The United States celebrated President's day today, honoring the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The birthday of the nation's 16th president is actually February 12th. The birthday of the nation's first commander-in-chief is February 22nd. Celebrated as two of America's great presidents among the 43, besides being born on different days in different centuries, there is another major difference: Abe Lincoln is credited with freeing the slaves, George Washington was a slave master.
Washington was so dependent on his slaves that he bought more than a handful with him up from Virginia to the nation's first executive mansion in Philadelphia.
After a meeting of The Trotter Group, a collective of African American columnist from across the nation, in the City of Brotherly Love, I wrote a commentary about Washington's slave quarters for ebonyjet.com.
I think it's holiday appropriate.
The Washington Legacy
the president's house project unearths an ugly history
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
By Monroe Anderson
George Washington may not have told a lie, but he
sure lived one.
The Father of His Country, in accord with the Declaration of Independence that serves up the "all men are
created equal" little white line, was as two-faced as they come when it
came to slavery. Our nation's first president was a slave master. He owned 36
slaves when he married the widower Martha Custis, who had inherited nearly 100
slaves from the estate of Daniel Parke Custis. Washington couldn't run his
Mount Vernon estate -- nor the newly-minted union -- without the free black
labor. So when the general of the Revolutionary War became the first
commander-in-chief and moved into the nation's first "White House" in
Philadelphia he brought more than a handful of his negroes with him.
Washington's dependency on enslaved Africans is not
news. What is news, however, is that this been-told-but-seldom-discussed chunk
of American history will soon forever go public.
Within the next two to three weeks in the City of
Brotherly Love, an architectural rendering for the President's House
Project/Slavery Commemoration will be unveiled on Sixth and Market Streets, the
site where the old executive mansion stood until the 1830s and where the
new Liberty Bell Center stands today. It's where Washington and John Adams
lived when Philadelphia was the national Capitol from 1790–1800. It's
where President Washington kept nine enslaved blacks in close quarters -–
exactly five feet away from America's first executive mansion. When
construction is complete, the project will lay out in excruciating
detail the historical hypocrisy that is the undergirding of this nation.
"It changes the foundation of American history as
we know it," says activist attorney Michael Coard who spoke last
week before the Trotter Group, a collection of black columnists from across the
nation. Coard heads up the Avenging Activists coalition which bills itself
as "a broad-based coalition of historians, activists, attorneys, elected
officials, religious leaders, media personalities, and other taxpaying voters —
descendants of the victims of the greatest holocaust in the history of humankind."
The coalition formed five years ago and began protests when it was discovered
that the story of slavery in the executive mansion was being footnoted.
Thanks to the efforts of the Avenging coalition,
Independence National Park officials oversaw an archeological dig that
uncovered the buried slave quarters. So, when the President's House Project
becomes a reality, the old history books will have to be trashed. The new
textbooks will have to reveal what tourists from home and abroad will see as
they come to check out the new site of the old big busted bell.
"The slavery commemoration
component is our Statue of Liberty," Coard said. "It shows for
the first time in American history that black folk are responsible for the
greatness of America."
Our contribution to America's greatness is not a
pretty picture. As if a metaphor for this nation, the President's House was
built by slaves for slave masters. The mansion was built in 1767-68 by the
widow of the aptly named William Masters, the mayor of Philadelphia in the
1750s and a powerful merchant who was most likely the city's largest slave
owner. It was bought in1781 by Financier Robert Morris, who bankrolled General
Washington and much of the American Revolution.
Morris, a signatory
of both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, was also a
partner of Willing and Morris, an import-export business that imported kidnaped
Africans and other valuables. After restoring the Mansion to its former glory,
Morris made it available to Washington a year after his first inauguration.
Although Washington's Mount Vernon plantation had as many as 316 slaves, the
president had only nine at his Philadelphia executive mansion, which, according
to Temple University's Charles L. Blockson, curator emeritus of the
Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, was not the "president's
house" but the "prisoner's house." He had been attempting
to draw attention to Washington and his Philadelphia slaves long before it came
to the attention of the Avenging coalition.
Blockson, whose slave memorabilia collection includes
books bound with the skin from enslaved Africans, knows from his extensive
research that our first president was not necessarily a believer in benign
bondage. The Pennsylvania Gradual Abolition Act of 1780 required that any slave
in the state be set free after six months. Washington did an end run around the
legislation by rotating his slaves between Philly and Mt.
Vernon -- every six months.
But it may be that our first president's
bite was worse -- much worse -- than his bark. As it turns out, those
false teeth we've all read about weren't made of wood after all. Some scholars
now believe they were real teeth yanked from the mouths of Washington's slaves.
No lie.
Monroe Anderson is an award-winning
journalist who penned op-ed columns for both the Chicago Tribune and the
Chicago Sun-Times. He is a regular contributor to Ebonyjet.com.
Stumble It!
