Washington could be considered the nation's first developer. He grew up on a tobacco farm in Virginia, when the highest aspiration for anyone would to become a wealthy planter. His great ambition - and it was great- was to end up doing that. He therefore had real greed for owning good land and acquired a lot, speculated in more, pushed forward a plan to render the Potomac navigable, and at the five farms there at Mt Vernon had a lot of projects, growing tobacco ( like many) but also building a grist mill, setting up a distillery, and trying to grow a variety of crops including (famously) hemp for making rope. To get all his projects done he used slaves. Around 500 seem to have passed through Mt Vernon itself, who were bought, borrowed, part of his wife's dowry, or rented. As administrator, he had overseers managing things on the ground. He expected the enslaved to work long days and work hard. Some slacking off seems to have been somewhat grudgingly tolerated, but insolence and outright disobedience could be punished by whipping. Or, in a few extreme cases, by being sold off to the Caribbean: this last was probably a powerful threat for his other workers to live under- a Jamaican plantation worker there might, if he was lucky, live into his mid 30's. Washington also had no doubts about their status. At the start of the War of Independence, thousands of slaves had accepted the British offer for freedom, if they would leave their rebellious masters, and at the British surrender at Yorktown, he was adamant that all of them be returned. When he was president, and resident in Philadelphia, one of his servants took the opportunity to escape to New England, and he would devote considerable time and trouble to tracking down Ona Judge and trying to get her back. Slaves were property; if they ran off it was theft.

Like Thomas Jefferson and other Virginia Founding Fathers, he expressed doubts in his last years about slavery as an institution, and hopes that it would eventually cease. Mt Vernon has a number of such statements on their website, and they were doubtless sincere. However, like Jefferson and Monroe, he did not demand an immediate end to it. He could not imagine how it could be easily done. He- they- were in the top of a slave society, one that had been built over a hundred years and was thoroughly established . Jefferson could , as an intellectual, admit readily that slavery was an evil institution. But it also allowed him a life of a gentleman of leisure, with a good library, good wine cellar, and a staff to serve him. Washington also needed labor, and the obvious source of that in his world were people who were enslaved. It is not surprising that this Virginia elite would echo St Augustine, "Save me, Lord...but not just yet".

The one thing that really marks Washington, however, is his emancipation in his will of the 123 slaves he owned. This required him not just to turn them loose- by law, he had to make some provision for them as well. He could afford to do that, and did. This is in contrast to Jefferson, who had mortgaged his slaves and couldn't afford to emancipate them, and the genuinely hypocritical Monroe, who spoke eloquently about someday there being abolition, but only freed one of his servants.

From very early days of the Republic, Washington was held up as the epitome of the Good American. And he should get a lot of credit. He did manage the War of Independence rather well, in just keeping a ragged force in the field. And there was a time, in the 1780s and during his first Presidency, when he could pretty easily have installed himself as king or dictator or president for life, and he did not- and that set the pattern for that job. So, you can't really sweep him out of the way- the man was significant. But at a time when statues of Confederate generals are being pulled down, slave owning is not being shrugged off the way it once was. After 100+ years of shrugging it off, there's now predictable - and appropriate- popular resentment about the Virginian Founding Fathers and their enslaved servants and field hands, and we will now be as often reading about heroic Ona Judge escaping from Washington as we used to read about him cutting down cherry trees. And that's a good thing.

But to actually understand the guy, it's important to correctly place him in his world, not ours. Slave owning was common there. It is loathsome to us: in the end, it also bothered him. It just did not bother him enough to make him into a radical who wanted to upend his world getting rid of it.

Looking backwards, the most frustrating thing about the vague good intentions of the Founding Fathers towards abolition before 1800 is that we know now that it really would have been the only possible time it could have been done. Washington would write that slave labor on his farms was, in the end , not economically viable: but in the next century the cotton boom would actually give his slave society immense profits , and entrench it far, far more deeply, to the point where eventually there was a war over it.

It is interesting that you're asking this after a visit to Mt Vernon. The staff at Mt Vernon has not at all avoided the subject of Washington's use of slaves, and their website devotes a good bit of space to it.

https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/

Joseph J Ellis His Excellency: George Washington