If you’ve been following the news lately, you’ve probably heard a lot of hype about how the mayor of Washington D.C. supposedly wants to tear down the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial. That’s not even remotely true. Right-wing media outlets and conservative pundits have been blatantly distorting the truth and blowing things totally out of proportion.
Here’s what actually happened: Muriel E. Bowser, the mayor of Washington D.C., commissioned a research committee known as the District of Columbia Facilities and Commemorative Expressions Working Group to come up with a list of federal monuments in the district that they think the government should “remove, relocate, or contextualize.”
The committee itself has no power to actually do anything to any of the monuments on its list. All it has the power to do is make recommendations. Furthermore, when it comes to structures like the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial, it’s pretty clear that the committee isn’t advocating for the government to just tear them down; what they’re probably thinking of is something more along the lines of putting up a sign noting some of the less-than-savory aspects of Washington and Jefferson’s lives. That’s what “contextualize” means.
Unfortunately, Fox News and other conservative media outlets are so hellbent on portraying liberals as deranged, frothing-at-the-mouth communist radicals who want to destroy American culture that they’ve seized on this committee’s recommendations of contextualization and spun it into a wildly distorted narrative of “the evil liberals want to tear down all the monuments in D.C.!”
A look at the federal monuments on the committee’s list
Now that I’ve hopefully cleared up what the list is really about, let’s take a look at some of the actual federal monuments that are on the list, the people they are supposed to honor, and why these historical figures might be seen as problematic.
Below is an image of the list of federal monuments that the mayor’s committee recommends removing, relocating, or contextualizing. We’ll go through each historical figure with a monument on the list one-by-one in the order that they are mentioned and talk about some of the things these historical figures did.
What a monument represents
Before we do that, though, let’s talk about what monuments are actually for. A lot of conservatives will try to insist that making any kind of changes to any kind of historical monument would be “erasing history.” This is not an accurate way of thinking about it, however.
As I discuss in this article about Confederate monuments from November 2019, the purpose of a monument is not to remember history. We remember history by writing about it in books and teaching our children about it in schools. The purpose of a monument is to glorifysomeone.
Being an important historical figure does not automatically mean that someone deserves a monument. For instance, Adolf Hitler was a very significant figure in the history of twentieth-century Germany, but there are very good reasons why there aren’t colossal marble statues of him all over Germany today.
It’s also important to remember that human beings are complicated. No person is completely good or completely evil and it is possible for a person to have done both great things and terrible things. (Even Hitler was—as bizarre as it may sound—very concerned about animal rights.) This is especially important to realize when talking about people like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who did some genuinely great things, but also committed atrocities.
ABOVE: Photograph of Adolf Hitler. Hitler is a very significant historical figure, but there are some very good reasons why people in Germany today aren’t building monuments to him.
Christopher Columbus
Now, with that out of the way, let’s talk about the mayor’s committee’s list. Christopher Columbus (lived 1451 – 1506) is the first figure who is mentioned on it. This makes a lot of sense, considering that Columbus was, quite frankly, a horrible person. I wrote an entire article two years ago about why we should not honor him, but I’ll give some of the highlights here.
Today, Christopher Columbus is popularly believed to have been first to propose that the earth is spherical and to have “discovered” the Americas. Neither of these things are true. In reality, by the time Columbus was born, the sphericity of the earth had already been common knowledge in Europe for around two thousand years.
The whole story about Columbus being laughed at by scholars for thinking the earth is a sphere is totally made up; it was popularized by the American writer Washington Irving through his pseudo-biography of Columbus titled A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, which was published in 1828.
Likewise, Columbus didn’t discover the Americas; there were at least fifty million people living in the Americas when he arrived and their ancestors had been living there for well over ten thousand years. It’s really hard to “discover” a place when there are already millions of people living there.
Columbus wasn’t even the first European to visit the Americas; the Norse founded a settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in what is now Newfoundland in the late tenth or early eleventh century—roughly 400 years before Columbus was even born.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a modern reconstruction of a medieval Norse sodhouse at the L’Anse aux Meadows settlement in Newfoundland
Thus, Columbus didn’t actually do any of the things he has traditionally been honored for. He did, however, brutally subjugate the native Arawak people of the Caribbean and force thousands of them into slavery. To give you an idea of the kind of conditions they faced, Michele da Cuneo, a childhood friend of Columbus who accompanied him on his second voyage, gives the following description in a letter dated to 28 October 1495 of how Columbus gave him a native woman to use as a sex slave:
“While I was in the boat, I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral [i.e. Columbus] gave to me. When I had taken her to my cabin she was naked—as was their custom. I was filled with a desire to take my pleasure with her and attempted to satisfy my desire. She was unwilling, and so treated me with her nails that I wished I had never begun. But—to cut a long story short—I then took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly, and she let forth such incredible screams that you would not have believed your ears. Eventually we came to such terms, I assure you, that you would have thought that she had been brought up in a school for whores.”
Not only did Columbus force native people into slavery, but, during his time as governor of the island of Hispaniola, he routinely used maiming, mutilation, and enslavement as punishments for even the most minor of offenses. Columbus was so brutal that his own Spanish subjects rebelled and, in 1500, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain actually removed him from his position as governor and had him and his brothers forcibly brought back to Spain.
They instated a man named Francisco de Bobadilla as Columbus’s successor as the governor of the colony of Hispaniola. Francisco conducted an investigation into Columbus’s abuses of power during his time as governor and produced a forty-eight-page report on the subject, which contains eyewitness testimony from twenty-three of Columbus’s own Spanish subjects.
