Just before Christmas in 1799, Richard Allen, the free Black minister, Philadelphian, and founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, stepped to the pulpit to speak to his congregation about George Washington. Allen had been born in slavery in Delaware, but gained his freedom in 1780; for some historians, he’s considered among the nation’s Founding Fathers.
Allen delivered a eulogy for George Washington, who had died two weeks earlier. As part of his sermon, Allen broke some news—not just for his congregation, but the entire nation: he was the first to reveal publicly that George Washington used his last will and testament to free the people he enslaved.
Allen told his congregation of free and enslaved Black Philadelphians that they should join their fellow Americans in mourning Washington’s death because Washington’s “heart was not insensible to our sufferings.” According to Allen, Washington believed Black Americans “had a right to liberty,” and thus freed the people he enslaved. Through this act, Allen believed, Washington “wipe[d] off the only stain with which man could ever reproach him. He ‘let the oppressed go free.’”
I’ve been thinking a lot about Allen’s sermon recently. Last week, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the National Park Service had revealed new interpretive panels for the President’s House site at Independence National Historical Park (I’m quoted in a follow-up piece to the initial reporting here). The proposed changes dramatically reduce the current exhibit’s focus on the people Washington enslaved and his active involvement in slavery. Instead, these new panels highlight Washington’s private statements opposing slavery, his decision to free the people he enslaved in his will, and the relative autonomy enslaved people experienced in Philadelphia. They shift the emphasis from Washington the enslaver to Washington the emancipator.
In so doing, the Trump administration has offered just the latest installment of a long-running American tradition. Across nearly two and a half centuries of our nation’s history, Americans have used Washington’s emancipation of the people he enslaved and his occasional private statements questioning the slave system to help him retain his status as a symbol of American liberty. Motivated by vastly different contemporary circumstances and divergent political goals, Americans have long seen how useful an antislavery version of Washington could be.
