Slavery was not the most important issue for which George Washington is remembered; nor were his views on the institution as revealing as those of some of his fellow Founding Fathers. But Washington was a slaveowner for all of his adult life and he lived in Virginia, which was dominated by tobacco plantations based on slave labour. Slavery was central to the socio-economic life of the Old Dominion: after 1750 40 per cent of the North American slave population lived there and the first United States census of 1790 showed 300,000 slaves in Virginia. The tobacco they produced was the most valuable staple crop grown in North America. At his home Mount Vernon, situated on the upper Potomac river overlooking the Maryland shore, Washington created an estate, based on the latest agricultural practice, that was also a set of plantation farms centred around the work of enslaved Africans. Slavery, then, was clearly a persistent part of Washington's life and career. Because of this and his pre-eminent position in American public life, Washington's use of slave labour and his views on an important paradox of American history in the revolutionary era – the coexistence of slavery and liberty – deserve close attention. One man's dilemma in dealing with the morality of his own slaveholding was mirrored in the broader context of what the United States could or would do about the problem of slavery.