Washington: a focal point of world power

THERE cannot be that many major cities named after a person while he or she was still alive. Stalingrad was one, but it has now reverted to Volgograd. Washington DC is another, and there let the comparison end.

George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon, is just a few miles from the capital city of the USA, and when we arrived there for a conference of newspaper editors, the first item on the agenda was a visit to the home of the Father of the American Nation.
It is a fine 18th century gentleman’s residence, not unlike a modest French chateau. The wooden boards of the walls are bevelled to imitate masonry, and plastered with a thick mix of paint and sand.
Our George was a modest man, we are told, but not so modest that he declined to display his status as a landowner and a man of means.
A member of the upper class from birth, he fought for the British in the French and Indian Wars of the 1750s, known to us as the Seven Years’ War.
There is no doubt that he was the main architect of the American victory in the Revolutionary War, and he was a worthy choice to be the first President.
But in light of the current controversy about the Dick Dowling plaque on Tuam Town Hall, it is worth remembering that George Washington was a slave owner. The slave quarters on his estate may still be visited.
And while Washington freed all his slaves in his will, those belonging to his wife Martha, a wealthy woman in her own right, remained in bondage.
Perhaps even more sensitive to realities of history than before, the costumed interpreters who explain the details of the house, its furnishings and surrounds now refer to them as “enslaved people”.
That’s a piece of political correctness with which I agree: the word slave implies a piece of property; an enslaved person is a human being whose rights have been stolen.

Read the full feature in this week's edition of The Tuam Herald