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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.
- Sales Rank: #335132 in Books
- Brand: Wiencek, Henry
- Published on: 2004-09-03
- Released on: 2004-08-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.26" h x 1.17" w x 5.49" l, .90 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 432 pages
Amazon.com Review
Was George Washington a dedicated slaveholder and, like Thomas Jefferson, a father of slave children? Or was he a closeted abolitionist and moralist who abhorred the abuse of African-Americans? In An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America Henry Wiencek delves into Washington's papers and new oral history information to assemble a portrait of the first President of the United States that (while uneven in the telling) concludes that Washington supported emancipation by the time of his death.
To begin, Wiencek briefly addresses and dismisses the claim that Washington fathered a child with Venus, (a slave owned by Washingtong's brother, John Augustine). According to Wiencek, the President was likely sterile and such an affair would have been out of character for a man who prided himself on "self-control."
Wiencek's real focus in An Imperfect God is Washington's personal and political position regarding emancipation. The primary ground for Wiencek's argument is Washington's will and a selection of private letters that elaborate a plan for providing land and means for his freed laborers. The will in particular offers powerful evidence of Washington's true intentions, including explicit declarations manumitting Washington's slaves after his death. As Wiencek shows, the document punctuated a long period of equivocation.
An Imperfect God is an imperfect book. Wiencek's occasional first-person accounts of his field research, including discussions with descendants of Washington, feel strangely out of place in what is elsewhere a straightforward biography punctuated with digressions into Washington's larger historical context. Further, Wiencek sometimes dabbles in hagiography and is willing to excuse much in a man who was a slaveholder his entire life. Yet, Wiencek is right to point out the distinctions of Washington among the slaveholding Founding Fathers. Readers can only imagine along with Wiencek the national tragedy that could have been averted had Washington provided the great example of emancipation while in office. --Patrick O'Kelley
From Publishers Weekly
This important work, sure to be of compelling interest to anyone concerned with the nation's origins, its founders and its history of race slavery, is the first extended history of its subject. Wiencek (who won a National Book Critics Circle award for The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White) relates not only the embrangled "blood" history of Washington's family and that of the Custis clan into which he married, but also the first-person tale, often belabored, of his own search for facts and truth. What will surely gain the book widest notice is Wiencek's careful evaluation of the evidence that Washington himself may have fathered the child of a slave. His verdict? Possible, but highly improbable. Yet his detective work places the search on a higher plane than ever before. Also, while being a social history (unnecessarily padded in some places) of 18th-century Virginia and filled with affecting stories of individual slaves, the book stands out for depicting Washington's deep moral struggle with slavery and his gradual "moral transfiguration" after watching some young slaves raffled off. While by no means above dissimulation, even lying, about his and Martha's bond servants, by the time of his death in 1799 Washington had become a firm, if quiet, opponent of the slave system. By freeing his slaves upon Martha's death, he stood head and shoulders above almost all his American contemporaries. This work of stylish scholarship and genealogical investigation makes Washington an even greater and more human figure than he has seemed before. History Book Club main selection.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Thomas Jefferson is revered as our apostle of liberty; yet, when he died deeply in debt, he had made no provision for the emancipation of his slaves, and many were sold and families scattered. George Washington was conservative, authoritarian, and aristocratic in outlook and demeanor; yet, he strongly emphasized in his will that his slaves were to be freed, despite opposition from his family. Wiencek, a Virginia historian, studies Washington's moral struggle with the institution of slavery. As Wiencek's fascinating and often emotionally wrenching examination of Washington's private correspondence reveals, he expressed distaste for slavery as a young man. But like many similarly minded Virginia planters, he was not prepared to advocate emancipation. As commander of the Continental Army, Washington was deeply moved by the sight of black slaves and free men fighting alongside whites, which seems to have accelerated his personal opposition to what he regarded as a curse. Unfortunately, like Jefferson, his personal opposition could not spur him to lead a public campaign that might have spared the nation the horrors to come. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
GW as a real human being
By Just Me
Love this book. It is the first biography of George Washington I've read that really made me appreciate him as a human being that, if I met him today, I could talk with him and not be just staring at a historical idol. The writing evoked an emotional as well as intellectual response in me.
I first read this book in hardcover, but had to have it on my Kindle to reread on a trip.