According to the report, when a man stole a piece of corn, Columbus had the man’s nose and ears sliced off and sold him into slavery. When a woman insinuated that Columbus was of low birth, his brother Bartolomeo had her paraded through the streets naked and then had her tongue cut out. Christopher reportedly praised Bartolomeo for “defending the family.” When the native subjects rebelled against him, the report says that Columbus brutally massacred them and had their bloody, dismembered corpses paraded through the streets to discourage future revolts.
ABOVE: Nineteenth-century imaginative illustration of Francisco de Bobadilla arresting Christopher Columbus for his tyrannical misrule over Hispaniola
Francisco de Bobadilla eliminated the gold tax on the natives and governed Hispaniola for a relatively peaceful two years. His elimination of the gold tax, however, displeased the Spanish monarchs, so they removed him and replaced him with Nicolás de Ovando, who reinstated Columbus’s policies and was, if anything, even more brutal than Columbus himself. Later governors of the island, including Columbus’s son Diego, followed in his footsteps. As a result of this, within half a century of Columbus’s landing, the native Taíno people of Hispaniola were virtually exterminated.
Columbus hasn’t always been revered. During colonial times, people in the English colonies in North America generally regarded the Italian explorer John Cabot (lived c. 1450 – c. 1500), who sailed under the sponsorship of King Henry VII of England, more highly than Columbus. During the American Revolution, however, the colonists became desperate for an explorer-hero who wasn’t English or in any way affiliated with the English crown. They eventually settled on Christopher Columbus. That’s why our nation’s capital is named after him.
Columbus’s fame grew throughout the nineteenth century, in part due to Washington Irving’s fake biography of him. In 1882, the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization, was founded. In 1893, the city of Chicago hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition, a world’s fair in honor of the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s supposed “discovery” of the “New World.” It was around this time that people began pushing for Columbus Day to be made a national holiday.
In 1912, at the height of Christopher Columbus’s popularity, a marble fountain with a colossal statue of him was erected at Union Station in Washington D.C. Its dedication was celebrated with three days of parades and fireworks. The fountain has stood in the middle of the station ever since, although, in recent years, it has fallen into disrepair and the plumbing is no longer operational.
I don’t know exactly what we should do about the fountain. It’s over a century old, it’s a work of art, and it’s included on the National Register of Historic Places, but it glorifies a man who certainly does not deserve to be glorified. The best option might be to remove the parts of the fountain that relate to Columbus and replace them with sculptures commemorating someone else who actually deserves to have a fountain in our nation’s capital.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the colossal statue of Christopher Columbus in the fountain at Union Station in Washington D.C.
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin (lived 1706 – 1790) is revered as the perhaps first truly great American statesman and polymath. He invented the lightning rod, bifocals, the glass harmonica, the Franklin stove, and the flexible urinary catheter. In 1731, he founded the Library Company of Philadelphia. In 1736, he founded the Union Fire Company, one of the first volunteer fire departments in the English colonies. In 1749, he founded the University of Pennsylvania.
Franklin also played a pivotal role during the American Revolution. In June 1776, he helped draft the Declaration of Independence. From 1776 until 1785, he served as the United States’ first ambassador to France, where he played a crucial role in winning the support of the French king. In 1787, he was present at the Constitutional Convention. He is generally regarded as the most influential American politician who never became president.
That being said, as I discuss in this previous article from April 2017 about the Founding Fathers’ views on slavery, Benjamin Franklin did own enslaved people. He first became a slaveowner in 1735 when he was only around twenty-nine years old. Over the course of his lifetime, he owned seven slaves in total. He held racist views towards black people throughout most of his life and his newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, frequently printed advertisements for slave auctions.
As he grew older, though, Franklin began to turn against slavery. By 1781, he had freed all his remaining slaves. In the last few years of his life, he became an outspoken abolitionist. He became the president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery in 1787 and, in February of 1790, only two months before his death, he personally wrote a petition to Congress on behalf of the society arguing that slavery needed to be abolished as soon as possible. He letter concludes:
“Under these Impressions they [i.e. the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery] earnestly entreat your serious attention to the Subject of Slavery, that you will be pleased to countenance the Restoration of liberty to those unhappy Men [i.e. enslaved black people], who alone, in this land of Freedom, are degraded into perpetual Bondage, and who, amidst the general Joy of surrounding Freemen, are groaning in Servile Subjection, that you will devise means for removing this Inconsistency from the Character of the American People, that you will promote mercy and Justice towards this distressed Race, & that you will Step to the very verge of the Powers vested in you for discouraging every Species of Traffick in the Persons of our fellow men.”
Personally, I think Franklin redeemed himself on the issue of slavery. That being said, he did own slaves for over forty years and, even as an abolitionist, I’m not sure he ever entirely abandoned his old racist views.
In addition to his ownership of slaves, there are other other aspects of Franklin’s personality that are frankly less-than-admirable; for instance, he was a notorious womanizer, party-lover, and hellraiser. As a young man, he frequently visited prostitutes. Some of his surviving letters, especially one titled “Advice to a Friend on Choosing a Mistress” are highly obscene and frankly express a very sexist view of women.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the statue of Benjamin Franklin in Washington D.C.
Personally, I think that Benjamin Franklin ultimately did more good than harm. I do, however, think his statue in Washington D.C. should be relocated—not because of anything he did, but rather because of where the statue is currently located.
