Uncancelled History with Douglas Murray | EP. 06 George Washington

hello I'm Douglas Murray and welcome to uncanceled history today I'm talking with Professor Alan galzo about George Washington the director of the James Madison program and Senior research scholar in the Council of the humanities at Princeton University he was previously the director of Civil War era studies and the Henry R loose professor of the Civil War era at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg Pennsylvania today on uncanceled history George Washington Professor Garza thank you so much for joining me Douglas it's a particularly pleasure to be here in the studio and being able to talk to your audience and to you about well the man whom everyone agrees more or less was the father of our country I wanted to start by putting to you something that was penned in the Washington Post just recently in an op-ed a student at George Washington University wrote that George Washington University ought to change its name the argument was that a new name would cement the University's dedication to racial Justice and affirm its commitment to change it's time to take action of course putting aside for a moment the fact that if we're going to change the name of George Washington University perhaps we'll also have to change the name of the Washington Post what do you have to say to claims like this sometimes I think it's because we don't understand the character of Washington sometimes I think it's because we don't understand our own history sometimes I think it's because you can get a lot of attention if you were to suggest that some more insignificant figure in American history gave people questions and qualms you might not notice it but if you raise a question about George Washington you got everybody's attention right away and I will concede this much to the student's op-ed George Washington was an owner of slaves in fact by the time it was death in 1799 he was the owner of some 317 slaves at Mount Vernon and the Farms that were part of the Mount Vernon system so he does have one point right George Washington was a slaveholder and today as we reflect back on that that that is a questionable aspect not only of our history as a nation but it's a questionable aspect about the character of the people who were its founders and I think it does bear looking into now I'm not inclined to draw the conclusion he draws that we need to well shall we say x out completely the name of Washington but I think we do need to conduct a serious inquiry that says who was this man Washington what's it mean for him to be a slaveholder what did it also mean that in spite of being a slaveholder he becomes reenironed as the great champion of American Liberty how do all these pieces fit together in so doing we may actually come not to a point of provocation we may actually come to a point of Greater understanding when we look more carefully at this and I think and I think that my response then would be to this student let's sit down and reason together let's try to understand who George Washington was because the answers to the questions that are raised by that op-ed are not simplistic and they're not easy and we shouldn't treat them that way so let's start at the beginning who was George Washington George Washington was born on the Northern neck of Virginia that's the northernmost peninsula of Virginia boundaried by the Rappahannock River on the shower I found the Potomac River on the North he's the son of a minor landowner and slaveholder too he has a distinct opportunity and and let's call it a Yen for military action military service military Glory and as a young man he becomes part of the Virginia militia at the outbreak of the Seven Years War he is swept up into that conflict because Virginia is a British colony this is which yeah this is in the 1750s and Virginia being a British colony one of the 13 Mainland North American colonies they are brought into this war in a conflict with France and its North American Empire so he is involved first and foremost in fighting this Great War actually in some senses the first World War uh against the French after that he settles into the life of a country gentleman at his estate Mount Vernon on the Potomac River but then in the 1770s comes the great friction between the American colonies and Britain and almost from the very first Washington sympathies lie with the American colonies he's a member of the First Continental Congress which meets in Philadelphia in 1774. he lines himself up almost at once with those who are going to move towards independence for the American colonies and when that Independence is declared he is in by that point he is in command of the American military forces that have been called into being to resist British Authority he has the Declaration of Independence read out to his Continental Army where they were on Long Island in July of 1776. he is not at first he would seem the most successful military commander though why was that well he loses the battle on Long Island in the summer of 1776 his forced to withdraw to Manhattan where inch by ancient seems mile by mile the British claimed Manhattan Drive Washington his forces on to New Jersey forces Washington to retreat across New Jersey to the Pennsylvania side it's now December of 1776. and at that moment Washington decides we really have no choice we have to strike a blow on a successful one at the British army or else our cause is going to go to pieces and he does that and scores this marvelous surprise victory at Trenton in December of 1776 follows it up with a victory shortly Beyond Trenton at Princeton and from then on Washington really is the man who emerges as the military face of resistance to Great Britain there's just no question Washington is the man in charge and he pursues that straight through to the surrender of Lord cornwallis's British Army at Yorktown in 1781 which effectively ends the military aspect of this and when American independence is secured by the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Washington resigns his Commission in command of the Continental Army it was it was a remarkable moment because the the Continental Army continental army had been through a great deal in this war with Britain they had suffered some embarrassing defeats they'd also suffered some remarkable victories we can call it suffering ah but at the same time they weren't getting terribly well rewarded by their own Continental Congress and there was a moment in Newburgh New York when the officers of the army believed that it was time to take action against their own Congress because of its dilatory way of handling matters especially pay and Washington gathered his officers together and proposed to read to them a letter that have been sent to him by one of the members of Congress and he prefaced his comments unrehearsed by pulling out his glasses to read this letter because the handwriting on the letter was was if you've ever seen this particular letter you'd know what trouble Washington was in the handwriting was very difficult to read the person the member of Congress who had written this Washington begs their Indulgence for a moment and says