en, Secretary of the
American Legation at Paris, and printed at Brooklyn, New York, in
1810.

[10] Gen. Washington, although a slaveholder, put on record throughout
his voluminous correspondence his detestation of the system of
slavery, as practiced at the South.

M. Brissot de Warville, in connection with Gen. Lafayette and other
French philanthropists, early in the year 1788, formed at Paris the
Philanthropic Society of the Friends of Negroes, to co-operate with
those in America and London, in procuring the abolition of the traffic
in, and the slavery of, the blacks. In furtherance of this object, M.
Brissot de Warville delivered an oration in Paris, February 17, 1788,
which was translated and printed by the Pennsylvania Abolition
Society, in Philadelphia, the next year. In May of the same year, he
arrived in the United States, and wrote the most impartial and
instructive book of travels in America (with the exception of M. de
Tocqueville's), that has ever been made by a foreigner, of which
several editions in English were printed in London. His principles
brought him into intimate relations with persons who held anti-slavery
sentiments, and his work gives a very interesting epitome of the
prevalence of those sentiments at that period.

He visited General Washington at Mount Vernon, and conversed with him
freely on the subject of slavery. He states that the General had three
hundred slaves distributed in log houses in different parts of his
plantation of ten thousand acres. "They were treated," he said, "with
the greatest humanity; well fed, well clothed, and kept to moderate
labor. They bless God without ceasing for having given them so good a
master. It is a task worthy of a soul so elevated, so pure and so
disinterested, to begin the revolution in Virginia to prepare the way
for the emancipation of the negroes. This great man declared to me
that he rejoiced at what was doing in other States on the subject [of
emancipation--alluding to the recent formation of several state
societies]; that he sincerely desired the extension of it in his own
State; but he did not dissemble that there were still many obstacles
to be overcome; that it was dangerous to strike too vigorously at a
prejudice which had begun to diminish; that time, patience, and
information would not fail to vanquish it. Almost all the Virginians,
he added, believe that the liberty of the blacks can not become
general. This is the reason why they do not