I do not gather that he ever regarded the black man as being essentially made of the same clay as the white man, the chief difference being the color of their skin.

To Washington, the Slave System seemed bad, not so much because it represented a debased moral standard, but because it was economically and socially inadequate.

His true character appears in his making the best of a system which he recognized as most faulty.

Under his management, in a few years, his estate at Mount Vernon became the model of that kind of plantation in the South.
Whoever desires to understand Washington's life as a planter should read his diaries with their brief, and one might almost say brusque, entries from day to day.[1] Washington's care involved not only bringing the Mount Vernon estate to the highest point of prosperity by improving the productiveness of its various sections, but also by buying and annexing new pieces of land.

To such a planter as he was, the ideal was to raise enough food to supply all the persons who lived or worked on the place, and this he succeeded in doing.