Just before Christmas in 1799, Richard Allen, the free Black minister, Philadelphian, and founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, stepped to the pulpit to speak to his congregation about George Washington. Allen had been born in slavery in Delaware, but gained his freedom in 1780; for some historians, he’s considered among the nation’s Founding Fathers.
Allen delivered a eulogy for George Washington, who had died two weeks earlier. As part of his sermon, Allen broke some news—not just for his congregation, but the entire nation: he was the first to reveal publicly that George Washington used his last will and testament to free the people he enslaved.
Allen told his congregation of free and enslaved Black Philadelphians that they should join their fellow Americans in mourning Washington’s death because Washington’s “heart was not insensible to our sufferings.” According to Allen, Washington believed Black Americans “had a right to liberty,” and thus freed the people he enslaved. Through this act, Allen believed, Washington “wipe[d] off the only stain with which man could ever reproach him. He ‘let the oppressed go free.’”
I’ve been thinking a lot about Allen’s sermon recently. Last week, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the National Park Service had revealed new interpretive panels for the President’s House site at Independence National Historical Park (I’m quoted in a follow-up piece to the initial reporting here). The proposed changes dramatically reduce the current exhibit’s focus on the people Washington enslaved and his active involvement in slavery. Instead, these new panels highlight Washington’s private statements opposing slavery, his decision to free the people he enslaved in his will, and the relative autonomy enslaved people experienced in Philadelphia. They shift the emphasis from Washington the enslaver to Washington the emancipator.
In so doing, the Trump administration has offered just the latest installment of a long-running American tradition. Across nearly two and a half centuries of our nation’s history, Americans have used Washington’s emancipation of the people he enslaved and his occasional private statements questioning the slave system to help him retain his status as a symbol of American liberty. Motivated by vastly different contemporary circumstances and divergent political goals, Americans have long seen how useful an antislavery version of Washington could be.
First though, let’s get on the same page. Although many people like to claim otherwise, Washington’s history with slavery was complicated. The two-sentence version goes something like this. George Washington was actively, intimately involved in the enslaving of other human beings for the entirety of his adult life, buying and selling them as property, exploiting their labor for his gain, directing their punishment, and attempting to recapture any who attempted to emancipate themselves. Simultaneously, however, Washington privately expressed his uneasiness with his involvement in the institution, his opposition to separating families, and his support of gradual abolition laws before he finally freed the people he enslaved in his will. These two dynamics exist side by side in a way that’s utterly irreconcilable.
While the current President’s House exhibit focuses on the first part of this contradiction, emphasizing Washington’s involvement with slavery and the specific experiences of the people he enslaved, the administration’s newly proposed exhibit panels instead shift the focus to the other side of this coin, highlighting Washington’s antislavery credentials.
For example, the new panels state that “Privately, George Washington often expressed discomfort with the institution and a desire to see it abolished,” though it also noted his wealth and status were deeply tied to slavery. Elsewhere, the panels note the relatively autonomy enslaved people experienced in Philadelphia compared to their earlier experiences at Mount Vernon. And, as always, they note Washington’s final decision to free the people he enslaved.
To be clear, the panels still mention the names of the people Washington enslaved at the President’s House—though I wonder if they would have been included if those names weren’t also engraved in stone at the site and thus in need of some kind of explanation. They also describe slavery as “odious” and “evil.” Yet the these proposed panels have also added new content that is far less connected to the specific history of the President’s House, such as Philadelphia’s role in the antislavery movement and the underground railroad.
The prevailing message of this revised interpretation is that George Washington—and thus the nation itself—were deeply committed to human liberty and, though imperfect, it was this commitment to freedom that has triumphed in the end.
It’s important to note that the statements on these panels are, in general, all factually correct. Washington did write privately about his opposition to slavery, he was the only one of the Founding Fathers to free the people he enslaved. Yet achieving the administration’s goals has also resulted in editing out other statements that are equally correct, but which paint Washington and the nation in a far less favorable light: his tireless, years-long effort to recapture Ona Judge after she fled from her enslavement to the Washington’s; his expression of betrayal at such self-emancipations; his belief that Black Americans were not prepared for the demands of freedom; his active involvement in perpetuating the enslavement of other people, even while serving as General and President.
In recent years, as Americans have more loudly demanded the nation to reckon with the legacy of slavery and racial oppression, some people have felt compelled to defend the United States as a beacon of liberty. The Trump administration’s effort to shift the emphasis of the President’s House site to reflect Washington’s antislavery bona fides for the 250th anniversary of the United States represents a new and important part of that effort.
