Our experts confirm Washington secretly rotated his slaves out of the state, sometimes just sending them over the river to New Jersey, so they couldn’t claim their freedom.
“He actually instructs his secretary to do it in a way that will deceive them, meaning the slaves and the public,” MacLeod said. “So, he doesn’t want his actions to become common knowledge because he knows that there are so many abolitionists in the city that it could become a PR disaster for him.”
In 1793, Washington signs the Fugitive Slave Act into law, which helps slaveholders recapture enslaved people who have escaped.