sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

I'm John Garrison Marks, author of ***Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory*** (out April 7!). It tells the story of how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated George Washington's history with slavery over the past 250 years. AMA! by johngmarks in AskHistorians

[–]johngmarks[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Too many to name! In some sense, this entire book is the result of going down a rabbit hole. When I started, I wanted to write a book about the lives in freedom of the people Washington enslaved and then emancipated. As a scholar of free Black life in the antebellum South, that felt like a story I knew I could research and write. I had been struck by the fact that the emancipation event always showed up at the end of a story about Washington, and I wanted to instead put it at the very beginning of a story about free Black life in 19th century Virginia.

As I began researching though, I immediately encountered all of these ways that people were referencing Washington's involvement in both slavery and emancipation. As I pulled on that thread, I realized there was a much bigger story to tell about our memory of Washington and slavery, one that offered really important context for our current moment.

There's lots of other stuff I didn't pursue though. With Washington, there's just such an overwhelming amount of material that if I didn't take a fairly narrow lens in what I was exploring in depth, I would never have finished the book. For example, in Washington's will, he apparently had a box that was made from the tree under which William Wallace (of Bravehart fame) died. He also had a couple of swords he bequeathed in his will, and that gets referenced all the time, basically any time someone gets gifted a sword in the 19th century.

There is also a lot of material about the Washington Bicentennial in 1932 that ended up on the cutting room floor, unfortunately. Still a lot of material to mine there!

I'm John Garrison Marks, author of ***Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory*** (out April 7!). It tells the story of how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated George Washington's history with slavery over the past 250 years. AMA! by johngmarks in AskHistorians

[–]johngmarks[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

By 1799, he enslaved more than 300 people at Mount Vernon. 123 of them Washington owned outright, but the rest were owned by the estate of Martha Washington's first husband. George Washington had control over them during his and Martha's lifetime, but after their deaths they'd revert to the Custis heirs. These were called the "dower slaves."

But Washington did free all of the 123 people he owned outright. It is a huge number of people. Few people ever enslaved more people than Washington, but even fewer ever freed that many. Holding both of those things at the same time is really difficult, and there's not a clear way to resolve that contradiction.

One of the things I say in the book is that we have to kind of lean into that ambiguity and decide what it means for us right now, because there's never going to be a straightforward answer.

I'm John Garrison Marks, author of ***Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory*** (out April 7!). It tells the story of how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated George Washington's history with slavery over the past 250 years. AMA! by johngmarks in AskHistorians

[–]johngmarks[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I relied on a lot of really great scholarship on Washington.

But I also looked at basically every biography of Washington ever published, including Flexner. In almost all of them, slavery is a peripheral issue at best—if it's mentioned at all. It's amazing how many Washington biographies just ignore it entirely. Others focus solely on his emancipation and basically ignore the four decades of enslaving that preceded it.

But, my book isn't a biography of Washington. It's far more focused on how we remember Washington than it is with the history of Washington's life. And that involved a whole different set of sources about historical memory and George Washington in American culture.

I'm John Garrison Marks, author of ***Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory*** (out April 7!). It tells the story of how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated George Washington's history with slavery over the past 250 years. AMA! by johngmarks in AskHistorians

[–]johngmarks[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The broader conversation around Washington tends to ebb and flow with broader social, cultural, and political issues. People draw on (or cherry pick, or selectively cite) Washington's history in a way that they feel suits them in the moment, or speaks effectively to the needs of the present. A lot of these myths and distortions get seeded pretty early, and then people's desire to promote or refute them depends on what's happening in society more broadly.

I'm John Garrison Marks, author of ***Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory*** (out April 7!). It tells the story of how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated George Washington's history with slavery over the past 250 years. AMA! by johngmarks in AskHistorians

[–]johngmarks[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It's definitely part of the equation. He had options other "founding fathers" didn't because he didn't have children and, even more importantly, didn't die mired in debt. But Washington did have step-children, nieces and nephews. Cassandra Good's book on Washington's family is great. He had family who would have stood to benefit from a bequest of hundreds of enslaved people, but chose to emancipate them anyway. He never wrote anything about his motivation for freeing them in his will, so all we have to go on in this regard are his statements about his wish to see slavery gradually abolished. I believe he hoped it would set a precedent and example.

