I learned a great deal from Henry Wiencek's study of Washington and his
slaves and look forward to his study of Jefferson, but I must
respectfully part company with him on this particular point.   One of
the major achievements of historical scholarship on Virginia and the
Chesapeake region generally at least since Winthrop Jordan's White over
Black:    American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (1968) has
been to demonstrate how profoundly a generally implicit commitment to
white racial superiority was interwoven with the roots of
Anglo-Virginian (and other white American) culture--a commitment that
remained essentially unaltered even as the terms in which it was
explicitly or implicitly justified changed significantly between the
early colonial and the antebellum periods.  Certainly that is the
wretched conclusion that arises from my own research on the black-white
intercultural encounter in the Chesapeake throughout the era of
slavery.

Did Washington ever write at any length in general terms on his view of
blacks?  To my limited knowledge, except for his positive comments on
black soldiers' capacity to serve in the Revolution (which represented
a change of heart on his part) he did not.  (I would be fascinated to
be proved wrong.)  Neither did nearly all his contemporaries.
Jefferson, of course, did; above all in Notes on Virginia, where in
response to a Frenchman's inquiries he had the highly dubious
distinction of publishing the first American speculations toward a
theory of "scientific" racism.  Yet it is only in such largely
theoretical reflections directed at an audience outside one's native
culture that one would expect to find an explicit enunciation of
attitudes so pervasive and commonplace that they otherwise required no
pronouncement (which is not to say that Jefferson did not go beyond the
views of his contemporaries in attempting to give such beliefs the
gloss of Enlightenment science).  It is just such an assumption of
white superiority and black incapacity, after all, that undergirds the
send-them-back-to-Africa colonization movement championed by James
Madison and (in slightly different form) by Jefferson himself--yet
Madison, too, wrote little or nothing to articulate the racial
assumptions that lay behind his actions, including his intellectual
paternity of a Constitution that designated black slaves three-fifths
of a man.  (And even opposition to slavery, of course, is not at all
the same thing as defiance of racism: see the whole history of Northern
attitudes surrounding such issues up through the time of the Civil
War.)

One of the most useful and revealing insights of anthropology and
historical ethnography is that human beings do not need to put into
words those deep and commonplace and unquestioned beliefs that inform
their culture's worldview.  In the absence of direct evidence to the
contrary, then, I would argue that Washington, like all or nearly all
his contemporaries in the Virginian elite (Robert Carter after his
conversion may be the one demonstrable exception), 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 to that effect before I could be persuaded that he did,
he was truly an even more extraordinary and revolutionary individual
than we have hitherto supposed.

None of which, by the way, detracts from Washington's exemplary
achievement in freeing his slaves in his will; if anything, it
paradoxically underscores the magnitude of that achievement, inasmuch
as his actions required him to ignore the corollary of racism's
cultural logic, his society's economic foundation in slavery, in order
to effect his bondspeople's emancipation.

--Jurretta Heckscher


On Dec 5, 2005, at 12:26 PM, Henry Wiencek wrote:

> Having studied George Washington I would say that Deane is completely
> wrong
> to call GW a racist.  You can look through GW's papers from one end to
> the
> other and you will not find any evidence that he believed black people
> to be
> inferior or even different from whites.  Deane--read my book on GW
> (there's
> a LARGE-TYPE edition!).
>
> Henry Wiencek
>
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