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Excellent column fr @michele_norris in WaPo this AM. A few thoughts on “founders” and slavery, two words that have to ride together. 1/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-and-martha-washington-enslaved-300-people-lets-start-with-their-names/2020/06/26/d3f7c362-b7e7-11ea-a510-55bf26485c93_story.html?utm_campaign=wp_opinions&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
As scholars have been writing for decades, public history sites inc exhibiting & the now famous red dot art all make clear, the founders were enslavers. 2/ https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/9/10/20859458/fact-check-declaration-independence-slaves-trumbull-painting-arlen-parsa
For ex, @MountVernon exhibit records 100s of enslaved people’s lives & experiences inc Ona Judge who ran fr & was aggressively pursued by Washingtons 3/ https://www.mountvernon.org/plan-your-visit/calendar/exhibitions/lives-bound-together-slavery-at-george-washington-s-mount-vernon/
And you can’t call urgent attn to Washington & slavery (MN does!) w/ out attn to the critical work of @ericaadunbar– eg this 2017 piece by @jennyschuessler 4/ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/06/arts/george-washington-mount-vernon-slavery.html
George Washington enslaved 100s of people – so did Martha Washington. As @sejr_historian
Has shown, it’s critical not to elide white women’s active role as enslavers. 5/ https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2020-04-17/female-slave-owners-independent-brutal-stephanie-jones-rogers
Has shown, it’s critical not to elide white women’s active role as enslavers. 5/ https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2020-04-17/female-slave-owners-independent-brutal-stephanie-jones-rogers
Edmund Morgan (_American Slavery, American Freedom_ 1975) argued that the liberty for some was bought with the enslavement of others. From his JAH essay preceding the book 6/: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1888384
But Michelle Norris’s point is not that we confront the reality of enslavers as founders—it is that we move the kind of intense focus accorded to founders to those enslaved people. Say *their* names, she says. 7/
Important work of historians doing this, calling attention to the individual and collective lives & experiences of enslevd people inc through projects like http://enslaved.org , http://freedomonthemove.org and more 8/
And also @MountVernon the database of enslaved people. But.... 9/ https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/slavery-database/
A key question Norris raises (and others have raised) is whether even beyond identifying founders as enslavers & the critical work of recovering and respecting the history of enslaved people to insist that these be consistently treated as part of the whole. I hope so. 10/
And, as I’ve written before (& more soon), the American nation needs an early American history that is honest and full--it is the only platform on which it can stand. #VastEarlyAmerica finis// https://www.neh.gov/article/vast-early-america
