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发帖数: 9831 | 1 Missing from Presidents' Day: The People They Enslaved
http://www.good.is/posts/missing-from-presidents-day-the-people
Schools across the country are adorned with posters of the 44 U.S.
presidents and the years they served in office. U.S. history textbooks
describe the accomplishments and challenges of the major presidential
administrations—George Washington had the Revolutionary War, Abraham
Lincoln the Civil War, Teddy Roosevelt the Spanish-American War, and so on.
Children's books put students on a first-name basis with the presidents,
engaging readers with stories of their dogs in the Rose Garden or childhood
escapades. Washington, D.C.'s Smithsonian Institution welcomes visitors to
an exhibit of the first ladies' gowns and White House furnishings.
Nowhere in all this information is there any mention of the fact that more
than one in four U.S. presidents were involved in human trafficking and
slavery. These presidents bought, sold, and bred enslaved people for profit.
Of the 12 presidents who were enslavers, more than half kept people in
bondage at the White House. For this reason, there is little doubt that the
first person of African descent to enter the White House—or the
presidential homes used in New York (1788–90) and Philadelphia (1790–1800)
before construction of the White House was complete—was an enslaved person.
The White House itself, the home of presidents and quintessential symbol of
the U.S. presidency, was built with slave labor, just like most other major
building projects had been in the 18th-century United States, including many
of our most famous buildings like Philadelphia's Independence Hall, Boston'
s Faneuil Hall, Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, and James Madison's
Montpellier. President Washington initially wanted to hire foreign labor to
build the White House, but when he realized how costly it would be to pay
people fairly, he resorted to slave labor.
Constructed in part by black slave labor, the home and office of the
President of the United States has embodied different principles for
different people. For whites, whose social privileges and political rights
have always been protected by the laws of the land, the White House has
symbolized the power of freedom and democracy over monarchy. For blacks,
whose history is rooted in slavery and the struggle against white domination
, the symbolic power of the White House has shifted along with each
president's relation to black citizenship. For many whites and people of
color, the White House has symbolized the supremacy of white people both
domestically and internationally. U.S. nativists with colonizing and
imperialist aspirations understood the symbolism of the White House as a
projection of that supremacy on a global scale. This idea is embodied in the
building project itself.
Although the White House is symbolically significant, there is a largely
hidden and silenced black history of the U.S. presidency. Here are just a
few examples:
George Washington's stated antislavery convictions misaligned with his
actual political behavior. While professing to abhor slavery and hope for
its eventual demise, as president Washington took no real steps in that
direction and in fact did everything he could to ensure that not one of the
more than 300 people he owned could secure their freedom. During the 10
years of construction of the White House, George Washington spent time in
Philadelphia where a law called the Gradual Abolition Act passed in 1780. It
stated that any slaves brought into the state were eligible to apply for
their freedom if they were there for longer than six months. To get around
the law, Washington rotated the people working for him in bondage so that
they were there for less than six months each.
Despite Washington's reluctance to carry out his stated antislavery
predilections, the movement against slavery grew anyway, including within
the president's very own household among the men and women he enslaved. One
of the presidential slaves was Ona "Oney" Maria Judge. In March 1796 (the
year before Washington's second term in office ended), Oney was told that
she would be given to Martha Washington's granddaughter as a wedding present
. Oney carefully planned her escape and slipped out of the Washingtons' home
in Philadelphia while the Washingtons were eating dinner. Oney Judge fled
the most powerful man in the United States, defied his attempts to trick her
back into slavery, and lived out a better life. After her successful
attempt became widely known, she was a celebrity of sorts. Her escape from
the Washingtons fascinated journalists, writers, and others, but more
important, it was an inspiration to the abolition movement and other African
Americans who were being enslaved by whites.
By the age of 10, Paul Jennings was enslaved at the White House as a footman
for James Madison, the fourth president of the United States. When he got
older, Dolley Madison hired out Jennings, keeping every "last red cent" of
his earnings. Dolley indicated in her will that she would give Jennings his
freedom, but instead sold him before she died. Thankfully, Daniel Webster
intervened and purchased his freedom. Soon after, Paul Jennings helped plan
one of the most ambitious and daring efforts to liberate enslaved blacks in
U.S. history, the Pearl Affair. It was not successful, but as with John
Brown's raid, the political repercussions lasted for decades and
strengthened the abolitionist cause. Paul Jennings went on to become the
first person to write a memoir of a firsthand experience of working in the
White House.
In textbooks and popular history, the White House is figuratively
constructed as a repository of democratic aspirations, high principles, and
ethical values. For many Americans, it is subversive to criticize the nation
's founders, the founding documents, the presidency, the president's house,
and other institutions that have come to symbolize the official story of the
United States. It may be uncomfortable to give up long-held and even
meaningful beliefs that in many ways build both collective and personal
identities. However, erasing enslaved African Americans from the White House
and the presidency presents a false portrait of our country’s history. If
young people—and all the rest of us—are to understand a fuller, people’s
history of the United States, they need to recognize that every aspect of
early America was built on slavery.
Dr. Clarence Lusane is the program director for Comparative and Regional
Studies at American University. He teaches courses in comparative race
relations, modern social movements, comparative politics of the Americas and
Europe, and jazz and international relations. He is a national columnist
for the Black Voices syndicated news network. Lusane has authored a number
of books including The Black History of the White House (City Lights, 2010).
Read more. This article is part of the Zinn Education Project If We Knew
Our History series. |
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