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CHAPTER 1
GEORGE WASHINGTON
1789–1797
Children learn in school that George Washington's false teeth were made of wood. That is not true. Some of his dentures were made of ivory and metal, but some of them came from the human beings he owned. Washington became a slave owner at the age of eleven upon his father's death. He increased his wealth in 1759 when he married Martha Custis, a widow who had nearly three hundred slaves, of which more than eighty were dower slaves — meaning they were granted to her upon her husband's death — while the remainder were in her custody until their minor son came of age to own them legally, while Washington had approximately fifty.
When Washington's dentures became ill fitting and painful, he chose to get teeth from the people he owned. Records show that they were paid 122 shillings for nine teeth — less than a third the going rate at the time. Washington told a friend, "I confess I have been staggered in my belief in the efficacy of transplantion [sic]." The payment didn't diminish the terror for the chattel. The fact that Washington owned other people at all was a crime and a grievous one at that. But the "Father of Our Country" didn't see things that way because he did not see black people as fully human, endowed with unalienable rights, and so he did everything in his power to maintain his hold on his living, breathing capital. His story, sanitized for elementary schoolchildren, is a fundamental example of the lies told about our nation's history that keep Americans ignorant of the truth and how it affects them today.
The first capital of the United States was New York City, where Washington was sworn into office in 1789. The Residence Act passed in 1790 mandated that the capital be temporarily moved to Philadelphia for a period of ten years before being permanently established along the Potomac River by 1800.
From the start northern politicians were held hostage by the southern plantation economy. Southerners insisted that the capital be located in a place that was decidedly dependent on the planter economy. The creation of a new capital city was an enormous victory for the slaveholding class. Their peculiar institution was granted physical protection and the imprimatur of a government built to ensure its survival. A central political principle in the early days of this country was the maintenance and protection of the slavery system. However, anyone who believes in American superiority is expected to omit or at least downplay this fact to maintain the illusion of democracy and beneficence.
Even the ten years of governance in Philadelphia proved to be problematic. A 1780 Pennsylvania law guaranteed enslaved people the right to seek their freedom if they remained in the state for more than six months. This could have put Washington in a bind, but he had a solution: He rotated his human property for six-month intervals between Pennsylvania and Virginia. He did this in flagrant violation of a 1788 amendment to this law, which prohibited such actions. In 1791, Washington started by rotating nine people, including a dower slave named Ona Maria "Oney" Judge. In a letter to his secretary, Tobias Lear, Washington mused on the slaves' potential access to freedom.
At any rate it might, if they conceived they had a right to it, make them insolent in a State of Slavery. As all except Hercules and Paris are dower negroes, it behooves me to prevent the emancipation of them, otherwise I shall not only loose [sic] the use of them, but may have them to pay for. If upon taking good advice it is found expedient to send them back to Virginia, I wish to have it accomplished under pretext that may deceive both them and the Public.
Washington was serious about denying any opportunity for freedom. Oney Judge recalled her escape in an 1845 interview: "Whilst they were packing up to go to Virginia, I was packing to go, I didn't know where; for I knew that if I went back to Virginia, I should never get my liberty. I had friends among the colored people of Philadelphia, had my things carried there beforehand, and left Washington's house while they were eating dinner." Oney managed to flee to New Hampshire in 1796, but she still was not safe. The Fugitive Slave Clause in the Constitution allowed for her to be returned to bondage, and the Washingtons tried incessantly to get her back. With more than three hundred human beings among their collective property, the escape of even one might put the entire enterprise on shaky ground. A friend of the Washingtons saw Judge in New Hampshire and informed them. The president wrote a letter to his secretary of the Treasury, Oliver Wolcott, demanding his assistance in getting Judge back. "I am sorry to give you, or anyone else, trouble on such a trifling occasion, but the ingratitude of the girl, who was brought up and treated more like a child than a Servant (and Mrs. Washington's desire to recover her) ought not to escape with impunity if it can be avoided."
Washington sent intermediaries to try to trick Judge into returning with promises of freedom. Those promises were lies; as a dower slave she could not have been freed without compensation given to the Custis estate, and the Washingtons' determination to recapture her is an indication that they were unlikely to even contemplate such an effort. She avoided the attempts to entrap her and remained a free woman for the rest of her life.
