Mother Jones illustration; Courtesy of John Garrison Marks
During the summer of 2020, as protestors rallied against racial injustice, at least two dozen monuments of Confederate soldiers and slave owners were “torched, occupied, or removed.” In Portland, protestors toppled a George Washington statue on the lawn outside the German American Society, erected to commemorate the sesquicentennial. Six years later, and the Trump administration is fighting in court to remove plaques in Philadelphia that commemorate Washington’s history of enslaving people.
These two sides of the argument over how we remember Washington are the inspiration for John Garrison Marks’s new book, Thy Will Be Done: George Washington’s Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory.
Thy Will Be Done, released this week, explores how Americans have struggled to grapple with the complex role slavery plays in Washington’s legacy for 250 years. While revered for helping found the nation, Washington was a prolific enslaver, who owned 123 people, signed the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act and evaded Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act by moving his slaves in and out of the state every six months so they wouldn’t have to be legally freed. Yet, Marks, a historian and American Association for State and Local History senior staff member, notes that Washington’s feelings about slavery weren’t necessarily always positive. In private letters, Washington wrote about his “growing objection” to buying and selling enslaved people because it often broke up families. However, he still served as an active participant in the institution, and his slaves were only emancipated in his will after he and his wife died.
To better understand how we’ve reckoned with this complicated legacy over our history, Marks searched through archives, newspaper and magazine articles, pamphlets, and books to track how debates surrounding Washington’s involvement with slavery have changed over time. What he discovered is that we’ve been having some version of the same argument over Washington and slavery since Washington was alive.
At the center of Thy Will Be Done is a question of how understanding Washington’s relationship with slavery helps us better understand our nation. “What is it, exactly, that Washington left to us?” Marks asks in the introduction. “Our current struggle to make sense of George Washington and slavery reflects a broader struggle to understand our relationship to the American past and what it should mean for us in the present.”
In our conversation, Marks discussed the arguments that surround Washington’s involvement in slavery, how these conversations can’t happen in a vacuum, and why unpacking this history should be a community effort. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
In the book you talk about reviewing the past decade of commentary about Washington and slavery, and it being clear to you that little progress has been made over the past two centuries.
I think it’s really remarkable to look at the historical record and to see that the criticisms that people are levying against Washington for his involvement with slavery today are no more intense—are no more vitriolic than what people were saying about him in the 19th century.
Then likewise, the people who want to continue to celebrate Washington and who say that his involvement with slavery shouldn’t be a factor in our admiration for this person who did so much for the founding of the nation, that idea echoes what you see in these eulogies for Washington right after he died.
So, the fact that you see both sides of this conversation so early on in our conversations about Washington is really remarkable and they remain consistent for more than two centuries. I think in part, that’s because the people engaging in those conversations, the people using Washington’s history with slavery, or ignoring Washington’s history with slavery, are rarely doing it with a desire for better historical understanding. They’re doing it to be able to score points in the present. They are wielding Washington’s history with slavery as a cudgel against the opponents in the political and cultural fight that they’re engaged in.
What I’m trying to do in the book is to say, let’s understand the ways that our conversation about history right now is informed by this two centuries of history that preceded it, in order to kind of break ourselves out of that cycle, to embrace the ambiguity and complexity of Washington’s legacy with slavery, to stop trying to find one single answer that is going to settle this once and for all, to recognize that that’s impossible, and instead to decide what should this mean for us now in the present.
That makes me think about chapter six, “Washington and Slavery in the American Classroom,” and how these conversations have been reflected there.
That was a chapter that was difficult to write, but it was one that I knew had to be in the book, because so much of our conversation over the last couple of years about the history of slavery and its intersection with the founding, how people should encounter this history or not, how they should be shielded from this history, has revolved around how young people are taught this history in the classroom.
It became one that I knew was going to be really important to understanding today’s debates about Washington and slavery. It was fascinating to see its history going back to the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and see all the ways that just suggesting that there was a connection between Washington and slavery, or even just writing about the history of slavery and also writing about George Washington on pages near one another, was sparking this reaction from people who were furious about their heroes being debunked, when, in reality, that often wasn’t even part of the text. It was just the mere mention of Washington and slavery near one another that seemed upsetting for people.
It begs the question of if you’re trying to erase something from history, that in itself feels like an admission that it’s bad, so why can’t we just say it was bad?
