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TIL that George Washington's dentures were likely made with teeth taken from slaves

mbpm

mbpm

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Oct 25, 2017
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I remember reading as a teen an alternate history horror where the founding fathers were cannibals after George Washington was forced to it at Valley Forge (in this AU) and introduced the tradition to his peers. They then disappeared signers of the declaration of independance to eat them in secret.

Wish reality were that pleasant!
 
Toxi

Toxi

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Oct 27, 2017
17,553
wenis said:
I mean... Jamestown was confirmed to have participated in cannibalism.


I don't feel bad jumping to the assumption they probably ate their slaves as well. To think they considered the natives "savage". Pffft. Projection.
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The cannibalism happened during the infamous period of 1609-1610, when most of the people in Jamestown died from starvation. This was before the first slaves were brought there. I don't doubt in starvation conditions that slaves would have been murdered though.
 
Inquisitive_Ghost

Inquisitive_Ghost

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Oct 26, 2017
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Today I learned that people used to make dentures out of other people's teeth. Which is horrifyingly repulsive even before you get to the horrifyingly nightmarish fact they stole them from slaves.
Powdered Egg said:
They try to hide the full scale of their barbarity. Someone last year posted an old newspaper clipping selling boots made out of leather skinned from Black people.
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This one, or something similar, I did already know. :/

I thought I remembered reading somewhere that great apes are unusually violent to other members of their own species compared to other animal groups. If I'm not totally misremembering that, I expect that has a hand in why people can justify nightmarish shit like this to themselves. Lack of empathy for other people is not treated with the extreme reprehension it deserves, given this particular deficiency's hand in basically every horrible thing humans do to each other.
 
Cuburger

Cuburger

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Oct 28, 2017
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I've only heard the wooden teeth myth.

Makes me wonder if it's persisted because the truth just makes it so much uglier.
 
jetpacks was yes

jetpacks was yes

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And Lincoln was also a racist. Yes he pushed to abolish slavery, but he also made it clear that blacks were not equal to whites, and that they had no place in post-slavery America.
 

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TheAndyMan said:
Was it this?
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there's some absurdity with "I'm not racist, I helped free them" as an excuse to wear human leather shoes.

edit:

One of the dudest dudes in town carries a match-safe covered with a portion of the skin of a beautiful young woman who was found drowned in the Delaware river. It still retains its natural colour. Another young man with whom I am acquainted carries a cigar case made of negro skin, a ghastly skull and crossbones appearing on one side in relief. One of the best known surgeons in this country, who resides in this city, has a beautiful instrument case, entirely covered with leather made from an African's skin. A young society lady of this city wears a beautiful pair of dark slippers, the remarkable lustrousuess of whose leather invariably excites the admiration of her friends when they see them. The young doctor who presented them to her recently returned from an extended foreign tour, and he told her that he had purchased them from a Turk in Alexandria, and that he did not know what sort of leather they were made of, but he supposed it was the skin of some wild animal. As a matter of fact, the skin came from a negro cadaver, which was once prone on a Jefferson College dissecting table, and the leather was prepared in Womseldorf. The rosettes on the slippers were deftly fashioned from the negro's kinky hair.
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Aske

Aske

The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
5,654
Canadia
I've read about countless horrors from history over the years, but this makes me feel physically sick.
 
Nida

Nida

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Aug 31, 2019
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Everett, Washington
Highly recommend this episode of The Dollop on the Death of George Washington.

His doctor killed him trying all sorts of wacky things to cure his illness. Drained way too much blood, used crushed up beetles, and more.

The Death of George Washington

Was under the impression they used horse teeth for him, but you learn new things every day...
 

Hound

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Jul 6, 2019
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AntoneM said:
Ah, so under orders from the British, a 22 year old George Washington attacked "a small French force" in 1754 which lead to the Seven Years War in 1757. That means HE was responsible for the world war. Just like Gavrilo Princip is solely responsible for WWI.
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IIRC, conflict with the French was likely due to recent French expansion into what the British considered their territory, so it was a similar powder keg type of situation. While Washington was under orders that would very likely result in escalated conflict, it's still pretty wild to me that the same dude that kicked it all off later violently bailed out on monetary cost of the conflict under the guise of freedom, all while owning slaves, and also while... *checks notes* using their teeth. Although I guess it's even wilder that wearing slave teeth was considered progressive back then.
 
Powdered Egg

Powdered Egg

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Wackamole said:
Fucking hell. That is some Hannibal Lecter shit to read. I feel sick.
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Well every white psychopath got to fulfill their desires. Too broke for a slave? Save up with your buddies so you can buy people to torture and experiment on. Jeffrey Dahmer was born too soon!

It's rather ridiculous when you step back and look at it that all the heat Black people catch right now is just because we demand the bare minimum.
 
WedgeX

WedgeX

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Oct 27, 2017
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Yeah the display on slave teeth is front and center (at least as I recall) at Mt. Vernon.
 
MonadL

MonadL

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Oct 25, 2017
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It's good to know shit like this, but I REALLY wish I didn't. Horrifying shit.
 
