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Slaves and slavery are mentioned indirectly in the 1787 Constitution. Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 prescribes that "three fifths of all other Persons" are to be counted for the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives and direct taxes. These "other persons" are a reference to slaves. In Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3, slaves are referred to as "persons held in service or labor". Many Northern states adopted legislation to end or significantly reduce slavery during and after the American Revolution. In 1782 Virginia passed a manumission law that allowed slave owners to free their slaves by will or deed. Thomas Jefferson, in 1784, proposed to ban slavery in all the Western Territories, but this law which failed to pass Congress by one vote. However Congress did ban slavery in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, for lands north of the Ohio River.
The international slave trade was banned in all states except South Carolina, by 1800. In 1807, President Jefferson called for and signed into law a Federally-enforced ban on the international slave trade throughout the U.S. and its territories. It became a federal crime to import or export a slave. However, the domestic slave trade was allowed, for expansion, or for diffusion of slavery into the Louisiana Territory.
George Washington was the most prominent Founding Father to arrange in his will for the freeing of all his slaves following his death and the death of his wife. He privately declared that he was opposed to slavery as an institution, calling it morally indefensible. But in a time when his nation was vulnerable to attack from foreign powers, he saw the unity of the nation as a greater priority and He believed that the divisiveness of his countrymen's feelings about slavery was a potentially mortal threat to that unity. Washington never publicly challenged the institution of slavery. He did not want to provoke a split in the new republic the issue. But he did sign into law the Slave Trade Act of 1794, which limited American involvement in the Atlantic slave trade.
Washington had owned slaves since the death of his father in 1743, when, at age 11, he inherited 10 slaves. He owned at least 36 slaves by the time of his marriage to Martha Custis in 1759. Martha brought an estimated 85 "dower slaves" to Mount Vernon after their marriage, which she had inherited one third of her late husband's estate. Washington bought more land using his wife's great wealth, tripling the size of the plantation at Mount Vernon. He purchased the additional slaves needed to work it. The last record of a slave purchase by him was in 1772, although he later received some slaves in repayment of debts. In his will, Washington provided that his slaves should be freed after the death of his wife. However, Martha chose to free them at the end of 1800.
Like Washington, Thomas Jefferson used slave labor for his household, plantation, and workshops. Over his lifetime he owned about 600 slaves. He inherited about 175 while most of the remainder were born on his plantations. Jefferson often purchased slaves in order to unite their families, and he sold about 110 for economic reasons. He did not work his slaves on Sundays and Christmas.
In his draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson included a section criticizing King George III's role in promoting slavery in the colonies, but this was edited out because southern delegates refused to sign it. In 1784, Jefferson proposed the abolition of slavery in all western U.S. territories, limiting slave importation to 15 years. Congress failed to pass his proposal by one vote. In 1787, Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, which ended slavery in the Northwest Territory.
Jefferson freed his slave Robert Hemings in 1794 and he freed his cook slave James Hemings in 1796. In 1804, in a compromise on the slavery issue, Jefferson and Congress banned domestic slave trafficking for one year in the Louisiana Territory. In 1806 he officially called for anti-slavery legislation terminating the import or export of slaves and Congress passed this law in 1807. The law took effect in 1818. Upon his death in 1826, Jefferson freed five male slaves from the Hemings family in his will.
In his writing "Notes on the State of Virginia", Jefferson created controversy by calling slavery "a moral evil for which the nation would ultimately have to account to God." He supported colonization plans that would transport freed slaves to another country, such as Liberia or Sierra Leone.
During his presidency Jefferson was publicly silent on the issue of slavery and emancipation. Like Washington, he realized that the issue had the potential to divide the nation Jefferson wrote privately in a letter to William A. Burwell, written in 1805, "I have long since given up the expectation of any early provision for the extinguishment of slavery among us." That same year he wrote to George Logan, "I have most carefully avoided every public act or manifestation on that subject."
Jefferson has been accused of fathering children with Sally Hemings'. In 1802, James T. Callender, after being denied a position as postmaster, alleged Jefferson had taken Hemings as a concubine and fathered several children with her. In 1998, a panel of researchers conducted a Y-DNA study of living descendants of Jefferson's uncle, Field, and of a descendant of Hemings' son, Eston Hemings. The results showed a match with the male Jefferson line. In 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation assembled a team of historians whose report concluded that "the DNA study indicates a high probability that Thomas Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings". In July 2017 the Thomas Jefferson Foundation announced that archeological excavations at Monticello had revealed what they believe to have been Sally Hemings' quarters, adjacent to Jefferson's bedroom.
John Adams never bought a slave and refused to utilize slave labor. He wrote:
"I have, through my whole life, held the practice of slavery in such abhorrence, that I have never owned a negro or any other slave, though I have lived for many years in times, when the practice was not disgraceful, when the best men in my vicinity thought it not inconsistent with their character, and when it has cost me thousands of dollars for the labor and subsistence of free men, which I might have saved by the purchase of negroes at times when they were very cheap."
As President, Adams also recognized that it was impractical and potentially harmful to national unity to press the issue. The support of southern states was essential preserve independence. Slavery was abolished in Massachusetts about 1780, when it was forbidden by implication in the Declaration of Rights that John Adams wrote into the Massachusetts Constitution. Abigail Adams vocally opposed slavery, and their son John Quincy Adams became one of the most vocal abolitionists of his generation, although his most forceful advocacy came after his term as president was concluded.
Finally, although he was never President, John Jay was one of the Founding Fathers who took an early role in the fight to abolish slavery, even though he himself was a slaveholder, as were many wealthy New Yorkers in his day. In 1777, Jay drafted a state law to abolish slavery in New York. It failed to gain passage, and so did a second abolition law in 1785. Almost every member of the New York legislature had voted for some form of emancipation in 1785, but they disagreed on what rights to give the freed former slaves afterward.
Jay was the founder and president of the New York Manumission Society in 1785, which organized boycotts against newspapers and merchants involved in the slave trade, and provided legal counsel for free African Americans who were kidnapped as slaves. The Society helped enact the 1799 law for gradual emancipation of slaves in New York, which Jay signed into law as governor. The law was entitled "An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery". It provided that, from July 4 of that year, all children born to slave parents would be free and that slave exports would be prohibited.
In 1794, while negotiating the Jay Treaty with the British, Jay angered many Southern slave-owners when he dropped their demands for compensation for slaves who had been freed and transported by the British to other areas after the Revolution.