The statue of Benjamin Franklin that now stands in Washington D.C. was first dedicated in 1889. It was moved to its current location outside the Old Post Office Pavilion in 1980. Unfortunately, the Old Post Office Pavilion was leased to a holding company owned by the notorious Donald J. Trump in 2013 and has now been fully converted into the Trump International Hotel of Washington D.C.
I don’t think Benjamin Franklin would feel comfortable having his primary statue in the nation’s capital situated directly in front of the entrance to a Trump hotel. In fact, I’m almost wondering if the whole reason why the Franklin statue is on Mayor Bowser’s committee’s list is because of its extremely poor placement.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of people protesting outside the Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C. (i.e. the Old Post Office Pavilion) in 2017. The Franklin statue can be seen right outside the entrance to the hotel.
Andrew Jackson
Andrew Jackson (lived 1767 – 1845) gained national fame as a general through his stunning victory over the British army in the Battle of New Orleans on 8 January 1815. He went on to found the modern Democratic Party and serve as the seventh president of the United States from 1829 until 1837. He portrayed himself as a man of the people, standing up for ordinary Americans against big banks and corporations, and as a proponent of radical democracy. The extent to which this portrayal is accurate is debatable.
As much as Jackson liked to portray himself as a hero for the “common man,” he was actually extraordinarily wealthy. He lived in a huge mansion on a plantation in Nashville, Tennessee, known as the Hermitage, where he owned roughly two hundred enslaved people. As a direct consequence of him owning hundreds of enslaved people himself, he was fiercely opposed to the abolition of slavery.
Jackson’s ownership of slaves is only the beginning of why he is such a problematic figure, though; in 1830, he signed the Indian Removal Act, which instigated the brutal and systematic ethnic cleansing of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole tribes from the southeastern United States. These peoples had been living there for thousands of years and, at the time Jackson ordered their removal, they were living peacefully for the most part. The only reason for removing them was because the white settlers wanted their land.
Tens of thousands of members of the tribes indigenous to the southeastern United States were forced to leave their homes and march through the rain, sleet, and snow to the land west of the Mississippi River that is now the state of Oklahoma. Most of them were only able to bring what they could carry, meaning they had to leave most of their possessions behind. They were forced to travel without adequate food, clothing, or supplies. Thousands of them died along the journey.
Alexis de Tocqueville, a left-wing French political thinker who greatly admired the United States, personally witnessed the forced removal of the Choctaw people in 1831 near Memphis Tennessee. He describes his horror at the encounter as follows in his book Democracy in America:
“In the whole scene there was an air of ruin and destruction, something which betrayed a final and irrevocable adieu; one couldn’t watch without feeling one’s heart wrung. The Indians were tranquil, but sombre and taciturn. There was one who could speak English and of whom I asked why the Chactas were leaving their country. ‘To be free,’ he answered. I could never get any other reason out of him. One must confess that it is a singular fate that brought us to Memphis to watch the expulsion, one can say the dissolution, of one of the most celebrated and ancient American peoples.”
These death marches have become known to history as the “Trail of Tears” and they remain one of the worst atrocities committed by the United States government.
ABOVE: The Trail of Tears, painted in 1942 by the American painter Robert Lindneux
Unfortunately, many white settlers at the time strongly approved of Andrew Jackson’s brutal policies against the Native Americans. He was regarded as a hero within his own lifetime. Seven years after his death, in 1852, a bronze equestrian statue of him was erected in the center of Lafayette Square in Washington D.C., showing him in military uniform with his horse dramatically rearing back on its hind legs.
In recent years, Andrew Jackson has begun to be reevaluated in much the same way that Christopher Columbus has. Personally, I think that Jackson’s legacy is more complicated than Columbus’s, since Jackson did play an important role in shaping our democracy. Nonetheless, on account of his ownership of enslaved people and his ethnic cleansing against the Native Americans, I think he ultimately did more harm than good.
I’m not entirely sure what should be done about the statue of him in Lafayette Square, since it is a historic landmark that is well over a century old, but I’m inclined to think that it should be removed from its current location and maybe put in a museum where it can be viewed as a historical artifact rather than a living memorial. At the very least, his statue needs some seriouscontextualization. Continuing to honor Jackson as a hero is an insult to the black people he enslaved and the Native Americans he forcibly removed.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square in Washington D.C.
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson (lived 1743 – 1826) is one of the United States’ most revered Founding Fathers. In 1776, he was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence. He was the one who wrote these immortal words:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Jefferson dedicated almost his entire adult life to public service. From 1785 to 1789, he served as the United States’ second ambassador to France. From 1790 to 1793, he served as our country’s first Secretary of State. During his time as Secretary of State, he founded the Democratic-Republican Party, the immediate predecessor to today’s Democratic Party. From 1797 to 1801, he served under President John Adams as our country’s second vice president.
Then, from 1801 to 1809, Jefferson served as our country’s third president. During his time as president, he made the Louisiana Purchase, which nearly doubled the size of the United States. In 1819, after his retirement from public office, he founded the University of Virginia, the first completely secular public university in the United States.
Unfortunately, Jefferson’s essential role in the founding of our country is complicated by the fact that he owned over six hundred enslaved people over the course of his lifetime—more than any other president in all of United States history. An FAQ about slavery on the official Monticello website clarifies:
“Thomas Jefferson enslaved over 600 human beings throughout the course of his life. 400 people were enslaved at Monticello; the other 200 people were held in bondage on Jefferson’s other properties. At any given time, around 130 people were enslaved at Monticello.”
