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Civics & Coffee: A History Podcast
Complicated Legacies: Thy Will Be Done with John Garrison Marks
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to Civics and Coffee, a history podcast. The show all about United States history delivered to you in the time it takes to enjoy your morning cup of coffee. I'm your host Alicia, a historian trained in United States history with a passion for telling both the known and unknown parts of America's past. So grab your coffee and get ready for some bite sized history. Welcome back everyone. March is a busy month and I am back with yet another interview, this time with Dr. John Garrison marks to discuss his forthcoming book Thy Will Be Done which explores Americans long struggle with first President George Washington's legacy. I hope you all enjoy the conversation. Hello everyone. Joining me today is Dr. John Garrison Marks. He is a historian and writer exploring the United States histories of race, slavery and public public memory. His writing has appeared in places including the Washington Post, Time and Smithsonian magazine. He has written several books including Thy Will Be Done, George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory which will be the focus of our conversation today. Welcome Dr. Marks.
- [01:17]
B
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to have a conversation today.
- [01:20]
A
I'm so excited to have you here. So let's dive into this fantastic book. What prompted your decision to research the long contested legacy of George Washington's involvement in the slave trade?
- [01:32]
B
Yeah, so I really started thinking about this book specifically in the summer of 2020. There was a huge public conversation that summer about how we think about George Washington and his involvement with slavery. There were demonstrations for racial justice all across the country. Statues of Washington were being vandalized, torn down. People were calling for them to be contextualized or moved to museums. And I really wanted to understand the longer history of those arguments from that summer and how other Americans had dealt with this or not in previous generations. And at the same time I had also begun work as a public historian helping museums and historic sites think about the 250th anniversary in 2026. And I knew that there would be this moment in 2020, 26. I hoped these questions were going to come up again and people would be newly engaged with these questions about how we remember found the founders and the founding. And so I started digging into it and thinking about what, what this might look like as a book project and was, you know, drawn in immediately. And five years or six years later kind of came out the other end with a book.
- [02:54]
A
And why do you think Washington has kind of been used as a, a through line in history when it comes to debates about slavery?
- [03:03]
B
Yeah, I think more than any other historical figure, George Washington functions as this symbol for Americans, he is a stand in for the nation itself. Whether people think the nation is mostly good or mostly bad, they see George Washington as this endlessly flexible symbol, this kind of avatar for the United States that they invest all of their other ideas about contemporary issues into. I think people have a hard time seeing Washington as a human being with both virtues and, you know, major flaws, and instead they kind of use him to advance a different conversation about current events, about contemporary challenges, about the history of racial injustice in particular. And so something I found in my research when I was reading and researching the book is that from really when Washington was still alive and certainly in the centuries after his death, anytime Americans want to talk about issues of slavery or racism or racial injustice, which are a constant feature of American society, they use Washington and Washington's involvement with slavery to make their points. So it comes now from a desire to understand Washington's history with the institution of slavery. People see it as a way, something that they can wield in the political and cultural fights of their day, particularly when it comes to issues of race.
- [04:37]
A
Yeah. And when readers pick up this book, you don't start them on third base, so to speak. Right. You kind of start the story all over again and you share in your opening pages the motivation. But why was it important for you to kind of outline Washington's history, slavery for readers, a topic that maybe some might feel has been covered significantly. And I guess, how does that help frame your analysis?
