Sarah Johnson's Mount Vernon: The Forgotten History of an American Shrine

by Scott E. Casper

Overview

Sarah Johnson's Mount Vernon brilliantly restores the lives and contributions of African Americans to the legacy of Mount Vernon. Digging beneath the well-known stories of George Washington and the era of America's birth, Scott E. Casper recovers the remarkable history of Sarah Johnson, who spent more than fifty years at Mount Vernon, in slavery and after emancipation. Through her life and those of her family and friends, Casper provides not only an intimate picture of Mount Vernon during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—years that are rarely part of its public story—but also a window into a community of people who played an essential part in creating and maintaining this American landmark.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809084159
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	01/20/2009
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.54(w) x 8.22(h) x 0.78(d)

About the Author

Scott E. Casper is a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is the author of Constructing American Lives, which won the 1999 Book History Prize from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing.

Table of Contents

Sarah Johnson's Family Tree     ix
Map of the Mount Vernon Estate, 1799-1900     xi
Introduction: Forever Old, Forever New     3
Oliver Smith's Memories     8
Hannah Parker's Kin     37
West Ford's Triple Life     58
Andrew Ford's America     79
The Johnsons' Neighborhood     107
Nathan Johnson's Enterprise     132
Sarah Johnson's Papers     158
Edmund Parker's Performances     185
Conclusion: Old Negroes, New Memorials     215
Notes     229
Acknowledgments     267
Index     271

Editorial Reviews

A fascinating look at a national shrine from another angle.” —Jules Wagman, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Casper lays bare the unique narrative of America's first sacred shrine, capturing the dizzying complexity of an early American community largely unrecognized and misunderstood.” —Richard Horan, The Christian Science Monitor

“Now, at last, Casper tells the story of the invisible men and women who worked the 8,000-acre riverfront estate for generations. While innumerable books have been written in recent years about the Founding Fathers, it's refreshing to read one in which slaves play a central part . . . Casper deftly uses the limited sources available to depict Johnson's life with an authenticity that is moving.” —W. Ralph Eubanks, The Washington Post Book World

“Casper must piece the prism together from many sources . . . The efforts pay off. His account is evenhanded and scrupulously detailed, yet always emotionally connected to the life of housekeeper Sarah Johnson.” —Erin Aubry Kaplan, Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher

While innumerable books have been written in recent years about the Founding Fathers, it's refreshing to read one in which slaves play a central part. Washington may have helped create our republic, but slaves built and upheld its economic infrastructure. In Sarah Johnson's Mount Vernon, Casper reminds us that they were founders, too…Casper deftly uses the limited sources available to depict Johnson's life with an authenticity that is moving. At the same time, he intertwines her story with accounts of other black men and women who tended Mount Vernon over the years, many of them her relatives…There is no marker at Mount Vernon commemorating Sarah Johnson's contribution to its preservation. Fortunately, Scott Casper has given her a written memorial, and it is altogether fitting and proper.
—The Washington Post

W. Ralph Eubanks

Schoolchildren, learning that George Washington freed his slaves when his wife died, may believe that slavery then ended at Mount Vernon, but this emancipation was not wholesale. Martha's slaves were not freed, and Mount Vernon remained a slave plantation. Historian Casper relates the complex tale of Mount Vernon's triple identities, "home, workplace, and enduring, malleable national symbol," via the lives of its black workers and residents, slave and free, and its owners while he restores African-Americans' essential roles as actors-both as historical persons doing the work of maintaining Mount Vernon and as theater, today playing the roles that maintain an illusion of 18th-century accuracy. Casper uncovers the full breadth of these African-Americans' lives. Sarah Johnson, for example, was not only a slave, a servant and an "attendant to the public" decades after Washington's death; she was also a wife, mother, seamstress, landowner and default curator of the Mount Vernon residence. Casper succinctly relates how Washington's 18th-century estate became a 19th-century "national shrine [and] site of reverent pilgrimage" and deftly integrates national political, social and technological transformations into his tale. Unanticipated links and unsolved mysteries engage, while Casper's cautious speculation and meticulous documentation make his book as trustworthy as it is fascinating. illus. (Feb.)

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