25 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
Washington and America's Original Sin - A Cautionary Tale
By Theo Logos
The troubling and uncomfortable subject of America's slave owning founders is a difficult one with which to deal, and one that many Americans would prefer to ignore altogether. The idea that men we have come to view as great and noble could on the one hand stake their lives and honor on the cause of freedom and liberty for "all" men, and on the other exclude an entire race that they held in bondage for their own profit is a huge contradiction that does not easily fit into the ideal American mythos that we have learned to revere. Never the less, it is important to face it, own it as part of our history, and begin to understand the meaning and consequences of this stain on the American ideal.
In `An Imperfect God', Henry Wiencek examines this question by focusing on the foremost founder - George Washington. In Washington, he detects a clear evolution of thought. He shows us Washington the young man who seemingly accepted the institution without question; the mature man who clearly began to question it on moral and ethical grounds, and the old man who found it morally repugnant, and against the wishes of his family, emancipated all of his slaves in his will, making him unique among the slave owning founders.
Wiencek recreates the world that Washington was born into, showing us the context of his thought and action. He explains the social system of the great landed plantation owners, whose wealth and prestige were built upon human slavery. He is unsparing in his depiction of an institution that often led to shared blood ties between masters and slaves, so that many masters held in bondage their own children, grandchildren, brothers and sisters, and reveals that some of the slaves held at Mt. Vernon were blood relatives of Martha Washington. And he makes it clear, not from the judgment of our own times, but from Washington's and other founder's own words that they were aware of the great moral evil of this vile institution. He shows us the great change in attitude that Washington experienced over the course of his lifetime, from a young man so hardened to the evils of the institution that he helped to run a lottery that raffled off Black children to pay a friend's debts, to the old man who, after many missed opportunities, wrote a remarkable will ten months before his death to free and care for all of his slaves, repudiating in death the evil system he was never able to directly confront during his life.
Wiencek writes of Washington with respect. He does not attempt to attack the greatness of the man, but to show us how even the noble of spirit can fail to act in the face of institutionalized evil. The failure of Washington and the other founders to eradicate slavery in their new land of liberty led directly to the terrible Civil War (an event which both Washington and Jefferson anticipated), and the continuing consequences of their failure still haunt us today. As such, `An Imperfect God' is a cautionary tale for our contemplation.
This should not be the first or the only book that you read on George Washington - it would not present a balanced picture of the man. Yet the dark history that it details is important, and is ignored at our peril. Knowing this, the greatest failure of the founding generation is as important to a full understanding of America as is knowledge of their tremendous achievements, and only by facing the inherent contradiction of the two can we move on to build a better America for future generations.
Theo Logos
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
One of the greatest nonfiction books ever!
By Jack Lechelt
George Washington owned slaves. Nothing new there. For anyone who looks at the title and thinks this is another attack on the foundingest (sorry) of all Founding Fathers, that person is making a big mistake. I love reading about the Revolutionary period and the Founders, and George Washington is my ultimate favorite historical figure. Yet we all must struggle with a great man who took part in a great injustice. There's no way to get around it. And don't go claiming that we can't judge him by today's standards. Although that would be foolish, we can fault him by not living up to HIS OWN standards and the standards of many from his era. Washington knew slavery was wrong. Many around him argued vehemently against slavery. And yet...
What Wiencek does is look at the topic from many different angles. He is part historian, part memoirist, part current events commentator, and part novelist. That is, he writes beautifully about a topic that clearly means a lot to him. He tells us Washington's story, but he also talks about HOW he came about the topic and HOW he went about researching it. For example, he writes about his trips to Mount Vernon and how he actually took in his own hands the tools slaves used at Washington's estate; he tried for only a short time the jobs slaves had to do all of their lives. I have not read tons on slavery, but of what I have read, nothing so clearly ingrained in me the cruel monotony of the lifestyle as did Wiencek's telling.
Weincek also chronicles some of the modern era's efforts to deal with our past. When Williamsburg attempted to do a mock slave sale, he poignantly described how just a single reenactment was so emotionally draining on all involved; it was never repeated again. One of the more interesting of Weincek's findings was that Washington actually took part in a slave raffle. So sad.
When I finished reading the book, I was not left with hatred for the great man. I still love him, but wish he did more to end the great American moral failure. But coming up short is not the same as coming up empty. He freed his slaves upon his death and provided some economic assistance to them for many years later. Other slaves continued on at Mount Vernon until Martha Washington passed away.
Well. There it is. History, if nothing else, points out our failings so that we don't repeat them. Of course, we often do repeat many of our mistakes, but maybe, just maybe, the next time will be less painful.
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