Two opinions of Washington

[JBFRAME at aol.com]

Nor can Washington easily be absolved for having said nothing about the evils 
of slavery. At one point, he expressed the sincere desire to see "a plan 
adopted for the abolition" of slavery—backing away from initiating such a 
plan, however, by looking to legislative authority for its conception and 
execution. These are uncharacteristically passive words from the leader who 
sent 15,000 militia to quell the "Whiskey Rebellion"; proposed a Bank of the 
United States and other pro-commercial federal policies; fought a war of 
national liberation; and used his moral authority to warn of the evils of 
partisanship and sectional divisions in his farewell address to the nation. 
This perspective, of course, raises the issue of judging Washington by 
standards not clearly accepted in his own time and place. Still, it is 
perhaps misleading to assert Washington's greatness in view of his 
failure—lack of moral leadership—to forthrightly address slavery, an issue 
that eventually split the nation into civil war. 
    
    
http://www.americanpresident.org/kotrain/courses/GW/GW_Impact_and_Legacy.htm

...Since the Second World War, Americans have been repeatedly told that our 
founding fathers were racial egalitarians. Anyone who opposed the Black civil 
rights movement were represented as un-American. Of course, it was all a big 
lie. Washington and Jefferson, as well as the other founding fathers were not 
hypocrites, they were completely consistent. The truth is that when 
Washington and Jefferson spoke about the "rights of man" they clearly were 
speaking about White men, not Blacks whom they viewed as a primitive form of 
humanity. Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia wrote that 
White women who cohabited with Black males should be "outside the protection 
of the laws," meaning that he believed that those who acted violently against 
them should not be prosecuted. The Constitution equated Blacks as 
three-fifths of a person. Even the Supreme Court of the United States dared 
to state clearly in a major decision that America was created "by and for 
White people." Racial integration, Black voting, and racial intermarriage 
were opposed by most Whites until late in this century....
-- David Duke

http://www.stormfront.org/0198/george_washington.htm
(not a recommended site)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20020702/d7c5bd02/attachment.html>