The other day Vice President Mike Pence said, “And in this nation, especially on Juneteenth, we celebrate the fact that from the founding of this nation we’ve cherished the ideal that all, all of us are created equal, and endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights. And so all lives matter in a very real sense.”
We’ve all been taught this in American schools.
But nothing could be further from the truth.
I am supportive of the removal of Confederate monuments, and for some this means that I’m guilty of supporting erasing American history. On the contrary, I am absolutely, unequivocally supportive of teaching American history to everyone.
Not some of it, but all of it.
All of it.
The good, the bad, and the ugly.
We should be teaching all American children about the abhorrent things these men did and stood for during their lives. Maybe if we did, there wouldn’t be so much resistance to removing these tributes honoring them.
They never deserved it.
One such person I believe we should all know more about is George Washington, the first President of the United States.
The average slave owner in America owned 4 to 6 slaves.
George Washington and his wife Martha collectively owned over 300 enslaved Africans.
In fact, George Washington had been a slave owner since he inherited his first enslaved African when was just 11 years old.
Martha had a mind-blowing 1,000 enslaved Africans waiting on her hand and foot throughout the entirety of her life.
When George Washington was elected the first President of the United States he was running this newly formed government from places like New York City and Philadelphia, and he brought with him his personal entourage of enslaved Africans, but he soon realized that he had a problem.
Pennsylvania had passed a law in 1780 called the Gradual Abolition Act that said that if anyone came to Pennsylvania and lived for more than six months with one’s “enslaved people” those enslaved people could successfully petition for their freedom.
In other words, if you want to live here you’ve got to leave your slaves back home.
George Washington assumed, incorrectly, that being the first President of these United States he would naturally be exempt from this law.
That is until his attorney general Edmund Jennings Randolph came knocking on his door one evening to tell him that Randolph’s slaves were packing up and leaving him as they spoke.
George Washington immediately began traveling with his entourage of enslaved Africans from Pennsylvania to New Jersey or Virginia and then back to Pennsylvania for the sole purpose of ensuring that his slaves would never stay at any one place long enough to be able to petition Pennsylvania for their freedom.
George Washington grew tired of the frequent moves and on Washington’s insistence, Congress passed and Washington signed the Residence Act on July 16, 1790. The states of Maryland and Virginia each donated land to form a federal district which would become the nation’s capital.
They ended up naming it Washington, after him, of course.
And this land ended up becoming Washington D.C.
The reason Washington wanted this specific piece of land was because it would be close to Virginia, a state that not only recognized slavery but adamantly protected it. He wanted to be where he could live and work with his slaves and not have to worry about them being free of him.
While Washington did believe that the use of harsh violence could and would eventually backfire on slave masters, in 1793, one of his farm managers whipped one of his slaves named Charlotte, a seamstress, for being “impudent”. Washington felt that whipping this woman was a “very proper” response. Clearly what Washington considered “harsh” was relative to men who by today’s standards we would consider violent sociopaths because whipping someone for being “impudent” is not in any way a “very proper” response.
You may have been taught in school that George Washington had a mouth full of wooden teeth.
And you believed it because it was the 18th century and you weren’t sure if dentures were a thing back in those days.
Well they were “a thing” and no he did not have wooden teeth.
While it is true that he had dentures, they weren’t made of wood. What they didn’t teach you is that his dentures were made for him out of the healthy teeth of his slaves that he bragged about paying below market value for.
While some would say the fact that he paid a slave for their healthy teeth showed that Washington was a “fair man”, I would counter by asking if you consider that Washington thought it “very proper” to whip a seamstress for being “impudent”, what choice did his slaves really have when he offered to pay for their healthy teeth?
I’ll tell you the choice they had, either “accept below market value for the teeth I’m going to take from your mouth” or “take absolutely nothing for the teeth that I’m going to take from your mouth”.
This is also completely consistent with White Supremacy, the belief that Whites have more right to Black bodies than Black people do. How can we teach our children that “from the founding of this nation we’ve cherished the ideal that all, all of us are created equal, and endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights” when Black people didn’t even have a right to their own teeth?
It has been documented that on numerous occasions enslaved Africans fled George and Martha Washington and Mount Vernon.
How do we know?
From the Want Ads they took out in the local papers to pay rewards for the returns of their runaway slaves, that’s how.
His own personal assistant Christopher Sheels tried to escape but unfortunately failed. The family cook Hercules decided to run away on George Washington’s birthday.
I’m sure that was just a coincidence.
And Martha Washington’s personal maid, Ona Judge, also successfully escaped.
Ona Judge ran after she learned that Martha was going to give her to Martha’s niece who was known for her irrational temper. Fearing for her health and safety she fled to New Hampshire where she met a man, fell in love, married, had children and converted to Christianity.
