Cancel Culture Goes to Washington George Washington University must change its name, says an article in, yes, the Washington Post. By Allen C. Guelzo
George Washington is a problem for George Washington University, according to the Washington Post. For years, the university in the nation’s capital has struggled with the shadow cast by President Washington’s ownership of slaves. In 2020 university officials began investigating the school’s sports teams’ name, the Colonials, because of the “ways colonists ravaged communities of color.” Last month “Colonials” disappeared. This spring, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Caleb Francois, a senior at the school, insisting that the university deal with “systemic racism, institutional inequality and white supremacy” by dropping the Washington name completely and renaming the university for Frederick Douglass.
George Washington certainly did own slaves. In addition to the 10 he inherited from his father, he accumulated another 65 through outright purchase over the years. When he married Martha Dandridge Custis in 1759, she brought another 84 slaves to the household at Mount Vernon. By 1786 the slaves numbered 216. In 1799, the last year of his life, Washington owned 317 men, women and children. Even in the years Washington served as the first president, he kept at least eight slaves in his home in the first capitals, New York and Philadelphia.
Nor was Washington necessarily an easy master. He punished four slaves for their “pranks” by selling them to the hell-on-water of the West Indies, and he approved the whipping by his overseers of the “very impudent.” When Ona Judge, one of the dower slaves Martha Washington brought with her to Philadelphia, bolted for freedom, Washington tried (in vain) to re-capture her. As a cure for his endless dental problems, he yielded to the persuasions of a French dentist in 1784 and paid his slaves for nine teeth to be extracted from their mouths and implanted in his.
Yet Washington’s time was also the Age of Enlightenment, when the classical hierarchies of the physical and political worlds were overthrown, to be replaced by the natural laws of gravity and the natural rights of “Nature and Nature’s God,” as the Declaration of Independence put it. Labor ceased to be a badge of subservience, and commerce became admirable. As commerce and labor gave people a greater sense of control over their lives for the first time in human history, slavery came to be seen as repugnant and immoral.
Washington was an emblem of this transition. The Continental Army, over which he assumed control in 1775, barred the enlistment of “any stroller, negro, or vagabond.” But by the end of the Revolution, there were as many as 5,000 black soldiers under his command. Ten percent of the troops who shivered through the Valley Forge winter with him were black. By the 1780s he began to speak of desiring the adoption of “some plan . . . for the abolition of slavery,” and he described slavery as his “unavoidable subject of regret.” In his will, Washington did what no other Founder did, emancipating all the slaves he owned in his own name and provided for the education of their children. He “religiously” forbade the surreptitious sale “of any Slave I may die possessed of, under any pretence whatsoever.”
So, yes, George Washington owned slaves, and his turn against slavery happened slowly. But this isn’t the only matter to enter into the historical calculus of blame or fame. Washington was fumbling toward the elimination of slavery in an America that was only just emerging from centuries of deeming slavery normal. He was also the indispensable man of a rebellion that began the movement toward ending slavery. Once that government was established, he frankly told Edmund Randolph that if the slaveholding states of the South persisted in wrecking the new republic, “he had made up his mind to remove and be of the Northern” states. Frederick Douglass, in his most famous speech, praised Washington as the man who “could not die till he had broken the chains of his slaves.”
Let his onetime opponent, King George III, have the last word. In 1797, the expatriate painter Benjamin West dined with Rufus King, the American diplomatic envoy to Great Britain. West astounded King with a comment George III made when he learned that Washington had voluntarily surrendered his commission as general-in-chief of the Continental Army at the close of the Revolution, a voluntary submission of military power to civilian rule. “That act,” said the king, placed Washington “in a light the most distinguished of any man living, and that he thought him the greatest character of the age.”
If only on that point, George III got Washington right. And so, I suspect, did the ones who named George Washington University.
Mr. Guelzo is director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in Princeton University’s James Madison Program.
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