![]() Americans were sympathetic toward the scorned artist and increasingly skeptical of the president’s character-a slight that Johnson, who was already seen as short-tempered, could hardly afford. Arrogant enough to be unaffected by the comment and eager to publicize the president’s “very damn rude” behavior, he readily responded to press curiosity about the incident. Hurd was already decades into his successful career as a painter, specializing in portraiture and landscapes of the American Southwest. Johnson disgustedly called painter Peter Hurd’s work “the ugliest thing I ever saw” and refused to accept it. When he first laid eyes on the painting that was to be his official White House portrait, Lyndon B. Bush praised college classmate Bob Anderson’s portrait as “fabulous” but quipped that he knew a sizable crowd would turn up “once the word got out about hanging.” Even Abraham Lincoln poked fun at his own looks, despite his savvy use of portraiture as political message.īut not all presidents’ reactions to their official portraits have been so joyful. Obama praised the likeness, but joked that artist Kehinde Wiley had denied his request to be painted with smaller ears and less gray hair in 2008, George W. That combination has become something of a norm since the museum began commissioning portraits of presidents in the 1990s. Ultimately, Washington was convinced that calling publicly for the end of slavery would possibly tear the new country apart - a risk that the first president was not prepared to take.When Barack Obama unveiled his official presidential portrait at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery on Monday, his response was gracious, if self-deprecatory. She didn't have the authority to free her own slaves, whom she had inherited from her first husband. Fleming speculated that if Washington had outlived Martha, he would have freed them immediately, but because many of his slaves had intermarried with Martha’s, he did not want any hardship to fall on her. Washington came close to freeing his own slaves at Mount Vernon and to speaking out strongly to encourage the rest of the nation to do the same.īut in both cases, practical reasons trumped ideological ones.Īt home, Washington wrote his will so that the slaves that he owned would be freed upon the death of his wife Martha, and that they would be both educated and cared for. Fleming said that Lafayette convinced Washington that slavery was “immoral and detestable, and could not be tolerated in a republic.” Washington was heavily influenced on the issue by the thinking of Marquis de Lafayette, a Revolutionary War hero and practically an adopted son of Washington’s. In Fleming's most recent book, “ A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War,” the historian titles a chapter on Washington, “The Forgotten Emancipator.” George Washington’s attitudes were similarly complex and seemingly contradictory, he said. “And this attitude was communicated, under the table you might say, to an awful lot of people in the South.” “He was basically secretly opposed to ever freeing the slaves,” he said. So, while Jefferson was publicly opposed to the institution, Fleming said his private views made him averse to the idea of abolition. that convinced him that blacks were inferior to whites, and that they could never be freed because they had so much resentment because of slavery.” because “when it came to the actual reality of slavery, (Jefferson) had a pseudo-science attitude. by introducing slavery to America.”įleming explained that even though the principal author of the Declaration of Independence hated slavery, it remained legal in the U.S. He accused the (English) king of trying to destroy the U.S. “He made that so clear in the Declaration of Independence. “Jefferson loathed the idea of slavery,” said Thomas Fleming, a historian and historical novelist with a special interest in the American Revolution. But the issue was also of great importance to the nation's Founding Fathers as they drafted the Declaration of Independence nearly a century earlier.Ĭonsider Thomas Jefferson, one of the people most closely linked to drafting of the Declaration of Independence. comes up, thoughts often go to the Civil War.
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