“Negro President”: Jefferson and the Slave Power, by Garry Wills (Houghton Mifflin); An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America, by Henry Wiencek (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). “The overwhelming presence of slavery in early America,” according to the New York Times’ Gordon S. Wood, is “driving a huge rethinking of our history.” Slate
I say, it’s about time.
“If anything can take founders like Washington and Jefferson out of our present and place them back into the particular context of their time, it is this fact that they were slaveholders. Slavery is virtually inconceivable to us. We can scarcely imagine one person owning another for life. Seeing Washington and Jefferson as slaveholders, men who bought, sold and flogged slaves, [and fathered children by their slaves] has to change our conception of them. They don’t belong to us today; they belong to the 18th century, to that coarse and brutal world that is so remote from our own.”
We’re moving, as a nation, toward the right location to solve, and finally resolve the issues of our past. Just because I never met my great-grandfather, was born into slavery, doesn’t mean I am not affected by it. On the other side of my family the aunt of my grandmother who I did know, was also born into slavery. Mixed race people, like part of my family, lead to some issues that still affect my family. Part of my family in Georgia deny any blood relationship, even though it could be proven otherwise by DNA. That legacy, the legacy of this nation, needs to be understood but, not lingered over needlessly so that we can move on.