that I must I must use my spectacles because I have grown not only gray But Blind in the service of my country and at that point you could almost hear the air going out of the balloon of his officer's resentments at Congress it was almost like saying here if our commander if our General Washington if he has been willing to make these kinds of sacrifices we should too and that takes that that takes all the energy out of any suggested resistance by these offices any kind of potential coup d'etat against the Continental Congress and then he does one better than that and hands in his commission he could very easily very very easily have taken the Viewpoint of his officers and said Congress has been unjust and unfair to the Continental Army and it had been there had been conspiracies against him at points during the war he could very easily have turned to Cromwell at that point and he could like Oliver Cromwell have taken his army in hand as Cromwell did in the 1640s in the English Civil War and marched them on Congress the way Cromwell did his New Model Army on Parliament and simply said I'm paraphrasing Cromwell you are no Congress I say you are no Congress make himself King Pig very easy a king a protector whatever kind of title people would have felt moved to bestow on him instead instead he goes to where Congress is meeting in Annapolis Maryland and he hands over his commission he resigns in fact he not only Hans River's commissioner hands over his commission to the man who was then president of Congress Thomas Mifflin who had been one of the most obnoxious thorns in his side a man who was really the the consummate incompetent politician During the Revolution and yet Washington is going to demonstrate his subordination to civilian Authority in a republic by handing in that commission and going back to Mount Vernon and resuming life as as a as a farmer as a planter now none of this was um ordained none of this was that emotion in the United States was not yet a country uh all sorts of interests from the old world were meddling in the new how did Washington come to the ideas he did about America how could how is he already in a position to talk about my country before it even was a country Washington had wanted very badly early in life to be part of a British Empire his brother had been involved with British military Expeditions in the Caribbean and he himself would have coveted nothing so much during the Seven Years War as a real Commission in the British army and it never was forthcoming Britain was for reasons of its own not terribly accommodating to its Colonial citizens someone like Samuel Johnson for instance made the comment I can love everybody except an American yes yes he owes that very negative views oh he did indeed yes he did indeed but Washington never got quite what he wanted that way instead what he got was life as a landowner in Virginia and that was where he realized that was where he belonged in a sense he was agreeing yeah it's a good idea they didn't give me a commission because I'm not really British I'm an American what did that mean at that time at first it meant we are part of 13 virtually self-governing colonies and understand the British Empire was not the product of someone's great scheme no one no one in London sat down one day and said wouldn't it be great if we had an empire in America let's establish 13 colonies and oh by the way we'll take over Canada from the French at the same time and also have a bevy of smaller colonies in the West End no one sat down to drop a plan Britain's Britain's North American Empire almost happened by accident yeah the fit of absence of mind is a generous aversion but yes right this is how it was described it was a product of what what Burke called a benign neglect yes and for that reason Parliament was only too happy to say well a few people would like to go establish colonies in North America go ahead and do it but don't let us know about it you know don't don't send bills to us we're not we're not paying anything for it um you do the best you can and if you succeed lovely we'll take the credit for it if you don't well we don't we didn't really need you or want you after all so all of these people who are how should we say I had a marginal to British life you know Puritans Quakers Catholics you're perfectly free to go to North America and don't let the door hit you on the way over surprising thing was that people in those colonies took that quite seriously and said all right well we will carve out lives of our own we will elect our own legislatures each of the colonies had its its own legislative body which technically speaking wasn't even legal there was only supposed to be one legislature for the British Empire and that was Parliament nevertheless if Parliament was going to take responsibility to the colonies we'd also have to pay the colonies bills and nobody in Parliament wanted to do that so the legislatures and the colonies took on a life of their own and when you do that eventually you begin to function almost as independent entities and so by the time we get to the 1760s and the 1770s a Virginian like Washington is part of a system in the colony of Virginia similar to all the other North American colonies that there are in large measure governing themselves by their own hook and so they've come to think of themselves this way and when delegates from the colonies come together in Philadelphia for the first time at the First Continental Congress in 1774. one of the Virginians this and Washington's part of his delegation one of the Virginians Patrick Henry stands up and says I don't want to speak as a Virginian I want to speak as an American was that one of the first times that was that is one of the first times that said crank things back to the 1750 the 1740s and a lot of people in the Colonnades tend to think of themselves as having a closer connection to London than they had to each other because they all sent agents representing their interests to London to Lobby Parliament but by 1774 that's changed and people are thinking of themselves as Americans first of all because that's the way they functioned for many many years the great shock of what happens in the 1760s and the 1770s is not that the British wanted Americans to drink tea from the East India Company it's not that the British wanted to tax paper or stamps it was that the British had never done anything like that before and now all of a sudden someone at the controls of Imperial policy in London decides that they do want to regulate everything that's going on in the colonies and the colonies response say wait a minute this is never this has never been the case we're used to governing ourselves and we mean to do that Washington is part of a system in Virginia which has been governing itself for a good long time and which now begins to see that that quasi-independence is something that they don't want to surrender and that has given them this this different identity the other part of that identity is the fact of of the blundering way in which the Imperial government in London decides to treat American requests because rather than saying yes you know you're right you really have been