Not only did Washington not allow any of his slaves to go free, but he also did not countenance other white people doing things that might lessen his hold on this property. Sally Green was the abandoned wife of an overseer on Washington's Mount Vernon estate. When Washington learned in 1794 that she planned to open a small store in Alexandria he was not pleased, and he wrote to his manager, William Pearce: "Caution Sally Green against dealing with my negroes after she is fixed in Alexandria. If she deals with them at all she will be unable to distinguish between stolen, or not stolen things; and if her conduct should lay her open to suspicion she need expect no further countenance or support from me."
A great irony exists in the fact that Washington is now the "blackest" surname in the United States. Ninety percent of the Washingtons in America are black people. It is not clear how many of them may be descended from Washington or the enslaved people on his estate. Booker T. Washington claimed to have chosen the name randomly when he was a child. Most of the ancestors of today's Washingtons probably chose the name as a way of identifying themselves with their country, a major irony in the face of what black people have had to contend with throughout this country's history.
George Washington would express some reservations about slavery, exclaiming at one point that he wanted "to be quit of negroes," yet he never freed any in his lifetime. He did not have the right to free Martha's dower slaves or those who belonged to the estate of her first husband, Daniel Parke Custis. But in his will he did agree to free those he owned after Martha's death. This left his widow, Martha, afraid that she could be killed by people who would gain their freedom if she died. Abigail Adams said as much after a visit with her in 1800: "In the state in which they were left by the General, to be free at her death, she did not feel as tho her Life was safe in their Hands, many of whom would be told that it was there [sic] interest to get rid of her — She therefore was advised to set them all free at the close of the year." Martha decided to manumit, or free, the slaves belonging to her late second husband, George Washington. But her dower slaves — those she received from her first husband's estate — never gained their freedom. Upon her death they were dispersed among her grandchildren, splitting up numerous families in the process.
Washington was followed in the office of president by eleven other slaveholding men, seven of whom owned slaves even while holding that office. Their slave ownership was not incidental to their achieving the highest office in the land but was inextricably linked to that fact. Slaveholding was profitable, and it is logical that the elite classes of that time would be represented in presidential contests. The United States was committed to maintaining this institution, and whether northern or southern, no president considered ending the practice until Abraham Lincoln was forced to confront the matter in 1861.
CHAPTER 2
JOHN AD AMS
1797–1801
Of the first twelve presidents, John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams were the only two who were northerners and non-slaveholding, but the elder Adams was far more pro-white than he was anti-slavery. He expressed racist views early in his life and took part in the shameful libel of a dead black man to win a court case. Adams represented the British soldiers who took part in the 1770 Boston Massacre. Crispus Attucks, a man who had escaped slavery, was the first victim to fall on that day. Adams's defense strategy included blaming Attucks, "... to whose mad behavior, in all probability, the dreadful carnage of that night is chiefly to be ascribed." Adams also represented slaveholders in four cases in which enslaved people sued for their freedom. He lost three of the four and later wrote dismissively, "I was concerned in several Causes in which Negroes sued for their Freedom before the Revolution." He felt more angst on behalf of white southerners than he did for enslaved people, and he asserted that "the condition of the common sort of white people" was "more oppressed, degraded, and miserable than that of the negroes."
Adams bragged that he had never held a slave, though he could have done so in Massachusetts for most of his life. Despite his self-congratulation on the subject, he didn't think slavery was so terrible that it needed to end, and he made clear that he avoided "animated speeches [and] inflammatory publications" expressing opposition to the institution. He was concerned about the prospect of black people, whether free or enslaved, rising up violently against whites. Adams feared black freedom more than he thought that slavery was wrong, and he argued that "the abolition of slavery must be gradual, and accomplished with much caution and circumspection. Violent measures would produce greater violations of justice and humanity than the continuance of the practice ... would probably excite insurrections among the blacks to rise against their masters, and imbue their hands in innocent blood."
Adams identified with his fellow white people, particularly white southerners, with whom he promised not to interfere. "The present slaveholders cannot justly be reproached. They have given proofs of dispositions favorable to the gradual abolition of slavery, more explicit than could have been expected."
