At George Washington’s death in 1799, 317 enslaved people lived at Mount Vernon. Washington directly owned 123 of them. Others were held through the Custis estate or rented from neighboring enslavers. The legal distinctions matter, particularly when discussing whom Washington had the authority to free. They do not change the larger reality: the plantation, household, and wealth of Mount Vernon depended on enslaved labor.

This is not a detail that belongs in the footnotes of Washington’s life.

It belongs in the story.

Washington’s views on slavery did change over time. In private correspondence during the 1780s and 1790s, he expressed a desire for legislative abolition, and his 1799 will provided for the eventual emancipation of the people he personally owned. That evolution is historically significant.

So is the fact that he continued enslaving people during his lifetime.

During Washington’s presidency, the federal capital was temporarily located in Philadelphia.

Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act created a problem for slaveholding visitors who remained in the state. After later amendments, enslaved people kept in Pennsylvania long enough could have grounds to claim freedom, and deliberately rotating them out of the state to evade the law was prohibited.

Washington did it anyway.

In an April 12, 1791 letter to his secretary Tobias Lear, Washington discussed sending enslaved members of the presidential household back to Virginia before they could claim freedom. He wanted the movement carried out under a “pretext that may deceive both them and the Public.”

The National Park Service describes Washington’s rotation of enslaved workers after the 1788 amendments as knowingly violating Pennsylvania law.

This is one reason the phrase man of his time is not enough. The record does not merely show a twenty-first-century disagreement with an eighteenth-century institution. It shows Washington responding to an antislavery law that already existed in his own time—and taking steps to prevent people he held in slavery from benefiting from it.

Ona Judge was an enslaved woman in the Washington household.

On May 21, 1796, while living with the presidential household in Philadelphia, she escaped.

Washington tried to recover her.

His surviving correspondence shows him asking officials to assist in returning Judge and rejecting conditions under which she might voluntarily come back. In November 1796, Washington told customs collector Joseph Whipple that he did not want violent measures that might cause a riot, but he also advised that the less advance notice given before putting Judge aboard a ship, the better.

Judge remained free.

Decades later, she explained her decision in interviews with abolitionist newspapers. When recounting an effort to persuade her to return with a promise of later freedom, she gave a devastatingly simple answer:

“I am free now, and choose to remain so.”

Judge’s interviews were recorded many years after the events and contain some chronological inaccuracies, so we corroborate them where possible with contemporary advertisements and correspondence. But her voice belongs in this story. She was not merely the object of Washington’s pursuit. She made a decision about her own life and successfully defended it.

In 1793, President Washington signed the federal Fugitive Slave Act.

The law placed responsibility on states for the return of people who escaped slavery across state lines. Washington’s later efforts to recover Ona Judge therefore did not occur in a legal vacuum: his administration had signed a federal framework for returning people claimed as fugitive slaves.

That does not mean every action taken in pursuit of Judge was automatically lawful. It does mean the federal government under Washington was helping construct the legal machinery that protected slaveholders’ claims across state boundaries.

The historical record does not require us to pretend Washington’s views remained frozen.

By the mid-1780s, Washington was privately expressing support for gradual abolition through legislative action. His final will went further than most prominent Virginia slaveholders of his generation: it directed that the people he personally owned receive freedom after Martha Washington’s death, while William Lee was to receive immediate freedom and an annuity.

Washington could not legally free the people held through the Custis estate.

Martha Washington ultimately manumitted the people owned by Washington early, effective January 1, 1801.

Those facts belong here.

So do the limits.

Washington did not make abolition a public presidential cause. He continued to use enslaved labor. He took steps to prevent enslaved members of his household from obtaining freedom in Pennsylvania. And after Ona Judge escaped, he tried to recover her.

History is allowed to contain all of those facts at once.

Washington’s relationship with Native nations cannot be reduced to one policy or one moment. His career included diplomacy, alliances, treaty-making, land acquisition, expansion, military conflict, and assimilation policy.

One episode requires particular attention.

In 1779, during the Revolutionary War, Washington ordered Major General John Sullivan to lead a major campaign into the homeland of the Haudenosaunee Six Nations.

There was a military context. In 1778, British-allied Loyalist and Native forces had carried out destructive raids against American frontier settlements in New York and Pennsylvania. The National Park Service describes the Sullivan-Clinton campaign as Washington’s response to those attacks and an effort to cripple the ability of hostile Six Nations forces to continue the war.

But Washington’s orders themselves were sweeping.

He called for the “total destruction and devastation of their settlements” and instructed Sullivan’s forces to destroy crops and make the country not merely overrun, but destroyed.

The campaign ultimately destroyed more than forty villages and enormous quantities of food. Thousands of Haudenosaunee people were displaced. The destruction of homes, fields, orchards, and stored food created consequences that extended well beyond a conventional battlefield.

That perspective should not be told only through the army that carried out the campaign.

The Onondaga Nation’s own historical account describes the 1779 attacks in terms of burned communities, destroyed food systems, displacement, hunger, and death. Its history remembers Washington through the Haudenosaunee name Hanadagá•yas — Town Destroyer.

That name is not a modern invention.

In December 1790, Seneca leaders Cornplanter, Half-Town, and Great-Tree addressed President Washington and invoked the memory of the campaign while discussing fear, peace, and land grievances.

The Seneca Nation’s history also reminds readers what those destroyed fields represented. Agriculture was central to Seneca life; corn, beans, and squash—the Three Sisters—were described as life supporters. Destroying crops was therefore not an abstract military maneuver against supplies. It struck communities’ means of surviving.

This does not erase the raids against American settlements that preceded Washington’s campaign.

It does mean those raids are not the only history worth remembering.

One of the easiest ways to flatten history is to assume that nobody living in the eighteenth century could have recognized contradictions that seem obvious now.

Some did.

In 1796, British abolitionist Edward Rushton sent Washington a blistering letter challenging the contradiction between Washington’s reputation as a champion of American liberty and his continuing ownership of enslaved people. Rushton published the letter in 1797.

Rushton did not speak for everyone in Washington’s world. Far from it.

But his existence matters.

It means criticism of Washington’s slaveholding is not simply a twenty-first-century moral standard dropped onto a world in which no alternative could be imagined. Antislavery arguments, gradual abolition laws, abolition societies, self-emancipation, and direct criticism of slaveholding all existed during Washington’s lifetime.

Because history does not become useless when its people become complicated.

Quite the opposite.

Snarky George draws heavily from Washington’s warnings about faction, public opinion, civic responsibility, republican government, and the dangers that power and political passion can pose to a republic.

Those ideas can be examined on their merits.

They do not require a spotless messenger.

In fact, Washington’s contradictions make one of this project’s central ideas more important:

Do not outsource your judgment to a hero.

Read the document.

Check the claim.

Look at who benefited.

Look at who paid the price.

Look for the person whose voice was left out the first time the story was told.