From Glenn Geist at MadMikesAmerica:
“. . . and forgetting long-passed mischiefs, we mercifully preserve their bones and piss not upon their ashes.”
-Thomas Browne-
Stephen Foster’s songs and ballads earned for him an honored place in the music of the United States,” or so says the Encyclopedia Britannica, but that must have been written some time ago before America got “woke” as they say in le nouveau dialecte. His name is now mud because of course, according to our new standards, he’s a racist, as of course am I, as a secular humanist of European extraction. His statue in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly but ephemeral and conditional love, is now being removed from public view.
Having died in 1864 with the war still on and the ink on the Emancipation Proclamation still wet, he spoke the English of the time. He grew up in the United States that included slave states and he spoke the same American English that every other American spoke and that included words we don’t use today out of respect for those enslaved people. I’m pretty sure Washington and Jefferson, as well as the Abolitionists, didn’t balk at common usage of the time.