The Washingtons found her but wanted to avoid the public backlash of forcibly returning her into slavery and actually tried to persuade her to willingly return, which she of course refused. Eventually to escape the optics of dragging her back to Mount Vernon kicking and screaming they left her alone. But they NEVER, and this is important, they NEVER officially manumitted her. Meaning that although they never asked her to return again she lived out the remainder of her life a fugitive slave, subject to being captured and forcibly returned to slavery if anyone saw fit.
Here is another thing you were taught in school, that when George Washington died, he freed all of his slaves in his will as proof of his condemnation of the institution of slavery.
Has anything that I’ve written about George Washington up until this point sound like a man who condemned slavery? A man who had owned enslaved Africans since he was eleven years old? A man who deliberately moved his personal entourage of enslaved Africans from here to there for the express purpose of denying them residency in Pennsylvania long enough to be free? A man who placed the nation’s capital in a spot that would allow him to keep his slaves? A man who thought it very proper to whip an enslaved African for impudence? A man whose smile was full of slave teeth that he bragged about paying below market value for?
No it doesn’t.
While it is undeniable that he did manumit all of his slaves in his will, the reason he did was not because he finally understood what great evil slavery was as he stared into the abyss on his deathbed. He manumitted his slaves for the same reason the Washingtons didn’t snatch Ona Judge by the throat and drag her back to Mount Vernon. Washington was a politician, and like most politicians, he cared about his legacy.
Washington’s popularity during his lifetime is not debatable. The fact that he was a slave owner was by far his biggest criticism from his loudest critics. So knowing what we know about how he lived his life, it is more than likely that Washington emancipated his slaves upon his death to safeguard his legacy and silence his critics.
And for the most part, it worked.
To this day Americans don’t think of Washington as being nearly the hypocrite that they think of Thomas Jefferson, who actually penned the words in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Those were Jefferson’s words, not Washington’s.
The Thomas Jefferson who raped his enslaved Africans, fathered children by them, and then kept those children enslaved never freeing a single one, while he was alive, ever!!
George Washington not only freed his former valet, William Lee, (pictured above) but also provided him a $30 a year annual pension.
That would be $625.35 in today’s dollars according to officialdata.org’s inflation calculator.
Yeah, I looked it up.
That was that brother’s pension for waiting on this man his entire life and not being paid a red cent to do it?
$625.35 a year?
In case math isn’t your thing. That is $52.11 a month.
That is $13 a week.
That would be insulting if that was your pension after working 40 hours a week, 5 days a week for 30 years.
What about working 90 hours a week, 6 days a week for 60 years.
If he had been paid minimum wage of $9.45 an hour he would’ve grossed $850 a week, every single week.
Washington gave him a pension that was less than one weeks of work, had he made minimum wage, and he gave him that for an entire year.
White supremacy is so inherently insulting and disrespectful they can’t help but to be insulting and disrespectful even when they think they are doing something kind.
Yet freeing his slaves on his deathbed was widely publicized and celebrated after his death by both abolitionists and fugitive slaves alike. In fact, Richard Allen, the founder of the AME Church said of Washington that he “dared to do his duty, and wiped off the ONLY stain with which man could ever reproach him.”
How about this for a little-known fact that they never taught you in school.
Yes, George Washington freed his 123 slaves, but did you know that there was a condition? They were all to remain enslaved until or upon the death of Martha Washington.
As far as condemnations of slavery go, that is pretty weak.
Slavery is so bad, but not bad enough to manumit them until you literally can’t use them anymore.
Like they say, “You can’t take it with you.”
But this move to “save my legacy” quite literally put Martha Washington’s life in jeopardy.
She knew that THEY knew that the ONLY thing standing between them and their freedom was her beating heart.
Washington either didn’t think that one through, or maybe he did.
Martha Washington was described by people who knew her personally as being “self-centered,” “querulous,” “crude,” “coarse,” “hypocritical,” “slovenly,” “strangely indifferent,” “crusty” and a “complainer.”
So maybe Washington knew exactly what he was doing.
Not being able to eat or drink anything without wondering if an enslaved African had put something in it, creeped out by the way they would smile at her while she drank or ate her meals, in December of 1800, citing that she didn’t feel safe anymore, Martha Washington signed a deed of manumission for George Washington’s slaves, freeing them early on January 1, 1801.
One must wonder when Vice President Pence said “from the founding of this nation we’ve cherished the ideal that all, all of us are created equal, and endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights” when he said “us” was he including Black Americans?
It should be no surprise to anyone who knows American history that when Thomas Jefferson wrote those words, he wasn’t including us.
ALL Lives Matter, right Mr. Vice President?
And they still don’t.