Dear Henry and colleagues:

Thanks, Henry, for your kind words and thoughtful posts on this and
other topics.

Your interpretation of GW's will as decisive evidence of his lack of
racism is truly thought-provoking.  I am going to have to keep thinking
about it, but I should say that I can't yet find the will quite as
persuasive as you do on that score, though you could well be right.
Racism is of course a very broad and elastic (and all too resilient)
phenomenon, but it seems to me that the provisions GW outlined, though
a frontal personal blow against slavery, are nevertheless consistent
with the sort of inchoate assumptions about white superiority/black
inferiority that nearly all white Virginians held.

I say this because on the evidence of antislavery (but still racist)
Northern attitudes in the run-up to the Civil War, and on the evidence
of the Southern experience between Emancipation and recent memory, and
on the evidence of other societies historically and currently, belief
in another group's inherent inferiority is no barrier to a willingness
or even a desire to permit their inclusion in society, provided that
society is hierarchically structured.

Let's recall, after all, the point Gordon Wood makes so strikingly in
The Radicalism of the American Revolution (if memory serves): that
American society before the Revolution, like nearly all societies
everywhere, was structured as a hierarchy of unequals.  (And as Sean
Wilentz argues in his massive and impressive new tome The Rise of
American Democracy, it was by no means a "given" that a structure of
political inequality even among white men would not be inherent after
the Revolution, either.)  Such inequality, though based on race in
regards to only one group, was nevertheless regarded as entirely
natural, consistent with the Divinely ordained and assigned capacities
of society's different strata (including, of course, outstandingly, the
"natural" hierarchy of sex).

In other words, GW, like most humans, lived in a society whose members
were considered in some real sense to be naturally unequal.  The fact
that the major inequality in his society was based on race was
initially a merely particularly pernicious and significant variation on
a pervasive human theme--and it only became in any sense truly
anomalous in the wake of the ascendance of the universal-natural-rights
ideology which his own Revolution chose to claim as its deepest
justification.

Accordingly, to want to see a group of people well treated, educated to
their capacity, and taking a productive place in society--as his will
makes clear he did for his slaves--was not in GW's time and has not
been since any barrier to simultaneously seeing them as in some sense
"naturally"--and, in fact, quite properly, in the scheme of a world
designed by a hierarchy-loving God--inferior in identity and capacity
to another group of people; that is how most societies have been
ordered, and we only see first the hideous injustice of such an
ordering in GW's world because it was based on the annealment of
inferiority to race and slavery, because it was inconsistent with the
principles of the political upheaval that make his life worth
remembering, and because the the course of history including that
upheaval both made the major inequality in his society increasingly
anomalous and made it antithetical to our own society's best beliefs
and hopes.

But to read our beliefs--that the only morally ordered and well
functioning society is one of acknowledged natural equals--back into
even the most "progressive" views in GW's time, and even into GW's
genuinely admirable will, would be, I believe, an unwarranted exercise
in anachronism.  Thus I cannot take his will as conclusive evidence
that he did not also harbor a belief that blacks were in some real
sense by nature inferior to whites.

In fairness, however, I should note that another historian of race and
slavery, for whom I have the utmost respect, seems to agree with Henry
on this point (while disagreeing with him on others):  see
http://www.ucd.ie/amerstud/archives/Morgan.htm  (and I trust I haven't
violated the terms of that page's posting by mentioning it here!).

On another point raised or at least implied in this discussion (perhaps
by Paul?), that GW's will was part of a tide of emancipatory activity
after the Revolution that could genuinely have toppled slavery had
others--notably TJ--only been willing to join it:  I have to say that I
am even more skeptical on that point.  That's not because of my own
research, but because such is the conclusion of the best in-depth study
to date on Virginia's post-Revolutionary emancipations, Eva Sheppard's
"The Question of Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to the
Slavery Debate of 1832" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2000;
forthcoming from LSU Press--possibly under the author's name as Eva
Sheppard Wolf?--as Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in
Virginia, 1776-1832).

Here's what Dr. Sheppard writes in her abstract:

"The manumission study reveals the rarity of private emancipation in
Virginia, and shows that there were two significant patterns in the
practice of manumission.  From 1782 to the early 1790s, manumission
reflected antislavery sentiment, as historians have traditionally
understood.  In contrast, manumission after the early 1790s was
primarily  a way to reward one or two favorite slaves for good service.
  As an incentive to behave well, manumission could reinforce, rather
than subvert, the discipline of slavery.  This study underscores the
fact that, because of racial antipathy toward black people and economic
dependence on slavery, there was not, as some historians have
suggested, ever a moment in Virginia's post-Revolutionary history when
abolition--total, gradual emancipation--was possible."

I would only add that the link to Dr. Morgan's study posted above will
demonstrate that he shares Dr. Sheppard's pessimistic assessment, while
noting that GW's will actually represents a late entry, rather than an
encouragingly early entry, into the post-Revolutionary emancipation
phenomenon.

In the end, as I hope Henry and everyone understands, such fine points
as the racial implications of GW's will are worth debating
not--not!--in order to condemn or laud individual persons, which I
regard as a futile and morally questionable exercise in any case
(though Paul does it with such virtuosity!), but because the issue of
how human beings treat one another is as important as any question in
life, because the study of history furnishes an opportunity to
understand the full range of that issue with unequalled clarity, and
because it is therefore so enormously important that we get our
understanding right, with all the challenging subtlety and and nuance
and complexity of insight we can bring to bear.

And on that note--holiday blessings to all!

--Jurretta Heckscher



On Dec 5, 2005, at 8:33 PM, Henry Wiencek wrote:

> With the TJ/Hemings issue in full conflagration again, I would like to
> roll
> back to Jurretta Heckscher's eloquent post on GW.  She wrote: "I would
> argue
> that Washington . . .  must be presumed to have believed almost
> inevitably
> in white racial superiority. That was, quite simply, one of the bedrock
> foundations of the world that made and sustained him--and if he broke
> extensively with that belief in his own mind, as I at least would need
> to
> see demonstrated by an unambiguous pronouncement."
>
> He did break with that world by freeing his slaves and he did make a
> "pronouncement" in his will, in which he not only freed his slaves but
> specified that they be taught to read & write, be "brought up to some
> useful
> occupation," and further ordered that no slave be transported out of
> Virginia "under any pretence whatsoever."  This is my interpretation
> of that
> pronouncement: Washington believed that blacks had a right to freedom;
> that
> formerly enslaved blacks were quite amenable to education and training;
> furthermore, he clearly believed that they had a claim to education and
> decent work; finally, he seems to have believed that with education and
> training the freed children of slaves could immediately take a
> fruitful and
> productive place in Virginia society as free people because he
> emphatically
> specified that no one should be exiled.  I don't think a racist of the
> 1790s
> variety would write such a will.
>
> Henry Wiencek

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