governing yourselves in this fashionable law that's fine we'll work out an arrangement that way instead the reaction in London was to Simply dismiss it entirely to foist upon Americans what was totally foreign to them and then to back it up with regiments of British Infantry and in that respect Britain almost forced the colonists to discover that they were Americans so between these two forces this long-term force of we've always done it this way and there's new force that says this is what we're being compelled to be Americans discovered that they were Americans something something entirely different than what people might have otherwise expected and of course this period was throwing up a churn of individuals people who'd soon be the leaders the founding fathers of the United States um they were military leaders political thinkers political leaders and others and George Washington begins to emerge as clearly one of the most important amount is when does that when does Washington star really start to rise he starts to rise when he arrives in Philadelphia for the meeting of the Second Continental Congress this is in 1775 May of 1775 after the first Clash of arms at Lexington and Concord Congress has called into being something that it is calling an army and it's going to need a commander for it the presiding officer of the Congress John Hancock of Massachusetts immediately imagined that he should be that person because after all the fighting had taken place in Massachusetts and Hancock was the presiding officer of the Congress Washington shows up at the Congress in his militia kernels uniform very quietly saying I'm in the running for command but beyond that yep very unobtrusive when the discussion about command of this continental army comes up in the Congress Washington stands up walks out of the room he excuses it he recuses himself which point he's in his early 40s yes yes he recuses himself and in so doing only draws more attention to the idea that he should be the commander of the army and that to Hancock's uh uh disappointment that is in fact what what is the decision of the Congress and Washington is sent to Cambridge Massachusetts there to meet the first Gathering of this so-called Continental Army he takes official command of it under an elm tree on Cambridge common and from that point on he is in command of the American forces he rises in stature until by 1781 and Yorktown he is really the American military commander what was the Army like in those days that he was a mess he was commanding a mess of men each of each of the colonies had its own militia but the militia were untrained undisciplined their officers were amateurs gentleman offices gentlemen gentlemen sometimes although when you try to define a gentleman in America in the 1770s is not quite like Britain it's a loose thing it's a it's a very loose very loose that way uh so much so that there's a there's a a wonderfully Illuminating story which actually pitches forward to 1781 at Yorktown because by that point France has come into this conflict the as a French army alongside the Continental Army and they're besieging the Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown at one point the French officers were boundlessly amused by the American officers who would Wander over to their camp and ask what their trade was back home in France that was a very declasse thing to ask a friend the French thought that was hysterically funny but that of course was what the American officers were now take it back to 1775 it's even more pronounced these are people who haven't I mean at best some of them had had some service in the Seven Years War right so they knew a little bit about military life and there were some officers in the Continental Army who had had some experience in the British army Charles Lee has won Horatio Gates is another but beyond that Washington's chief of artillery was a Bookseller from Boston well how how were they armed as well that's by everything under the Sun from sometimes uh right sometimes muskets that are acquired abroad sometimes supplied by the French under the table sometimes shotguns sometimes just odds and ends of the strangest things there's actually one point at which Washington confiscates the weapons of the militia because the militia is actually better armed than his own continental army confiscates their weapons and turns them over to his own troops on the Continental Army the the level of amateurism when you look back on it it's it's no compliment to the American Revolution but it's the it's the truth and that is that the Continental Army was overwhelming an army of amateurs who were learning on the job what it was to be an army and sometimes that had disastrous consequences in terms of discipline and organization on other occasions it had an almost Sublime effect because these were Ordinary People not fighting as mercenaries not fighting for the king's Shilling not as not as the Duke of Wellington would would speak of his soldiers at Waterloo as the scum of the earth now these Americans were very different they were very independent-minded they knew what they were fighting for and they were happy to fight under an officer like Washington who while he had all the manner and all the atmosphere of a gentleman was never afraid to come down on the common level talk to them encourage them compliment them lead them move them forward into battle so what was it about Washington because the Army you're describing the army of the time um poorly equipped poorly trained motivated but perhaps um not all the time um any commanding officer in that situation must have some kind of special spark or magic to inspire the men fighting under him was that the case with Washington and what was that spark that is so hard to identify and and for two reasons one is that Washington himself is not a very forthcoming public person he's very reserved he has practiced through his life this sense of propriety and decorum and it makes him very demanding in terms of the behavior he spects from the expects from the officers who are serving under him time for instance Washington expected people to be on time he gave you he gave you a variance of three minutes you could be three minutes early or you could be three minutes late anything beyond that and he wouldn't even talk to you this is not an American tradition that's been retained no no he could be very frosty with people he could be unsmiling now some people have said well the reason is unsmiling is because he suffered from extraordinarily bad teeth that might be part of it but no I think there's actually a part of it that also is that Washington believed he had to inhabit the persona of a great leader of a great company he already had an idea of a great man and he wanted to be one in a sense he he has a role that he knows he has to play It's Curious how how close theater could be to Washington during the long winter at Valley Forge one of the things that Washington encourages his officers to do to join with him to do is is participating in a play a play by Joseph Addison Cato a tragedy about this this great Noble Roman of the most unimpeachable principles Cato and it was almost as though what