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Following is the text of a speech presented
during July 4 ceremonies in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia.
It was given by archaeologist Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, who who is helping
to excavate the site of the “President’s House.”
The house served as the executive mansion of
George Washington and John Adams during the 1790s. Recent excavations on
the building’s foundations have revealed startling evidence of
Washington’s role as a slaveowner.
I can't think of a more appropriate way to mark the
nation's 231st birthday than by talking to you about the many
unanticipated gifts that have emerged from the President's House site
that remind us that history is written more simply and heroically than
life was actually lived.
Archaeology allows us to go deeper. It exposes the
minutia, the mundane, the magnificent, the distressing and appalling
without design or prejudice. It spreads before us the unearthed evidence
of human lives lived in every facet of their glory and their secrets. It
reveals a picture that is often conflicted and challenges us to look more
deeply.
At this extraordinary site we have uncovered the
foundation of the bow window, the ceremonial space chosen by our first
president to express his power as chief executive. And we have uncovered
the foundation of the kitchen where enslaved Africans toiled, the space
where Washington exploited his power as slaveholder.
Washington had first-hand knowledge of the African
captives' quest for freedom. Dozens had escaped from Mount Vernon,
Virginia, during the American Revolution. Of the nine captive Africans
Washington brought with him from Mt. Vernon to the President's House in
Philadelphia, four either planned or attempted escape at some point
during or after their captivity in Philadelphia.
Two of Washington's enslaved workers, Oney Judge
[lady’s maid to Mrs. Washington] and Hercules [the master cook],
succeeded in escaping from this site, the nation's first executive
mansion. They seized the freedom the Declaration of Independence promised
but the nation would not deliver. Each defined liberty and freedom for
themselves in the face of gross injustices and, to quote Frederick
Douglass, in the face of "the sacrilegious irony" of being
enslaved by the leader of the new democratic republic and his wife.
Frederick Douglass did not celebrate the Fourth of
July. As an escapee from slavery and a Black man in America in 1852, he
thought it a mockery to expect him to do so.
Sixty years after George Washington signed the first
Fugitive Slave Act and two years after the last and infamous Fugitive
Slave Law of 1850 was written into the Constitution, Douglass wrote one
of his most important speeches, "The Meaning of the Fourth of July
for the Negro.” In it, Douglass thundered, "Your high independence
only reveals the immeasurable distance between us.
... The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity
and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by
me." As he critiqued the conduct of the nation, he condemned its
hypocrisy and its barbarity around American slavery in the face of its
"shouts of liberty and equality."
At the President's House site, that "immeasurable
distance" between freedom and slavery was lived out under one roof.
At this site, my colleagues, visitors, and I bear witness to evidence of
those complexities and inequities. Over time, history often gets distilled
down to what makes us feel good about ourselves as a nation. Every day
this site, instead, challenges us to reconsider what we've been taught in
history class, and why to think and to feel more deeply.
Douglass went on to say, "I do not despair of this
country ... I, therefore leave off where I began, with hope. While
drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great
principles it contains and the genius of the American institutions, my
spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of ... [our] age."
Furthermore, in referring to the injustices of
slavery, Douglass demanded that "the feeling of the nation must be
quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of
the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be
exposed."
What Douglass demanded of the nation, I ask of the
visitors who come to the President's House archaeological site today as
we examine freedom, slavery, and Black history at the site.
Tonight, let every burst of fireworks that penetrates
the night sky illuminate the dark recesses of injustice. I call for a
contemplative Fourth of July, a meditation on freedom, liberty, justice
and democracy, and I ask: What would Frederick Douglass have to say to us
today?
And lastly, my work on this site has been personally
gratifying and life transforming. I had been thinking about and
researching Oney Judge for at least two years before I began work here.
To walk the ground where she may have stood is for me a blessing of the
rarest kind.
Archaeology allows me to experience Black history, to
walk with the ancestors. This Fourth of July I have been profoundly moved
by their stories of hope and freedom, and on behalf of Doug Mooney and
the URS archaeology team, I invite you to the President's House site at
Sixth and Market St. so that you may be touched by these brave stories as
well.
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