An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America
431
An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America
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Overview
An Imperfect God is a major new biography of Washington, and the first to explore his engagement with American slavery
When George Washington wrote his will, he made the startling decision to set his slaves free; earlier he had said that holding slaves was his "only unavoidable subject of regret." In this groundbreaking work, Henry Wiencek explores the founding father's engagement with slavery at every stage of his life--as a Virginia planter, soldier, politician, president and statesman.
Washington was born and raised among blacks and mixed-race people; he and his wife had blood ties to the slave community. Yet as a young man he bought and sold slaves without scruple, even raffled off children to collect debts (an incident ignored by earlier biographers). Then, on the Revolutionary battlefields where he commanded both black and white troops, Washington's attitudes began to change. He and the other framers enshrined slavery in the Constitution, but, Wiencek shows, even before he became president Washington had begun to see the system's evil.
Wiencek's revelatory narrative, based on a meticulous examination of private papers, court records, and the voluminous Washington archives, documents for the first time the moral transformation culminating in Washington's determination to emancipate his slaves. He acted too late to keep the new republic from perpetuating slavery, but his repentance was genuine. And it was perhaps related to the possibility--as the oral history of Mount Vernon's slave descendants has long asserted--that a slave named West Ford was the son of George and a woman named Venus; Wiencek has new evidence that this could indeed have been true.
George Washington's heroic stature as Father of Our Country is not diminished in this superb, nuanced portrait: now we see Washington in full as a man of his time and ahead of his time.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466856592 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 06/04/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 431 |
| Sales rank: | 231,648 |
| File size: | 868 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Home Ground
Hardly Had I Begun my research when I discovered that collateral descendants of Washington still live in Virginia. There is almost always something to be learned from meeting descendants of your subject — they have fragments of lore to pass on, documents bypassed by other researchers, echoes of old mannerisms. So when this family extended an invitation to visit I leaped at the opportunity. Like many ancient Virginia families, this branch of the Washington clan remains rooted to the soil. They live on an estate called Blenheim adjacent to the spot where George Washington was born. The birthplace is a National Monument, a weighty designation that lies like a tombstone over the past, but almost within shouting distance Washington's relatives are still there, doing what he would be doing, farming the land.
George Washington is so firmly associated with Mount Vernon that many people assume he was born there. In fact his birthplace lies some sixty-five miles downriver in a part of Virginia known as the Northern Neck, a finger of land fifty-two miles long and ten miles wide between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. At the time of Washington's birth in 1732 the Neck was one of the most important regions in the colony — home to some of its richest and most influential families — but it began to lose population in mid-century as its tobacco fields became depleted. By the late 1700s the population of Westmoreland County, where Washington was born, had dwindled to about half of what it had been at the end of the 1600s. As in so many parts of the South, economic decline preserved the world of long ago. Today the land is still rural, the houses of the colonial tobacco barons still stand, and descendants of the original families still live on the ancestral acres.
As I drove east from Fredericksburg toward Blenheim, the suburbs dwindled and the road shrank to a two-lane blacktop fringed with fields and forests, the landscape of Washington's time. Today we travel alone, at high speed, encapsulated in vehicles that take us to our destinations with minimal interaction with anything outside the glass. Not so in Washington's time. Travelers, if they seemed a decent sort, were eagerly welcomed at private homes as bearers of news or, at least, breakers of the rural monotony. Virginia hospitality was such, said one visitor, that it was "possible to travel through the whole country without money." If one offered to pay one's hosts for the night's stay, they were "rather angry, asking whether one did not know the custom of the country." An eighteenth-century English traveler named Andrew Burnaby described the effect that the heat and lushness of the American southland had on his former countrymen: "the climate and external appearance of the country conspire to make them indolent, easy, and good-natured: extremely fond of society, and much given to convivial pleasures."