Washington wanted to do was to have his officers and himself conform to that image of the unsmiling unsparing noble Roman the other thing which limits our understanding of Washington this ways Washington is not a man of what people then would have called polite education in fact on one occasion when someone quizzed him about his education he summed it up in one word defective he'd never been to college not like Thomas Jefferson not like John Adams he has no college education and he's very conscious of that he feels less of himself because of it do you think well I think he tries to compensate for that but it it means that he's not a great auditor he hasn't gone where he's been trained in oratory because rhetorical performance was an important part of the college system of of the of early America so he's not the kind of person who can give rabble-rousing speeches but there are moments when in public he can be Sublime not not because he's giving a tremendous emotional appeal but because he is speaking directly to the Loyalty of individual people and a great moment like that occurs not only at Newburgh when he's addressing his officers there's an even greater moment this is during the the campaign but with Trenton and Princeton at the end of 1776 and into 1777. because the enlistments in the Continental Army were running out to the end of 1776. he's in the middle of a campaign what's going to happen his army legally could could dissolve he makes an appeal to them I mean the Army is drawn up Rank by rank unit by unit he makes this appeal to them and it's an appeal in which he says yes you have served Faithfully yes many of you want to go home yes you would be entitled to do it but any man who will sign up to continue we'll have the thanks of every man woman and child in America hmm you can almost visualize this because what happens the soldiers first there's no response soldiers are all they are listening to then you start to see them turning and talking to each other right right and what they're saying is Well you know if if you go I'll go one steps forward two steps forward then four or five step forward eventually they all step forward at that moment Washington's adjutant kind of rushes them and says should I take down their names in other words they're volunteering it better have some legal way to enforce this Washington says no no when these men say that they are going to fight for their country they may be dependent upon yeah there's a a third moment too but this is After the revolution it comes after the new Federal Constitution of 1787 has been adopted and Washington has been elected president and Washington makes this journey from Mount Vernon to what was then the temporary capital in New York City he embarks by barge from the New Jersey side of things to land in Manhattan and when he lands in Manhattan the great crowds there people ready to receive him and and a militia unit and the commander of the militia unit says well General Washington we are here uh to welcome you as president of the United States and to provide security for you and we're going to be your your bodyguard and Washington's reply is to this effect well I appreciate very much the offer that you are making but the greatest security that I will enjoy is the esteem of these people hmm so he combines this this marvelous sense of the perfect Roman Senator the Cincinnatus of America yet with this tremendous confidence in his ordinary fellow citizens you mentioned the 1787 Constitutional Convention um what was Washington's role in that how did he make himself so indispensable at that moment he was indispensable simply for being there the Articles of Confederation had been the American instrument of government from 1781 onwards but they were a ramshackle affair and people very very quickly realized that something more was going to have to be done to strengthen the national government and National unity and identity and Washington favors this right from the start this again ties into the sense in which Washington thinks of himself as an American I mean previously he didn't think of himself as British well now he's not going to think of himself as a Virginian he's going to think of himself as an American he helps to sponsor one of the initial meetings that takes place about what should we do about a new instrument of government he encourages a meeting at Annapolis that also makes a recommendation to the Confederation Congress about calling a constitutional convention in Philadelphia but the key is Will Washington himself attend this convention and if he does will he preside will he be the president of the convention Washington first is a little hesitant to do that he's not sure that he wants to push himself so far into things and besides he spent so many years away from Mount Vernon during the war does he really want to commit himself to something that he's not entirely sure how it's going to so it's not entirely false modesty or no positioning at all no no no but James Madison in particular persuades Washington works on Washington and Washington Washington finally agrees to come and when the convention assembles one of the very first things they do is that Washington is going to be elected president of the convention and he does and he serves as president during the convention and he only speaks three times during the convention one time it was a disciplinary statement the agreement of the convention had been that no one in the convention would discuss any aspect of what was going on out of doors well things leak some discussion of things leaked into the Press Washington got wind of it and he tried the members of the convention about having talked to people out of doors they should not have done that that must not happen again then at the very end he inserts a suggestion about the amount of representation each district should have should it be forty thousand as people originally were thinking in the Constitution one representative in Congress for every 40 000 people or thirty thousand and Washington comes down in favor of the thirty thousand but it's but these moments are sort of procedural though yeah yeah but it's the it's it's strikingly rare I mean this is a convention which is filled with people who have visions of oratory yes but he exerts his influence over the convention in large measures simply by sitting there at the head of the convention on the diocese everyone who was part of this convention in that respect knows he's under the eye of George Washington that in a sense he's responsible to Washington and the simple fact of Washington's presence there is is an important piece of glue that holds this convention together that keeps it moving forward the very fact that he's there that it's Washington because of his already record obviously recognized military prowess uh his success is a as a military leader but now he's he's got to transform into something else he is at this moment transforming into a political leader he is he is already becoming the father of his country at that point and having Washington as president of the convention was an important plus for the convention because there was no one in that convention who was going to stand up