henry winchick, whose exhaustive research provides the most comprehensive account of washington and slavery believes that his subjects' racial attitudes began to change after he saw slave families broken up on a williamsburg auction block. in an unintentionally revealing letter to brian fairfax in england, washington protested british taxes, adding that a failure to resist such oppression would brand he and his fellow colonists as, quote, as tame and abject slaves as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway. better than most, washington understood the devil's bargain on which virginia's economy rested. martha custis's first husband, daniel, had a mulatto brother, the product of his own father's liaison with a slave woman. their child, jack, died when he was but 12 years old. martha washington herself had a slave half sister, ann dandridge, sired by her father and an unknown woman of mixed blood. ann lived at mt. vernon with the washingtons. only after their passing did she receive her freedom. as a member of the colony's house of burgesses, the future president couldn't fail to note