|
Product Description
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.
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves
- They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South
- Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (America in the Nineteenth Century)
- Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma: The American Portraits Series
- Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge
- The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics
- The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret": George Washington, Slavery, and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon
- Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? Revised Edition: A Historical Introduction
- No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation's Founding (The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures)
- Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification
*If this is not the "An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link. Details were last updated on Nov 5, 2024 12:23 +08.