An Imperfect God by Henry Wiencek - Book Report/Review Example

[You work] Book Review An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America By Henry Wiencek(2003). New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. DOI: 10.1177/0021934705282095 Theme. An Imperfect God by Henry Wiencek is about George Washington's life as a slave master where he benefited financially from slavery. However, by the final ten months of his life when his family owned more than 300 slaves, he began to contend with the thought that America - a nation that was "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal- was upholding slavery" (p. 5). This inner battle led him in 1799 to amend his will, emancipating his slaves upon his and his wife Martha's deaths. Wiencek depicts a clear evolution of thought in Washington: him as the young man who seemingly accepted the institution without question; the mature man who clearly began to question it on moral and ethical grounds; and the old man who found it morally repulsive, and against the wishes of his family emancipated all of his slaves in his will. Wiencek's real focus in An Imperfect God is Washington's personal and political position regarding emancipation. Summary. As told by Wiencek, Washington was born and raised among blacks and mixed-race people. He and his wife, Martha, had blood ties to the slave community. Wiencek's study of the Virginia Gazette revealed that Washington had overseen lotteries in which slaves were raffled off to liquidate the debt of their owners. It was said that slave managers of such an "appalling business" (p. 183) "had broken up families at random" (p. 180). Washington knew his field slaves individually (p. 98), closely supervising them and his overseers on the five farms that made up his Mount Vernon estate. He was a strict taskmaster, working his slaves in the fields 16 hours a day, 6 days a week. The slaves performed countless backbreaking tasks like planting and harvesting tobacco and wheat. Typical of the cruelty and inhumanity of slavery, Washington's slaves were poorly clothed and fed, and housing conditions were grossly not enough. In slave management, Washington was a disciplinarian, who, according to the author, was "possessed by a rage for order and a horror of waste" (p. 93). He ordered overseers to whip resistive slaves, and had sold those he was unable to break to the even more brutal and "disease ridden" (p. 132) plantations in the West Indies. 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 emancipating Washington's slaves after his death. However, as Wiencek shows, the document emphasized a long period of equivocation. Like many similarly minded Virginia planters, Washington was not prepared to advocate emancipation. Earlier, Washington had said that holding slaves was his "only unavoidable subject of regret." His personal opposition could not spur him to lead a public campaign. Wiencek carefully evaluates the evidence that Washington himself may have fathered the child of Venus (a slave owned by Washington's brother, John Augustine). He says it is possible, but highly improbable. According to Wiencek, the President was likely sterile and such an affair would have been out of character for a man who prided himself on "self-control." What has fueled the insistence that the child was Washington's was his apparent fondness for the boy, who was often seen with him on riding trips and church visits. Washington had no "legitimate" children and was suspected to have been sterile from childhood illnesses. A July 1999 New York Times article resurrected historical accounts from Ford's family, however. All the mixed-race liaisons in Washington's family lead up to the final question about Washington's reported biracial offspring named West Ford. "We will probably never be certain one way or the other. DNA testing can prove only that West Ford was a member of Washington's family, not that he was or was not George Washington's son," Wiencek wrote. Washington allowed bizarre arrangements in his household involving his wife's black half-sister. Martha Washington kept the woman, Ann Dandridge, as a house slave or "colored house pet." Worse yet, Martha's son Jacky Cuslis, from her first marriage, had a "relationship" with Dandridge, his mulatto aunt, and out of that union a son was born. Wiencek writes: "The masters possessed absolute power over the slaves, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Wiencek depicts Washington's deep moral struggle with slavery and his gradual "moral transfiguration" after watching some young slaves raffled off. By the time of his death in 1799 Washington had become a firm, if quiet, opponent of the slave system. Wiencek seeks explanations for the late-life decision of Washington to liberate his slaves including the possibility that the first president fathered West Ford. He also considers that Washington "had witnessed the heroism and patriotism" (p. 274) of African American soldiers in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. As commander of the Continental Army, Washington was deeply moved by the sight of black slaves and free men fighting alongside whites, which seems to have accelerated his personal opposition to what he regarded as a curse. On the side, the writings of famed slave poet Phyllis Wheatley passionately inspired him. Yet he remained committed to the institution of slavery as president. Such commitment was evident in his ruthless and illegal pursuit of his slave Ona Judge. In 1796, Ona had escaped from him in Philadelphia, fleeing to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. President Washington dispatched "federal agents to shanghai" (p. 325) her and bring her back to bondage. Then, on the Revolutionary battlefields where he commanded both black and white troops, Washington's attitudes began to change. Washington may have acted too late to keep the new republic from perpetuating slavery, but his repentance was genuine. On the subject of slaves, Washington seemed to part company with his wife. Mrs. Washington appears to have no problem with the continuation of slavery while Washington clearly did. Washington owned outright only 123 of Mount Vernon's 316 slaves. The others were inherited by Martha from her first husband and entailed on her heirs, Washington's stepchildren. But the slaves had intermarried and created families together, entangling the two groups. To free Washington's 123 and set them up as tenant farmers (his initial plan) while keeping the rest in bondage was a recipe for domestic trouble. He left it to his strongly worded will to force the change. Washington stipulated that they be freed after Martha's death, but Martha emancipated them early, fearing they would kill her to speed up the process. Critique. The author pours through records of slave sales and personal correspondences of Washington and his family in order to discover what Washington's true thoughts were and what he actually did when it concerned his slaves. The author examines how Washington went from a man steeped in the belief that slavery was acceptable to one who seemed to be deeply troubled by it. He spends a lot of time constructing arguments and making educated guesses. This is what I find interesting. Slavery was not a topic that Washington liked to talk about publicly, and he seemed to have thoughts both pro and con. Wiencek was able to give proof that Washington favored emancipation by presenting Washington's will and some private letters elaborating a plan for providing land and means for his freed laborers. Even in trying to prove the notion that Washington could be father to the slave boy comes to me as amusing. The conclusion is that he probably is not. A weakness in the book is Wiencek's occasional first-person accounts of his field research, including discussions with descendants of Washington that feel strangely out of place. This is supposedly a straightforward biography punctuated with digressions into Washington's larger historical context. Further, Wiencek has the penchant of idealizing Washington and is willing to excuse much in a man who was a slaveholder his entire life. It is in Wiencek's attempt to point out that even the noble of spirit can fail to act in the face of institutionalized evil that he seems to excuse Washington for the hesitation to act. Wiencek's inability to pinpoint Washington's motivation for freeing his slaves is also a flaw in this book. However, Wiencek was fair enough to point out the distinctions of Washington among the slaveholding Founding Fathers. The strength of the book is found in Wiencek's conclusion. Although presented as favoring emancipation, Washington is qualified by Wiencek in this regard: "The tragedy, for the nation," Wiencek argues, "is that Washington did not act upon his convictions during his lifetime. Had he freed his slaves in 1794 or in 1796, while in office, the effect might have been profound" (p. 359). This book shows a truth that slavery hurt the owners more, making the owners hard-hearted and cruel than the enslaved. It had this effect in Washington, making him "imperfect," though he was a Founding Father of America. It is a great book in explaining slavery historically and how Washington's opinions about slavery changed. Read More