H.W. Brands

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313 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 12 May

H.W. Brands’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci · NYT Bestselling Historian: Why George Washington Was the Greatest Leader Who Ever Lived — H. W. Brands · 12 May 2026 podcast

slavery, and this freedom that they're fighting for.

I'll add something else here.

Before American independence, it was not within the legal or political capacity of Americans to end slavery because they lived under British law, and British law was made far away in London, and the British had no desire to emancipate the slaves in the Western Hemisphere.

But now that Americans could, and Americans did, start freeing their slaves state by state.

Pennsylvania went first in 1780 and the other northern states.

Washington hoped that Virginia would come to that.

It was a bigger deal for Virginia.

There were a lot more slaves and slaves are more central to the economy.

But Washington was trying to figure out how he could get out from under the slave system.

He couldn't do it as long as he was president, because for the reasons that I said, if he

If he came out against slavery, then he would lose all of his credibility among the very important slaveholders in Virginia and the other southern states.

But after he retired, in fact, even while he was president, thinking about retiring, he was trying to figure out how he could eliminate slavery as a part of the way he operated his system.

Now, with Washington, there's an important complication.

This comes out

in his will because he decides that he's going to free his slaves upon his demise.

Except that his wife Martha was really the owner of most of the slaves at Mount Vernon, except even technically she wasn't the owner.

She was the trustee of the slaves for the children of her first husband.

And so if Washington had wanted to free most of the slaves in Mount Vernon, he didn't legally have the power to do it.

Neither did Martha because of the will of her first husband.

So he did what he could.

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