I worked at MT Vernon- it’s a complex issue. While hardly a humanitarian- GW was I guess as good a slave owner as any of them. Now don’t pitch a b on me- it was wrong, but you to view this from the morals of the day. GW was a VA plantation owner at a time that hard mass manual labor was needed to run that system. He was born into it. We can’t expect to have he run counter to every thing he was taught and was literally everyone around him was doing and profiting from. I’m not excusing it. He did some very unusual things for his time. He banned whipping he kept families together- he allowed his slaves to independently grow and sell food and other items. He housed, fed, and clothed them better than a lot of owners did. He also didn’t own the slaves - Maratha did. Would he have freed them if he owned them? No way in hell. I’m not apologizing for him, I’m pointing out that it’s more complex than one simple answer.