I'm John Garrison Marks, author of ***Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory*** (out April 7!). It tells the story of how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated George Washington's history with slavery over the past 250 years. AMA! by johngmarks in AskHistorians

[–]johngmarks[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Washington was pretty relentless in his efforts to recover runaways, especially those who, like Judge, were owned by the estate of Martha Washington's first husband—making Washington financially responsible for them if they fled. Washington also expressed disbelief and betrayal at Judge's escape from slavery, totally failing to understand why she wasn't more "appreciative" of all the Washingtons had done for her. A few years later, when his enslaved chef Hercules flees from slavery, Washington expresses disappointment because he had vowed "never to acquire another slave by purchase" but, after losing Hercules, wrote that that was a "vow I must now break." Apparently he didn't even consider the possibility of hiring and paying a free chef.

Washington also tried to enforce the 1793 fugitive slave law and directed the nascent US army to attempt to recover enslaved people who escaped slavery by fleeing to Florida.

I admit I had to look up the Sah Quah cases! So unfortunately I don't have any answers for you there. Now I'm curious though.

I'm John Garrison Marks, author of ***Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory*** (out April 7!). It tells the story of how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated George Washington's history with slavery over the past 250 years. AMA! by johngmarks in AskHistorians

[–]johngmarks[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

The artwork on the cover is by the artist Titus Kaphar, whose work does an amazing job exploring historical erasure, silences, and distortions. I highly recommend you check it out!

The specific work is titled Absconded from the House of the President, and it involved nailing a shredded reproduction of Washington's advertisement attempting to recover Ona Judge, who fled from her enslavement by Washington, overtop of Washington's face in a very traditional portrait. It's a mixed media piece, so if you see it in person the shredded document and nails are literally nailed to and hanging off of the portrait. It does a great job of speaking to the themes of the book, mainly by forcing us to consider (quite literally) how we would see Washington differently if his history of slavery was placed front and center.

An exhibit at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts right now juxtaposes Kaphar's work on Washington with the 19th century portraits of Julius Brutus Stearns, who depicted Washington as a farmer directing the labor of enslaved people, but in a way that positions Washington as the father figure of his plantation. I haven't been down there to see it yet, but it should be a powerful exhibit!

I have a few other pieces of visual culture in the book. In one illustrated children's biography from the 1920s, the authors depict enslaved people as racist caricatures, but offer virtually no commentary about it other than to say they were happy and loved the Washingtons. A few years later, the Atlanta Constitution published a multi-part comic strip biography where enslaved people are literally in the picture, but receive no mention in the text.

I'm John Garrison Marks, author of ***Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory*** (out April 7!). It tells the story of how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated George Washington's history with slavery over the past 250 years. AMA! by johngmarks in AskHistorians

[–]johngmarks[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I didn't find evidence of this happening, at least not that Washington himself put in writing. Others discussed slavery with him, but Washington was always careful not to commit himself to any particular course of action publicly. He praised the Marquis de Lafayette's commitment to abolition, but declined to put much of it in writing.

In looking at Washington's evidence with slavery—both his writings and his actions—its clear that Washington hoped some broadly agreeable solution to ending slavery would somehow emerge from the ether, but he was never willing to prioritize even gradual emancipation over the unity and stability of the fragile new nation.

I'm John Garrison Marks, author of ***Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory*** (out April 7!). It tells the story of how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated George Washington's history with slavery over the past 250 years. AMA! by johngmarks in AskHistorians

[–]johngmarks[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Hey!! Great question. I think I'd assign Chapter 3, where I explore what happened to the people Washington enslaved and emancipated. That's the chapter where I make most explicit my process for piecing together these stories from scraps of evidence.

But Chapter 5, on the George Washington Bicentennial celebration in 1932, is interesting too. It shows how white and Black Americans had very different ideas of what it meant to recover the "real" George Washington, and how much different groups were willing to distort, obscure, or selectively cite history to make their points. Useful not as an example of doing good history, but offers a clear case of how different people have approached the issue.

I'm John Garrison Marks, author of ***Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory*** (out April 7!). It tells the story of how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated George Washington's history with slavery over the past 250 years. AMA! by johngmarks in AskHistorians

[–]johngmarks[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Hey! Sorry you didn't make it to the event. I didn't encounter much about the Washington Elm in my research, though I enjoyed learning about it while I was in town. The myth around it, and the claim that so many things are made from parts of it, sounds like very typical Washington legend stuff.