and quarrel with George Washington they might quarrel with each other and they did but no one was going to direct it at Washington's having Washington there was the biggest Advantage the convention starts out with now everything that was being discussed the 1787 Convention is um by the standards of the time extraordinarily radical this is a republic this is a republic where there aren't republics no this is this is this is as radical as the English-speaking world can imagine at this point I mean English political theorists had thought about republics before and for a brief period of time even under Cromwell England was a republic but the very fact that it was Cromwell made republics saying oh well you see these things can't work these things they can't last they didn't survive Oliver himself yes so most of the English theorists who are writing in Praise republics and you look at people like James Harrington you look at Elgin on Sydney you look even at John John Locke when they talked about republics they tended to talk about thought experiments but the American colonies had always governed themselves that way not because they planned to because it just fell out that way and then as they read political Theory the political Theory they're reading what are they they're reading Montesquieu they're reading lock they're reading their career they're reading all the people who are talking about the ideal of a republic and the Americans say all right well maybe we are the people to actually put it into practice we can do it we have been doing something like that already all these decades if we are functionally little republics let us now take the step that makes us into a real functioning National Republic and that's what lies behind the Constitutional Convention and the constitutional government that comes out of that is of it the words are given by others um but the authority at this point is given by Washington is that correct to say it is it is Washington who makes its conclusions very difficult to question not that people didn't there was substantial opinion in the United States at that point about whether the the the the product of the Constitutional Convention this constitution is something they all wanted to ratify maybe they wanted to have amendments to it maybe they wanted to have a second convention but without Washington I think it might be safe to say that the Constitution might not have survived that process of ratification the very fact that Washington himself had been at the Helm of the convention was its single greatest endorsement at this point was it inevitable that he would become the first president I don't know if there's a a moment during the convention when that seems to be what people were concluding but by the end of the convention in September of 1787 that was already the received wisdom it didn't happen automatically because of the opening of the convention when people want to try to talk about the power of an executive that is one of the most sensitive topics hmm beside after all been a republic called into being in Rebellion against a powerful executive King George III and many of these people were not too eager to recreate in the office of President of the United States simply another Monarch I mean one of the delegates from Virginia Edmund Randolph had said well this idea of a of an executive of a powerful Central executive a single person who's going to be the president this he said is the fetus of monarchy but the fact that Washington by the time the convention ends the fact that it's understood that Washington is the person who will be that president that goes a long way to allaying fear and suspicion and a long way towards promoting the ratification of a constitution do we have a sense of how Washington himself felt this point because an awful lot by now is on his shoulders not only the incoming the first president of the United States but I mean if if it hadn't have worked with him than the United States doesn't work America doesn't work was he aware of this that he mustn't screw it up it's difficult to say at this point because by this point Washington is very well aware that anything he says or anything he writes is going to be broadcast through the United States it's going to be a subject for debate he's extremely cautious in his correspondence so officially he will say two things and it's very hard to distinguish when he's not being official he says two things one is I would prefer to live out my days here as The Squire of Mount Vernon and he pictures himself as being on the the declining Side of the Mountain of life and he would like the peace and quiet and you know and not being disturbed he would like he would like to stay at learn it yet at the same time he's also very conscious that he is really going to be integral to the success of this experiment with the 1787 Constitution so while same time he's he's saying and I don't think it's false modesty either at the same time he's saying I I really do not want to see myself pushed to the front that's not the reason I involved myself in the creation of this constitution nevertheless he is prepared to accept this and so he does and he becomes the first president he serves two terms and what is remarkable about those two terms is how it's almost Unthinkable that anyone else could have navigated the choppy Waters of the first years of this new constitution apart from George Washington and George Washington navigating those Waters ensures that there can be a second president and a third president and much more yes he sets so many precedents he sets a precedent first of all in something as minor and detailed as how should we address the president I mean there's a serious question how do you address the president do you address him as your your Excellency do you address him as your highness uh do you address him as one suggestion was as the protector of American Liberties and finally what the conclusion is and Washington has has something to do with this is simply Mr President that suited Washington quite happily Washington was at the end of the day not simply a man on a white horse looking to take opportunity for power I mean the sorry truth is that happened in so many other places in this age of revolutions and in France Napoleon Bonaparte wants to come to the rescue of the Revolution but what does he do he turns it really into an Empire with himself as Emperor and creates a mnemonic and create yeah creates a new monarchy we don't have George Washington the second third fourth in America no no um even in the South American republics even Simone boudivar is not immune to the to the to the blandishments of power and the concentrations of power but Washington Washington by the time we see him in the Revolution and the post-revolutionary years Washington is not shy about speaking to to how committed a republican he is and he doesn't do this in terms of political Theory again he's not a man with college education he's not there's no Trace of him reading political philosophy his is the instinctive republicanism that he has simply drawn from the American environment but he is as committed to that as anyone like John Adams who was a great theorist