In Defense of President George Washington

Celebrate a great American on this Fourth of July

American Independence

IN DEFENSE OF PRESIDENT GEORGE WASHINGTON

Celebrate a great American on this Fourth of July

W. F. Twyman, Jr. 

This week should be one of national celebration in remembrance of national unity and sense of purpose. And yet there is an unhealthy urge these days to see our Founding Fathers only as slave owners. Yes, George Washington was a slave owner as were many of his contemporaries. The majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were slave owners. In Washington’s day and place, slave owning was legal and accepted. Only limited thinking prevents some from seeing the giant of a man that was Washington. But for Washington, there would be no United States of America. There’s a reason why Washington’s face graces our dollar bill, his monument stands in our National Mall, his portrait hangs in our White House, and his bust is carved into Mount Rushmore. He has given his name not only to our nation’s capital city but also to one of our states. Indeed, Washington is the only state named after a president. George Washington made America happen. 

The White House portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart

What the myopic do not see are the many ways in which Washington was ahead of his time and place on the question of race. And by his time, I mean the late 1700s, not the 2020s. And by his place, I mean Tidewater, Virginia, not Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

Monsters abounded during slavery. A thousand eyewitness accounts of slavery can be found in American Slavery As It Is by Theodore Weld. Be forewarned that the accounts were recorded in 1839 and spare no brutality or atrocity. Granted that slavery is in and of itself an unmitigated evil, Washington was not one of these monsters. He refused to sell slaves without their consent if a sale would break up families. He oftentimes took personal charge if disease broke out in the slave quarters. Washington himself tended to sick slaves and inoculated slaves against smallpox. Tending to ailing slaves was a priority. Although slave marriages were not sanctioned and had no standing under Virginia state law, Washington treated them as binding and sacrosanct. In his 2010 biography, Washington: A Life, Ron Chernow writes, “One startled visitor [to Mt. Vernon] expressed amazement that [George Washington] ‘often works with his men himself, strips off his coat and labors like a common man.’”

Where are the images in the Washington Post or the New York Times of our first United States president laboring side by side with black men and women in the fields? 

The most celebrated black person in colonial America, Phillis Wheatley, presented Washington with poetry. Wheatley’s book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, which appeared in 1773, was the first publication in North America by a person of African descent. Born in West Africa, Wheatley was a slave in the Wheatley family. Her last name reflects that of her owners and her first name is that of the ship that brought her to North America. Members of the Wheatley family taught Phillis to read and write and encouraged her obvious talent in poetry. In October 1775, the African-born slave and poet sent Washington her lyrical tribute, which concluded:

A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine, With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! be thine.

Moved by Wheatley’s poetic exhortation, Washington corresponded with Wheatley, thanked Wheatley for her sentiment, and invited Wheatley to his Cambridge headquarters for a reception. Wheatley accepted and the two met at Washington’s headquarters in March 1776. This level of social equality was unusual for the time, let alone for a southern slave owner. 

Even if one dismisses a reception with the leading black figure of Washington’s time as a social nicety and nothing more, it is far more difficult to discount Washington’s actions on the battlefield. Washington commanded a racially integrated Continental army. No racially integrated United States military unit would be fielded again until the Korean War (1950-53), and Washington’s was the most integrated American fighting force before American troops entered the Vietnam War in 1965. He witnessed the bravery of black soldiers in battle. His closest personal aide during the Revolutionary War was a biracial slave named Billy Lee, who accompanied Washington into conflicts and earned a place alongside the general in multiple portraits. About five thousand blacks fought in the Continental Army under Washington’s direction. There is no question that Washington initially opposed recruitment of black soldiers, but he grew in his acceptance and wisdom. When victory was eventually won, Washington had gained several years of appreciation for black gallantry on the battlefield. Among the heroes of Alexander Hamilton’s victory charge at Yorktown was the largely black First Rhode Island Regiment. “The bravery exhibited by the attacking troops was emulous and praiseworthy,” Washington recorded in his journal in 1781. “Few cases have exhibited stronger proofs of Intripidity coolness and firmness than were shown upon this occasion.” 

