It's worth reading Ramin Ganeshram's and Andrea Davis Pinkney's posts.
The problem, I believe, is that this is a children's book that presents the true complexity of a historical situation to parents that have no basis in that complexity nor the preparedness to explain it adequately to their children. Slavery = bad is about the nuance you usually get from children's books (if you're lucky - lookin' at you, Berenstein Bears) and if there's complexity, that complexity pretty much has to be the payload of the story... not the background against which the story is set. It's a shame, but an unsurprising one.
Yes, it is probably best saved for young adult. I knew nothing about Hercules myself, which is a shame. From Wikipedia: When the national capital moved to Philadelphia in 1790, there was a question about whether the state law would apply to federal officials. Washington argued (privately) that he was a citizen of Virginia, that his presence in Pennsylvania was solely a consequence of Philadelphia's being the temporary national capital, and that the state law should not apply to him. Rather than challenging the state law in court, Washington took the advice of his attorney general, Edmund Randolph, and systematically rotated the President's House slaves in and out of the state to prevent their establishing a six-month continuous residency.[9] This rotation was itself a violation of Pennsylvania law, but no one challenged the President's actions.[10] The U.S. Supreme Court later found Pennsylvania's 1788 amendment to the Gradual Abolition Act to be unconstitutional in Prigg v. Pennsylvania. It might be a bit difficult to get my 3yo daughter to follow slave rotation. I wonder if A Birthday Cake for George Washington contained this episode: ... The general's cook ran away, being now in Philadelphia, and left a little daughter of six at Mount Vernon. Beaudoin ventured that the little girl must be deeply upset that she would never see her father again; she answered, "Oh! Sir, I am very glad, because he is free now." There seems an opportunity for a very good young adult book there.Pennsylvania passed a gradual abolition law in 1780 which prohibited non-residents from holding slaves in the state longer than six months. If held beyond that period, the state's Gradual Abolition Act[7] gave slaves the legal power to free themselves.[8] Members of Congress were specifically exempted from the act. Officers of the executive and judicial branches of the federal government were not mentioned since those branches didn't exist until the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1788.
In November 2009, Mary V. Thompson, research specialist at Mount Vernon, discovered that Hercules's escape to freedom was from Mount Vernon, and that it occurred on February 22, 1797 – Washington's 65th birthday.
Louis-Philippe, the future king of France, visited Mount Vernon in the spring of 1797. According to his April 5 diary entry: