Read More Books: John Garrison Marks, Thy Will Be Done: George Washington’s Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory (UNC Press, 2026)

John Garrison Marks, Thy Will Be Done: George Washington’s Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory UNC (April 7) 2026.

1. Why do you think George Washington is such a subject of intense focus for Americans?

Washington was the most famous, most important American when he was alive, and he’s basically held that spot ever since. Because of this place in our national psyche, Americans have long struggled to see Washington as an actual human being, probably more so than for any other historical figure. Instead, Washington long ago became a symbol of the nation itself. For a huge number of people—both today and historically—George Washington essentially is the United States. Even people who didn’t hold Washington in particularly high regard have recognized the potency of using Washington in their rhetoric.

Most of the time, our arguments about Washington aren’t really about Washington at all. They’re about democracy, or equality, or what it means to be an American. People have continually drawn on Washington’s image or words to wage the political and cultural battles of the day. They leverage his immense symbolic power to serve arguments about contemporary issues. In my book, the people citing Washington’s history with slavery are rarely doing so to promote a better understanding of the past. Rather, they’re wielding history as a cudgel to make points in the present. Simply put, no one serves that purpose better than Washington.

       2. How has that focus changed over time, and what makes his role as an enslaver important to understanding change– and continuity? 

What most stood out to me while I was researching the book was how much continuity I saw in the ways people referenced Washington’s involvement with slavery. Over the past several years, there’s been a new wave of intense controversy over how we should publicly acknowledge Washington and his legacy. A growing number of Americans in recent years have highlighted Washington’s hypocrisy, making the case that his role as an enslaver should lead us to remove him from places of public honor. Others have demanded we continue to revere Washington; obviously the most notable recent example is the White House’s insistence on celebratory narratives and the removal of the slavery exhibit from the Presidents House site in Philadelphia. Still others, in social studies curriculum and at some historic sites, argue that Washington’s eventual emancipation of the people he enslaved redeemed his lifetime of involvement in the institution, and that this is what we should remember.

What was really fascinating in researching the book was how early and consistently all three of these perspectives appeared in the record. In 1797, British abolitionist Edward Rushton wrote directly to Washington, criticizing him for being a “proprietor in human flesh and blood.” Shortly after Washington’s death in 1799, Black Philadelphia minister Richard Allen told his congregation they should mourn Washington because he had set an example by freeing his slaves, and in so doing managed to “wipe off the only stain” from his legacy. A few weeks later, Henry Lee’s famous eulogy of Washington ignored slavery entirely, calling Washington “the most illustrious and most beloved personage this country has ever produced.” You see people making nearly these exact same points still today.

What changes over time is the specific contexts in which people are wielding this history, how different generations of Americans try to bring the past to bear on the present. Because issues of race are so persistent in our history—and because Washington’s legacy of slavery is so complicated—people selectively cite evidence and bring him into the conversation more often than I ever would have imagined.

     3. How do you see your work intersecting with other histories of founders and slavery but also of histories of American memory?

I’ll admit that I still have trouble thinking of myself as a scholar of George Washington or the founders, though I suppose I should get used to it. I certainly didn’t come to the project interested in political or presidential history. Instead, my work in public history over the last decade made me much more interested in how people of the present and past related to history, remembered history, and put it to work in their lives. It turns out looking at Washington’s history with slavery offers a great lens to understand those dynamics.

This book builds on decades of incredible work other scholars have done to help us understand Washington’s involvement with slavery. Because so many Americans have twisted and manipulated Washington’s history with slavery over the past two centuries, I thought it was important that the book set a strong historical foundation at the beginning to make sure readers were all on the same page for understanding all the historical cherry-picking that followed. I drew heavily on a mountain of great scholarship on the subject: former Mount Vernon historian Mary V. Thompson’s work on the enslaved community at Mount Vernon; Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s excellent book on Ona Judge; other biographies or books about Washington and his family by Alexis Coe, Cassandra Good, Bruce Ragsdale, and so many others; and so many primary source collections that provided easy access to Washington’s writings, especially Founders Online. All of that work made it possible to tell the story I wanted to tell without first spending decades researching the particulars of Washington’s involvement with slavery.