of politics that's the nature of history that um things are seen in a different light or the light changes on people and on events and what seems right in one era seems wrong in another um people who seemed unassailable in one era become highly assailable in another in our own day uh George Washington and perhaps you could say also the other founding fathers are highly assailed they gave an example at the beginning but uh one that's always on my mind is the CNN correspondent who said Mount Rushmore and beginning of Independence Third Day 2020 that uh the Mount Rushmore consisted of a monument of two slave owners on land wrestled away from Native Americans more recently or they're just before that the New York Times gifted the world the 1619 project which looks at the founding fathers and indeed the founding of America almost solely through this lens of slavery of racism and Nicole Hannah Jones of the 1619 project has claimed that the whole um the whole purpose of the American founding uh was to Institute slavery and to make sure that Americans could continue slaving um first of all before responding to the specific points what do you have to say to the the new way in which figures like Washington are now being imagined and indeed taught in America in some respects it's a typical American response to our own americanness we're critical of ourselves we always have been we've been that way from the very beginning so taking the longest view of it these critical postures are themselves a remarkably and typically American response sometimes these postures are are poorly founded sometimes they neglect history sometimes they're good for rhetoric I have been very skeptical and publicly critical of the 1619 project perhaps one of the most outspoken academics in the area well if there's an outspoken this meter I I'll I'm happy to submit to a test that way I haven't tried to go after it single-mindedly as that was the only thing worth talking about but I have been critical of it and not shy about the criticism and I don't say that out of any personal animus for any of the people who are contributors to to the 1619 project but it struck me very forcibly from the beginning that the project itself had gone disastrously awry in terms of its premises and especially in terms of its historical approach because what you got was what you might see as a kind of journalistic version of History a quick Smash and grab kind of History drive by shooting drive by shooting yes you might say and that's the kind of history that I really spent decades correcting trying to head off but Americans need their history and we we argue about our history a great deal and we do that because Americans don't have an ethnicity Americans don't have a national religion they don't have a national language they don't have something that you can point to from centuries and centuries back there's no there's no american-ness the way you might say there is a russian-ness or a Grecian this or an italian-ness or something like that Americans are organized around a proposition this is what Lincoln said at Gettysburg you know we're finding it on a proposition that all men are created equal how do you found a nation on a proposition in the 1780s and 1790s people in Europe rolled around on the floor laughing at the idea hey how how could you how could you have a nation built solely on a commitment to a series of propositions in a document you call the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution and yet that is what we are and also a story and a story that emerges from those those documents and it's a story of how do we put these things into practice how do we live able and practical lives by them and Lincoln captured this in an unusual way when he talked about his hero Henry Clay as political hero he said that clay loved his country first of all because it was his country that was an instinct but also he said clay mostly loved his country because it showed that free men could be prosperous in other words that the idea of a republic just wasn't going to blow itself up yes which as it turned out we nearly did a decade after Lincoln said that so we are really committed to these propositions and so we hold ourselves to a very strict and demanding standard and if it and if we don't live up perfectly to that standard then we have nothing but that standard to measure ourselves by and that leads us to slight our history because our our history is about people who who make mistakes our history is about human beings who are imperfect so we are imperfect people trying to live to a perfect standard that always creates a dissonance sometimes that dissonance is so great that we think it indicates a genuine flaw at the root of the whole American Experience so what are the what are the specifics in something like the 1619 project that are that are wrong and what's the approach about it that you regard as being so flawed let me give you an example one of the contentions of the 1619 project probably the most well-known of them was that the American revolutionaries embarked on this project of a revolution against British Authority because they were trying to protect slavery they had been spooked so to speak by a decision handed iron in Britain in 1772. this is the somerset decision from Lord chief justice Mansfield which had declared that there could be no such thing as slavery in the British Isles therefore this one black man who had been brought into England uh James Somerset therefore was rendered free simply by stepping setting food on British soil well the argument of the 1619 project was that Americans American slave owners looked at this and said oh well that's the British Isle oh they're coming for us next therefore we have to rise and Revolt become an independent nation so that we can protect slavery it's it's an argument which is strengthened by the fact that in 1775 when the American colonies move into military confrontation with Great Britain the royal governor of Virginia the Earl of Dunmore solicits slaves in Virginia to run away and to join Hibbs Royal forces and he organizes what he calls his Ethiopian regimen I don't know if he called it that but that's what it became known as and and he does it enlist a substantial number of fugitive slaves under under British colors that way so this seems to be primafarchy evidence that the Americans were fighting on behalf of Slavery to protect their slave property there are a number of real problems with that the first is hardly anybody in the there's hardly any evidence that hardly anybody in the American colonies even noticed the somerset decision and it wouldn't have been binding in America and it wouldn't have been binding in America anyway because Mansfield went a handstanding this decision this is just in the British Isles it doesn't have any application to any place else in the British domains doesn't certainly doesn't have anything uh any application in the West Indies where there was where where slavery was much more prevalent and much more deeply entrenched and much more valuable the exports that that Britain Drew from its West Indian colonies dwarfed the value of the trade it had with the mainland colonies