Over the past 250 years, other Americans have taken a similarly selective approach to explaining Washington’s history with slavery, though often toward very different political ends.
For Richard Allen, Washington’s decision to free the people he enslaved—to “let the oppressed go free”—helped him make the case that Washington believed African Americans deserved liberty. Allen hoped his fellow Americans would agree.
Decades later, some abolitionists regularly invoked Washington’s status as “first emancipator” to support the antislavery cause. In 1838, John Quincy Adams (then representing Massachusetts in Congress following his presidency) told an antislavery crowd that “George Washington was in the broadest and most comprehensive sense of the word an ABOLITIONIST,” that he viewed the Declaration of Independence as an antislavery document.
Even William Lloyd Garrison—whose abolitionist newspaper The Liberator published some of the most searing criticisms of Washington’s slaveholding ever produced—at times saw the rhetorical utility of lifting up an antislavery version of Washington. In 1848, Garrison told a packed crowd in Boston’s Faneuil Hall that he had encountered a case of a southerner who was declared insane because he used his will to free his slaves. Garrison pointed dramatically to the portrait of Washington that flanked the stage and bellowed “There! There is a man who was insane when he died! There stands George Washington, who by his will emancipated his slaves!”
Prior to the Civil War, Americans highlighted Washington’s emancipation and his occasional opposition to slavery to attempt to bring the institution to an end. If emancipating enslaved people was good enough for Washington, the argument went, it should be good enough for America.
The antislavery Washington even proved useful in the immediate aftermath of the war, as white Americans attempted to make sense of their obligations to millions of formerly enslaved people who had gained their freedom. Auctioning off a copy of Washington’s will in 1865, Philadelphian William Hirst said the document showed how “the Father of His Country indicated his profound hostility to slavery,” adding that, “We may from this great lesson realize our own present duty.” A few years later a Washington, DC publisher produced a new copy of Washington’s will, revealing its renewed salience for the American people. In a foreword, the publisher wrote that the will’s emancipation provisions offered lessons for the nation’s “great social and political problem which is yet but half solved”—and which demanded a continued commitment from white Americans.
Yet this use of the antislavery Washington soon shifted, finding other uses in the century and a half after the end of slavery. In large part, white Americans began using Washington’s ostensible opposition to slavery—especially his emancipation of the people he enslaved—to deny any need to offer redress for the material effects of slavery and racial oppression. Americans began to use the antislavery Washington to wave away slavery as a momentary aberration in America’s long march of freedom.
Recently in Florida, for example, the state’s revised social studies curriculum has highlighted Washington’s antislavery credentials and excluded any other discussion of his involvement in slavery, part of its quest to serve as the national model for how to oppose all things “woke.” It asks students to consider the role of the nation’s founding principles to the abolition of slavery, analyzing the roles of prominent antislavery figures. Such figures include Elizabeth “Mum Bett” Freeman, an enslaved woman whose suit to achieve freedom contributed to the end of slavery in Massachusetts, and Benjamin Franklin, a founder of Pennsylvania’s highly influential antislavery society. But the list also includes George Washington, a man who enslaved more than 300 people when he died in 1799. The curriculum suggests opposition to slavery is the only way we should remember Washington’s involvement with the institution.
That groups with so little in common politically—nineteenth-century abolitionists, modern conservative education reformers, and now the Trump Administration—have all emphasized Washington’s opposition to slavery (while excluding the mountains of evidence revealing his lifelong involvement in it) reveals the ways Washington’s contradictory legacy with slavery has been manipulated to support a wide range of causes. That the same cherry-picking of Washington’s history with slavery can be used to support such different political goals highlights that Americans have always viewed history not just as a window into another time, but also a mirror reflecting their own. Even those who have taken the opposite approach, denouncing Washington as a slaveowner to emphasize the deep roots of American racial injustice, often leave out huge parts of the story.
When it comes to George Washington and slavery, today’s debates about our history have been transformed by our history—by centuries of selective remembering and forgetting—in ways we rarely recognize.
To do differently, to try to absorb these contradictions all at once and make sense of them, is a tall order. Laying bare the complexity of Washington’s involvement in slavery would require visitors to sit with discomfort, to lean in to ambiguity. More than anything else, it would demand that many people tell a different story about America and what it represents. It would mean admitting that history’s answers aren’t always what we want them to be—and that sometimes it doesn’t offer us clear answers at all.