In the 1700s a traveler of the common sort would doff his hat and bow if he encountered a well-born gentleman on horseback. Such gentlemen stood out not only because of their fine clothes but because of their peculiar, damn-you-get-out-of-the-way gallop. There were many such potentates on the Neck, but none could match Robert Carter, who bounced along the road in a gilded carriage. The possessor of a thousand slaves and 300,000 acres of land, Carter was easily the wealthiest man in Virginia. His power earned him the appellation "King" Carter. Though Carter's enormous house on the Northern Neck, Corotoman, is long gone, he did leave behind one of Virginia's most enigmatic architectural treasures: the jewel-like Christ Church near the eastern end of the Neck. No one knows who designed it, but the anonymous architect created a profoundly spiritual structure — an apparently simple brick construct whose soaring interior makes the mind leap toward the eternal.
Churches such as this one also served as the focus of temporal power. Attendance at Sunday services was required of all by law, and all heads of households were taxed to support the church. The church's governing body, the vestry, had quasi-public functions, including unusual police powers. The churchwardens, naturally, kept an eye out for those who neglected to attend services. These miscreants were reported to the county court (reporting was simple because vestrymen usually served as the county justices as well) and fined, with the proceeds going to the support of the church. Since churches provided support for orphans and abandoned children, churchwardens were always alert for the births of illegitimate children who might become an expense for the church. The wardens hauled the mothers into court, where they were duly fined. The churches, formally and informally, were depots of local gossip, news, and official pronouncements. Runaway slaves could be "outlawed," meaning that they were thenceforth outside the protection of the law and could legally be killed with impunity, because they had ceased to exist as far as the law was concerned. Notices identifying outlaws were customarily nailed to the door of the church where all would see them, and where they became a sharp symbol of the distinction between the saved and the damned.
One aspect of Christ Church's design is deeply symbolic of the era. The seating does not consist of rows of pews, but of twenty-two rectangular, high-backed stalls, each designated for a particular family, with the Carters having the largest one. Families came in with their servants and slaves and sat together in isolation from the other congregants. The minister preached from a raised pulpit that allowed him to look down on his flock while they gazed up at him. In Washington's Virginia, family determined one's place and one's identity, even in relation to the Creator. The family was the engine of wealth and power. The Carters had their stall enclosed in a curtain so that ordinary folk could not even lay eyes on them as they worshiped.
In Washington's time Virginians were already obsessed with what we might call practical genealogy. This grew out of the need for keeping mental track of distant cousins for legal purposes. All these people had to be kept in mind when one was drawing up a deed or a will, or dividing slaves (recall that Washington made mention of more than fifty relatives in his will). Kinship with an old-line family of substance and influence conferred prestige on the lesser relations. Thus, as one historian wrote, "the gentry of Virginia studied one another's genealogies as closely as a stockman would scrutinize his stud books." When an English visitor asked for advice on getting along in the colony, a Virginian strongly cautioned him against offending any "person of note." By way of explanation he added, "either by blood or marriage, we are almost all related, and so connected in our interests, that whoever of a stranger presumes to offend any one of us will infallibly find an enemy of the whole. Nor, right or wrong, do we forsake him, till by one means or other his ruin is accomplished." At the top level of Virginia society and government the entanglements were almost incestuous: in 1724 all twelve members of Virginia's Royal Council were related by blood or marriage.
King Carter founded a dynasty numbered among the "FFVs" — First Families of Virginia. (Carter's son Landon became George Washington's political mentor.) His children intermarried with other leading families and established Carter outposts across the Tidewater. Alongside the Carters, the other pillar of the Northern Neck in Washington's time was the Lee family. The Lees lived in Stratford Hall, just a few miles east of the Washingtons. Their massive brick mansion, with the look of a fortress, still stands on its magnificent site atop bluffs over the Potomac. (The Lees' earlier home was burned to the ground in 1729 by convicts sent from England to be American servants.) Despite its formidable appearance, the house was designed for the lavish, large-scale entertainments of which Virginians were so fond. Parties lasted for days, featuring horse races, boat races, music, dancing, and reckless gambling.