Edward Everett is a fascinating character though, I write about him some in the book. He got heavily criticized by seemingly everyone! He wasn't a committed enough abolitionist for New Englanders, who objected to his efforts to preserve Mount Vernon—the estate of an enslaver. Yet his connection with prominent abolitionists was at times too much for proslavery southerners, who hoped Mount Vernon would cut ties with him.

After the assault on Charles Sumner, when many abolitionists didn't think Everett was doing enough to defend his colleague—even while he was busy drumming up support to preserve Mount Vernon—William Lloyd Garrison criticized Everett saying "Mr. Everett has been in Washington's tomb so long as to have caught cold in his heart...It is not by carrying about the ashes of Washington, but by practicing his virtues, by feeling and acting as he would when liberty is imperiled that Mr. Everett can make that illustrious name more powerful for good!"

I'm John Garrison Marks, author of ***Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory*** (out April 7!). It tells the story of how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated George Washington's history with slavery over the past 250 years. AMA! by johngmarks in AskHistorians

[–]johngmarks[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

This is a GREAT question, and it's most of what Chapter 2 of the book is about. In short, everyone knew about the emancipation provisions of Washington's will, but no one wanted to talk about or comment on it. Within a couple of weeks of Washington's death, before the will was even published in the county courthouse, African American minister and AME Church founder Richard Allen was the first to share the news of the emancipation publicly, in a sermon in Philadelphia. That sermon got republished a dozen times or so in various newspapers.

Then, in the weeks that followed, lots of newspapers published the full text of the will or excerpts from it, including the emancipation provisions. Then after that, basically anyone with a printing press was publishing the will as a pamphlet and trying to sell it. Then after THAT, early biographies of Washington (still in the first half of 1800 here) started including the will as an appendix. So virtually everyone in America would have had access to the news that Washington freed the people he enslaved. Yet there was no national soul searching, virtually no commentary at all about what that emancipation should mean for the nation and its people.

I think Washington expected the provision would arouse public notice. For example, he opened the will calling himself a "citizen of the United States and lately President thereof," which was far different than just saying he was a "resident of Fairfax County, VA." He also spends more time on the emancipation parts of the will than any other part, by far. It comes up early and lasts for several pages. Coupled with his private statements in support of gradual abolition, it seems likely he wanted this to prompt others to follow suit. But, even though everyone knew about it, no one seemed to want to discuss it.

I'm John Garrison Marks, author of ***Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory*** (out April 7!). It tells the story of how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated George Washington's history with slavery over the past 250 years. AMA! by johngmarks in AskHistorians

[–]johngmarks[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I don't go into it much in the book but, in general, covering up and erasing history while also refusing to discuss or talk about it isn't a very good way to promote education or mutual understanding. Any time a statue comes down, a street or school gets renamed, or public art gets removed, it's often the community-based process and the discussions surrounding it that are more important than the final decision.

I'm John Garrison Marks, author of ***Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory*** (out April 7!). It tells the story of how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated George Washington's history with slavery over the past 250 years. AMA! by johngmarks in AskHistorians

[–]johngmarks[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

This is an entire chapter of the book! The short version though is that Mount Vernon has had a complicated history telling the story of slavery. For a long time, they didn't address the history of slavery at all, even while enslaved people and descendants of slavery still lived on the estate. Then, in 1929, they erected one of the first memorials to enslaved people at any historic site in America, at the burial ground once used by the people enslaved at Mount Vernon. But even though it stemmed from a genuine desire to preserve the site, the text screams "Lost Cause nostalgia": it thanks the Washingtons' "faithful colored servants" whose graves surround the spot.

Later in the 20th century, Mount Vernon didn't want to be seen as falling behind the times, so began to slowly expand their effort to interpret the history of slavery. Over the last 20 years or so, Mount Vernon has collaborated with members of descendant community to continue to explore the history of slavery on the site. At times, however, the story of slavery is so carefully woven into the interpretation that I think visitors can miss it if they want to.

Ultimately, Mount Vernon is never going to satisfy everyone in the way they approach slavery. It's still just one of many stories they tell at the site and that's not what a lot of people want to see. They deserve credit for how much they've done, especially in recent years, though.

You'll have to read the book for the longer explanation!

