Analysis Of George Washington's Struggle With Emancipation

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Washington’s Struggle with Emancipation Many believe George Washington is remembered for the issue of slavery, to some extent Washington himself was a slave owner for almost all of his adult life. He lived in Virginia, a region that was dominated by tobacco plantations, which relied mostly on the slave labor. The Old Dominion regarded slavery as the Centre of the social economic life. During the 1750s about 40 percent of the slave population from North America lived in this region of Virginia. In 1790, the census conducted in the United States showed about 300,000 slaves lived in Virginia, and the reason as to why there were many slaves who actually lived in Virginia is the tobacco being produced as the staple crop in Northern America (Potter, …show more content…

Longmorein relation to moods and attitudes about Washington on slave charge which were actually a mixture of patriarchal, commercial, and paternalist attitudes. To some extent one of the three models dominated in Washington’s behavior as a planter, this three models intermingled to establish a complex view about slavery. Washington viewed slavery as a business to make reasonable profits from the grain cultivation and the tobacco plantations to oversee the general advancement in agriculture. Washington underscored this view and the fact that slaves were his chattels. Washington also displayed a patriarchal attitudes absorbed from the planter culture during his youth in Virginia (Chernow, 2010). All this attributes manifested through the strict control of the slaves as he acted distantly and to some extent rigorously towards the slaves. Ron Chernow portrays George Washington’s attitude as he hanged people in public expressing his blazing …show more content…

In 1799 Washington had to move some slaves from his estate to his fellow tenements in Frederick and Berkeley counties. In fact, to some extent Washington did not want estate property to be in pieces and such a step would economically ruin the Mount Vernon property. Washington’s sense about racial superiority towards African Americans did not result to the expression of negrophobia, in relation to this he is actually contrasted with Madison who never described the blacks were inferior towards the whites and with Jefferson whose expression about negrophobia is concrete in his Notes on the State of Virginia and further his reactions towards the Saint Domingue slave rebellion. Though Washington did not want the white workers to be housed near the blacks in his estate, he argues that the racial intermixture was

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