I asked ChatGPT to tell me about the signers of the declaration of Independence and their owning slaves and this is what it told me:

Slavery and the Founders
of the American Republic
A Historical Narrative Report

Introduction
When the fifty-six delegates affixed their signatures to the Declaration of Independence in 1776, they proclaimed as self-evident the truth that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet a significant majority of those same men — historians generally count at least forty and often about forty-one of the fifty-six — either directly owned enslaved people, participated in the slave trade, or both. This report examines that profound contradiction: who among the signers enslaved others, for how long, and what the history tells us about the economic, social, and moral dimensions of the institution they left largely intact.
A necessary caution attends this inquiry: "owned slaves" is not always a clean yes-or-no category. Some men enslaved people directly and for life; some participated in the slave trade as merchants or investors; some freed enslaved people later; and for several, surviving records do not permit a precise accounting. The table and narrative that follow reflect the best available historical scholarship, with acknowledged uncertainty where it exists.
Part I: The Signers and Their Relationship to Slavery
The fifty-six signers came from thirteen colonies with widely varying relationships to slavery. The New England signers — men like John Adams, Samuel Adams, Elbridge Gerry, Samuel Huntington, Roger Sherman, and William Williams — generally did not hold enslaved people, reflecting both a different regional economy and, in some cases, active moral opposition to the institution. William Ellery of Rhode Island and Robert Treat Paine of Massachusetts also appear to have been non-slaveholders.
By contrast, the signers from Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Maryland, and North Carolina were overwhelmingly slaveholders, often on a large scale. Thomas Jefferson of Virginia enslaved people until his death in 1826 — fifty years after signing — and is estimated to have held more than six hundred over the course of his life. Carter Braxton, Richard Henry Lee, Francis Lightfoot Lee, Benjamin Harrison V, and Thomas Nelson Jr. of Virginia all continued as slaveholders until their deaths. Charles Carroll of Maryland lived until 1832, continuing to hold enslaved people for fifty-six years after signing — the longest span of any signer.
The middle colonies — Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware — present a more varied picture. Pennsylvania had a strong Quaker antislavery tradition, and several Pennsylvania signers including George Clymer and James Wilson are generally listed as non-slaveholders. But Robert Morris, one of the most important financiers of the Revolution, likely held enslaved people until his death in 1806. Benjamin Franklin had earlier owned enslaved people but became a leading abolitionist; by the time of signing in 1776, his personal participation in slavery had likely ended, though the precise timing is unclear. Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician and signer, held an enslaved man named William Grubber but freed him in 1794 — about eighteen years after signing.
Several signers died quickly and thus their post-signing slaveholding was brief: Button Gwinnett of Georgia died in a duel in 1777, John Morton of Pennsylvania died the same year, and Philip Livingston of New York died in 1778 — each only one or two years after signing. This brevity of time reflects mortality rather than any movement toward emancipation.
Among the clearest exceptions to the pattern of lifetime slaveholding are William Whipple of New Hampshire, Benjamin Rush of Pennsylvania, and George Wythe of Virginia. Whipple manumitted an enslaved man named Prince Whipple in 1784, about eight years after signing. Rush freed William Grubber in 1794. Wythe freed enslaved people after the Revolution, likely by the late 1780s or 1790s — though he did not free everyone in his household by all accounts. These men represent the minority of signers who moved toward emancipation during their lifetimes.
Part II: George Washington and the Paradox of the Founding Era
George Washington did not sign the Declaration of Independence — he was commanding the Continental Army in the field — but no account of the Founders and slavery can omit him. Washington is simultaneously one of the largest slaveholders of the founding era and, among that group, the one who moved most decisively toward emancipation.
Scale of Ownership
Washington inherited his first enslaved people as a young man and acquired more through inheritance, marriage, and purchase. By the time he became president, Mount Vernon held approximately 577 enslaved people in total. Of these, roughly 123 were owned outright by Washington, approximately 153 belonged to the Washington estate, and approximately 300 were "dower slaves" — legally belonging to the estate of Martha Washington's first husband, Daniel Parke Custis. Virginia law governed the dower slaves, and Washington could not legally free them himself. He relied on this enslaved workforce for farming, livestock operations, skilled trades, and domestic service.
Evolution of Washington's Views
As a young Virginia planter, Washington accepted slavery as the organizing reality of his social and economic world. He bought and sold enslaved people and pursued those who ran away. After the Revolution, however, his views appear to have changed substantially. Historians point to several factors: the ideals of liberty articulated during the Revolution; his experience of command alongside free Black soldiers; growing personal doubt about the morality of slavery; and emerging economic skepticism about its efficiency. By the 1780s and 1790s, Washington privately expressed discomfort with the institution. He generally avoided public advocacy for abolition, fearing that the controversy would fracture the fragile new republic.
