“America’s Original Sin”

January 6, 2019     “America’s Original Sin”     Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

The Pennsylvania Gazette, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, May 24, 1796. "Advertisement. ABSCONDED from the household of the President of the United States, ONEY JUDGE, a light mulatto girl, much freckled, with very black eyes and bushy black hair. She is of middle stature, slender, and delicately formed, about 20 years of age. She has many changes of good clothes of all sorts, but they are not sufficiently recollected to be described—As there was no suspicion of her going off, nor no provocation to do so, it is not easy to conjecture whither she has gone, or fully, what her design is;—but as she may attempt to escape by water, all matters of vessels are cautioned against admitting her into them, although it is probable she will attempt to pass as a free woman, and has, it is said, wherewithal to pay her passage. Ten dollars will be paid to any person who will bring her home, if taken in the city, or on board any vessel in the harbour;—and a reasonable additional sum if apprehended at, and brought from a greater distance, and in proportion to the distance. FREDERICK KITT, Steward. 

Religions and nations alike have myths of origins. As children we all learned the story of how our first president, when he was a child, used his little hatchet to chop down a cherry tree on the family plantation and when confronted by his father, Washington is said to have confessed, “I cannot tell a lie, I cut down the tree.”

Today, I’m going to tell you a sad story about how, as it turns out, the historical George Washington could tell a lie. And it isn’t simply that he lied about the young slave in his household, Oney Judge, but I want to talk about the way ethical thinking evolves. 

If you have a kind of “Gone with the Wind” view of American history, you can believe that the institution of slavery in our country was just a normal form of what Stephen Colbert calls, “an uncompensated intern program” that was the labor arrangement in our country before the Civil War. Like, before the Civil War, decent people, especially in the south, owned slaves. After the Civil War, no one owned slaves. The truth is much more complex. 

Ending slavery in our country was more like a century long debate that resulted in a horrible Civil War but, sadly, even the war and the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t snuff out slavery. It started to open some doors to freedom but an institution like slavery doesn’t end all at once. There was share cropping and things like the 

Pullman porters on the growing train travel: the porters were typically freed slaves and they were not paid a salary but were allowed to work for tips. It was this tradition that started tipping in restaurants which continues to be a near slavery wage arrangement even today. 

We should also be aware that in the institution of slavery, slave holders provided housing, food and clothing to their slaves which is not typically possible for minimum wage earners today. I would argue that until the minimum wage is a living wage, that we have not really ended slavery in America. 

But more graphically, we should never forget that the majority of the clothing, shoes, household goods, toys, and food found on the shelves of Walmart were produced by slaves, mostly in Asia and Central America but some by prisoners in America . . . or did you think that we keep 2.5 million Americans in prison because they are the bad guys?

Or didn’t you know that for very many years, and maybe it is not cricket for a gentleman to tell a lady’s secrets, but Victoria’s Secret was that sexy underwear was made by male prisoners for pennies a day. 

And you thought it was their ads that were obscene!

But I digress, let’s get back to George:  George had become wealthy the old-fashioned way; He married a widow who owned an estate that would have been worth about $10 million in today’s economy. Martha’s estate included several slaves. When George Washington was elected president, he and Martha had to move from their Virginia plantation to the president’s residence which was, at that time, in New York. The next year, the capital was moved from New York to Philadelphia where it remained until our seat of government was moved to the newly constructed city of Washington, D.C. when John Adams was president. 

When Washington became president, Martha’s personal assistant, Oney Judge, was 17. In Virginia, Oney slept in the bedroom next to Martha where she spent her days combing Martha’s hair and caring for her wardrobe. But Pennsylvania was not like Virginia. 

Philadelphia had more freed slaves than any other city in America. Oney saw free black men and women walking up and down the streets as if that was normal, normal in a way she had never seen in Virginia. And, as I said, the end of slavery in our nation was not a singular event nor did it even go in a straight line. 

Pennsylvania had passed a law that allowed slave holders to move there with their slaves but after six months of living there, the slaves were automatically emancipated. So, she saw what black liberty looked like and she saw a path towards freedom herself. But Washington was unwilling to give up the lifestyle of having uncompensated personal attendants. 

He wrote to his secretary that when any one of his six or seven household slaves had been in Philadelphia for more than five months, they were to be rotated with other slaves from among the more than 100 living on his plantation in Virginia. When he brought them back to Pennsylvania, the six month clock started all over again. He instructed his secretary that this was to be done in a way that deceived both the slave and the public. What he was doing was legal but it was morally reprehensible to most of the people around him so he wanted to make it look like his slaves wanted to remain a part of his household. 

Washington also had a law passed that allowed a slave holder to use a slave hunter to capture and return a runaway slave, no matter where they might be found. This was the first fugitive slave act. A captured runaway might be flogged or otherwise cruelly treated but the most common practice was to sell them to a Caribbean sugar plantation where they would almost certainly die in a matter of months. 

In spite of these threats, when Oney learned that she was to be given as a wedding present to one of Martha’s granddaughters who lived in the south, a place where Oney never wanted to live again, she decided to try to escape. One warm May evening when the Washington’s were entertaining guests, she slipped away and found passage on a boat called “The Nancy” and three days later, she was in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

The Washingtons wanted her back but they didn’t want to be humiliated both by the fact that a member of their domestic household had become a fugitive and that they had been outsmarted by a 20-year-old black woman whom they had never bothered to teach how to read and write. So they did what Americans of that era often did, they blamed a Frenchman. Washington concocted a lie that Oney had been seduced to run away by some lecherous Frenchman.

