Untold History: More Than A Quarter of U.S. Presidents Were Involved in slavery
= new reply since forum marked as read
typical american hypocrites. 
all thanks continue to go to attorney and activist Michael Coard for keeping at it to get the commemorative monument erected and maintained by the National Park Service (despite the-then Shrub appointee Regional Director's attempts to block it).
Prior to this effort, while excavating to complete the renovation of the Independence Mall area, the foundation of Washington's mansion was uncovered along with the underground passageways used by his slaves to service he, his family, and his guests without need to traverse the house. The excavation itself unexpectedly became a massive massive tourist draw as the archeologists worked on the site, so much so that the NPS built a temporary platform (directly in front of where the current memorial is) for tourists to look down over the progress.
Representations of the original -
(more on this house - http://www.ushistory.org/presidentshouse/plans/pmhb/ph1.htm)
Alot of plans were debated including laying plexiglass over the dig site but ultimately, a decision was made to cover it over to protect it as the weather here can get quite dicey.
Kudos to those activists here and nationally who helped to make it happen. There were (and still are) hiccups that happened along the way but we lurched a step forward with this acknowledgment of the ultimate of hypocrisy at the highest levels. Such hypocrisy of men who were so desperate to hold onto their property, that they found loopholes to skirt any effort to liberate their chattel as plans for the new nation's capitol in D.C. were being established as noted in the below -
Congress under the Articles of Confederation was meeting in Philadelphia in 1780 when Pennsylvania's Gradual Abolition Law went into effect. The federal government then had only one branch — the legislative — and members of Congress and their personal slaves were specifically exempted from the state law. Ten years later when the national capital returned to Philadelphia after seven years elsewhere, the federal government under the Constitution had three branches. In February 1791, a bill was introduced in the Pennsylvania Assembly exempting all officers of the federal government from the Gradual Abolition Law. This would have provided relief to the President, the members of his Cabinet, the Vice President (although John Adams never owned a slave), and the justices of the Supreme Court — albeit not to their enslaved Africans — but the bill was suppressed after vigorous opposition from the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.38 This attempt by the Assembly to expand the exemption to the slaveholding officers of the executive and judicial branches may have been related to a larger effort to persuade Congress to abandon the planned move to the District of Columbia — scheduled for December 1, 1800 — and name Philadelphia the permanent capital of the United States.39
Following the bill's defeat, Washington conferred with his attorney general, fellow Virginian (and slaveholder) Edmund Randolph.40 Rather than risk losing the enslaved Africans the President had brought to Philadelphia in a legal challenge, Randolph advised him to rotate them out of the state. Washington saw himself as having good reason to skirt the Pennsylvania law: six of the initial eight enslaved Africans in the presidential household were dowers, owned by the Custis estate. Were they to obtain their freedom through his negligence — i.e., allowing them to remain in Pennsylvania beyond the six- month deadline — he might be required to reimburse the estate for their value:
As all except Hercules and Paris are dower negroes, it behoves me to prevent the emancipation of them, otherwise I shall not only loose the use of them, but may have them to pay for.41
In addition, as administrator of the Custis estate, he had a fiduciary duty to protect its financial interests. To prevent the enslaved Africans who worked in the President's House from obtaining their freedom under the Pennsylvania law, Washington rotated them out of state until the end of his presidency.
More: http://www.ushistory.org/presidentshouse/plans/pmhb2/index.htm
