George Washington
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GENERAL, THEN PRESIDENT, GEORGE WASHINGTON “Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair. The event is in the hands of God.” — George Washington “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY President, General George Washington “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON PRESIDENT GEORGE WASHINGTON Our Fearless Leaders NAME BORN INAUGURATED EX OFFICIO DIED GEORGE WASHINGTON 1789 1792 JOHN ADAMS 1796 JULY 4, 1826 THOMAS JEFFERSON APRIL 13, 1743 1800 DITTO 1804 JAMES MADISON 1808 1812 JAMES MONROE 1816 1820 JOHN QUINCY ADAMS 1824 ANDREW JACKSON 1828 1832 MARTIN VAN BUREN 1836 WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON 1840 JAMES K. POLK 1844 ZACHARY TAYLOR 1848 FRANKLIN PEIRCE 1852 JAMES BUCHANAN 1856 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 1860 1864 HDT WHAT? INDEX PRESIDENT GEORGE WASHINGTON GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON 1731 OLD STYLE / 1732 NEW STYLE February 22, Tuesday (1731, Old Style): George Washington was born to Augustine and Mary Ball Washington at Wakefield Farm, Westmoreland County, Virginia. NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT President, General George Washington “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON PRESIDENT GEORGE WASHINGTON 1747 February 27, Friday (1746, Old Style): Young George Washington surveyed a turnip field. NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE President, General George Washington “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX PRESIDENT GEORGE WASHINGTON GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON HDT WHAT? INDEX GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON PRESIDENT GEORGE WASHINGTON 1748 March 19, Saturday (1747, Old Style): Elias Hicks was born on the Hempstead Plain of Paumanok “Long Island,” on “nineteenth day of Third month.” (I wouldn’t myself have a clue whether that meant Saturday, March 19th in 1747 according to the Old Style for which New Year’s Day was March 25th, or Sunday, June 19th of the year 1748, but ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA indicates that it meant March 19th — and I suppose that settles the matter for some of us.) His grandfather Jacob Hicks, an Anglican churchwarden, had been influenced by an itinerant Quaker exhorter named Thomas Chalkley, and offered the Hicks family home as the place of worship for Friends residing in the area, and his father John Hicks (1711-1789) had become a member of the Westbury Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, three miles from the farm, “by convincement” a few years before. His mother Martha Smith Hicks (17??-1759) declined to join any religious grouping, and it is clear from her firmness in this regard that she knew there to be something irreducibly incompatible and incommensurable between the religious impulse and any social grouping whatever.1 As Elias, the 4th of her six sons, would put it when he preached, “The business of life is to turn inward.” ELIAS HICKS “Religion and righteousness are the same thing.” 1. Her son recorded that she “was never in strict fellowship with any religious society, but was a Woman of Strict Morality and generally beloved and respected by her Neighbors, and acquaintance, of every profession.” HDT WHAT? INDEX PRESIDENT GEORGE WASHINGTON GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON 1749 At the age of 17, George Washington became a land surveyor for an Ohio company. CARTOGRAPHY LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD. President, General George Washington “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON PRESIDENT GEORGE WASHINGTON 1752 July: Upon the death of his half-brother Lawrence Washington, George Washington inherited rights to the Mount Vernon plantation in Virginia, inclusive of 18 slaves. (The ledgers and account books which he kept show that he then bought slaves when necessary and possible, to replenish this original 18. In the account books of Washington, the entries show that in 1754 he bought two males and a female; in 1756, two males, two females and a child, etc. In 1759, the year in which he was married, his wife Martha, brought him 39 “dower-Negroes.” He kept separate records of these Negroes all his life and mentions them as a separate unit in his will. Washington purchased his slaves in Alexandria from Mr. Piper and perhaps in the District in 1770 “went over to Colo. Thos. Moore’s Sale and purchased two Negroes. During Washington’s lifetime, the number of slaves would increase to 200.) It would seem that during Washington’s youth, he would be rather casual in regard to the lives and fortunes of black slaves. For instance, Henry Wiencek reports in AN IMPERFECT GOD: GEORGE WASHINGTON, HIS SLAVES, AND THE CREATION OF AMERICA (NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003) that at one point, the young man found it not to