Henry,

    These are fine points that you make regarding George Washington but I am
puzzled that you seem to think of GW only as an individual planter.  Edmund
Morgan in The Genius of George Washington (sorry for my limited biblio. from
the colonial era but I am a historian of modern America) notes GW's constant
focus on leadership.  The commanding general of the revolution, the chair of
the Constitutional Convention, the first president of the United States
under that Constitution had to be mindful that he was making history and
setting an example.
    Washington knew that even his last will and testament would be news, not
only in America, but in Europe as well.  What legacy should a slaveholding
patrician, the "father of his country," leave?
    I would like to think that the personal Washington and the political
Washington had the same values but I will leave that important question to
experts on the Founding period.  Nonetheless, I think that the terms of GW's
will mollified those in the North and Europe that the problem of slavery in
a revolutionary republic would be solved by the thoughtful generosity of its
great men.  How different our history would have been had this been so.

Harold S. Forsythe
Visiting Fellow (2005-2006)
Program in Agrarian Studies
Yale University
----- Original Message -----
From: "Henry Wiencek" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, December 05, 2005 8:33 PM
Subject: Re: "common-sense Jeffersonian conservative principles"


> 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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