An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America
By Henry Wiencek
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 404 pages, $26
Henry Wiencek thinks Americans should add another accolade to Henry “Light-horse Harry” Lee’s famous description of George Washington as “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Among all the leading founders of the republic, the great man was also alone in providing for the emancipation after his death of the substantial number of slaves he owned in his own right.
This is a fact that many, perhaps most Americans, casually recall without fully appreciating — a deed we know and admire, but one whose deeper significance Wiencek is really the first to explore, in “An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America.” For as he makes clear in this engaging though at times meandering book, the general’s decision was more momentous and more cautious than it might have been. It was a tribute to his moral courage and a reflection of his political prudence.
To free his slaves, Washington knew, would defy the hopes and expectations of his family and astound and insult his neighbors. Yet he nurtured his scheme of emancipation completely in private, disclosing the secret to only a handful of confidants. His wife, Martha, who owned more slaves than her husband by virtue of her prior marriage, knew nothing of it. Nor did she or any of her Custis descendants find Washington’s example worth emulating.
Yet if Washington did defy his family in death, he was not similarly inclined to disturb the American public–or rather, the Southern public–in life. As Wiencek’s sifting of the evidence makes clear, the plan, veiled as it was, involved more than a deathbed conversion. Slavery and its consequences had begun to vex Washington’s equanimity much earlier, well before he assumed the presidency in 1789. It is worth asking what effect a public announcement of his intentions, delivered before he retired from the presidency in 1797, might have had on the public discussion of slavery. It was one thing to lead by moral example in death, but it would have been quite another to do so in life, with the immense prestige that Washington commanded. The “imperfect god” of the book’s title was not a man with feet of clay. The Washington who emerges from these pages still possesses great authority. His imperfection is just that: not a failure to perceive the evil of slavery in an era when it was only beginning to become morally problematic, but an inability to act as decisively as his prestige and authority could have permitted him to do.
“An Imperfect God” is in part a family book, and in this it resembles, though only faintly, Wiencek’s previous work, “The Hairstons.” There he explored the dual histories of two families, the white Hairstons and the black Harstons, who once cohabited as masters and slaves a far-flung network of antebellum plantations. Much of the interpretive punch of that book lay in contrasting the declining fortunes of the descendants of the former masters with the striking progress of their former slaves in the generations since emancipation.
Here, however, Wiencek tells us rather less about Washington’s practice of slavery and the lives of his slaves than one might expect, given the rich quality and voluminous extent of the general’s surviving papers. Individual slaves and illustrative incidents do appear here, but often to confirm aspects of slavery or of Washington’s management style long familiar from other accounts. Because much that Wiencek says about Washington’s life and personality also echoes standard works, stretches of “An Imperfect God” add little to what is well known. But the book also makes for compelling and troubling reading, especially when it identifies tensions and turning points in Washington’s relations with slaves and with blacks more generally.
Washington lived in a society where ownership of slaves was more important than ownership of land. Well-connected Virginians did not find it hard to acquire land. The real capital factor of production that mattered was slaves. And by the middle of the 18th Century, slavery in the Chesapeake region was beginning to differ in one critical respect from the other slave societies of the Western Hemisphere: Elsewhere slavery required a continuous flow of fresh imports from Africa. In North America, by contrast, slavery was becoming a self-sustaining system through reproduction.
Planters encouraged this, of course. But it was more fundamentally a function of the differences in working conditions. However harsh these conditions were, they nevertheless enabled the slaves of British North America to begin to flourish as an African-American people. Their identity as a people rested on the family networks that were beginning to thicken by the mid-point of the 18th Century, just when Washington was coming of age as a surveyor, young officer in the Virginia militia and a planter whose social status improved significantly with his 1759 marriage to wealthy young widow Martha Parke Custis.
Planters lived in some intimacy with their slaves. Visitors to Mt. Vernon today cannot ignore the jumble of workshops that lie hard by the great house, where Washington labored to obtain a modicum of provincial gentility.
And of course intimacy could be personal as well. Just as Thomas Jefferson’s presumed paramour, Sally Hemings, was the half-sister of his late wife, so Martha Washington brought a much younger half-sister of mixed parentage and slave status into the Washington household. Wiencek explores this dimension of plantation life with some care, including the recent allegation, which he rejects, that Washington might have fathered a child, Wes Ford, by the slave of his brother, John Augustine.
A different facet of the intimacy of plantation life, however, looms much larger in Wiencek’s account of Washington’s moral evolution: his disgust at the casual ease with which his family and neighbors would break up slave families as Virginia’s surplus slave population was used to feed the expansion of the peculiar institution into the interior and the lower South.
Wiencek examines other material for signs of Washington’s attitudes toward slavery and blacks. He is impressed with the hospitality he showed Phyllis Wheatley, the Boston poet whom he cordially and even admiringly entertained not long after he took up his position as commander in chief of the new Continental Army outside Boston. On the other hand, Wiencek grades the general poorly for resisting plans to encourage slave enlistments, especially if such a record of military service could be cited to qualify blacks for citizenship. Pressing manpower needs overcame his early aversion to using blacks at all, but Wiencek makes clear that Washington’s shift in attitudes was limited and grudging.
Nor does Washington appear as an especially charitable or benign master. Where he ranks on a scale from kind to brutal cannot be said, but Wiencek uses the story of Ona Judge to mark the limits of Washington’s sympathy.
Judge was Martha Washington’s personal maid, and she lived in the Washingtons’ Philadelphia household through most of his presidency. But when the prospect of a return to Virginia loomed in 1796, Judge ran away and escaped by ship to Portsmouth, N.H. Washington learned her location and used every subterfuge possible to lure her back, other than the embarrassing legal remedies he could have tried under the Fugitive Slave Act he had signed as president in 1793.
But amid the peculiar matrix of attitudes that sustained the legal existence of slavery, Washington’s embarrassment was a sign of his loss of moral certainty. As Wiencek makes painfully clear, this “imperfect god” was wrestling, in a genuine if flawed way, with the profound moral dilemma that the revolution exposed between the pretensions and reality of the revolutionary commitment to equality and liberty.
“An Imperfect God” may dawdle and meander in places, but it offers a sensitive, powerful, disquieting, balanced account of one of Washington’s most important legacies–and previously one of the least understood.
