 Okay, everybody. Now I want you all to face the house. I've seen it before. So grab your photos. You are standing in front of the iconic Mount Vernon, the home to our first president. I think you could probably show a picture of this to someone in any country and they could recognize it as George Washington's home. But actually, there's another story to be told here. The very first mention of slavery in Virginia is a letter written by John Wolf to the Virginia company in London. This is in the early 1600s. Now I asked the student once, what does that tell us? And they said, George Washington didn't invent slavery. Well, it wasn't exactly what I was going for, but I thought fabulous answer. He didn't invent slavery. In fact, Washington becomes a slave owner at the age of 11. His father dies. And part of his inheritance are ten slaves. He owns them. Just like you own your pair of shoes. You can do with them what you want. You can sell them. Give them away, gamble them away or rent them. Now it's interesting because of course people say one of the big questions here is, was Washington a good slave owner? Washington is actually a pretty typical Chesapeake slave owner. I can tell you how he differed. Washington recognized marriages. Don't forget chattel property, like your shoes, don't have rights. And of course one of those rights are marriage. It's a right. Washington recognized families and marriages. And very early on Washington decided not to separate families and to honor those marriages. That is a significant way in which he differed from other Chesapeake slave owners. Now we're going to head over and we're going to talk about daily lives of slaves here at Mount Vernon.