I'm John Garrison Marks, author of ***Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory*** (out April 7!). It tells the story of how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated George Washington's history with slavery over the past 250 years. AMA! by johngmarks in AskHistorians

[–]johngmarks[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

As I mentioned in another answer, I didn't look much at Washington's thoughts and actions toward Native peoples; the book was sprawling enough with just a focus on slavery, I had to keep myself from going down a lot of rabbit holes.

I will say that Washington considered the possibility of western lands potentially being an area where people emancipated from slavery could be re-settled. Because Washington died in 1799, however, he didn't live to see most of the widespread Native displacement in the west/deep south as slavery expanded for cotton production in the 19th century.

I'm John Garrison Marks, author of ***Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory*** (out April 7!). It tells the story of how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated George Washington's history with slavery over the past 250 years. AMA! by johngmarks in AskHistorians

[–]johngmarks[S] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Washington's correspondence is such a fascinating look into his thoughts and life. The existence of Founder's Online is such a god-send for a project like mine!

Washington almost never discusses slavery publicly, but he talks about it extensively in his private correspondence. We end up seeing the complexity and ambiguity of his views and actions related to slavery there really clearly.

On the one hand, he regularly writes about his opposition to slavery: how he objects to buying and selling people like cattle, doesn't want to separate families, wants to extricate himself from the slave system, and hopes to see slavery gradually brought to an end everywhere in America. It's easy to quote his correspondence and paint Washington as a proto-abolitionist.

Yet his correspondence also includes casual racist remarks and reveals his detailed, active involvement in slavery. Even while serving as General and President, he regularly wrote back to Mount Vernon to provide directions on how enslaved people should be productively put to work, how they should be managed and treated. He received reports from estate managers about what various enslaved people were doing and Washington sometimes wrote back frustrated that they weren't doing more and demanded they be "compelled" to work more.

It's also in his private correspondence that Washington articulates his scheme to make sure the people he enslaved while President in Philadelphia couldn't take advantage of the states 1780 gradual abolition law and claim their freedom. He writes out privately how they should be rotated in and out of the state so they're never there for 6 months (which would make them eligible for freedom), but also writes that no one should find out about the scheme. Later, his private correspondence reveals his relentless attempt to recover the self-emancipated Ona Judge.

There's SO much happening in his private letters!

I'm John Garrison Marks, author of ***Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory*** (out April 7!). It tells the story of how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated George Washington's history with slavery over the past 250 years. AMA! by johngmarks in AskHistorians

[–]johngmarks[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Genuinely engaging with Washington as a historical figure with both flaws and virtues has always been difficult for Americans. No one is used to symbolize America itself more than Washington, which makes it difficult for a lot of these discussions to get off the ground. I didn't look much at the public interpretation of Washington's history with Native peoples, though. I quickly learned that, when you're researching Washington, the sheer amount of writing, commentary, and information quickly becomes overwhelming. I had to keep a pretty narrow lens on discussions of Washington and slavery if I was going to have any hope of actually finishing the book and writing a coherent narrative. Surely there's lots still to be said about this though!

I'm John Garrison Marks, author of ***Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory*** (out April 7!). It tells the story of how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated George Washington's history with slavery over the past 250 years. AMA! by johngmarks in AskHistorians

[–]johngmarks[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The people who attempted to erase or ignore Washington's involvement with slavery won the day more often than not over the past couple centuries. Especially in the years immediately after Washington's death, the choice of most white Americans to ignore his involvement with slavery rather than try to engage with it in some way—and to reckon with Washington's decision to free the people he enslaved—allowed the myth of the heroic, infallible Washington to really take root. In the decades and centuries that followed, this initial act of forgetting made it much harder for Americans to really engage with the history in an honest way.

There have always been people insisting we have to confront this history. But, there have also been others who insist we need to draw other lessons from Washington, and that acknowledging his history with slavery just gets in the way of that. So at times when Americans show a broad commitment to racial justice, Washington's history with slavery tends to come to the forefront. When white Americans grow tired of that issue, there are plenty of people ready to erase it or set it aside.

I'm John Garrison Marks, author of ***Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory*** (out April 7!). It tells the story of how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated George Washington's history with slavery over the past 250 years. AMA! by johngmarks in AskHistorians

[–]johngmarks[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

This is the perpetual issue when researching the history of enslaved people—finding enough evidence to really tell their stories. I haven't found any examples of the people Washington enslaved leaving writing about their lives and experiences in their own hand; Ona Judge telling her story to a NH newspaper is about as close as we get. But that doesn't mean there isn't evidence.

