by Dan Jones
You’ve probably heard on SRN News on Kinship Christian Radio that Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia, has taken down and moved two plaques in the church which honor George Washington and Robert E. Lee.
George Washington was one of the founders of the church, which dates its origin to 1773. Lee was a parishioner who died in 1870.
Noelle York-Simmons, the Rector of Christ Church, said that it had become clear to the Vestry — the governing body of the Church — that the conversations about taking down confederate statues needed to be taken more seriously after the events in Charlottesville earlier this year.
Emily Bryan, Senior Warden of Christ Church, said that “the plaques in our sanctuary make some in our presence feel unsafe or unwelcome.”
And I cannot help but think that the church has let slip past them an opportunity to teach certain truths which appear to have been completely left out of our current public education system.
For you see, our very first documents– the writings that define us as a nation –were all about freedom and liberty for all people.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights…” (emphasis added)
Most people are familiar with that line from the Declaration of Independence and we should never, ever forget that those were words that this little upstart colony were flinging right in the very face of the King of England– the most powerful man in the world at the time. They were radical words. They were words that labeled every man who signed that document as a traitor to the Crown worthy of death and confiscation of all his property.
They were words that George Washington willingly risked his life to defend.
But what most people don’t know are some of the words from the first draft of that document:
“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobium of INFIDEL Powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.”
Yes, what that means is that the first draft of the Declaration of Independence took a firm stand against slavery and listed that evil commerce in human beings as one of our legitimate reasons for declaring our independence from Great Britain.
And yes, the word “Christian” is in all caps because the movement to abolish slavery was a Christian movement that had been building for thousands of years. Our founders, George Washington included, knew very well that our God was the very same God who had torn the Red Sea in two to free his chosen people from the bondage of slavery.
The paragraph was eventually cut from the final draft of the Declaration because it seemed too much at once. The abolition of slavery was a long, slow process all around the world because the sin of slavery had existed as an institution probably since before most cultures had a written history. In the case of the United States, the northern states began a process of abolition shortly after 1776.
And yes, George Washington did own slaves, but here are some direct quotes from him on the subject:
“I never mean, unless some particular circumstances should compel it, to possess another slave by purchase, it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted, by which slavery in this country may be abolished by law.”
“I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery.”
“Not only do I pray for it, on the score of human dignity, but I can clearly forsee that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union, by consolidating it in a common bond of principle.”
“I wish from my soul that the legislature of this State could see the policy of a gradual Abolition of Slavery.”
Not only did Washington say these things, his will granted freedom to all the slaves he owned outright and gave clear instructions that they be taught to read and write and be educated in some “useful occupation.” Provision was also to be made for orphans and other children.
But what of Robert E. Lee? Surely he was entirely pro-slavery, right?
In a December, 1856, letter to his wife, Lee wrote:
“In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages.”
From that same letter, we can see that Lee thought the abolition of slavery was inevitable, but that it may well take another two thousand years before it was accomplished.
In an eerie foreshadowing of our own age, he ends the letter thus:
“Is it not strange that the descendants of those pilgrim fathers who crossed the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom of opinion, have always proved themselves intolerant of the spiritual liberty of others?”
It was that conflict, that question as to whether one man would have the freedom to own another man, that lead to the greatest, bloodiest, most horrific war our nation has ever seen. In the end, the blood of 620,000 men who had formed a nation based on the concepts of freedom and liberty lay dead on its soil. There were so many dead the governments of both the Union and the Confederate states did not have the manpower to bury them in a timely manner and the stench of the thousands of dead hung over our land for years afterward.
In his Second Inaugural Address, as that terrible war was just coming to its bloody end, Abraham Lincoln said:
“Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
And so, to the Vestry at Christ Church and to those who feel unsafe or unwelcome because of those names that have been taken down from that wall, I ask if it is worth the discomfort of looking at those names and remembering what it has cost to be a nation still trying to achieve freedom and liberty for all?
What will it take to finally forgive ourselves, to be healed, to be reconciled as brothers and sisters, and to be the One Nation Under God we were intended to be?
Today’s Praise
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. (Concluding paragraph of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. March 4, 1865.)