11/15/23
Newsletter #512
The Crack of Dawn
I am a student of history, particularly American history, and presidential politics is central to that history. Most American presidents were not particularly special, accomplished very little, and did nothing memorable – other than keeping our ship of state on course, avoiding the very largest icebergs, and for the most part not getting us into too many needless wars. However, a few of our presidents were truly exceptional: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. That’s it. Luckily, we’ve also had at least a half-dozen good presidents: James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson (yes, it’s true), Grover Cleveland (twice), William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and because I’m a sport, I’ll give you Dwight Eisenhower, who golfed over 800 times in two terms. But in the scheme of governments, in a mere 250 years, that’s a lot of good to great presidents.
Let’s back up. Previous to the American Revolution in 1776, there had never been a democracy of ostensibly free people in the entire 50,000-year history of human beings. It took 30,000 years before humans began gathering in groups or tribes. Then over the course of a very long time, tribal leaders became monarchs. Kings and queens of every shape and size ruled in their own small to big fiefdoms for the next 10,000 years. In just the last 2,500 years humans began experimenting with other forms of government, like republics, where at least some people got to vote (meaning the rich and powerful). Keep in mind that everybody had human slaves everywhere in the world, which includes all of the mythical characters written about in the Old and New Testament Bibles and the Koran. In recent times the translations of these books have attempted to ameliorate the offensive references to slaves by making them “servants.” Yes, unpaid, indentured servants called slaves. Slaves were property; property had value. Property did as it was told, or suffered, or died.
In 1492 the greatest navigator in the world, Christopher Columbus, made it across the entire Atlantic Ocean to the New World, and kept records. He ended up in the West Indies, and of course tried to take anything of value that might possibly pay for his incredibly expensive voyage. Columbus didn’t discover the New World because he was looking for slaves; he discovered it because it was the greatest human achievement of the day, sponsored by the notoriously Antisemitic, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabela of Spain. Finding the New World was better than going to the moon because the moon only has rocks. The New World had everything you could possibly desire to potentially get rich: lumber, fish, animals with furry pelts, and a need for slaves.
It took Europeans 100 years to colonize what became known as America, or the 13 colonies — 1500 to 1600. Yes, the southern American states had slaves – just like all of the rest of the world still did – but the northern American states had already started the process of the abolition of slavery, many groups from the moment of their settlement, like the Puritans, Quakers, Dutch Calvinists, and Jews, and many other European religious outcasts were all against slavery. Very soon, however, there were all types of European Christians in America, most of whom were not opposed to slavery. Most of them would come to believe in abolition if they resided in the north. By 1700 it was mostly understood that there was no slavery above the Mason-Dixon line (which wouldn’t come into being until 1767).
The United States of America would not exist if we hadn’t been lucky enough to have a Virginia planter and slave owner among our population named George Washington. Were it not for that one man, this country wouldn’t exist for post-modern kids to run around thinking that George Washinton was nothing but a slave owner and to try his statue down. We were also exceptionally lucky to have the Founding Fathers: Ben Franklin (with no slaves), Thomas Jefferson (the smartest of the bunch, and the biggest slave owner), John Adams (no slaves, and virulently against it), Monroe and Madison (both slave owners), et al. Yes, they were white men wearing wigs and knee breeches, which was the fashion at the time, but those were the guys who had the biggest dream in history – to be free. And they pulled it off.
But they wouldn’t have done it without George Washington. You could eliminate any of the other guys, but not him.
First of all, only George Washington could have pulled off being America’s first commanding general, due to his experiences as an American commanding officer attached to the occupying British forces during the French and Indian War (1754–1763). He had already worked his way up the Virginia Militia so that when he was a colonial with the British Army he became a lieutenant-colonel at the ripe old age of 18. Aside from everything else that Washington learned during those brutal years of war – the British against the French, with Indians on both sides – he grew to truly and deeply hate the British who consistently treated him and everybody else like colonial idiots (like they did in all of their many colonies, all over the world), which Washington resented.
When he was called upon by the Continental Congress to be America’s first commanding general in June 1775, America sadly had no army or navy, and Washington’s first job would be to fight Britian, who had the most powerful army and navy in the world.
Who the fuck would take that job? Only George Washington. Although there were many reasons, the predominate reason that Washington took that insane command was because of how much he hated those British motherfuckers who treated him like an idiot, and how much he knew about war, history, life, and everything else. Of the 2,500,000 people living in the British American colonies in 1775, he was the only person who could pull this off. That, my fine feathered friends, is actually awesome.
Regarding that Washington is now being remembered as nothing but an “oppressive slave owner,” is so fucking dumb that it hurts. He joined the military at 17, and though he was born relatively poor in Virginia (his father was a farmer with a few slaves), he was busy fighting the French and the Indians. Then, at the advanced age of 26, he married the richest widow in Virginia, Martha Custis, who had come into owning a plantation with many slaves the year before when her husband died. I love this this wonderfully old, reasonably contemporaneous painting that I found (although I couldn’t find the date or the artist), which is entitled, “Courtship.” The year was 1758 and both George and Martha were 26 years old (she was eight months older than him). She had been widowed the year before. She had two little kids and 17,500 acres – the biggest plantation in Virginia – that she wasn’t prepared to run. Washington was a big man, six-foot-three, in great shape, an outdoorsman, a surveyor who had recently retired from a high-ranking position in the military (for a colonial), but alas, was penniless.
As we see in this painting, the irony department of the universe was working overtime. George and Martha (the names used in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) only met a couple of time previous to their marriage. So this moment caught in the painting can be seen as a quaint, somewhat uncomfortable, though not unhappy, first or second date; or this can be seen as the preeminent founding father of our country joining the slave-owning, plantation class. Or do you think maybe he was thinking, “She’s kind of cute – although she does have two kids – but let’s not forget, she owns 17,500 acres of land, which equals 105,000 plots at 100’ x 50’ each.” What do you want to bet the topic of slavery never even came up?
The Revolutionary War took eight years, but somehow – miraculously – George Washington and the most ragtag, ill-equipped, never paid, shoeless, starving, army actually beat His Royal Majesty King George III’s military and won freedom for America, soon to be the United States of America. It’s a bloody fucking miracle! More often than not, military leaders who win wars make themselves king, or emperor, or Fuhrer. Washington had no interest in that. None. He had performed the impossible, which was his duty, and now he was perfectly happy to retire to his enormous plantation, Mount Vernon, and see if he could be a farmer and actually grow anything.
As a final note, because I am directly dealing with Washington and slavery, this is what happened. As a kid he worked side by side with his dad’s four slaves, then at 17 he joined the military and got the hell off the farm. At 26 he married Martha and tried to run this insanely huge plantation, with 300 slaves, and no matter what he did, which crop he grew, it didn’t work. I would like to say he was morally disgusted by slavery, and he was to the extent that he included in his will that all the slaves be freed upon his death — which was unusual — but not before his death. The thing is, what he came to learn in his farming was that the slave system was a failed, flawed (immoral) system. Washington found out that it was not possible to get more than 30-35% of the slaves working at any given time because they were too old, too young, too sick, or injured, and had to be tended to by other slaves. And what he never seemed to learn, and I find this amusing, was why the slaves working with him day in and day out were not more enthusiastic about their jobs. Seriously.
Hey! Nobody’s perfect. But he may be the closest person we have in our short history.
Well, this newsletter took me on a wild ride. I had no idea that it was going to be about George Washington when I started.
A jolly good day to one and all.