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Title: Washington Federalist [Newspaper] - 1802 George Washington's Slaves for Rent Author: ** Place: George Town [District of Columbia] Publisher: William A. Rind & Co. Date: December 15, 1802 Description: Washington Federalist newspaper, No. 406. Complete 4-page issue. 13x20½. On the front page, among several advertisements of “Negroes for Sale” is this notice: “FOR SALE, On the third day of January next…at Mr. Anderson’s Mill on Dogue run in the county of Fairfax, the residue of the personal estate of the late General George Washington, yet unsold, consisting of forty five mules, upwards of thirty oxen, and a variety of plantation utensils, wagons, carts, blacksmith’s tools, etc. Six months credit will be allowed, the purchasers giving bond with approved sureties. At the same time will be hired 40 or 50 Negroes held by the executors during the life of Mrs. French.” Before Washington’s death in 1799, his inventory of slaves at Mt. Vernon included 40 Negroes, aged from 12 to 60, plus 13 children, whom he had “rented” from his neighbor Mrs. Penelope Manley French, when he acquired her life rights to 550 acres of land she owned on the road to Alexandria. When Martha Washington died, eight months before this newspaper appeared, all the slaves Washington owned outright were freed, but Mrs. Manley’s slaves were apparently left in legal limbo and were therefore offered “for hire” by Washington’s executors at the same time they put his livestock and farm implements up for auction. The ad was published in the Georgetown newspaper of William Alexander Rind, a British royalist during the Revolution, which was then the leading anti-Jeffersonian Federalist journal in the nation’s capital. Lot Amendments Condition: Dampstain at top left corner, plus in a thin line down left edge of newsletter (fairly faint too); very good. Item number: 231401