George Washington: “This tribe of black gentry”

Image courtesy of nationalcurrencyfoundation.org

Originally posted on Tuesday, February 4th, 2014

George Washington, in a letter to Edmund Pendleton, Esq, dated Nov. 1, 1779 made an passionate critique of the “depreciation of our Money.”

General Washington leveled an indictment of speculators who he anathematized as ‘black gentry” … here transcribed at Wikiquote:

… but I am under no apprehension of a capital injury from ay other source than that of the continual depreciation of our Money. This indeed is truly alarming, and of so serious a nature that every other effort is in vain unless something can be done to restore its credit. …. Where this has been the policy (in Connecticut for instance) the prices of every article have fallen and the money consequently is in demand; but in the other States you can scarce get a single thing for it, and yet it is with-held from the public by speculators, while every thing that can be useful to the public is engrossed by this tribe of black gentry, who work more effectually against us that the enemys Arms; and are a hundd. times more dangerous to our liberties and the great cause we are engaged in.

Curiously,  according to Wikiquote, this quotation was tampered with to create: “a classic anti-semitic hoax, evidently begun during or just before World War Two by American Nazi sympathizers, and since then has been repeated, for example, in foreign propaganda directed at Americans. In fact it is knitted from two separate letters by Washington, in reverse chronology, neither of them mentioning Jews.”

Of course, Washington, author of an iconic letter to the Jews of Newport sanctioned no bigotry.  But his hostility to the speculators, “this tribe of black gentry, who work more effectually against us that the enemys Arms; and are a hundd. times more dangerous to our liberties and the great cause we are engaged in” is not a matter of religious or any other form of bigotry.

It is a tribute to George Washington’s integrity.

The capital city named after him would do well to emulate the kind of integrity in monetary affairs he commanded.