It is true that Jefferson nominally deplored slavery in writing, calling it a “moral depravity,” an “abominable crime,” and a “hideous blot.” He even said that it was the greatest threat to fledgling American democracy. Despite this, over the course of his entire lifetime, Jefferson only set two of the people he owned as slaves free. He set five more free in his will. All his other slaves were sold after his death to cover his debts.
There is strong evidence that the slaves on Jefferson’s plantation were brutally abused and mistreated on a daily basis. For instance, the nail factory at Monticello was staffed solely by enslaved children. A report written in Jefferson’s Farm Book by his son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph Jr. records that the enslaved children didn’t like showing up early in the morning during the cold of winter to work at the nailery, but the overseer scourged them all “for truancy,” which made things run much more smoothly.
Jefferson was also an avowed white supremacist and he firmly believed that non-white people had no place in American society. He regarded all black people as naturally inferior to white people, calling them “as incapable as children.” He supported the gradual end of slavery through voluntary manumission, but believed that black people would have to all be shipped back to Africa once they were free so that the United States could become a homogenous white society.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the present-day vegetable garden at Monticello, where the over six hundred people enslaved by Thomas Jefferson were forced to work
As I discuss in this article from November 2019, Jefferson’s hypocrisy over slavery was pointed out at the time. On 19 August 1791, the prominent black abolitionist writer Benjamin Banneker (lived 1731 – 1806) wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson in which he quotes back Jefferson’s own words from the Declaration of Independence and indicts Jefferson of hypocrisy, writing:
“Sir how pitiable is it to reflect, that altho you were so fully convinced of the benevolence of the Father of mankind, and of his equal and impartial distribution of those rights and privileges which he had conferred upon them, that you should at the Same time counteract his mercies, in detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren under groaning captivity and cruel oppression, that you should at the Same time be found guilty of that most criminal act, which you professedly detested in others, with respect to yourselves.”
Unfortunately, Jefferson did far more than just own slaves; he also sexually exploited them.
Jefferson’s wife Martha Jefferson was the daughter of John Wayles, a wealthy plantation owner. Wayles repeatedly had sex with an enslaved black woman named Betty Hemings and, in around 1773, she gave birth to a daughter named Sally Hemings. Because her mother was a slave, Sally was a slave as well. When John Wayles died that same year, his daughter Martha inherited all his slaves. Thus, Sally Hemings passed into Thomas Jefferson’s possession.
Martha Jefferson died in 1782, but her half-sister, the young Sally Hemings, was said to bear a striking resemblance to her. In 1787, Sally Hemings, who was only fourteen years old at the time, was chosen to accompany Thomas Jefferson to Paris. At some point between her arrival in Paris and her return to Virginia in 1790 at the age of about seventeen, Thomas Jefferson began having sex with her. Over the course of the following years, Sally Hemings gave birth to six children. Jefferson is believed to have been the father of all of them.
When word first got out of Jefferson’s affair with Sally Hemings in 1802, it created an enormous stir. Jefferson’s political enemies used rumors of the affair against him, portraying him as a lecher. For nearly two centuries, historians tried to deny that Jefferson really had an affair with Sally Hemings, but a series of genetic studies conducted between 1998 and 2001 effectively confirmed that Jefferson really was the father of Hemings’s children.
ABOVE: A lewd political cartoon from c. 1804, mocking Thomas Jefferson’s notorious affair with his slave Sally Hemings
The Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C. was constructed between 1939 and 1943. Built in the Neoclassical style, it is one of this country’s most beloved landmarks. The survey “America’s Favorite Architecture” conducted in 2007 and 2008 under the sponsorship of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) found that the Jefferson Memorial was the fourth most admired work of architecture in the United States and the most admired memorial building. I’m personally going to have to agree with them; it truly is an extraordinarily beautiful building.
This puts us in a very difficult situation. How do we deal with the fact that a building that is widely agreed to be one of the most beautiful in the United States is effectively a temple to a man who held over six hundred human beings in bondage and kept a teenaged girl as his personal sex slave? We rightly regard Jeffrey Epstein as a monster for engaging in the sexual trafficking of teenaged girls, but, for some reason, we have a tendency to excuse Thomas Jefferson.
I think that, no matter what, the Jefferson Memorial should remain standing, since it is historic building and a truly magnificent work of architecture—but it cannot remain the way it is. Right now, the Jefferson Memorial only tells one part of the story of Thomas Jefferson.
The story of those six hundred some enslaved black people who worked on his plantation at Monticello matters, not just because it tells us a lot about what our country was like in the days when it was founded, but also because it tells us a lot about what our country is like now; there are probably thousands of people alive today who are descended from Thomas Jefferson’s slaves. Honoring Jefferson for all the good he did without acknowledging the bad is an insult to all those people.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C. from across the Tidal Basin at dusk
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the main entry to the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the colossal statue of Thomas Jefferson inside the Jefferson Memorial
George Mason
George Mason (lived 1725 – 1792) is best known today as the primary author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, on which the United States Bill of Rights is based. Mason was also one of the foremost proponents of the addition of a Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution. Without him, we probably wouldn’t have a federal Bill of Rights at all.
Despite this, Mason personally owned over a hundred enslaved people. He owned more enslaved people than anyone else in Fairfax County, Virginia, other than George Washington himself. Although he denounced the slave trade, as far as we know, he never set a single one of the people he enslaved free.
The George Mason Memorial stands in West Potomac Park in Washington D.C. Its construction was first authorized in 1990. Construction on the memorial began in 2000 and the completed memorial was officially dedicated in 2002.