Ona Judge and the Persistence of Control
The evolution in Washington's private views did not prevent him from exercising the legal powers of ownership. One of the most telling episodes involves Ona Judge, an enslaved woman who served in the presidential household in Philadelphia. In 1796 she escaped to New Hampshire. Washington pursued her recovery for years, invoking his legal authority and applying political pressure. She remained free for the rest of her life. Her story has become one of the most vivid illustrations of the gap between the founding generation's rhetoric of liberty and the lived experience of the enslaved.
The Will of 1799
The most significant act of Washington's life in relation to slavery came in his will, written shortly before his death in December 1799. He directed that all enslaved people he personally owned would be emancipated after Martha Washington's death. He provided for the support of elderly and infirm former slaves, directed that young people receive education or vocational training, and asked that families not be separated. Martha Washington chose to free his enslaved people earlier — on January 1, 1801.
The dower slaves — the largest group at Mount Vernon — could not be freed by Washington and remained enslaved under the Custis heirs. Historians note that Washington thus became the only major slaveholding Founding Father to arrange for the emancipation of all the enslaved people he legally could. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Patrick Henry, who all professed varying degrees of moral unease about slavery, made no such provisions. For this reason, Washington occupies a singular and complicated position in historical memory: a man who participated deeply in slavery for most of his life, yet ultimately moved farther toward rejection of it than almost any of his peers among the founding leadership.
Part III: Economics, Class, and Power — Why Slavery Persisted
To understand why so many of the men who declared that liberty was an unalienable right continued to hold human beings in bondage for the remainder of their lives, it is useful to consider the structural foundations of the institution. Slavery in the Atlantic world rested on several interlocking pillars: economic demand for labor, social class and status, the exercise of power, and ideological justification.
The Economic Foundation
The most fundamental explanation for slavery's persistence is economic. Throughout history, slavery has been a mechanism for extracting labor at minimal cost to the owner: agricultural labor, mining, construction, domestic service, and skilled trades were all supplied by enslaved people in various societies. From ancient Rome to the Caribbean sugar islands to the Virginia tobacco plantations, enslaved workers produced enormous wealth for those who controlled them. Enslaved people were treated not as workers but as capital assets — human property that could be bought, sold, inherited, mortgaged, and deployed to generate income. Many historians argue that the institution's profitability was the primary reason it endured as long as it did.
Class and Social Status
Beyond pure economics, slaveholding in colonial and early national America served as a marker of social class. In Virginia, large slaveholders like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were not simply wealthy men — they were members of a planter gentry that occupied the apex of a highly stratified society. The scale of one's enslaved workforce was a public declaration of one's station. Owning enslaved people defined who was important and who was not. Any serious disruption to slavery would thus have required the planter class to dismantle not only an economic system but the social order that gave them standing and authority.
Power and Control
Underlying both the economic and class dimensions is the most basic reality: slavery is a form of radical human domination. The slaveholder controls another person's labor, movement, family relationships, economic opportunities, and legal standing. Economic gain and social status are the rewards that flow from that power, but the power itself — the capacity to compel — is the foundation on which everything rests. Understood this way, the persistence of slavery among the founders reflects not only self-interest but the deeply human tendency of those who hold power to find reasons to retain it.
Racial Ideology as Justification
Historians are careful to note that slavery did not originate as a racial institution. In ancient Greece and Rome, the Ottoman Empire, parts of Africa, and much of Asia, people were enslaved because they were conquered, indebted, or vulnerable — not because of their ancestry. In the American colonies, however, race became progressively intertwined with slavery over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Colonial laws increasingly defined Africans and their descendants as permanently enslaveable, and slave status became heritable through the mother. Scholars generally argue that racial ideology developed partly to justify an already-profitable labor system — a moral and legal architecture constructed after the fact to rationalize what economic interest and power had already established.
Conclusion: A Founding Paradox
The history of the founders and slavery is a history of paradox rather than simple hypocrisy. Most of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence were embedded in an economic and social system built on enslaved labor. Most continued within that system for the rest of their lives. A handful — Whipple, Rush, Wythe, and in his own complicated way Franklin — moved toward emancipation during their lifetimes. George Washington, the most powerful non-signer of the era, ultimately made the most consequential individual gesture toward emancipation among the major slaveholding founders, freeing through his will those he legally could.
What the history ultimately reveals is that slavery in early America was not primarily a personal moral failure of individual men, though individual moral failures were real and consequential. It was a system — economic, social, legal, and ideological — so deeply embedded in the structure of colonial and early national life that even men who understood its contradiction with their own stated principles found themselves unable or unwilling to dismantle it. The Declaration they signed proclaimed liberty as the birthright of all persons. The institution most of them continued to participate in denied that birthright to hundreds of thousands of human beings. That gap between principle and practice remains one of the central facts of American founding history.
Note on Sources
This report is based on historical scholarship compiled through archival research and peer-reviewed historical analysis. Individual signer records are drawn from a range of sources including the National Park Service, the Papers of the Founders Online (National Archives), and published biographies. Where records are incomplete or contested, uncertainty is noted in the text. Dates of death and manumission are drawn from standard reference sources; "years after signing" calculations are approximate.