It was harder to hide in Portsmouth, there were fewer free blacks there, and, predictably, she was spotted by a friend of the Washington family who let them know where Oney was living. Washington felt that it was within her purview to use employees of the federal government to help him capture and return her. 

Trump was not the first president to believe that he could use his office for personal gain. There was a customs collector in the small town of Portsmouth, Joseph Whipple, and Washington instructed him to find, capture and return Oney to Philadelphia. And here is another issue in the evolution of morality:

Whipple and his wife had recently freed their slaves, being no longer willing to participate in this barbaric practice. So, he was being ordered by the president of the United States to capture and return a slave when he, personally, no longer found slavery to be palpable. This is the trap we all often find ourselves in. We have a principle, like not wanting to support slavery by buying slave produced goods, and the practical, “prices are much lower at Walmart.” Can you feel me?

So, Whipple tried to split the difference. He tricked Oney into coming to his office with the promise of a job. He asked her about the seductive Frenchman and discovered that what had seduced Oney was her desire to be free. 

He then tried to reason with her, telling her that if she returned to the Washington household, he might allow her to be emancipated after a few years of service. She pretended to agree to these terms and Whipple set out to arrange it through correspondence with Washington, but George would have none of it. Oney was property and he would not reward her with favorable treatment in reward for illegal conduct. Whipple caved in to the authority of the president and went to Oney’s home to take her by force, but she had wisely escaped.

Moving to a small community a few miles away, Oney met and married a sailor, named Jack. With him she gave birth to a daughter, Eliza. But, per the laws of slavery, the children of a slave belonged to the slave holder. By this time, Washington was no longer president, but he did not give up on trying to recover Oney. 

He sent his nephew, Burwell Bassett, who found her and again, tried to kindly persuade her to come back to Mt.
Vernon in Virginia. She flatly refused. Burwell left to hire men and to fetch a rope so that he could capture her and force her to leave with him but when he returned, she had disappeared again.

Even though the Washingtons never were able to recover Oney, the story is not especially a happy one. Oney had three children with Jack but, unfortunately, Jack died young and Oney was not able to support her small family. She had to contract her daughters out as indentured servants to neighboring farmers households and her son followed his father and became a sailor, and she never saw him again.

Eventually, George Washington died, and in his will he stipulated that his 120 slaves would be freed when Martha died which was not a terribly clever thing to 

say. 

A 120 people, living in these crowded dormitories at Mt Vernon,  had their freedom hinged on the death of one old white woman whose safety became rather precarious. There were a few mysterious fires and other incidents at Mt. Vernon that persuaded Martha to go ahead and emancipate the slaves prior to her death but she did not include Oney in that gesture and so Oney continued to live as a fugitive for the rest of her life. 

Her daughters eventually worked off their indentured servanthood and they, with their mother tried to survive in the crushing poverty that was the lot of even freed black people in those days. Eventually, Oney sold the only thing she ever owned, her story of slavery and her life as a fugitive from the first president of the United States to an anti-slavery magazine, just before she died when she was about 70 years old. 

It is my job to write eulogies for the deceased and I typically try my best not to dance on the graves of folks when I am delivering their eulogies but, honestly, I cannot tell a lie, not even then. If you see me at a funeral waxing eloquently about mortality and quoting a lot of philosophers and not talking much about the deceased, you may safely assume that I am avoiding something. I can try to be diplomatic but, as Confucius said, “One does not plaster a dung wall.” If any of you are around to speak at my memorial, I expect nothing more than honesty from you.

So, let me ask you, was George Washington a good man? He did a lot of good things. He risked his life in service of his country. He wrote wonderful documents about freedom and liberty. He delivered speeches, most noticeably, his farewell speech when he left office, even while he was trying his best to find and return Oney to slavery. 

No one is perfect. Good people, without exception, do bad things. But Washington was very well informed regarding all of the debates around slavery. There were people all around him who had thought their way through this issue and had freed their slaves at considerable financial sacrifice to themselves . . . Washington didn’t.

I have made the same observation about the prophet, Muhammad, who, late in life married a six-year-old child when he was in his 50’s. There were people in his life who implored him not to do it but it was legal, even though many people knew how wrong it was and begged him not to do it. So, with my apologies to Muslim defenders of the prophet’s reputation, was Muhammad a pedophile?

Ethics is always a moving target and the best people among us make compromises. I felt it was important to tell Oney’s story here today, not for us to sit in judgement of Washington over 200 years later but to remind us that we have to be willing to examine our own lives with the kind of objectivity that we are applying to Washington and Muhammad today.

For me, at least a part of my ongoing relationship with a spiritual community is the simple fact that being in community helps me to consider my own life in ways that may help me to be a better person, to make fewer compromises. I wish that Joseph Whipple had been strong enough in his convictions to just tell George “no.” 

I wish that Burwell Bassett had never gone to get a rope and some strong men to help him capture Oney. But more than that, when the time for moral decision making in the face of fortune or power comes to me, that I will make a choice that will make you proud when you stand up to speak at my memorial. 

When Ted Kennedy spoke at his brother, Bobby’s, memorial, he famously said, “My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it" I am forced 

 to wonder if Marilyn Monroe had lived long enough to be there and speak if she would have said the same.

We live life one moment at a time, making decisions, often without the perspective of history, but we are left to try to live in a way that when the lights are turned on, we can hope that the sum total is that we have been good and decent people, who saw wrong and tried to right it, who saw suffering and tried to heal it, and who try to leave a legacy of ethical decision making that outweighs our mistakes.

Have courage. Avoid compromise. Advocate for freedom, and don’t go buy a rope, not even for the president of the United States.