I don’t think that the George Mason Memorial should be torn down, but I do think it should be contextualized. Whatever good Mason did for this country will forever be tainted by his association with slavery and, once again, if we don’t contextualize his memorial, we are directly insulting the people he owned as slaves and their living descendants.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the George Mason Memorial in Washington D.C.
Francis Griffith Newlands
Francis Griffith Newlands (lived 1846 – 1917) was a United States representative and Senator from the state of Nevada. He didn’t own slaves, but he was an extremely outspoken supporter of white supremacy and segregation. He once wrote: “blacks are a race of children requiring guidance, industrial training and development of self-control.”
Newlands publicly argued that non-white immigrants should be banned from entering the United States. He strongly supported restricting the rights of black Americans and, in 1912, he argued in favor of flat-out repealing the Fifteenth Amendment, which grants suffrage to all citizens, regardless of skin color.
There’s frankly no good reason why Newlands should have a monument in our nation’s capital. Fortunately, his monument in Washington D.C. is just a fountain without any statues or huge inscriptions, which should make it fairly easy to rename.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Francis Griffith Newlands Memorial Fountain in Washington D.C.
Albert Pike
Albert Pike (lived 1809 – 1891) was a lawyer, poet, writer, and Freemason. Perhaps surprisingly, as a lawyer, he was a tireless defender of the rights of Native Americans and he actually won several huge settlements for them from the United States government.
Unfortunately, he held extremely racist views towards black people. In the years before the Civil War, he owned at least one slave. He claimed that slavery was a “necessary evil” because he thought that black people were naturally so stupid and lazy that they would be incapable of surviving on their own in the civilized world.
After his home state of Arkansas voted to secede from the Union in May 1861, Pike became an avowed supporter of the Confederacy. During the Civil War, Pike served as a brigadier general in the Confederate army. He trained three regiments of Native Americans—most of whom came from the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole tribes—to serve as Confederate soldiers.
His time as an officer was short-lived, however, because, after his troops saw combat for the first time in the Battle of Pea Ridge in March 1862, he was accused of having allowed his troops to scalp Union soldiers while they were still alive. He submitted his resignation on 12 July 1862.
After the war, Pike remained an ardent supporter of white supremacy and was staunchly opposed to suffrage for black people. He was a member of the Committee of the Citizens of Little Rock and Pulaski County and, in 1858, along with eleven other members of the committee, he signed a circular that called for white citizens to forcibly expel all black people from the state of Arkansas. He is also rumored to have been a high-ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Pike was instrumental in developing many of the rites and rituals used in Scottish Rite Freemasonry. In 1871, he published a book titled Morals and Dogmas of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, which remains an important text for Freemasons even today. (The book itself is controversial, though, since substantial portions of it are plagiarized from the French occultist Éliphas Lévi.)
A memorial for Pike was erected in Judiciary Square in Washington D.C. in 1901. The memorial included a bronze statue of Pike depicting him as a Freemason, standing atop a granite pedestal. For many decades, it was the only outdoor monument in Washington D.C. honoring a Confederate military officer.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Albert Pike Memorial in Washington D.C. as it appeared in 2008
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Albert Pike memorial statue in Washington D.C.
On 19 June 2020, a group of protesters spray-painted Black Lives Matter slogans on the pedestal of the statue, toppled the statue itself with ropes and chains, doused it in flammable liquid, and set it on fire. Only the pedestal on which the statue once stood remains standing. The debate over what to do with the statue and the now-empty pedestal remains ongoing.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the pedestal of the Albert Pike Memorial taken on 2 July 2020
George Washington
George Washington (lived 1732 – 1799) is by far one of the most revered figures in all of United States history. He is known as the “Father of His Country.” He served as the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolution. Without his leadership, the United States probably wouldn’t exist as an independent nation today. From 1789 until 1797, he served as the first president of the United States. His presidency set the direct precedent for all future presidencies.
At the same time, George Washington was a lifelong slaveowner; his parents owned enslaved people when he was growing up and he personally inherited ten enslaved people upon the death of his father Augustine in 1743 when he was only eleven years old.
In some ways, Washington was less cruel to his slaves than some other slaveowners in Virginia during his time. For instance, he insisted on keeping enslaved families together, which was something that many other slaveowners didn’t do. Likewise, there is no evidence that Washington ever forced any of his slaves to perform sexual favors for him, which at least puts him a step up from Thomas Jefferson.
On the other hand, Washington was extremely demanding towards his slaves. Washington was an obsessive workaholic and he expected the enslaved people he owned to work just as hard as he did. He forced them to work from dawn till dusk, six days a week. When they didn’t work as hard as he wanted them to, he had them whipped. Richard Parkinson, one of Washington’s neighbors, wrote that Washington treated his slaves “…with more severity than any other man.” On one occasion, he ordered for an enslaved man to be whipped just for walking on the grass.
He was also relentless in his pursuit of slaves who tried to run away and passed laws that made it easier for slaveowners to pursue escaped slaves. In February 1793, he signed the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it a federal crime to assist an escaped slave in any way or interfere with efforts to recapture an escaped slave and made it legal for slavecatchers to hunt for escaped slaves in every state and every territory.
When an enslaved woman named Oney Judge escaped from Washington’s captivity in 1796, Washington posted advertisements for her capture in dozens of major newspapers and dispatched agents to hunt her down and bring her back. He continued his ruthless mission to hunt her down for three years until he finally died in 1799.
