Presidents’ Day should be abolished. It is unseemly to celebrate evil especially if Presidents’ Day has morphed from Washington’s Birthday to a full-court press in honour of these men. It is well to remember how evil so many were. Eight of the twelve slave-owning presidents actually held chattel persons during their tenure as president. Mt Rushmore, the ultimate visual disgrace, contains four presidents chiseled in stone of whom half owned enslaved persons. These were Mr George Washington and Mr Thomas Jefferson who believed African-American blackness was an “eternal monotony” unlike whites with “flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form…They seem to require less sleep [and] in reason [are] much inferior.” Notes on the State of Virginia. I did not see these racist writings on the walls of the Jefferson Memorial. Teddy Roosevelt was a racist warmonger and Abraham Lincoln was a centrist on the issue of abolition of the Peculiar Institution, as the south referred to it. Lincoln opposed civil rights and equal treatment under the laws for any freed person. This was the racist Mr Lincoln’s position on this issue at the fourth Lincoln-Douglas debate in Charleston, Ill. during his failed Senate bid in 1858:
“I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races…nor ever have been in favor of making voters of the negroes, or jurors, or qualifying them to hold office, or having them to marry with white people.â€
And now the Hall of Shame: To liberal historians who vote Democratic, can you really ignore this historical evil and minimise it in your historical assessment of these villains? Do slaveowners earn our respect and admiration or our opprobrium? It is time to burn the canon and light a candle of revisionism for historiographical justice.
1. George Washington | 1789-1797 | VA |
3. Thomas Jefferson | 1801-1809 | VA |
4. James Madison | 1809-1817 | VA |
5. James Monroe | 1817-1825 | VA |
7. Andrew Jackson | 1829-1837 | SC |
8. Martin Van Buren | 1837-1841 | NY |
9. William Henry Harrison | 1841 | VA |
10. John Tyler | 1841-1845 | VA |
11. James Knox Polk | 1845-1849 | NC |
12. Zachary Taylor | 1849-1850 | VA |
17. Andrew Johnson | 1865-1869 | NC |
18. Ulysses Simpson Grant | 1869-1877 | OH |
Number represents slaveowner’s sequential order as president. Barack Hussein Obama is the forty-fourth president and was not a slaveowner.
Mt Rushmore’s paean to slavery and slavemasters: #1 is Mr Washington, the “Father” of our slave country. I thought the Articles of Confederation preceded this man’s presidency! #2 is Mr Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence. I think he left out enslaved persons including Sally. #3 and #4 are Mr T. Roosevelt and Mr Lincoln:
