Americans whom he was bound in a relation of mutual dependency and obligation

By 1820, during the political crisis that resulted in the Missouri Compromise, Jefferson had come to believe that the spread of slavery into the west – its diffusion – would prove beneficial to the slaves. He feared that if slavery was prohibited west of the Missouri Compromise line he feared it would threaten the union and lead to civil war.

Jefferson only freed those slaves that knew a trade or skill or who were fari enough to pass as being white. Jefferson did father a child, Eston Hemings, who he fathered with Sally Hemings, a slave at Monticello where Jefferson grew up.