Just a bit of insight into some of their views:
George Washington: “there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it.”
—Letter to Morris, April 12, 1786, in George Washington, A Collection, ed. W.B. Allen (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1989), 319.
John Adams: “Every measure of prudence, therefore, ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States…. I have, through my whole life, held the practice of slavery in …abhorrence.”
—Letter to Evans, June 8, 1819, in Selected Writings of John and John Quincy Adams ed. Adrienne Koch et al. (New York: Knopf, 1946), 209-10.
Benjamin Franklin: “Slavery is …an atrocious debasement of human nature.”
—”An Address to the Public from the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery” (1789), Benjamin Franklin, Writings ed. J.A. Leo Lemay (New York: Library of America, 1987), 1154.
Alexander Hamilton: “The laws of certain states …give an ownership in the service of negroes as personal property…. But being men, by the laws of God and nature, they were capable of acquiring liberty—and when the captor in war …thought fit to give them liberty, the gift was not only valid, but irrevocable.”
—Philo Camillus no. 2 (1795), in Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold C. Syrett (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961-), 19:101-2.
James Madison: “We have seen the mere distinction of colour made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.”
—Speech at Constitutional Convention, June 6, 1787, in Max Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937), 1:135.
Yes as I said Morally Conflicted at best.
Geo. Washington Owned slaves till the day he died.
Adams was against it from the start, but did vote against a law in Ma. to end it thinking the time not right and the issue too decisive but only 3 years later wrote in the Ma. Declaration of Rights.
Franklin much like Washington owned slaves but LATE (1770)in life freed his slaves but was still on both sides of the fence in 1789
Hamilton as often the case is the hardest for or against anything, no fence sitter he. His opposition was both moral and practical and there is no firm evidence that he ever owned a slave but that he MAY have aided others at times to keep or buy them leaves a grayness to his position
Madison while supporting freeing slaves (and sending them back to Africa) did not end his use of the practice during his lifetime.