An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America

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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 Used to be 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 Used to be 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 Used to be genuine. And it Used to be perhaps related to the possibility–as the oral history of Mount Vernon’s slave descendants has long asserted–that a slave named West Ford Used to be 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.

Used to be George Washington a dedicated slaveholder and, like Thomas Jefferson, a father of slave children? Or Used to be 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 USA that (at the same time as 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 Used to be likely sterile and such an affair would have been out of character for a man who prided himself on “self-keep an eye on.”

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 a less than perfect book. Wiencek’s occasional first-person accounts of his field research, including discussions with descendants of Washington, feel strangely misplaced in what is elsewhere a straightforward biography punctuated with digressions into Washington’s larger historical context. Further, Wiencek every so often dabbles in hagiography and is willing to excuse much in a man who Used to be a slaveholder his entire life. Yet, Wiencek is right to point out the distinctions of Washington some of the slaveholding Founding Fathers. Readers can only consider along side Wiencek the national tragedy that could have been averted had Washington provided the great example of emancipation at the same time as in office. –Patrick O’Kelley