Yes, slavery was bad, Mr. President. Denying ugly truths about it is terrible, too | Opinion

Our current president, Donald Trump, believes that the Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C., focus too much on “how bad slavery was.”

Our first president, George Washington, sometimes used to whip the Black men and women he enslaved. Other times, he’d assign a white overseer to whip them on his behalf.

Washington forced enslaved Black men and women to work from sunup to sundown — and considered them lazy and ungrateful for trying to find ways to not work themselves literally to death.

Washington initially prevented Black men from fighting in the Revolutionary War. Then he relented and was in charge of a military that was maybe the most racially integrated in American history through the Korean war, according to historian Eric Foner.

Washington saw Black men die next to white men, giving their lives to establish freedom. The experience supposedly convinced him to see slavery differently. Though he didn’t free the enslaved, he stopped participating in the trading of slaves, at least for a little while.

He even spoke of the need to end the practice — given that thousands of Black men helped white colonists defeat the British, making possible what is now known as the world’s greatest democracy.

A year before the U.S. Constitution was signed, Washington wrote that there was no one who wished to see a plan for abolition adopted “more sincerely than I do.”

That was a boastful bald-faced lie.

Even as a significant number of white men around him pushed to end slavery, Washington “did nothing to promote the end of slavery and rejected any suggestion that he publicly call for Virginia or the country generally to adopt a plan for abolition,” Foner wrote in 2019 in the London Review of Books.

Washington contemporary Benjamin Franklin freed his slaves and devoted much of his time providing them with education. Thirteen other Declaration of Independence signers were wealthy white men who never owned slaves. Three signers joined Franklin and became slavery abolitionists.

Washington did not join them, instead expending enormous time and energy tracking down runaway slaves and freeing none, except leaving instructions in his will that they be freed after his wife’s death.

And yet it was Washington we decided to deem the father of the country, the man whose face should be on our currency, the man who should be honored just about everywhere — not Franklin, not the white non-slaveholding founders, not any of the thousands of Black men who fought for the colonies despite their own bondage.

It was Washington we made sure young Black boys and Black girls would revere, and almost worship him the way many white Americans do, despite Washington’s involvement with a system of enslavement, rape and murder of their ancestors.

We didn’t put Washington on that mythical pedestal because he was a great military tactician. Despite iconic paintings portraying otherwise, he lost more battles than he won. Even his alleged impeccable honesty was built on a lie about a cherry tree.

Mount Vernon historians say “Washington’s greatest wartime legacy” may have been “his decision to surrender his commission to Congress, affirming the principle of civilian control of the military in the new United States.”

Maybe that’s so — but American slavery is just as much of his legacy, a brutal system based on the idea of permanent Black servitude to white people, a system that gave way to lynching and Jim Crow and mass incarceration.

The ongoing debate about slavery a year before we celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary is revealing, as is the current president’s push to idolize and re-honor white Confederate soldiers who were literal traitors to the U.S. in their quest to keep Black people in chains forever.

We’ve never fully grappled with this country’s origins. We’ve spent much of the past 250 years denying ugly truths and spreading pretty lies that make us feel better or don’t discomfort us.

Our country’s first president whipped his slaves. Our country’s current president doesn’t want you to know. That’s not out of step with how we speak of our history. It’s American tradition.

Issac J. Bailey is a McClatchy opinion writer in North Carolina and South Carolina.

This story was originally published August 22, 2025 at 5:00 AM.