1776

It might be useful to step back for a second at the world as it existed in 1776, to realize how important Washington, Jefferson, and the nation they founded are to the entire human race.

On January 1, 1776, slave holding was not a detestable, morally condemned practice. It was universal. The major European colonial powers, Great Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands all practiced slavery. Great Britain and France both had colonies in the West Indies, the most vicious living conditions on earth. The British practices in India and Australia (aborigines) were an abomination. The great gold and silver mines that had made Spain the most powerful nation in Europe were largely played out, but native Indian slavery persisted. The Dutch don't say too much about it these days, but slavery was practiced in Indonesia for two centuries and involved over a million individuals. There is also South Africa and the first African colonies.

You could lay this off to European racism, but the dark continent of Africa was hardly an island of liberation. It's a historical cliche that most of the slaves brought to the New World were enslaved in Africa - the 'Roots' scenario is an exception if it existed at all. (It's a lot easier to buy anything than take it by force.) There's a real sense in which the class issue that some of us these days think is so much more important than race, was already in play here. Lower class Africans were a commodity that Upper Class Blacks sold to Upper Class Southerners. The common factor is Upper Class.  In that sense, though African-Americans clearly have the worst narrative of all, it is the same narrative that Emma Lazarus described - another instance of a poor, tired huddled mass escaping the oppression of traditional rulers. The thought that this nation of slaves, peasants, serfs, and coolies, the refuse of five Continents, has become the most powerful on earth, gives me great pleasure. I wish more intellectual elites saw it that way.

Going further east in Europe, you encounter imperial Russia, where serfdom was still the order of the day and would be for another 90 years. Anyone who wishes to argue that the Tsardom of Catherine the Great was more liberal that Great Britain at the time is welcome to do so. I'm not even going to bother answering.

Dipping South you come to the Ottoman Empire, in steep decline, but still with 150 years of life. I don't know whether the Sultanate was still drowning odalisques, but slavery was still ensconced there and around the shores of the Mediterranean. Thirty years later US Marines would storm the shores of Tripoli to end the practice of kidnap and ransom/or enslavement.

Move further east and you encounter the remnants of the Mongol empires. Slavery was the least of the sickening practices of the most vicious aggressors in the last millennium. Time sentimentalizes everything, and there is now contemporary affection for good ol' Genghis Khan. Maybe in 500 years it'll truly be Springtime for Hitler. But the people of the time thought of fearsome mounted men with whips, casual cruelty and slaughter, and wholesale enslavement of cities and regions.

India, Indonesia, and the like may have suffered from European practices, but they also practiced it themselves.

On to China and Japan and an outlook for coolies and peasants (who could be murdered at the whim of a Samurai) that was as akin to slavery as makes no difference. What serfs, coolies, Asian peasants, and slaves all had in common was that they lived and worked without hope. Their children and grandchildren could expect no better.

In short, slavery was a universal. You either owned slaves or were a slave or participated indirectly in the practice by the goods you bought or sold or the profession you practiced. Slavery was sanctioned in religious texts of every major religion, in ancient poetry (e.g., the Homeric epics), in historical precedent (e.g., Rome, Greece - Israel), and codified into ancient law. There were isolated voices that protested, and certainly some philosophical themes. But they were isolated and not widely heard, certainly not by men and women making a practical way through the world.

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were thus not exceptional men who practiced exceptional evil. They were men who lived in the times as they were. If you want to demonize them, you can demonize 99% of the human beings who have ever lived - because the culture of slavery and oppression was the dominant, in fact, the only culture that humankind had managed to create in recorded history. Pretty scary, actually.

I'm 71. I've lived through multiple versions of American history, including a long overdue revisionism of the 'Lost Cause' myth of the Civil War. I lived through the 60's and Amerika. I'm fully aware of the almost toxic cynicism about American purposes that infects the teaching of American history these days. I believe I'm fully rational.

It is thus with absolute cold blood I opine that the Declaration of Independence is the single most important political document ever written - and George Washington the single most important man of the last millennia.

The easy egalitarianism we take for granted today, the freedom that too many human beings believe is the default state of human existence - none of this existed before Jefferson took pen to paper, to insist that a nation could be founded on these principles. Even at that, they are only a statement of lofty ideals, perhaps unworkable in real life, until someone proves that you actually can make a nation work. Washington above all, the Indispensable Man, proved out the practice.

The French Revolution, thirteen years later, produced all sorts of flowery sentiments. But for the next century, beginning with Talleyrand and Metternich, European reactionaries reminded true liberals that all that the energy had produced was Napoleon. That was the rationale for steadfast resistance to popular government. Later the Russian Revolution devolved to the same sort of totalitarianism, and all sorts of greater and lesser social movements in between. Perhaps there is some sort of cultural defect, perhaps a quirk in theory. But mostly . . .

. . . none of them had a personality like Washington, simultaneously a fervent believer in the Jeffersonian principles and basic moderation, who conducted himself in the Revolutionary War and in the initial two Presidential terms with an almost unnatural wisdom. For that reason, Metternich and other monarchists could prate as cynically as they liked about the inevitable decay and destruction of movements headed by the common man. But there was always that nation across the sea, that -despite all its problems and inconsistencies - WAS succeeding on those terms, and indeed expanding them, though not without the cost of a great Civil War. There was always that damned City on the Hill, a counterpoint to European monarchists - and, yes, I think City on the Hill is also a description drenched in ice-cold realism.

No one escapes his own times, and Washington and Jefferson were creatures of those times. They were slaveholders. But they were slaveholders at a time when it was the universal practice of mankind. What matters is not that they were men of their times, but that collectively they changed them. One created the intellectual machinery that transformed the world, the other proved that it was workable.

So, yeah, I think we should leave the statues up. Hell, we might even name the nation's capital after one of them.

(P.S. I haven't forgotten Alexander Hamilton. Not a slaveholder (which is why he is not in this debate) but what an interesting man. Someone should write a musical about him.)