Ultimately though, in my mind my book isn’t really about Washington at all. He dies in the very first chapter! Mostly this is a book about how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated our memory of Washington over the course of our history. So I definitely think of the book as being in conversation with other books about historical memory—of Washington, of slavery, or of both. Work by Scott Casper, Matthew Costello, Annette Gordon Reed, Clint Smith, and many others I’m probably forgetting right now all helped me think through the questions I wanted to ask and provided a framework for answering them in ways that were really helpful. I hope readers will appreciate my approach—grounding us in the history before a pretty sweeping look at how our memory of that history has evolved (and not) over time.

   4. What prompted you to write the book?

My very first thoughts about this book focused on the people Washington freed from slavery in his will. It struck me that historians seemed to always treat this decision as the end of a story about Washington and slavery; I wanted to see what it would look like to instead place it at the beginning of a story about Black freedom in early-nineteenth-century Virginia. My first book explored the worlds of free Black people before the end of slavery in the urban Americas, so I felt like I had the research chops and grounding in the relevant literature to tell that story really well. As I began researching, though, I was immediately confronted by how little that emancipation was discussed immediately after Washington’s death—and how much it got brought into the discourse decades and centuries later. That provided a really deep well to draw from.

More broadly, my early thinking about the book was informed by two parallel developments over the last several years. The first was the demonstrations for racial justice in the summer of 2020 and the historical reckoning that went with it. Seeing people so fervently contesting the ways we discuss and display the history of slavery and enslavers prompted me to think more deeply than I had previously about my role in these conversations as a historian, and about what I might contribute to this growing debate. Second, by 2020 I had already been working as a public historian for several years, with most of my work focused on helping history museums prepare for the U.S. 250th anniversary. I recognized then that these debates about how to understand the founders’ relationship to slavery would become even more salient in 2026, and I thought I could research and write a book in time to meet the moment. With the book coming out just a few months before the peak of the semiquincentennial commemoration, I feel like I landed a plane on an aircraft carrier, but it has proved to be relevant subject matter in ways I never could have anticipated.

     5. What was your most remarkable experience doing research for the book? 

Speaking with members of the descendant community. I’m incredibly honored that five people descended from ancestors enslaved by the Washingtons at Mount Vernon met with me to share their stories and their perspective on how we remember George Washington. As a historian of eighteenth and nineteenth century America, I have never had that kind of direct link to the past in my research. It was incredibly powerful to listen to their stories and perspectives, not only to hear their perspective on how the story of slavery gets told at Mount Vernon today, but to hear first-hand how they think about their personal connections to an incredibly important history. Engaging with descendants has become an important part of how museums and historic sites—including Mount Vernon—interpret the history of slavery, so I knew getting that perspective was going to be an essential part of the book. But the fact that they invited me into their homes and workplaces, that they trusted me with their stories, was an incredible experience and helped me tell a much richer story.

What else to read:

Scott Casper, Sarah Johnson’s Mount Vernon:  The Forgotten History of an American Shrine (2009)

Alexis Coe, You Never Forget Your First:  A Biography of George Washington (2020)

Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught:  The Washingtons Relentless Pursuit of their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (2018)

Matthew R. Costello, The Property of the Nation: George Washington’s Tomb, Mount Vernon, and the Memory of the First President (2019)

Cassandra A. Good, First Family: George Washington’s Heirs and the Making of America (2023)

Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2009)

Bruce A. Ragsdale, Washington at the Plow: The Founding Farmer and the Question of Slavery (2021)

Clint Smith, How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (2021)

Mary V. Thompson, “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret” George Washington, Slavery, and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon (2019)

 

This article originally appeared in April 2026.

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Karin Wulf is the Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director & Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library, and Professor of History at Brown University. A historian of gender, family, and politics in British America, her most recent book is Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America, published by Oxford University Press in 2025.