Trump messes with history again

MS NOW -   There’s no disputing the record: George Washington, the leader of the Continental Army and the first president of the United States, legally (and immorally) claimed other human beings as his personal property. While you may find people who claim Washington was ambivalent about chattel slavery — or felt hypocritical given the nation’s founding principles — no one can truthfully argue that Washington didn’t wrongly exercise godlike control over those African human beings.

And there ought not be people who’d argue against the U.S. government posthumously honoring the humanity and dignity of such people in ways that Washington did not.

There ought not be people who’d argue against the U.S. government posthumously honoring the humanity and dignity of such people in ways that Washington did not.

But last week, the Trump administration had employees of the National Park Service take crowbars to the President’s House in Philadelphia and pry off its walls exhibits that provided the names and biographies of nine people President Washington brought to that house and held in captivity. 

Those exhibits weren’t removed because they were false. They weren’t removed because they contained inaccuracies. They weren’t removed because they honored people whose recognition isn’t warranted. They were removed because, as we approach the country’s 250th birthday, they clash with the sanitized white-hat version of American history the Trump administration wants to sell.

The Philadelphia exhibit helped show that Washington wasn’t just a slave owner, but a conniving one. When he was president, Pennsylvania had a law that allowed any enslaved person brought there to be set free after six months, but historian John Garrison Marks told E&E News that every six months, Washington would send his captives out of Pennsylvania, if only temporarily, to avoid setting them free. Marks has a book due in April called, “Thy Will Be Done: George Washington’s Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory.”