ABOVE: Washington as a Farmer at Mount Vernon, painted in 1851 by Junius Brutus Stearns—a heavily idealized and inaccurate representation of George Washington as a kind slaveowner
Up until the American Revolution, Washington doesn’t seem to have even questioned the morality of owning slaves; he just accepted slavery as normal and natural. After the revolution, Washington’s views on slavery began to change. He began to express discomfort with the idea of slavery in private—but he never spoke out publicly against the practice.
At the time of Washington’s death in 1799, there were no less than 317 slaves working on his plantation at Mount Vernon. He personally owned 123 of them. Another 153 of them belonged to his wife’s family. The remaining forty-one slaves belonged to other people, who loaned them to him.
Washington stipulated in his will that all 123 of the slaves he personally owned were to be set free upon the death of his wife Martha. Martha, however, ended up signing a order to free all her late husband’s slaves in December 1800 because she was afraid that the slaves would try to murder her for their freedom. The 153 slaves belonging to Martha’s family were never set free and, upon her death, were inherited by her grandchildren.
In addition to owning slaves, during his time as commander-in-chief, Washington also ordered the violent destruction of Native American communities that had aligned with the British. For instance, in 1779, he ordered General John Sullivan to totally destroy all the villages of the Iroquois nation and to take their women and children as hostages. As president, he permitted the further encroachment of white settlers onto native land.
Despite his many misdeeds, Washington was greatly beloved among white settlers. Upon his death, Major-General Henry Lee III famously described him as “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” The Washington Monument in D.C. was constructed in two phases. The first phase lasted from 1848 to 1854. During this phase of construction, slave labor was almost certainly used to haul the stones from the quarries, which were in Maryland. The second phase of construction began in 1879, after slavery was abolished, and lasted until 1884.
As with the Jefferson Memorial, I don’t think that the Washington Monument should be torn down under any circumstances, but it would be good to add a sign or something to remind people that, while Washington may have been instrumental in the founding of this country, he was also a ruthless slave-driver and a destroyer of native communities.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Washington Monument in the center of the National Mall in Washington D.C.
Conclusion
I understand that many people do not want to hear anything I am saying, that they will call me “unpatriotic” for pointing out the flaws of some of our country’s most beloved national heroes. This is a conversation we need to be having, though. If we continue to deny that the Founding Fathers and other revered figures from our past were deeply, deeply flawed human beings, that isn’t history; that’s idolatry.
True history is not always pleasant. It doesn’t inspire patriotism. It doesn’t make people proud of their ancestry. Instead, it has a tendency to make people uncomfortable. The people we admire are seldom worthy of the admiration we give them. Though their actions may be significant, those actions are not always good.
This doesn’t mean that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are “cancelled,” but it does mean that we need to think really hard about the ways we choose to honor them. Likewise, this isn’t about “erasing history”; if anything, it is about correcting history, since the history we’ve told for so long is incomplete.
Imposing our contemporary moral principles on another period in history is something we are constantly reminded not to do. The Founding fathers did not live in our world. The fact that some of them, like Franklin, or even Jefferson, came to question slavery and then abhor it, is a sign of their intelligence and moral compass, going well beyond their time.
A word about TJ. We know, I think, that when his wife died, TJ was not yet 40. She asked of him that he did not marry again, as she did not want her children raised by another woman. We know that he loved her and honoured her wishes. You will say this is no excuse, but think again of the context of the 1780s, as you yourself urged everybody to contextualize. You are asking for a fairly young man to be celibate. I’m not sure we should be asking this of anyone. Sleeping with a slave was a common practice at that time, not a crime, not even a moral question. Choosing Sally, his wife’s half sister, and not some other slave, shows how important his wife continued to be for him after her death.
TJ also had debts and when we think about why he did not free his slaves, we have to think about those. The debts were so high that Monticello had to be sold after his death. TJ sold his books, although he loved them so dearly and were so much part of who he was. It was not enough, not by far. TJ could not have freed his slaves, paid his debts and continue to live at Monticello. It was a life dilemma, a question of life or death. We are asking of TJ to renounce who he was (an American aristocrat) to live in poverty and do nothing to provide for his daughters, who were wholly dependent on him. This is asking a great deal of a human being who wanted, like everyone else, to snatch a little happiness in his life.
As I point out in my article, there were people in Thomas Jefferson’s time who recognized that slavery is morally wrong and that it is morally wrong for a master to have sex with an enslaved teenaged girl. I’m not imposing any moral standards on Thomas Jefferson that he wouldn’t have been familiar with.
Thank you for this. Please give me a few examples, the academic way so that I can verify, and I’ll concede, of course. It is not enough to talk in general terms.
As you said yourself, history is not pleasant and quite different from moral ideals.
There were a few opponents of slavery at the time who held positions in opposition to slavery more radical and consistent than Jefferson’s. Benjamin Banneker being one example mentioned in the article. A few other examples might be John Jay, Thomas Paine, and Jefferson’s good friends in France Brissot, Condorcet, and Lafayette. That being said, Jefferson was generally regarded in his time as being on the anti-slavery side of the debate, even though his positions seem questionable, racist, and paternalistic by modern standards, and he wasn’t nearly as radical on this position as the others I mentioned.
Roxana Preda,
You are proving with your contemporary apologist rationalization that this is *not* a matter of imposing “our” more advanced modern morals on a benighted past. In Thomas Jefferson’s time there were both abolitionists and people critical of his rape of an enslaved teenager, as there are today. That you are not among us today in criticizing that behavior whenever it may have occurred shows that even today some people have not morally developed out of that level of racist and sexist moral thinking. There is still oppression of both these kinds today, by the way, which ranges from the subtle apologist type to the graphically, physically brutal and murderous. The former upholds the latter and keeps it happening in our current experience. Please rethink which side of that ongoing struggle you want to be on. Is admiring someone dead because he is a member of your race that you want to feel pride in more important than standing for the justice, safety and peace among your living fellow Americans and fellow humans who are suffering still under cruel and unsustainable inequities that you have the privilege to deny and pretend to have outgrown? Really?