I think that’s a big part of the reason why you’ve seen what the state of Florida has done. It seems they kind of recognize, “okay, we can’t just ignore and erase George Washington’s history with slavery, so instead, we’re going to acknowledge it, but all as part of his lead up to his decision in his will to free the people that he enslaved.” This lets them celebrate Washington as this great emancipator, as this liberator, as this person who delivered liberty, both to America and to the people that he enslaved. And it helps them kind of reconcile that contradiction and tell the story that they want to tell, while still sort of acknowledging that Washington was involved with slavery.
It sets aside that he enslaved other people for the entirety of his adult life, and only in his will does he say, after both he and his wife died, can this subset of the people that he enslaved at Mount Vernon achieve their freedom. [Florida] uses [Washington’s emancipation of the people he enslaved] as this, like this end point to the story.
You see this at various times throughout American history. You see it in some ways, in the way that Mount Vernon has told this story, where it always seems to lead to this moment of emancipation. You also saw it among some anti-slavery activists in the 19th century. Where they’re using the story of Washington emancipating the people that he enslaved as part of their effort to say, “what could be more American than ending slavery? If Washington freed the people he enslaved, clearly, this must be a fundamentally American value, and we should all try to emancipate all the people that are enslaved in this country.”
So, they were able to use that story in one way in the 19th century, and now you have conservative education reformers trying to use it in a very different way in the 21st Century. The way that those two examples kind of speak to each other and don’t was really fascinating to me, and speaks to the way that Washington’s history with slavery has been used and abused throughout our history in ways that are really complex.
There was a quote that stood out to me about social media. You write “it’s as if these conversations are happening in a vacuum—never more than inside the echo chambers of modern social media—sealed off from all the earlier iterations of these same ideas.” What role does social media play in disrupting any forward motion in these conversations?
I think there is a tendency to use history, not to improve understanding, but to score points in the present, and that kind of point scoring is never more clearly on display than in the ways that people post on social media.
Many of the people using the past in one way or another are more concerned with trying to support something that they already believe and that’s a problem.
I don’t think I have to point out that often the people who are engaged in these debates or are commenting on Washington’s involvement with slavery and how we should or shouldn’t talk about it, probably think that they are presenting an idea that is novel. They probably think that now is finally the time to fully acknowledge Washington’s involvement with slavery, not realizing that there have been other Americans making that very same point for more than 200 years.
Anti-slavery activists in the 19th century. Black activists during the Jim Crow era. Civil rights activists in the 1960s. Descendants of slavery at Mount Vernon in the 1990s and early 2000s. All the way up through Black Lives Matter, there have always been groups of Americans who are demanding that we confront this part of our history. It’s really striking that the legacy of these conversations, the broader historical context of these conversations, almost never figures in at any moment that it actually arises as part of the discourse.
Which then leads into what you were saying about the semiquincentennial being a space where we can have all these conversations, so we can start that first step of moving forward.
I think it’s a real opportunity to bring people together and have some difficult and complex conversations about our history. I’ve been working on Semiquinentennial initiatives since 2017, and my hope has always been that this anniversary can help us arrive at a more complete and more inclusive and more widely shared understanding of American history.
I hope that this anniversary is going to spark for people this idea that they want to know more about the nation’s past. Maybe people who haven’t thought about history since they were in high school or since the Bicentennial are suddenly reengaged in thinking and talking about history. And maybe that can help them encounter some history about Washington or other founders that they didn’t necessarily go looking for, but they find really interesting and rewarding, and can have that kind of conversation.
In the book, you also emphasize the community effort of unpacking this history, that’s not just one person’s job to do it.
Yeah, that’s important to me. That is certainly important to the museum and public history field is increasingly how we talk about it and talk about our work. If we accept that there’s no single answer here, if we accept that there’s always going to be this degree of ambiguity and complexity that we have to contend with, then I think the only way to really do that and the only way to truly benefit from a deeper engagement with this history is to do it together, to do it with other people, to decide, with members of your local community, or people in your state, or even thinking about it much more broadly, as a national community, is to do that process together and try to arrive at an understanding of why people think about this question in different ways, why different people might come to different conclusions and come to kind of a greater acceptance of what it means to reconcile Washington’s history with slavery. To accept that ambiguity as part of his legacy.