A physician attended them at their master's expense when they were sick.

That he obliged them to do their specified work, that he punished them in case of dishonesty, just as he would have done to white workmen, were facts which he never would have thought a rational person would have regarded as heinous.
In his will he freed his slaves, not for the Abolitionist's reason, but because he regarded slavery as the most pernicious form of labor, debasing alike the slave and his master, uneconomic and most wasteful.
But in so general a matter as Washington's treatment of his slaves, we must be careful not to take a solitary case and argue from it as if it were habitual.

By common report his slaves were so well treated that they regretted it if there was talk of transferring them to other planters.

We have many instances cited which show his unusual kindness.

When he found, for instance, that a mulatto woman, who had lived many years with one of the negroes, had been transferred to another part of his domain and that the negro pined for her, he arranged to have her brought back so that they might pass their old age together.