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George Washington-Founding Father? Essay

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George Washington became President in 1789 and since then has been regarded as America’s “Founding Father”(10). This grand and hero-like status is said to have “began gravitating to Washington six months before the Declaration of Independence, when one Levi Allen addressed him in a letter as ‘our political Father.’”(10). The preservation of Washington’s role as a national hero has been allowed by authors and the media omitting his many flaws as if they had either been forgotten or were no longer important. Yet by excluding these human faults, they have projected an almost god-like hero and inflicted him upon the nation as their Father, somebody whose “life still has the power to inspire anyone”(10).

When in reality, how can a …show more content…

It is also suggested that Washington was a good man as at the beginning of “the early 1770s, he rarely bought a slave, and he would not sell one”. In addition to this, the author explains how the “slaves were to be freed at his wife’s death”. However I am sure that these excuses could not justify his behaviour to Black Americans today. Similarly, can George Washington really be considered a hero, or just an immense hypocrite who owned slaves whilst signed the Declaration of Independence, declaring, “all men were created equal” (11). Another way that was intended to preserve him as a hero is that he was a “disapproving owner” (12) and that he would have liked slavery to end but he didn’t personally feel politically driven to put an end to it.

George Washington claimed in a letter to Robert Morris that “there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition” of slavery (13). However if he felt so passionately against slavery, he could not have been that heroic or strong as a President as he did not even attempt to implement abolition. It seems that George Washington was fully aware that slavery was morally and humanely wrong, yet was to accustomed to the economic and social ‘benefits’ to want to change the situation. Ironically, the British who George Washington had claimed had been enslaving the American colonies under

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