The View from the Slave Quarters

After a speaking engagement at Mount Vernon, George Washington’s Virginia estate, in 2007, prominent historian and Washington biographer, John Ferling, was invited to take a candlelight tour of the mansion. He had made many trips to this site in the past, but this time he viewed the house and grounds from a somewhat different perspective. About this cold snowy evening, he recalls, “on the long walk over from the auditorium to the mansion, we went through the area that had been the slave quarters. I don’t mean to suggest that it was an epiphany, but it had a powerful impact on me.” While viewing the mansion from a vantage point once held by Washington’s long-deceased slaves, Ferling could not help wondering about “what it must have been like to have had to live in those squalid quarters in such weather, and to have no hope of ever achieving anything better.” He remembers, “As we completed our walk through the quarters and rounded a bend, there in the snow, with candles burning in each window, was Washington’s huge mansion, looking warm and secure, and inviting.”¹

In many ways, Scott Casper’s Sarah Johnson’s Mount Vernon: The Forgotten History of an American Shrine is an attempt to flesh out this view from the slave quarters, an imaginary glimpse of which temporarily startled Ferling on that frigid winter night. The main characters in Casper’s tale are the African Americans who worked on the estate both as slaves and later as freedpeople for more than a century after Washington’s death. The title is an obvious play on Robert F. Dalzell, Jr. and Lee Baldwin Dalzell’s 1998 book, George Washington’s Mount Vernon: At Home in Revolutionary America. The Dalzells endeavored to decode the property looking for its “essential set of clues,” which could enable Washington admirers to discover the “real” man behind the public figure.² Casper’s quietly subversive allusion to the Dalzell book is an effort to depose Washington of his role as the estate’s sole and perpetual proprietor and to remind present-day visitors and interpreters to seek the alternative histories and counter-narratives furtively embedded in America’s founding.

Casper’s study is decisively not another book about Washington. In fact, the vast majority of the text recounts the history of Mount Vernon in the years after Washington’s death. Yet, even in this deliberate and interpretively significant omission, Washington hovers in the margins, and one cannot experience Sarah Johnson’s Mount Vernon without also encountering Washington’s. In the memories of those who inhabited his home in the generations after his death, Washington takes the shape of part historical figure and part mythological creation. Those who followed after him played the simultaneous role of preserving and creating his legacy. Casper demonstrates that African-Americans played a substantial and often unacknowledged part in this dual pursuit.

Americans have always found the idea of the nation’s revered Founding Fathers as slave owners discomfiting. Ferling’s experience at Mount Vernon was heightened by his awareness that “Washington of course knew the difference in his life and the lives of his slaves, and knew that he was responsible for the difference.” Revealing the ambivalence of a biographer who knows his subject’s foibles all too well, Ferling remarks, “Some aspects of Washington’s life and career have always caused problems for me, and nothing more so than his ownership of slaves.” ³ Indeed many Americans, professional historians and non-specialists alike, have struggled to reconcile the laudatory legends surrounding the founders with a much more complicated historical reality that involves complex moral questions, chief among which is the issue of slavery. This is the central paradox in the history of the United States, what Edmund Morgan famously described as “American slavery” versus “American freedom.” There have been numerous attempts among scholars to somehow release the...