Among the courageous soldiers who served under Washington’s command were Salem Poor, Peter Salem, and Lemuel Haynes. 

Washington’s singular accomplishment on race was stipulating in his will that the slaves legally within his control should be emancipated upon the death of his wife, Martha. As it happened, Martha died on May 22, 1802, about two and a half years after George, who died on December 14, 1799. While Washington’s provision for eventual emancipation at some unforeseeable future date can not possibly live up to our modern uncompromising preference for instant and unequivocal abolition, Washington nonetheless accomplished something more significant than any of his battlefield victories as general or legislative acts as president. He did what no other founding father dared to do, although almost all proclaimed a theoretical revulsion at slavery. Washington freed his slaves over 60 years before our country freed slaves!

Reverend Richard Allen

It is for this reason that the free black community revered Washington upon his passing. Reverend Richard Allen (1760-1831), founder and bishop of Philadelphia’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, echoed these feelings for the ages in his eulogy: 

Our father and friend is taken from us…

[…]

If he who broke the yoke of British burdens “from the neck of the people” of this land, and was hailed his country’s deliverer, by what name shall we call him who secretly and almost unknown emancipated his “bondwoman and bondmen” – become to them a father, and gave them an inheritance!

Deeds like these are not common…

[…]

The name of Washington will live when the sculptured marble and statue of bronze shall be crumbled into dust – for it is the decree of the eternal God that “the righteous shall be had in everlasting remembrance, but the memorial of the wicked shall rot.”

I grew up in the Ebenezer African Methodist Episcopal Church, so these words from Bishop Allen resonate with me deeply. 

Unfortunately, there are some who cannot see beyond the slaveholding that was a universal and unremarkable feature of every society of Washington’s time. In 2017, Pastor James Dukes urged the Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, to remove President George Washington’s name from a park. Pastor Dukes reasoned that a bronze statue of George Washington might be appropriate elsewhere, but not in black neighborhoods. In a letter to Emanuel that he also posted on Facebook, Dukes wrote:

In an African-American community, it is a slap in the face and it’s a disgrace for them to honor someone who was a slaveowner.

I am feeling ambivalent that I would have to walk my child, attend a parade or enjoy a game of softball game in a park that commemorates the memory of a slave owner.

With all due respect to Pastor Dukes, why would you feel compelled to view the greatest political leader in world history only as a slave owner? It mystifies me. Slave owning should be number 10 or 20 on the list of things Dukes should see in Washington. Why not see a young man who was shot four times in the wilderness and did not die? Why not see an ambitious Virginian of steel resolution who led a rag tag army of ill-clothed blacks and whites to victory? Why not see a leader whose force of character united the Constitutional Convention when our young country spiraled on the edge of disintegration? Why not see a man with the depth of judgment to serve as our first President with no precedent to guide him? 

I am weary of endless tribalism among some in the black community. Young children are led to resent and hate our country when, instead, they should give thanks that they are Americans! There is no future in the sort of blindness to greatness exhibited by Dukes. Even if I made the good minister aware that President Washington freed his slaves, that he did so over 60 years before our country freed all slaves, and that none other than Rev. Richard Allen praised Washington as a friend, I fear Dukes’s vision is permanently impaired. And that is a pity. The black community needs more men and women of vision, not narrow minds and limited thoughts. 

This Fourth of July, let us celebrate America and Washington, and look to the coming of a better time.

---

Winkfield Twyman, a former law professor, was born in Richmond, Virginia. He came of age in the New South in the 1970s. A graduate of the University of Virginia and Harvard Law School, Twyman is the author of the newly acclaimed book, Letters in Black and White: A New Correspondence on Race in America (co-author Jennifer Richmond). His essay in the Pennsylvania Lawyer Magazine inspired the posthumous admission, in 2010, of the first black lawyer in New York state, George Boyer Vashon, to the Pennsylvania State Bar, which had denied him twice, in 1847 and in 1868.