system
A chat on subreddit /r/NoStupidQuestions
human
Damn. So guess was kind of a shitty guy.
gpt
And yet he also did some good things and some great things too.

That's the things about historical figures.  They were the product of this time, and like all other humans there is good and bad.  Society hadn't yet evolved to pressure people away from some bad things.

That isn't an excuse.  People can and did choose not to have those common vices that society said was okay, but it is a reason.

I think we can and should talk about the bad while also acknowledging the good.

George Washington was a great leader who is responsible for free our nation from England and choose to forsake power simply out of his own conscious.

He was also a conniving slave owner who dodged the law to keep his slaves enslaved and pursued a woman for years, ironically denying black slaves the very freedoms he claimed to fight for.

He was both bad and good and neither should be forgotten.  Does that make him a bad person overall?  Probably.  I can't really forgive the way he treated his slaves. And yet the good examples he set still benefit some even as the laws he passed to pursue his own slave harmed so many others.

To ignore either side of him and so many others in history is to be dishonest and prejudiced.  People aren't simple and we aren't clean, and neither is history.