Like many presidents who followed him, Adams favored colonization, the forced removal of black people from the United States. Thirty years after the end of the Revolutionary War, he condemned the British for again giving freedom to enslaved people who fought for them, this time in the War of 1812.
Instead of leaving the stolen Negroes to Starve in Halifax and London or Sending them to Sierra Leona, they have now planted a Colony of them in Nova Scotia. A thousand Families are established in one Settlement, with ten Acres of Land granted by the Crown to each with an Allowance of Instruments and Provisions for two Years. From this Nursery are hereafter to be drawn recruits to invade the Southern States to entice and Seduce other blacks to desert or rebel against their Masters and the Nation.
John Adams has been damned with faint praise for never owning slaves, but his fear of black people and their continued presence in the country explains why he and his northern brethren bent over backward to adhere to the demands of the slavocracy. Adams wanted black people to be kept subservient or, better yet, kept out of the country altogether. Adams and other northerners weren't that different from their slaveholding countrymen in their feelings of racial superiority. They saw black people as irritants and inconveniences at best, and murderers at worst. They had no inclination at all to advocate for the enslaved — Adams admitted as much.
Adams did not change in the years after his term in office ended. He continued to fear the presence of black people, and he saw no value in giving them their freedom. In an 1814 letter he predicted that emancipation would end with "the shiftless perishing from want" or "asking their old aristocratical masters [to take them back]" or "inroads, depredations and brigandages."
Even after declaring himself "utterly averse to admission of slavery into the Missouri territory" in an 1821 letter, he didn't want to say so publicly. He feared that his son John Quincy's political career might be damaged by "heated prejudiced minds of southern people." He begged his friend, "I hope you will by no means publish my letter."
Perhaps Adams felt the fact that he never owned another human being absolved him from needing to express any pro-emancipation opinion. He could be honest in his antipathy toward black people — unlike his successors Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who engaged in breathtaking hypocrisies.
CHAPTER 3
THOMAS JEFFERSON
1801–1809
Jefferson presents a contradiction for the apologists and idol worshippers. For obvious reasons they admire his erudition and scholarship, but they cannot sugarcoat the fact that he owned more than six hundred human beings during his life and had sex with at least one of them when she was a minor child. Yet he also claimed to have misgivings about slavery. Thomas Jefferson was the worst kind of hypocrite on this topic — and one who defined his time, because his wealth depended on his ownership of human beings. Jefferson said that he wanted the gradual abolition of slavery, but during his lifetime he freed only two of the people he owned, and only five more in his will. It should no longer be acceptable to overlook the profit Jefferson made from involvement in a cruel and barbaric industry.
The early presidents established the mandate to expand feverishly westward, relentlessly occupying Indian land and turning it over to the white settler population. Jefferson is credited — if such a positive word can be used — with transacting the Louisiana Purchase. The United States doubled in size in 1803 when France agreed to sell off the last of its territories on the North American mainland. The 827,000 square miles of territory west of the Mississippi comprised what are now Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and portions of Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico, Texas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and, of course, Louisiana. The sale was driven by the French need for money after the loss of their extremely profitable plantation economy in the wake of a successful Haitian slave revolt. The ultimate irony is that the end of Haitian slavery increased the amount of territory that would be available to the American plantation economy. The purchase included lands still inhabited by indigenous people, most of whom had no idea that France had claimed ownership of their homes or that the United States now "possessed" them.
Jefferson, who ostensibly held the opinion that slavery was evil and unjust, could have forbidden the practice in the newly acquired territories when in March 1804, Congress gave him full executive, judicial, and legislative power over them. He drafted the territorial constitution himself. The original treaty giving the United States jurisdiction asserted that "inhabitants of the ceded territory" would enjoy the same rights as all American citizens; Jefferson changed the wording to "white inhabitants."
Jefferson saw this expanse of land in part as a gigantic Indian reservation to which he could forcibly relocate the remaining members of the eastern Native American tribes. He told William Henry Harrison, a future president and the governor of the Indiana Territory at that time: "Should any tribe be foolhardy enough to take up the hatchet at any time, the seizing [of] the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace, would be an example to others, and a furtherance of our final consolidation."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Prejudential"
by .
Copyright © 2020 Margaret Kimberley.
Excerpted by permission of Steerforth Press.
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