"IN INVENTING A NATION the inimitable Gore Vidal has his own peculiar explanation for why we Americans have ''so many academic histories of our republic and its origins.'' We want to ''gaze fixedly on the sunny aspects of a history growing ever darker.'' That's why, he says, we have ignored Benjamin Franklin's dire warning in 1787 that our Republic was likely to become corrupted and end in despotism. Instead of realizing that Franklin was correct in his prediction and that we have already arrived at this awful moment of corruption and tyranny, we celebrate Franklin as ''the jolly fat ventriloquist of common lore, with his simple maxims for simple folk...''

If anything can take founders like Washington and Jefferson out of our present and place them back into the particular context of their time, it is this fact that they were slaveholders. Slavery is virtually inconceivable to us. We can scarcely imagine one person owning another for life. Seeing Washington and Jefferson as slaveholders, men who bought, sold and flogged slaves, has to change our conception of them...

To make his farm pay (Washington) worked his slaves hard, divided their families for efficiency, punished them by whipping or selling them and clothed and housed them as meagerly as possible. He, along with other planters, raffled off the slaves, including children, of bankrupt slaveholders who owed him money. He even had some of his slaves' teeth transplanted into his own mouth, though he did pay his slaves for the teeth. Wiencek, a historian, tells stories of miscegenation and incest in the Washington household that rival anything William Faulkner imagined, though he discounts the story that Washington fathered a mulatto child.

THE REVOLUTION changed everything, both for much of the country and for Washington. Washington as commander in chief in Massachusetts for the first time saw blacks as human beings rather than as slaves. He began recruiting free blacks into the Army and even invited the black poet Phillis Wheatley to his headquarters. By the time of the battle of Yorktown, a quarter of Washington's Continental Army was made up of blacks. With peace and the prodding of Lafayette, Washington began gradually and quietly to rethink the issue of slavery. By 1786, he vowed never to purchase another slave and expressed a wish to see slavery in America ''abolished by slow, sure and imperceptible degrees.'' Eventually he found slavery to be morally repugnant, and he did what no other Southern slaveholding Revolutionary leader was able to do. In his will, which he drew up secretly, he freed upon the death of his wife, Martha, all the slaves under his control and urged that they be educated. He did this in the face of Martha's and his family's bitter opposition.

THE CONTRAST with Jefferson could not have been greater. Not only did Jefferson not free all his slaves, but, unlike Washington, he suspected that blacks were inherently inferior to whites and believed that free blacks and whites could never live together in peace. Yet, as Lincoln pointed out, Jefferson, much more than Washington or any of the other founders, has come to stand for America's highest ideals and aspirations. That our principal spokesman for democracy and equality was a slaveholding aristocrat with what we today would consider racist views is surely the greatest irony in American history; it is the reason Jefferson has suffered from so much recent criticism.
NY TIMES