I have read many of TJ’s letters and was impressed by his intellect, generosity and open-mindedness. I find it hard to reconcile them with the image of a sexual predator. This is one of America’s best presidents and has very few peers. It is just too easy to judge from the safe distance of unassailable principles.
Please also bear in mind that girls were routinely exploited sexually two or three centuries ago. A princess was white and privileged, yet married at ten, or earlier, for a political purpose. She may have had nice dresses and plenty to eat, but the sexual exploitation was the same. At thirteen she could be a mother. At 18, she could be unlucky and murdered or discarded. History is chock full with the tragedies of teenage girls.
And as for myself, I cannot unread those letters to please anyone.
I know it’s hard to reconcile the noble ideas that Thomas Jefferson espoused publicly with the acts of cruel depravity that he engaged in privately. That’s precisely the point of my article. He was a complicated man and it does us no good to deify him and make him into an idol. There are good things he did that we can admire him for, but there are also some really bad things he did that we should remember as well.
Regarding princesses in western Europe in pre-modern times, you’re exaggerating a bit; it’s true that princesses were generally married quite young, but they usually were not married off until they were at least teenagers. A princess might have been engaged at the age of ten, but she probably wouldn’t have been married until she was at least fourteen or fifteen. Even Catherine Howard, the youngest of all Henry VIII’s wives, was about seventeen at the time he married her. That’s still really young and it’s still really messed up that he married her at that age, but it’s not quite as extreme as you were making it sound.
Also, to be very clear, it was not normal for kings in western Europe in pre-modern times to behead their own wives; the reason you hear so much about how Henry VIII beheaded two of his own wives is because it was seen as very shocking and unusual, even at the time. A far more typical English king in this regard was Henry VIII’s father Henry VII, who married his wife Elizabeth of York (i.e. Henry VIII’s mother) in 1486 when she was nearly twenty years old. They remained married for seventeen years until she died in childbirth on 11 February 1503 at the age of thirty-seven. He mourned her death greatly and never remarried.
You can disagree with Roxana, but characterizing them as a racist is extremely unfair. Disagreement on a matter of historical interpretation is not the same as disagreement on the political and moral position that all people are equal.
Ned Borninski, and yet certain historical interpretations have the effect of whitewashing history and reinforcing readings of some people as “everyone” and others as “no one.” When someone proposes that everyone in a given time period took for granted that enslaved people were property or teenage girls were to be forced into marriage or sex slavery as a matter of course, it says that people in these categories were not people, were not anyone who dissented and they had no allies who saw them as people. We know not one of these things is true. So what do you call a false interpretation that upholds a traditional but false set of power categories along gendered and racial lines if not a racist narrative? I do not call individuals “racists” because they will either claim to agree or disagree with a statement that people of different races are or aren’t equal. Anyone can make a racist statement without meaning to due to the embedded quality of racism in the culture. Racism is the default thinking in a number of dominant institutions and practices and when we argue to justify it rather than identify and ameliorate it, that argumentation is racist whether we would like it to be or not. No personal offense at all intended to you, Ned, or Roxana, both of whom are doing a good job of not taking comments personally that are systemic and addressing content rather than personal character. I did not say anyone *is* an intentional and ideological racist or white supremacist. I can see that you do not identify yourselves as such. I am hoping that as intelligent and educated people with the capacity to identify and empathize with others you will be able to reflect on how you might read this conversation if you were African American, for example, and reconsider some of the contentions.
Been following your blog for a while and I overall agree with you that contextualizing monuments is a good idea. However, I have to disagree on two points:
1. The proposal from the DC committee may not have been intended to result in the removal of these monuments but I don’t think it was that unreasonable for people to have thought it was. The proposal did not make any differentiation between the monuments which should be removed and the monuments which should be contextualized. In addition, the DC committee’s standards of evaluating historical figures are highly questionable. They looked at the racism, sexism, and homophobia of various historical figures, which is all well and good, but they left out other significant atrocities which to me are even worse than the aforementioned. For instance, nobody seems to be talking about contextualizing Alexander Hamilton’s monuments even though, as you pointed out in your post earlier this summer, he devoted his entire career to suppressing democracy in the United States and establishing authoritarianism. There’s also the fact that, as you pointed out, he wasn’t nearly as opposed to slavery as the musical makes it seem. I think it is highly questionable how we tend to overly focus on the racism of various historical figures, which certainly should be considered, while ignoring other important issues. Another example with regard to Hamilton would be his religious intolerance: Hamilton did not believe in religious freedom and wanted American society to be for Christians only, a point which was opposed by many other Founders at the time who supported religious freedom and separation of church and state. But it seems like the DC committee did not even take this into account… So, while I’m in favor of contextualizing monuments and adding information about these figures’ negative qualities, I don’t think it was unreasonable to question the DC Committee’s proposals.
