What the Founding Fathers Really Have in Common
by Lloyd Williams
"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it." -- Abraham Lincoln, 1862
In ghetto gangsta' parlance, paper money is routinely referred to as "Dead Presidents," implying that's what the various denominations have in common. But the rappers who started spreading that rumor must have flunked American history.Alexander Hamilton, for instance, was never President. In fact, he was ineligible, because he wasn't even born in the U.S. Yet, he was such a revered Revolutionary War figure that he ended up on the $10 bill.Though Lieutenant-Colonel Hamilton had fought tirelessly for the notion that "All men are created equal" in 1776, he had this to say about his slaves some twenty years later: "I believe no man gets more work from his Negroes than I do, at the same time they are my Watchmen and my friends; never was an absolute Monarch more happy in his Subjects than at the present time I am."Benjamin Franklin, whose face graces the $100 bill, was never President either, but he owned slaves for most of his life. Though better known as an inventor who coined folksy proverbs like "A penny saved is a penny earned," he had both a shop and a newspaper in Philly dedicated to the trade in Africans.And among Ben's pearls of wisdom was this sage advice about how to deal with black people. "Perhaps you may imagine the Negroes to be a mild tempered, tractable Kind of People," he said in 1770. "Some of them indeed are so. But the Majority are of a plotting disposition, dark, sullen, malicious, revengeful and cruel in the highest Degree..."While Washington ($1), Lincoln ($5), Jackson ($20) and Grant ($50) were, indeed U.S. Presidents, they all shared a commitment to the institution of slavery. Father of the Country George Washington, who could not tell a lie, explained that he opposed abolition because, "it introduces more evils than it can cure."
So, he signed the Fugitive Slave Act (1793) into law, ordering the return into servitude any Africans who had managed to escape from their masters to free territories. Upon his death, he emancipated only one of his hundreds of slaves, his personal manservant, William Lee. Everybody knows that Thomas Jefferson was a certified psychotic who never squared his ideas about people being born with certain inalienable rights with the fact that he owned slaves, impregnated some, and then sold his own children at auction to the highest bidder. In 1788, Andrew Jackson bought his first slave, an attractive teenage girl. By 1820, he already had 160 working the fields at The Hermitage, his 425 acre plantation in Tennessee. While President, Old Hickory once offered this opinion about the abolitionists then lobbying Congress to end the evil institution: "I regret that such monsters live in our country. They ought to be made to atone for this wicked attempt with their lives."Although Ulysses S. Grant would change his ways and become a Civil War hero, he was still a slave owner in 1858 when he said of a servant: "He is a very smart, active boy, capable of making anything... I can leave him here and get about three dollars per month for him now, and more as he gets older."Even Abraham Lincoln, the so-called Great Emancipator, sold, rather than freed, the slaves he and his wife inherited from his father-in-law. So I say, if the rappers are going to resort to slang when it comes to money, start calling dollars "Dead Slave Owners" instead of "Dead Presidents."
Why not expose the duplicitous nature of our racist Founding Fathers? Hitler's face ain't on the mark, as much as he might have once meant
to Germany. Whose face is on a country's money matters. And only after admitting the truths about our lingering legacy, however disgraceful, can there ever be any hope of finally walking down the road of reconciliation towards a truly colorblind society.
Attorney Lloyd Williams is a member of the NY, NJ, PA, CT, MA & US Supreme Court bars.