by by a factor of something like like 15 to 1. I mean the West Indian colonies were pure economic gold for Great Britain but they were also a living hell for the slaves who had to labor there which also brings up an interesting point too if the American Revolution was something which was created to protect slavery why didn't the West Indian colonies join with the mainland colonies because the West Indian colonies had a whole lot more to lose that way if that really was the British strategy of course they don't they decline to have any common purpose with the American Rebels but then there's also the Dunmore business and once again Dunmore is no Paladin of of British Liberty this way Dunmore will later after will be a governor in the West Indies and there he'll deal in slaves and deal in slavery without the slightest compunction others what what he was doing in 1775 in Virginia it was purely opportunistic and the British army does this repeatedly during the revolution uh it will it will publish advertisements suggesting slaves should run away and when they do the British just as quickly um deal with them uh in the harshest fashion if they become a logistical liability in fact this kind of playing slaves off against their masters is something which not only the British did but the French and the Spanish did all through the 18th century so there was nothing particularly new about this and it really didn't have much of a purchase and listen the truth is that by 1775 the Americans had been in resistance to Great Britain for a decade before even before the Mansfield decision even before dunmore's Ethiopian so these are examples of the 1619 project basically picking at a couple of things um misrepresenting them or representing them in the light that they were not seen as at the time and now retrospectively claiming them as the foundational purposes of America I mean it's very it's very strange as um to focus on on these things rather than say the Declaration of Independence as being the reasons why America declared independence except for one factor and that is that the 1619 project has the impromater of the New York Times if the 1619 project had been published as the effort of some minor newspaper some small scale organization it probably would scarcely have have cracked public awareness but the New York Times is a great American institution I've written for the New York Times so it's uh when you're when you have the New York Times as your mouthpiece people listen and that has been a major factor in the kind of influence the 1619 project has had many American parents and students and others will have nevertheless been let's say pushed into the tributary of thinking of this project among other things has encouraged in America um what would you say to those people to parents as students alike about getting a better perspective on the American story particularly on the founding my response to them would be to say dig deeper read wider understand that mathematics is more than two plus two equals five that takes some time it takes some investment but it's a good investment and it's worth the time because if as I say Americans are a people which are created not by race or by ethnicity or by language or by religion but by their allegiance to a proposition then our history our history is the only thing we have which gives us the story as we tell us ourselves about ourselves our history is vital to us because we don't have what other nations and other cultures have had we we instead are devoted to that proposition and is the history of how we've implemented that proposition which is dearest to us which gives us something worth sacrificing for which promises to us as Lincoln said at Gettysburg the government of the People by the people for the people shall not perish from the Earth our history is vital to us when I see as I have seen a great deal over the last 20 years when I have seen history scanted when I've seen history curriculums drawn back when I've seen history badly written badly executed and in the case of the 1619 project done in a misleading fashion I weep not only because It embarrasses me professionally but I wait for it for the fact that it's laying violent hands on what is so important to us as a people to be able to tell Americans who they are is something we do when we reach back to these stories about Washington speaking to his army to his officers about Lincoln at Gettysburg about so many other events in so many places now in the midst of all that yes there have been plenty of mistakes we are not perfect our past is not perfect but the present is not the judge of the past because what is now the present is going to become the past very quickly and there were moments when I when I when I wanted to ask people as you stand in this kind of judgment over the American past are you prepared 50 years on from now for someone to stand in judgment over you [Music] there's a great deal of confidence for someone to say well I am going to decide that George Washington is wanting because he was a slave owner now therefore I will condemn him out of category and I will say his statute should be taken down and his name should be removed from anything in public all right first of all there's there's a bit of virtuosity in that because it assumes that there's only one factor in someone's life that counts hmm that George Washington was only a slave exactly second thing is are you prepared 50 years from now 100 years from 250 years or 250 years to be judged for something that today you don't even notice that you take for granted are you prepared for that because that's in fact what will happen is modeled on what you have established now and that tends to make people hesitate a bit and rightly so because when Washington is living and thriving in the 18th century this this is a world which doesn't even notice that there's anything peculiarly odd about slaveholding it's the norm the the world in which Washington is born is still very much a world that conceives of things as hierarchies that you've got a king on the top you've got Nobles beneath that you've got commoners beneath that you've got peasants beneath that and below that you've got slaves everything's a hierarchy everything's a pyramid it's all works together and and everybody is Born Into the place that they occupy for their lives and anyone who tries to disturb that is a threat to a public order and it's to be treated that way people took that for granted that means that when we talked about Labor in the 18th century you really talked about a spectrum the spectrum that included slaves and that was at the most extreme end of the spectrum because slavery was something you were born with as a permanent natal disability but then there was also indentured servitude and convict servitude and there was no shortage of indentured and convict servitude in the American colonies Britain was sending convicts to the American colonies right up until 1775 and the horrors of the convict passage were only slightly less than the horrors of a slave passage from Africa then you have ordinary laborers then you have mechanics and artisans in other words you have a great mass of people who work