Were the Founding Fathers 'Enslavers'?

An historical biopic about George Washington called Young Washington opened the day before Independence Day, appropriately, which I reviewed for the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s FrontPage Magazine. It centers on a George Washington you don’t often hear or think about: the ambitious, inexperienced young man fumbling his way toward becoming the legendary Father of His Country; Young Washington is about the forging of that heroic character.

Prior to watching the movie I viewed a 45-minute roundtable discussion on YouTube featuring the director and screenwriter of the film, Jon Erwin, and a handful of historians discussing the historical accuracy and fidelity of the film. It was interesting mostly because of the thoughtful perspective of the filmmaker Erwin, who really strove to do Washington justice, but one thing that stood out was how often the word “enslaved” popped up, as in “enslaved people,” “enslaved person,” “the enslaved” instead of the simple word “slave” that non-academics commonly use. You could have made a drinking game out of how often the female historian on the panel said “enslaved,” although if you did you would die of alcohol poisoning by the end of it.

In fact, if you go into a museum today, or an historical exhibit like George Washington’s home at Mt. Vernon or Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, you won’t be able to miss this strange, seemingly innocuous but profound shift. A word that stood at the absolute center of American historical writing for generations has quietly, but intentionally, been almost totally erased, at least in modern historiography.

Over the last couple of decades, the noun “slave” has undergone basically a linguistic retirement. In its place, a new term has stepped into academic parlance: enslaved person. In addition, the traditional term “master” or “slave owner” is also being systematically replaced by the word enslaver.

Why? What is the reasoning behind this quiet, semantic movement? Well, it’s not happening by accident. The only reason Leftists do anything – and the academic activists behind this are indisputably and overwhelmingly Left-wing – is for power. And the manipulation of language is how they impose power over the culture without the use of force. Make no mistake about it: this linguistic shift from “slave” to “enslaved person” is intentional and agenda-driven. It exemplifies the profound, high-stakes manner in which they pervert language to reshape and eventually erase our historical memory. As Orwell wrote: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

Weaponizing the Language

To understand this linguistic evolution and the subversive theory that built this modern academic consensus about slavery, we have to look at a concept that has swept through medicine, sociology, and now historiography over the last forty or so years: person-first language.

The philosophy behind person-first language goes like this: an individual’s identity should never be entirely defined by their condition, their medical diagnosis, or their legal status. In modern writing, for example, we no longer refer to someone as “a schizophrenic”; we say “a person with schizophrenia.” We no longer say “the disabled”; we say “people with disabilities.” This is at least ostensibly intended to be more respectful and destigmatizing.

The theory about the noun slave is that it functions as an identity. It implies that being property was the inherent nature of the person being described. It merges the human being with the legal category, or so the argument goes.

But when you switch to enslaved person, “enslaved” becomes an adjective, and “person” becomes the noun. By making “person” the root of the phrase, the language establishes that their humanity comes first. Their legal status as property wasn’t who they were; it was a condition imposed upon them by an external system.

The theorists behind this re-conception of the word “slave” argue that this alters how we assign historical agency. Take the traditional term slave owner. It sounds passive, almost natural, like landowner or homeowner. It frames the relationship as a static state of possession. But when modern historians substitute the more active noun enslaver, derived from a verb, it turns the “slave owner” into a perpetrator. The connotation is that holding someone in bondage is not a passive fact of property ownership but an active choice renewed every day.

The same applies to the infrastructure of slavery. A slave ship sounds like a neutral category of vessel, like a cargo ship or a passenger liner. But calling it an enslavement ship or a transatlantic slave vessel refocuses attention on the function of the vessel—that it was designed or retooled specifically to participate in the stripping of human beings of their freedom.

By restructuring words like this, modern academics purport to be trying to break the habit of uncritically adopting the language of the perpetrators. In fact, what they are trying to do is force a subtle shift in how we think about anyone who owned slaves – specifically the Founding Fathers. The political aim here is to smear the Founding Fathers as, first and foremost, not the pioneer architects of a liberty unprecedented in human history, but as nothing more or less than enslavers, which sounds flat-out evil.

This shift didn’t happen overnight. It bubbled up through decades of – predictably – black feminist scholarship and grassroots academic organizing. The moment the ground began to shift under the feet of the historical profession came in 1985, when an historian named Deborah Gray White published a book called Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. That book was about – predictably – the intersection of race and gender in the antebellum era.

But in 1999, when the university press was preparing a new edition of the book, Deborah Gray White wrote a new preface in which she admitted, “Were I to write this book today, I would refer to them as ‘enslaved’ rather than ‘slaves’...” because the word forces us to acknowledge that there was someone doing the actual enslaving.

That insight—that the language of history should reflect the active imposition of power—began to spread. (That insight, by the way, is Marxist at its core, because Marx trained the Left to think of every human interaction in terms of power imbalances.) By the 2010s, historians were arguing that if we simply repeat the language of the perpetrators uncritically, we are, in a sense, extending that erasure of human identity into the present day.

Eventually, this movement was codified into a formal tool for the profession. An historian named P. Gabrielle Foreman, alongside a coalition of scholars “of color,” created a community-sourced guide that circulated through universities and newsrooms. It was titled, Writing about Slavery? Teaching About Slavery?: This Might Help. It emphasized that “People weren’t slaves; they were enslaved.”

The Pushback

Some historians, political scientists, and linguists objected that this shift is problematic in terms of grammar, law, and historical reality. They point out that these multi-word adjectival phrases create an awkward clunkiness on the page. Writing “the runaway enslaved person” instead of “the runaway slave” or “the children of enslaved people” instead of “children of slaves” introduces passive constructions that can distance a reader from the propulsive energy of narrative history.