be beneath him, to participate in a lottery some of the prizes of which were slave children! November 4, Saturday: La clemenza di Tito, a dramma per musica by Christoph Willibald Gluck to words of Metastasio, was performed for the initial time, in the Teatro San Carlo of Naples. George Washington joined a whites-only, males-only club, Alexandria Masonic Lodge No. 22 in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and took the 1st step into the mystique of Masonry. (ALERT: For a historian to refer in the 21st Century to a whites-only, males-only 18th-Century club as a whites-only, males-only club constitutes the egregious error which all proper historians decry as presentism.)2 2. The African Lodge of Freemasons, which would start up in 1776 in Boston under the leadership of Prince Hall, would also be segregated by race and gender (!) and yet would be considered clandestine by many Freemasons of the skin color of Washington — although this blacks-only, males-only club would receive a charter from the Grand Lodge in England. Among Freemasons, debates about the authenticity of Prince Hall Masonry would persist into the 20th century. Among the members of these Prince Hall Lodges would be Supreme Court Justice Marshall, Mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles, Dr. Benjamin Hooks of the NAACP, Mayor Andrew Young of Atlanta, and Mayor Coleman Young of Detroit, and yet none of these luminaries would ever be allowed to set foot in a white Masonic lodge. (ALERT: To refer to a blacks-only, males-only club as “segregated” constitutes an egregious error which, unfortunately, as yet lacks a name.) HDT WHAT? INDEX PRESIDENT GEORGE WASHINGTON GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON 1753 3 November: In MEN OF CONCORD it is recorded how Cato Ingraham dealt with a problem dog that had killed turkeys and cows, and bitten someone: The next that was heard of him, Black Cato, that lived at the Lee place, now Sam Wheeler’s, on the river, was waked up about midnight by a noise among the pigs, and, having got up, he took a club and went out to see what was the matter. ETC. Cato worked as a day laborer and he and his wife Philis evidently during their old age would have a guest room in their home near Goose Pond which they made available to transients of color. George Washington led an expedition west from Virginia to challenge French claims to the Allegheny River Valley. 3.“Cato, the slave of Duncan Ingraham who lived next to Daniel Bliss on what is now called Walden Street.” I don’t know whether this means that Cato and his wife lived alone at that location, or whether Squire Duncan Ingraham lived at that location and they had a cottage on his estate. Ingraham had been the captain of a seagoing vessel and it is said that he had engaged in the slave trade. It is also said that during the American revolution he had favored the British cause. HDT WHAT? INDEX GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON PRESIDENT GEORGE WASHINGTON 1754 Again conflict erupted in the Great Lake and Ohio Valley region between French and English — the French and Indian War (or Seven Years War, since it would not end formally until the Treaty of Paris in 1763). Once again Major George Washington went to the region to defend English interests. At the Battle of Great Meadows (Fort Necessity) in Pennsylvania, his army of Virginians was defeated. The French renewed their HDT WHAT? INDEX PRESIDENT GEORGE WASHINGTON GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON assaults on Fort Number 4 in New Hampshire. At a colonial congress in Albany attended by representatives of seven English colonies, Benjamin Franklin, one of the Commissioners appointed from Pennsylvania to that Colonial Congress, presented “Short Hints towards a Scheme for a General Union of the British Colonies on the Continent,” and a motion passed that it would be “absolutely necessary for their security and defense” that there be “union of all the colonies.” The term “president” was also introduced for the first time, a “president” here being merely a person who “presides” over an assembly of delegates and then keeps the ball rolling until the next assembly of delegates. This first step toward American independence was not at all intended in the spirit of separation from the British crown, but was intended merely as preparation by the English settlers for race warfare against the red people of the continent and their too-intimate French allies. (It may come as a surprise, to some, that the American union originated as a necessity of race war, while, to others, this may come as a revelation and an explanation. For instance, Thomas Hutchinson, always a friend of the white man and enemy of the colored man, and never an advocate of separation from the mother country, was a delegate from Massachusetts to the Albany Convention — and was, with Franklin, a member of the committee appointed to draw up a plan of union.