Our slave-owning founding fathers

I've been holding onto this article since the 4th of July and meaning to post about it. The Washington Post ran an article last week about the archaeological dig going on in Philadelphia of the so-called "First White House." This is the home that Washington and Adams used when the nation's capital was in Philadelphia. The dig has attracted a lot of attention not only because it is where our first two presidents lived but also because of what it tells us about the slaves Washington owned. It's not a flattering picture of our first president. (John Adams, our second president, did not own slaves.)

The dig supports information gleaned from Washington's personal correspondence and publicised in recent biographies. Washington shuttled his slaves back and forth from his home in Virginia to his lodging in Philadelphia in order to avoid Pennsylvania laws that allowed slaves to go free after six months of residency in the state. He his this from his slaves and from authorities in Pennsylvania. Also, he tried to get federal authorise to help him pursue a runaway slave. In fact, this house is where Washington signed the Fugitive Slave Act which allowed slave owners to pursue escaped slaves as "lost property." (See another article in the San Diego Union Tribune)

This side of Washington is disturbing, because it reveals a side of Washington that is cruel and inhumane--images that clash with our popular mythology of him as an honest and just and heroic leader. In a sense, this is a microcosm of our entire history as a nation. Mixed in with incredible ideas about freedom and justice are cruel acts and policies--slavery, genocide against Native Americans, etc. This is what I was trying to get at on July 1 when I preached about the Christian's allegiance to God before the state which I titled "A Lover's Quarrel With America" using a phrase by William Sloane Coffin.

Our nation's history is a complicated one and it must be confronted in all its complexity. Those who claim that our nation is a Christian nation founded by Christians must in all honesty wrestle with the fact that those early Americans, among whom were many Christians, also happened to be capable of extreme cruelty. Washington's legacy of slave ownership is one example of this complexity.

Grace and Peace,

Chase