2. I believe you have mischaracterized Thomas Jefferson. Obviously, he was a slave owner, which is an atrocity, but I don’t agree with characterizing his relationship with Sally Hemings as being a forced one. On this issue I highly recommend the work of Harvard historian Annette Gordon-Reed, who was the historian who brought mainstream attention to the Jefferson-Hemings relationship in the first place. She has extensively discussed this relationship and deals with this issue directly, and she does not come to that conclusion. Nobody’s saying Thomas Jefferson was a perfect person, but I think a comparison to Jeffrey Epstein is unwarranted. And contrary to the commenter above me, most of the criticism directed at Jefferson over Sally Hemings was directed at him for racist reasons, portraying him as a practitioner of miscegenation and a naive egalitarian who was seduced by a slave into supporting abolition. Jefferson was even often accused of fomenting slave revolt, and for good reason as he was one of the more outspoken opponents of slavery among the Founders at the time, ironically enough, given his ownership of slaves. Jefferson arguably did even more than Franklin to oppose slavery, with his many proposals to limit and gradually abolish the practice. There is a reason Jefferson was the Founder that abolitionists most often went to for support, both during his life and after. The criticism over Jefferson sleeping with Hemings did not focus on his having power over her, in part because men having power over women was standard in that patriarchal society. As Gordon-Reed points out, arguing that an imbalance of power, even a huge one like slave and master, automatically makes a relationship forced, would result in categorizing the vast majority of heterosexual relationships at the time as being forced. Doing so removes the agency of women at the time. I agree with Gordon-Reed and question the idea that the fact that it was legal for Jefferson to rape Hemings means that is automatically what happened. I believe that a romantic relationship, as odd as it may sound between a master and a slave, is more likely.
Additionally, while slavery must be included in any analysis of Jefferson’s life, he comes off as better than other Founders on a lot of other issues. He did not share Hamilton, Washington, and Adams’ political authoritarianism, and he was a strong defender of religious freedom in contrast to some other Founders who wanted freedom for Christians only. He also believed in relative economic equality.
All that being said, I agree that it may be a good move to include some information on Jefferson’s involvement in slavery at his memorial, especially as the words the memorial includes have been selectively quote-mined to make him seem less racist than he actually was.
Either way, despite my partial disagreement with your characterization of these things, your blog is still very interesting. Thank you for helping to spread historical awareness.
People like heroes, and definite answers to questions, and they don’t like having to think in nuanced ways. And we find it uncomfortable to confront the fact that the current prosperity of Europe and its former colonies is in large part founded on the genocide, enslavement, and exploitation of non-Europeans. If we had treated the aboriginal peoples in a just way, there would simply be no USA, or Canada (my country), or Australia as we know them. If the British had not conquered India, would it have had the wealth to become the nation it is today? Etc, for the rest of the colonial powers.
And what attitude should we take to the sins of our forebears? I do ethical theory for a hobby (I have eccentric hobbies). Morality is essentially a social phenomenon, and what we de facto think is right and wrong strongly tends to be what our culture thinks it is (i.e. as a practical matter, relativism holds). I think it’s a very difficult problem to get beyond that to anything more objective.
Roxana,
I am not asking you to unread the letters of Thomas Jefferson, nor give up any indebtedness to him or to the European colonizing culture whosd fruits we all enjoy in varying portions. Like Spencer Alexander McDaniel, I am advocating for contextualizing truthfully, giving history a context that sees all people in our story as people rather than divide our ancestors into heroes and non-entities. Sexual predators are not worthless monsters, by the way. They are often charismatic, highly trusted and credible people who do good things enough that they will be believed and supported more than those they abuse who are selected because the perpetrator sees them as vulnerable, accessible and less credible — or able to be *made so* with impunity. Even now, large portions of the voting public support a proven liar who admits openly to sexual harrassment of women and “wishes (a sex trafficker) well,” publicly, repeatedly. Voters believe at his word that a man who was instrumental in creating VAWA and wrote the “Dear Colleague Letter” — instrumental in improving campus response to sex abuse allegations and the Me Too Movement — is the more deadly perpetrator because he smells people’s hair. Trump is to Biden what Jackson is to Franklin in the above article, loosely. There are people who do introspection and grow and try to leave things better than they inherited them and there are people who shrug and say, oh well, it is what it is and do relentless harm while feeling entitled. It is not enough to intend no harm. Impact is what must be acknowledged.
“In addition to his ownership of slaves, there are other other aspects of Franklin’s personality that are frankly less-than-admirable; for instance, he was a notorious womanizer, party-lover, and hellraiser. As a young man, he frequently visited prostitutes”
There’s nothing wrong with prostitution but even if there were, Franklin, from your description, seems to have only done that when he was younger. The rest of your description about “party-lover, hellraiser” could aptly describe your colleagues at IU, a notorious party school as everyone in the Midwest knows. Your school literally appeared in those old “I’m Shmacked” videos, an honor reserved only for the most rowdy party schools in the country. I would say it’s akin to the pot calling the kettle “black” but that could be seen as racist. FWIW Franklin was never an official member of the Hell-Fire Club, even though he attended often, mostly for bachelor reasons. I haven’t seen any evidence that he was seriously into the occult but there’s nothing wrong with that.
First of all, I am not saying that there is anything inherently morally wrong with people partying; I have merely stated that womanizing, excessive partying, and engaging in riotous behavior are generally not admirable qualities.
Moreover, how does the fact that other people who happen to go to the same university as me engage in activities that I have described as “less-than-admirable” make me a hypocrite? I have personally never gone out partying in my life and I don’t even generally hang out with people who regularly go out partying. Saying that I am somehow morally responsible for the actions of other people who go to the same university as me is like saying that anyone who goes to Harvard is somehow morally responsible for all Ted Kaczynski’s crimes; it’s a perfectly ridiculous assertion.