And David Blight, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Frederick Douglass, has argued that the people who actually lived through the nightmare of human bondage did not shy away from the noun slave. When Douglass wrote the book that would shake the conscience of the nation, he didn’t title it The Narrative of an Enslaved Person. He called it Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Critics ask, if Douglass felt it was vital to use the starkness of that noun, aren’t we doing history a disservice by smoothing it over with 21st-century academic prose?

But the critics’ core argument is the simple linguistic distinction that enslavement refers to the actual process, whereas slavery refers to status. Being enslaved is a perfectly accurate description of a free person living in, say, West Africa being captured, forced onto a ship, and inducted into slavery. But this is linguistically distinct from being a slave, and should remain so. Words matter, as the Left knows very well, which is why they are perpetually perverting language to suit their propaganda.

Take, for example, the American system of slavery. The international slave trade had been banned since 1808. Nearly all of the 2-4 million black people living in bondage in the American South in the 1840s, ‘50s, and ‘60s were not literally abducted from freedom. Unlike in places like Brazil or the Caribbean, slavery in the United States had become hereditary. Those people were slaves, yes, but enslaved would literally mean they were seized from a prior state of independence. Similarly, slave owners is not interchangeable with enslavers, which should be reserved for those doing the seizing. This is not at all to minimize any aspect of the practice of slavery; it’s simply a point of linguistic accuracy.

The critics who argue these objections have not been able to prevent the academic embrace of the term enslaved. By the late 2010s, this new terminology had achieved total victory in woke activist institutions like the Smithsonian, major university presses, the Advanced Placement historical curriculum, and now AI. It’s virtually ubiquitous at historical sites across the country, where patrons who are excited to visit landmarks such as the aforementioned Monticello or Smithsonian have to endure lectures and exhibits about the evils of slavery from Left-wing activists who want to demonize the Founding Fathers as enslavers.

Resist

The patriots visiting these places know full well that a majority of the Founding Fathers owned slaves. We don’t approve of it; we’re not ignoring it; but unlike the Left, we understand that human beings are not perfect and that history is the agonizingly slow process of humans struggling to overcome their flaws and their brokenness. We don’t make idols of the Founding Fathers, but we do revere them for their literally unprecedented wisdom and efforts to create a nation which has striven more than any other in human history to rectify those flaws.

Here is a clue for the historically illiterate who have been indoctrinated to believe slavery was a uniquely American or even white practice inflicted on black and brown people: human bondage was universal. As has often been noted: everywhere throughout history, people have enslaved others. Ancient Meso-Americans enslaved each other. The ancient Egyptians enslaved Jews and other conquered peoples. When the Mongol armies swept across Asia and into Eastern Europe, they enslaved captives. Native American tribes enslaved other conquered tribes. Arab slavers enslaved white Europeans. The blacks ensnared in the transatlantic slave trade were largely enslaved by other black Africans, then sold to white and Arab slavers. And on and on. It was a ghastly but universally accepted practice.

Another point worth noting: 95% of slavery throughout history was tribal, not racial. A tribe or a people made slaves of their enemies simply because they belonged to a different tribe or group of people, not because of the color of their skin.

Slavery continues today in places like China and North Korea and in many Muslim countries, although the Left cares nothing for those enslaved people because their plight can’t be weaponized against Western civilization.

No reasonable or sane person in the West today thinks of slavery as anything but an abomination, but the reason for that is that 19^th century white Christian Americans and British forced an end to the practice – in America, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of white lives in the Civil War – because it was immoral and because in America at least, abolishing slavery was a fulfillment of the unprecedented truth in our Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. That truth was a world-changing statement from the Founding Fathers, whose attitude toward slavery (except for Deep South colony delegates) ranged from being deeply conflicted about it to outright wanting to end it. To make slave ownership the central focus of our perspective on the Founding Fathers, and then to condemn them as enslavers is a grotesque, Marxist-driven distortion intended to subvert American patriotism and to twist the knife of white guilt. They were slave owners, yes, but not enslavers, a term more appropriate to the black Africans who enslaved each other, and which is designed to demonize the very men who launched the country that would declare all men free.

We must push back against this Progressive agenda to perpetuate racial division in America wherever it rears its ugly head. That’s why I was pleased when the White House issued, on Independence Day, no less, a report blasting the once-respected Smithsonian Institute for woke propagandizing, about which I wrote last week for FrontPage Mag’s paid subscribers. The report concluded that, as I wrote, “presenting such tragedies as slavery as a defining characteristic of the United States—while entirely erasing major historical achievements, foundational documents, and unifying figures—is a distortion that generates national shame rather than informed citizenship.” When entering an historical site like Monticello, the public has a right to expect neutral stewardship rather than Left-wing ideological conditioning. Bravo, Trump administration, for calling out the Smithsonian.

Resist. Refuse to use the Left’s preferred terminology except in mockery. Call them out on it when they use it. Show zero tolerance for Leftist subversion. Zero tolerance for their weaponization of language. Zero tolerance for their divisive hate. We are in a war for the soul and future of America with an enemy that, as my culture critic friend Michael Walsh always reminds us, never rests. Their goal is permanent, totalitarian, one-party hegemony and the eradication of our freedoms and prosperity. We will win only by demonstrating greater conviction and tenacity in defense of this great nation than they can muster to destroy it.

Photo credit: The Declaration of Independence, by John Trumbull from the US Capitol at Wikimedia Commons.