Washington was a farmer, yet he never in his life beheld a tomato, nor a cauliflower, nor an eggplant, nor a horserake, nor a drill, nor a reaper and binder, nor a threshing machine, nor a barbed wire fence. [Illustration: Kitchen in Washington's headquarters in Morristown, N.J.[1]] [Footnote 1: This shows a fine specimen of the old-fashioned fireplace. Notice the andirons, the bellows, the lamp, the spinning wheel, the old Dutch clock, and the kettles hanging on the crane over the logs.] [Illustration: A plow used in 1776] His land was plowed with a wooden plow partly shod with iron. His seed was sown by hand; his hay was cut with scythes; his grain was reaped with sickles, and threshed on the barn floor with flails in the hands of his slaves. %195. Negro Slavery.%--No living person under thirty years of age has ever seen a negro slave in our country. When Washington was President there were 700,000 slaves. When the Revolution opened, slavery was permitted by law in every colony. But the feeling against it in the North had always been strong, and when the war ended, the people began the work of abolition. In Massachusetts and New Hampshire the constitutions of the states declared that "all men are born free and equal," and that "all men are born equally free," and this was understood to abolish slavery. In Pennsylvania, slavery was abolished in 1780. In Rhode Island and Connecticut gradual abolition laws were passed which provided that all children born of slave parents after a certain day should be free at a certain age, and that their children should never be slaves. The Ordinance of 1787 had prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory. But in 1790 New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and all the states south of these were slave states. (See map on the next page.) Though slaves were men and women and children, they had no civil rights whatever. They could be bought and sold, leased, seized for a debt, bequeathed by will, given away. If they made anything, or found anything, or earned anything, it belonged not to them, but to their owners. They were property just as oxen or horses were in the North. It was unlawful to teach them to read or write. They were not allowed to give evidence against a white man, nor to travel in bands of more than seven unless a white man was with them, nor to quit the plantation without leave. If a planter provided coarse food, coarse clothes, and a rude shelter for his slaves, if he did not work them more than fifteen hours out of twenty-four in summer, nor more than fourteen in winter, and if he gave them every Sunday to themselves, he did quite as much for their comfort as the law required he should. [Illustration: MAP SHOWING THE AREA OF %SLAVE AND FREE SOIL IN 1790%]