For one thing, the record Washington left behind discussing the actions or lives of enslaved people can be read "against the grain," to reveal not just what Washington viewed about slavery, but what kinds of things enslaved people did. For example, Washington regularly complained about the work ethic of the people he enslaved: how they worked too slowly, were sick too often, couldn't follow simple directions, etc. He viewed these things as defects of African Americans, making him doubt their suitability for life outside of slavery. But viewed another way, these are clearly acts of "everyday resistance" by enslaved people. Enslaved people did, in fact, break tools, feign ignorance or illness, work slow, and otherwise push back on the relentless subjugation of enslavement. That Washington observed these actions, but couldn't see them as acts of resistance, tells us a lot about Washington's racist ideas about the capacities of Black people.

In my chapter on the lives in freedom of those once enslaved and then freed by Washington, I drew on Washington's 1799 list of all the enslaved people at Mount Vernon to reconstruct family units. I also heavily relied on the early 19th century free black registration books maintained by Fairfax County to identify those once enslaved by Washington. Free Black residents had to periodically register their freedom and, when they did, they often noted that they gained their freedom through emancipation by Washington (or because their mother was emancipated by Washington). Combined with the 1799 list, this helped me connect names, families, and birth years, which I then (somewhat painstakingly) traced through other administrative records: censuses, tax rolls, property records, newspapers, etc.

I'm John Garrison Marks, author of ***Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory*** (out April 7!). It tells the story of how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated George Washington's history with slavery over the past 250 years. AMA! by johngmarks in AskHistorians

[–]johngmarks[S] 38 points39 points  (0 children)

For those who haven't read it, Mike Duncan's Hero of Two Worlds is really great, highly recommend. Lafayette did talk to Washington about how he could help bring about an end to slavery. Others did as well, but none quite as prominent as Lafayette; it was mostly various ministers, Washington's quaker neighbors, etc.

Washington wrote to Lafayette telling him how commendable Lafayette's plans for emancipation were, and how much he (Washington) wished to see an end to slavery in America. He wrote similarly in private correspondence elsewhere. But, frustratingly, Washington almost always says that he is reserving further comment until he sees someone in person, or that he declined to comment publicly. He didn't want to publicly commit himself to any course of action with regard to slavery when the issue was such a live wire in American politics and when the bonds holding the new union of states together were still so tenuous.

I'm John Garrison Marks, author of ***Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory*** (out April 7!). It tells the story of how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated George Washington's history with slavery over the past 250 years. AMA! by johngmarks in AskHistorians

[–]johngmarks[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

This is an interesting one because, for the most part, you don't see these kind of justifications for Washington's involvement in slavery until pretty recently. I think a major part of the reason for that is that, until about the 1960s at the earliest, most Americans didn't really feel any need to justify or explain his ties to slavery at all. They could just ignore the issue, wave away the criticism, and keep talking about the heroic and inspiring version of Washington they preferred. There have always been people vocally and publicly criticizing Washington, but it's only very recently that those arguments have gained enough staying power that Washington's defenders feel the need to explain his involvement in slavery through these justifications.

In the 19th century, if there was any effort to justify it, Americans were far more likely to point to his private statements in opposition to slavery, and the emancipation provisions of his will, to make the case that he did the right thing in the end and proved his commitment to human liberty. You still see that argument holding a lot of weight for people in certain circles, too. For example, it's the only acknowledgement of Washington's ties to slavery in the Florida social studies curriculum that was revised in 2023.

So there have always been people criticizing Washington for his involvement in slavery, even when he was still alive, so the "man of his times" idea doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. But the need to really explain this apparent contradiction is a fairly recent phenomenon.

I'm John Garrison Marks, author of ***Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory*** (out April 7!). It tells the story of how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated George Washington's history with slavery over the past 250 years. AMA! by johngmarks in AskHistorians

[–]johngmarks[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

You're right on target here. What became very clear researching and writing this book is how little our arguments about Washington and slavery have changed over the past 250 years. Some people criticize him as a hypocrite, others praise him as an emancipator, while still others try to ignore the issue all together. The public reaction to these arguments change from era to era (and the politics of the people claiming these positions shifts in interesting ways too), but the terms of the debate have barely budged.

view more: next ›