The builder of Stratford was Thomas Lee (1690–1750), whose position as head of the colony's Royal Council allowed Lee to style himself "President of Virginia." With a sharp nose, high forehead, and piercing eyes, he possessed a visage that was both exceedingly handsome — he may have been one of the few men of the eighteenth century who actually looked good wearing the flowing wig of high office — and unbearably proud. He passed the Lee pride in abundance to one of his sons, who was said to possess "a haughtiness peculiar to himself ... being in the superlative degree to any I had ever beheld, even in this Country," by which the speaker meant Virginia.
In 1744 Lee journeyed from Stratford to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to negotiate with the Iroquois for the purchase of an enormous inland empire — territory that would form the future states of Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and part of Minnesota — all for about $400 in cash and gifts. With a group of other Virginians Lee founded the Ohio Company to settle and exploit this tract. Thereafter, Ohio Valley land speculation became the dream and the bane of Virginians, including George Washington. His half brother Lawrence served as president of the Ohio Company, and as a Virginia militia officer young George went into the wilderness to bully the French into leaving the territory that Lee had purchased, and ended up starting the French and Indian War. Two of Thomas Lee's sons signed the Declaration of Independence (the only brothers to do so).
For generations the Lees did business with the Washingtons, competed with them for land, and intermarried with them. The Lee-Washington relationship is fraught with historical ironies. During the Revolution, Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee caught George Washington's eye with a dashing victory over British forces in New Jersey. The two became close friends, and Henry Lee delivered the famous eulogy of Washington before Congress: "First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." Lee and Washington shared a commitment to a strong national union and central government. After the Revolution Lee invested rashly in real estate and fell so catastrophically into debt that he chained shut the doors of Stratford Hall to keep out the creditors. At Stratford on January 19, 1807, Lee's wife, Ann, gave birth to their fifth child, Robert E. Lee, in an atmosphere of financial gloom — she left the house to reside with her relations. Ann was a Carter, a great-granddaughter of King Carter. Robert E. Lee connected the Lee and Carter lines with the Washington and Custis lineage when he married George and Martha Washington's great-granddaughter, Mary Custis.
* * *
Blenheim was hard to find. The only landmark I had to go on was a mailbox by the side of the road, and I sailed right past it. When I corrected my mistake I ended up on what seemed a road to nowhere, a narrow graveled trace that burrowed through a tunnel of trees and vines, curving this way and that as it followed the course of a stream. The outlines of a house reared up on the left. This was not the historic Washington house but a newer one (newer being nineteenth-century) occupied by the younger generation. Blenheim lay somewhere farther down the twisting road.
A man emerged from this house, and I watched closely as he approached. It was said by Ralph Waldo Emerson that "every man is a quotation from all his ancestors"; I wondered if this man quoted any inherited Washingtonian vestiges. I was braced for a dose of the haughtiness I had experienced at other Southern ancestral homes. His family was descended in a female line from George's half brother Augustine "Austin" Washington, whose son William Augustine had built Blenheim (and was bequeathed a sword by George Washington). This property had passed into a female Washington line when William Augustine's great-granddaughter married a Latané. My host was Larry Washington Latané.
A trim, soft-spoken man in his thirties, Larry displayed no godlike traits at first glance or any patrician airs, but he quickly reverted to ancestral form by inviting me to have a look at his garden. George Washington's guests at Mount Vernon were invariably taken to see the general's garden; special guests were taken to the outlying farms. Likewise, Larry gave me a tour of his plantings. He wrote for the Richmond Times-Dispatch but also cultivated a large organic garden, selling his vegetables to restaurants in Washington, D.C. Like his collateral ancestor, he could not separate himself from agriculture and had chosen the purest way of pursuing it. Unlike his ancestor, who depended on the labor of slaves, this Washington planted and tended the land himself.
Three generations of the Latané family, counting Larry's children, resided on the Blenheim property. In short order Larry's parents drove up from the Blenheim house down the road. A grizzled, stocky man, Lawrence Sr. spoke with the old Virginia accent, which has a Scottish tone that makes "outside the house" sound like "ootside the hoose." He outlined a Virginian's plan for a visit: we would go to see the family cemetery.