Post Reply

Post Reply

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Aug 1, 2018
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Wait til you find out how this country built it's medical knowledge:

After 1808, when a federal ban on importing slaves from other countries took effect, the perpetuation of American slavery became dependent on domestic slave births. That aligned the economic interests of slave owners — who wanted to promote the healthy births of slave children — and the interests of white physicians — who portrayed themselves as helping slaves but also reaped professional benefits because they could experiment on slaves without their consent. As historian Deirdre Cooper Owens has observed, those economic incentives drove medical innovation. Gynecological examinations of black women influenced the country's slave markets, and "slavery, medicine and medical publishing formed a synergistic partnership" in the establishment of gynecology as a medical specialty in the United States.
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Racist beliefs associated with slavery also provided perceived ethical justifications for conducting repeated invasive experiments like those Sims performed. Sims carried out his experiments on women's genitalia from 1845 to 1849 without anesthesia, which had recently been introduced. In addition to their status as enslaved people, black women were considered appropriate subjects for such experiments based on the widespread belief that black people experienced less pain than white people.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ill-affects-how-doctors-treat-patients-today/

https://www.history.com/news/the-fa...logy-performed-shocking-experiments-on-slaves
 

Deleted member 36708

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Dec 23, 2017
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Fuck the founding fathers of this country. They killed and murdered 100 of millions of people to "build" a land of the free and home of the brave. Fuck them!
 
KG

KG

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Oct 12, 2018
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Tron1 said:
Fuck the founding fathers of this country. They killed and murdered 100 of millions of people to "build" a land of the free and home of the brave. Fuck them!
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100% Reading a lot of this, and man they were just cruel. Like you would have a hard time doing that kind of stuff to animals, yet they did to black people no problem.
 

Deleted member 31133

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KG said:
100% Reading a lot of this, and man they were just cruel. Like you would have a hard time doing that kind of stuff to animals, yet they did to black people no problem.
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This.

Why do you have monuments of George Washington? Why is he still celebrated in the US? Not only did Washington own over 100 slaves, but he treated them no better than animals, yet he is still treated like a god in the US. It's pretty sickening.
 

Ravensmash

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Oct 25, 2017
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sersteven

sersteven

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Oct 25, 2017
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Washington was a rich opportunist who used the war as a way to take land he wanted. Yes he rose to the role thrust upon him and one of the reasons our nation exists but people act like all the founding fathers are gods when they were racist rich elites who just wanted to take control from england to let them run roughshod over a goldmine that is a new country (that they stole anyway).
 
TheGrayFox

TheGrayFox

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jetpacks was yes said:
And Lincoln was also a racist. Yes he pushed to abolish slavery, but he also made it clear that blacks were not equal to whites, and that they had no place in post-slavery America.
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While you're right, it's pretty disingenuous to not also point out the fact that Abraham Lincoln did a complete 180 on his position regarding recolonization before the end of his life. Just like it'd be disingenuous to not point out that Lincoln was advocating for voting rights for blacks after Lee's surrender
 
jetpacks was yes

jetpacks was yes

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TheGrayFox said:
While you're right, it's pretty disingenuous to not also point out the fact that Abraham Lincoln did a complete 180 on his position regarding recolonization before the end of his life. Just like it'd be disingenuous to not point out that Lincoln was advocating for voting rights for blacks after Lee's surrender
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Wasn't his statement regarding voting rights something to the effect of it should be given to "very intelligent" blacks?
 
TheGrayFox

TheGrayFox

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jetpacks was yes said:
Wasn't his statement regarding voting rights something to the effect of it should be given to "very intelligent" blacks?
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I believe he said that voting rights should be given to intelligent blacks and veterans of the war but again context is important because most states had only just enfranchised non-land owning whites and even then some Northern states still had exceptions only allowing tax payers to vote right up until the Civil War.... also believing that blacks can be intelligent enough to vote is a long ways away from believing them completely unequal to whites and that they have no place in a post-slavery America.... which is again, what I was pointing out as disingenuous.

Lincoln isn't the perfect emancipator history makes him out to be, he was definitely racist in some regard and would've most certainly thrown the black race under the bus to preserve the union early on in the war but boiling the entirety of his complicated legacy down to a common racist that thought blacks too subhuman to exist in America ignore the nuance and actual growth that occurred in his beliefs regarding blacks.
 
jetpacks was yes

jetpacks was yes

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TheGrayFox said:
I believe he said that voting rights should be given to intelligent blacks and veterans of the war but again context is important because most states had only just enfranchised non-land owning whites and even then some Northern states still had exceptions only allowing tax payers to vote right up until the Civil War.... also believing that blacks can be intelligent enough to vote is a long ways away from believing them completely unequal to whites and that they have no place in a post-slavery America.... which is again, what I was pointing out as disingenuous.

Lincoln isn't the perfect emancipator history makes him out to be, he was definitely racist in some regard and would've most certainly thrown the black race under the bus to preserve the union early on in the war but boiling the entirety of his complicated legacy down to a common racist that thought blacks too subhuman to exist in America ignore the nuance and actual growth that occurred in his beliefs regarding blacks.
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If we're going to take an honest look at our history of racism, don't you think we need to be completely frank about it? We can recognize a revered figure like Lincoln for all of the amazing things that he did while also recognizing that he was racist, even if he got less racist over time. He may even have been the least racist white man in America for the time, but all of these judgments we make about historical figures is through a modern lens. Otherwise we would forgive all white slave owners because that was the norm.