with their hands that's the big distinction in the 18th century people who work with their hands people who don't people who don't are gentlemen nobility and so on like that it's just seen as everyone who works with their hands is seen as being on this same Spectrum they're just at different points on the Spectrum the 18th century will change that the 18th century changes it for two reasons one the 18th century is the age of enlightenment when people think differently about Nobles and kings and no longer think of the universe as a rigid hierarchy no now the university is all men are created equal that is a revolution in and of itself there's a whole different way of understanding the relationships of human beings from time out of mind these were ideas that uh Washington's contemporaries Thomas Jefferson and others had been um just dating in and then brought forth into the world at the time that this this is Washington's middle year this is an era of transition when we stop thinking about mechanics and Artisans and laborers as being simply in the same category but slaves no now you actually begin to have this possibility that someone who works with their hands can improve themselves and move into a different category and no one is a better example of that than Benjamin Franklin Who start starts out as a leather apron printer but who Rises to become a member of the Royal Society this this kind of change in status was Unthinkable for centuries before now it begins to change and the other thing that changes along with that is Commerce because one of the great things about the enlightenment is the nobility it bestows upon Commerce it is in in earlier ages to have indulged in trade in Commerce that was a low thing I mean you can you can find whiffs of this even in Jane Austen's novels where some of her Heroes and heroines say oh well so oh he's been in trade yes as though you were somehow staining yourself now that that changes completely in the hands of 18th century Enlightenment thinkers Commerce becomes something Noble even Samuel Johnson will say you know there's hardly a more innocent way to lead your life than in making money foreign that would have been Unthinkable before now now just as these different forms of Labor begin to acquire respect and dignity that's the moment when slavery becomes a problem and a problem that has to be resolved exactly exactly that's when it becomes an offense so Washington is living in an age of transition transition from the old world of hierarchy to this new world of Enlightenment and self-transformation and he shows that because on one hand yes he's a slave owner at the time of his death he's the owner of something like 317 slaves at Mount Vernon and at surrounding Farms yet at the same time he's also the Washington who says that he would like to move towards emancipation he would favor emancipation he's not sure quite how to do it but emancipation should be the goal and in his will he provides for the emancipation of the 150 so some slaves that he owned in his own right the rest of the slaves at Mount Vernon had come by dower to his wife Martha Dandridge custis Washington but the ones that were his to give away he gave away he gave away he's the only one of the group that we sometimes call the founding fathers it's the only one who does that um he the general in the revolution he's commanding an army which sometimes is remarkable for the fact that it includes immigrants it includes shopkeepers it includes day laborers includes people on the Run it also includes somewhere between five thousand and eight thousand black people even in the Deep winter of Valley Forge there are 750 black soldiers who are part of Washington's Army continental army at Valley Forge if the American Revolution had been created for the purpose of protecting slavery what were they doing the Washington is in it Washington is a man in an age of transition he's not a thinker he's not an intellectual he hasn't been trained to that he doesn't read like that but he is picking up these currents and part of him is saying I am this but at the same time I want to move to this and the best evidence of it is in fact in what he does with his will finally so it's uh let's say it's the late 1770s early 1780s George Washington feels like he's done his time for his country he's been dreaming of going away going back to Mount Vernon if he had of done would we have the America we have today would we have the world we have today Douglas I always am dicey about what-if questions I have a hard enough time establishing what actually did happen without thinking about what might have happened but I will grant you this if we take Washington off the board let's say we take him off the board During the Revolution now there were moments when that might have happened especially at Princeton when he puts himself right out in front it's inconceivable what would have emerged from that I think we would have lost the revolution I think the British army would have would have triumphed and what we would look back upon now is something similar to what for instance in Canada is looked back upon as these uprisings in the 19th century especially in uh Louis riel's uh Uprising and we look back on and say well that's an interesting moment but it's not significant doesn't really have any bearing on us today take Washington off the board in the 1780s I think you have an attempt to implement a constitution and it fails without Washington I do not see this infant Republic surviving the dangers and risks of infancy in a world hostile to the idea of republics when you think of the 1780s all right here's here is the North American colonies which have now transformed themselves into the United States of America and a republic what are they surrounded by the French the Frip our allies in this war are busy reporting back to France the Americans are going to self-destruct the American Union is going to go to pieces and we'll be there to pick up the pieces in other words we're going to get to reconstitute our new world Empire the one we lost in the Seven Years War the Spanish had the same expectation Spanish are right out there of the Mississippi River that's the frontier of the Spanish Empire and Britain you know why wouldn't Britain after this misguided cromwellian experiment why wouldn't Britain welcome back its colonies and some kind of negotiated settlement after all when the colonies achieve this independence from Britain they also lose Britain's overseas protection for its trade they lose automatic access to the British economy after a little while of that Americans might come to their senses and say maybe this revolution wasn't such a good idea after all and then something could be worked out and maybe it would look like a commonwealth maybe would look I want something in the same order as we saw develop in Canada in its history but it would have been very very different subtract Washington from the equation and you do not have this thing that we call the United States of America you just don't Professor Alan gelzer thank you thank you Douglas foreign

Channel: Douglas Murray

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Published: Tue Dec 27 2022