The Washington family cemetery was on a farm that had once been owned by another branch of the family, who had sold it some time ago while retaining title to the cemetery and the right to visit it. As we approached the graveyard, Lawrence Sr. told how they had almost lost it. The farm had been purchased by a family from up North who didn't like the idea that a patch of useful land was being taken up with a graveyard. He got wind of the new owner's intentions from a workman: "A man came to me and said, 'That new man that bought the place wants to bulldoze the cemetery.' So I had to go up there and get him straight." Having failed to bulldoze the Washington cemetery, the new owner then asked if he could be buried in it. Lawrence declined to extend him that honor and made a point of visiting the cemetery more often just to keep his eye on it.
An iron fence surrounded the graves, at the end of a large field. A house called Campbellton once stood just a short distance away, but it had burned down in the 1920s. A line of trees screened the field and the cemetery from view, so the gravestones had escaped the vandalism that often befalls isolated country burial grounds. Lawrence tugged open the iron gate. As he took me through the place I was struck by its evidence that the family of the Founding Father had firmly embraced the cause of the rebellion in the Civil War.
"Here is a son who lived at Blenheim," Lawrence said as we paused at the stone for Richard Washington, who died July 6, 1863. When we scraped some dirt from the bottom of the stone we unearthed the inscription: Killed in Action at Hagerstown in the Retreat from Gettysburg. Lawrence pointed to the next stone: "Here's another Civil War man, the son of Sarah Tayloe Washington. He was a lieutenant colonel, I think, in the Ninth Virginia Cavalry." Nearby was the stone for John Tayloe, whose story Lawrence also knew. "He was a prisoner held on a gunboat. They were coming down the Rappahannock and the captain saw that he was nearly dead, so they put him ashore opposite his house, which is a mile inland, and he died after he got home. Now here's a man who was a cadet at VMI in the Battle of New Market. And then he joined Mosby and stayed with him the whole war. Those Mosby men — they put up with something; it was tough." Mosby's cavalry was a legendary Confederate guerrilla unit. Mosby himself became known as the Grey Ghost, because the Union army could never figure out how to catch him after his devastating raids.
William Latané, a cavalryman killed heroically in 1863, also ascended into Confederate legend. His kinsman William D. Washington painted a sentimental scene of his funeral, titled The Burial of Latané. Engravings of the painting graced the walls of parlors throughout the postbellum South: its depiction of faithful slaves laying the fallen hero to rest perfectly expressed Lost Cause nostalgia for plantation life. It was not, however, painted from reality, but from a fantasy. William Washington depicted the scene in a Richmond studio during the war, recruiting a number of Richmond's society women to serve as his models. The completed canvas was displayed in the state capitol, becoming such an inspiration for Confederate patriotism that a receptacle was placed in front of it for people who wished to contribute to the war effort.
We stopped at the grave of a Washington who lived to be ninety. Lawrence remembered him from his childhood. "He was a real strong man, very powerful. All these old Washingtons were six feet four and weighed over two hundred pounds. They were tall and real powerful." That was a fair description of George Washington himself, who boasted that he had tossed a stone to the top of Natural Bridge, a stone arch in the Blue Ridge Mountains that is 215 feet above the ground. Washington was so enthralled by the bridge that he cut his initials into it, a manly G. W. still visible today.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "An Imperfect God"
by .
Copyright © 2003 Henry Wiencek.
Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Map of Washington's Virginia,
Introduction: The General's Dream,
CHAPTER ONE: Home Ground,
CHAPTER TWO: On the Borderland,
CHAPTER THREE: The Widow Custis,
CHAPTER FOUR: A Life Honorable and Amusing,
CHAPTER FIVE: A Scheme in Williamsburg,
CHAPTER SIX: "So Sacred a War as This",
CHAPTER SEVEN: A Different Destiny,
CHAPTER EIGHT: "A Sort of Shadowy Life",
CHAPTER NINE: The Great Escape,
CHAPTER TEN: Mrs. Peter's Patrimony,
CHAPTER ELEVEN: "The Justice of the Creator",
Notes,
Acknowledgments,
Index,
Also by Henry Wiencek,
Copyright,