And about the "very intelligent" remark, I don't think he was suggesting that blacks are very intelligent, just that only very intelligent blacks should get the vote. I could be wrong though.

Anyhow, I'm still learning about this so this is just where I'm currently at in my understanding.
 
TheGrayFox

TheGrayFox

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jetpacks was yes said:
If we're going to take an honest look at our history of racism, don't you think we need to be completely frank about it? We can recognize a revered figure like Lincoln for all of the amazing things that he did while also recognizing that he was racist, even if he got less racist over time. He may even have been the least racist white man in America for the time, but all of these judgments we make about historical figures is through a modern lens. Otherwise we would forgive all white slave owners because that was the norm.

And about the "very intelligent" remark, I don't think he was suggesting that blacks are very intelligent, just that only very intelligent blacks should get the vote. I could be wrong though.

Anyhow, I'm still learning about this so this is just where I'm currently at in my understanding.
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Oh I absolutely agree and I think we're in the same boat here. I think there a very few figures in American history worth hero worshiping without honest critique and I wholly admit that Lincoln was racist in his own regards and that he would have gladly thrown black Americans under the bus to preserve the Union at the beginning of the war. I just think we're doing a historical disservice to Lincoln if our examination of his beliefs on race stop and end at "He's an incorrigible racist just look at his promises on the campaign trail or his early support for the American Colonization Society."
 
Baji Boxer

Baji Boxer

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Oct 27, 2017
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Coyote Starrk said:
I am probably super late to this particularly horrifying party, but I came across someone on Twitter mentioning that George Washington's teeth were made from the teeth of slaves. And at first I was a bit confused because I had always thought they were made from ivory. Or at least that's what I was taught in school. But nope. Turns out they were at least partially made out of teeth pulled from the mouths of slaves.


Here is an excerpt from the official Mount Vernon website on the issue



Washington and Teeth from Enslaved People

www.mountvernon.org www.mountvernon.org


Am I an idiot and this is super widely known or this a more recent thing? Because I've gone my whole life thinking his teeth were made of ivory. This is fucking horrific.
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This is the first I've heard of it. You educated me today!
 
The Albatross

The Albatross

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Oct 25, 2017
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ALexis Coe mentions this in her history / social history of Washington, "You Never Forget Your First," a lot of whcih is the myth making of Washington by male historians and the lack of history by female authors on WAshington.

You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington: Coe, Alexis: 9780735224100: Books - Amazon

You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington: Coe, Alexis: 9780735224100: Books - Amazon
www.amazon.com

In an interview on RecodeDecode last month she casually mentions how Washington's teeth weren't made out of wood, but likely of horses teeth, animal teeth, metal, marble, and the teeth of some of his slaves.
 
KingM

KingM

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Oct 28, 2017
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DragonSJG said:
What?????
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After you took the family to a lynching it wouldn't be right to leave empty handed. All types of body parts torn and cut from flesh just like having a fly ball from a Yankees game on the mantle.

nmaahc.si.edu

The Evidence of Things Unsaid

Whether used in remote backwoods, on the side of a bridge, or on a courthouse lawn, the noose is one of this nation’s most compelling and enduring symbols of lynching. Lynching remains a critical issue that forces this nation to confront its history of violence against African Americans. But...
nmaahc.si.edu nmaahc.si.edu
 
The Albatross

The Albatross

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Oct 25, 2017
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wenis said:
I mean... Jamestown was confirmed to have participated in cannibalism.


I don't feel bad jumping to the assumption they probably ate their slaves as well. To think they considered the natives "savage". Pffft. Projection.
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The original lost Jamestown settlement didn't have slaves. Some may have participated in cannibalism because they all died of starvation. Slavery wasn't really formalized in the Americas until 1640, about 30 years after the original Jamestown settlers had all vanished.
 

Deleted member 2226

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The Albatross said:
The original lost Jamestown settlement didn't have slaves. Some may have participated in cannibalism because they all died of starvation. Slavery wasn't really formalized in the Americas until 1640, about 30 years after the original Jamestown settlers had all vanished.
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And it didn't become firmly entrenched until the latter decades of the century. There were a few free black slaveowners at the time, but many of them lost their property as racial laws become codified, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Johnson_(colonist)
 
jetpacks was yes

jetpacks was yes

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TheGrayFox said:
Oh I absolutely agree and I think we're in the same boat here. I think there a very few figures in American history worth hero worshiping without honest critique and I wholly admit that Lincoln was racist in his own regards and that he would have gladly thrown black Americans under the bus to preserve the Union at the beginning of the war. I just think we're doing a historical disservice to Lincoln if our examination of his beliefs on race stop and end at "He's an incorrigible racist just look at his promises on the campaign trail or his early support for the American Colonization Society."
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Fair enough
 
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