George Washington was president from 1789 -1797. Washington was around slavery his entire life, he becomes an actual slave owner when his father dies at age 11. He continues to acquire slaves into his adulthood.
He was 22 when he took over Mount Vernon, at the height of it's production his Mount Vernon estate had over 300 slaves in both his house and fields. Washington expected his slaves to work six days a week from sun up to sun down.
Throughout his life, Washington did nothing to abolish the institution of slavery, but upon his death he made a final gesture - in his will he decrees , that all his slaves be freed and provided with education only after the death of his wife. However, Martha is now worried that the slaves has a vested interest in her death, so she frees them early. www.loc.gov
John Adams President from 1797 - 1801, never owned slaves. In 1820 John Adams were quoted as saying "I shudder when I think of the calamities which slavery is likely to produce in this country. You would think me mad if I were to describe my anticipations. If the gangrene is not stopped I can see nothing but insurrection of the blacks against the whites."
"Although I have never sought popularity by animated Speeches or inflammatory publications against Slavery of the Blacks, my opinion against it has always been known...and never in my life did I own a Slave. The Abolition of Slavery must be gradual and accomplished with much caution and Circumspection ." www.loc.gov
Another founding father who owned slaves, Thomas Jefferson. Both Washington and Jefferson thought slavery was bad, but they both used slaves to make money for their plantations. Thomas Jefferson inherited many slaves. His wife brought a dowry of more than 100 slaves, and he purchased many more throughout his life. At some points he was one of the largest slaveowners in Virginia. www.loc.gov
James Madison was the fourth president of the United States (1809 –1817). Madison was part of the coterie of nationalists who wrote the Federal Constitution in 1787, ushering in the new federal government in 1789. Madison drafted the Bill of Rights and shepherded them through Congress. After serving as Thomas Jefferson’s secretary of state, he was elected president in 1808.
An incident that illuminates James Madison's ambivalence toward the issue of slavery is the story of Billey, a body servant who accompanied him to Philadelphia during the Contintental Congress. Madison wrote to his father at Montpelier:
"On a view of all circumstances I have judged it most prudent not to force Billey back to Va. even if it could be done; and have accordingly taken measures for his final separationfrom me. I am persuaded his mind is too thoroughly tainted to be a fit companion for fellow slave in Virga. The laws here do not admit of his being sold for more than 7 years. I do not expect to get near the worth of him; but cannot think of punishing him by transportation merely for coveting that liberty for which we have paid the price of so much blood, and have proclaimed so often to be the right, and worthy pursuit, of every human being."— James Madison, Jr., to James Madison, Sr., 8 September 1783. www.loc.gov
Madison solution was to sell Billey to a Quaker, knowing that, by Pennsylvania law, Billey could only remain a slave for only seven years and then freed. Billey was indeed freed, adopted the last name Gardner, and in his occupation as a merchant's agent, was lost at sea a few years later.
In his personal life, however, Madison continued to own many slaves. He does remind his overseers to treat the slaves with "humanity," but not so much as to make them forget their proper place as slaves. Furthermore, he does request in his will that his slaves not be sold without their consent, contingent upon their good behavior. However, this stipulation later falls second to Dolley's financial needs.
In his retirement years as a member and eventually the president of the American Colonization Society, Madison advocated the manumission of slaves, but not so that they could join American society as free citizens. Rather, he preferred that they be freed and relocated away from white society, either in the American west or in Africa.
He makes it clear that while he does not endorse slavery in principle or as the base of a system of production, he did not believe blacks could live in harmony with whites, unlike some of his close abolitionist peers and colleagues.
In 1819 Madison says, "A general emancipation of slaves ought to be;
1. gradual.
2. equitable & satisfactory to the individuals immediately concerned.
3. consistent with the existing & durable prejudices of the nation... To be consistent with existing and probably unalterable prejudices in the U.S. freed blacks ought to be permanently removed beyond the region occupied by or alloted to a White population." (Madison. Writings. p729)
James Monroe grew up on his family's 500- acre tobacco plantation . When his father died he inherited the land and a slave named Ralph. When he owned the farm Highland he owned 30 to 40 slaves.
While he never acknowledge equal rights for the slave population, Monroe sought a gradual end to slavery and advocated re-settlening freed slaves in the Caribbean or Africa. Monroe was also humane in the treatment of his own slaves.
In one of his later writing he said "we perceived an existing evil which commenced under our Colonial System , with which we are not properly chargeable, or if at all not in the present degree, and we acknowledge the extreme and difficulty of remedying it"
Torn between his belief in the evil of slavery and his fear that immediate abolition would result in a mob violence and race wars, Monroe came to believe that colonization was an effective means of reducing, and ultimately eliminating, slavey in the United States. I 1817 the American Colonization Society was formed to seek the end of slavery through repatriation of freed slaves. The Society established Liberia on the Africa's west coast in 1822 as a place where African captured on foreign slave ships and freed slaves from the United States could be resettled. www.loc.gov