- [05:05]
B
Yeah, it's funny. I really don't think of myself as a historian of George Washington. I don't think of myself as a presidential historian. And the first chapter of the book is one that I tried to avoid writing for a while. But I came to realize that the ways that other Americans have used Washington's history to advance their particular causes at different moments in our past just wouldn't make any sense if every reader didn't have some kind of shared foundation for what Washington's history with the institution actually was. There are all of these references that people are making throughout the 19th century, the 20th century and today to specific things that Washington did, specific things that Washington said or wrote to other people, and oftentimes they're true. People are making completely different arguments about, you know, criticizing Washington as a. As a hypocrite and a villain for enslaving other people or lifting him up as this leader of the revolution and the, you know, the father of his country, or talking about him as this early anti slavery crusader, this person who in the end, frees the people he enslaved. And none of them are wrong. They're all, you know, kind of remarkably faithful to the historical record. And I realized that a reader would have a tough time making heads or tails of all of these references if the book didn't start off with some kind of grounding in. Okay, here is the history. Here is, you know, the. The best way that I can in, you know, 30 pages or so, describe Washington's history with the institution of slavery. And so, you know, what I hope people take away from that chapter is that, you know, it is complicated. At the very same time that Washington is writing to friends and associates talking about his opposition to slavery, he is actively involved in every aspect of the institution. He enslaves other people for the entirety of his adult life, and yet he is the architect for. Of one of the largest private emancipations in American history. He frees 123 people in his last will and testament. And all of these things just have to be true at the same time. And what most of the rest of the book looks at is how people have taken one part of this or kind of cherry picked pieces of that story in order to make some kind of argument, not just about Washington, but about America. And in order for that process of cherry picking to make sense, in order to understand the way different actors are wielding Washington's history with slavery, everyone needed to kind of start from the same foundation, have a broader look at Washington's history with the institution.
- [07:58]
A
Yeah. And you kind of explore how it starts almost immediately. This myth building starts kind of right away. And so can you talk a bit about that myth building as it relates to Washington immediately after his death and what impact that has for future interpretations about his legacy?
- [08:22]
B
Yeah, I think it's really fascinating what happens in the very first weeks after Washington dies and then in the months and the couple years after that. So in about two weeks after he dies, or maybe a month after he dies, Richard Allen, an African American preacher, a man who was born into slavery, the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first black church in the United States. He tells his congregation in Philadelphia that Washington died and that African Americans had, you know, particular cause to mourn Washington's death. And he tells them that Washington was not insensible to our sufferings, that he believed that they had a right to liberty. And he is the first person to share publicly that George Washington freed the people that he enslaved. He. In a couple weeks after that, the will of George Washington becomes public. It's filed in the Fairfax county courthouse in Virginia. And it becomes public everywhere across the United States. Newspapers are printing the full text. We're printing references to it. Newspapers are reprinting Richard Allen's sermon where he talks about the emancipation. They're printing it as a pamphlet and selling it. So everyone had access to Washington's will. Everyone knew that Washington freed the people he enslaved, and yet there was virtually no commentary on it at all. It just wasn't a subject that Americans seemed to want to take up. Washington creates this opening to have this conversation about what it would look like to end slavery in the United States. You know, he is by far the most famous, the most influential American. Even to people at the time. Washington effectively was the United States. And he writes his will in a way that clearly recognizes that people are going to read it. It's not just going to be read by the, you know, the county clerk in the courthouse. Right. And yet Americans just do not have this appetite for engaging in this question. I think there is a recognition that slavery was already a sort of live wire in American politics. They had seen how it nearly destabilized the Constitutional Convention, that slavery was an issue that going to have to get dealt with eventually. But it also threatened the very tenuous unity of these states, of this new nation. And after Washington's death, people feared that, you know, the person who did more than anybody else to hold these states together, to bring this American project to fruition had now died. And they worried that it was at risk of collapse. And more than that, they worried that introducing slavery so directly into the conversation after Washington's death would. Would really prove destabilizing. And so, for the most part, Americans ignored it.
- [11:17]
A
Yeah, well, and then they. They ignored it immediately after his death. But kind of in the years since, you've. You've referred to Washington's will as kind of retaining like a magnetic pull. And so what about the document makes it such an enduring piece of physical history for so many Americans?
- [11:34]
B
Yeah. Again and again in the book, I found all of these examples of people reaching back to Washington's will. Anytime they. They talk about his history with slavery, sometimes to praise it, sometimes to condemn him. But it. There's just all these references to Washington's will, especially in conversations about slavery. But even in other kinds of conversations, it just becomes this touchstone for Americans across the centuries. And I think there's part of it that was just sort of tabloid interest. Right. It's a list of, you know, one of the richest Americans and the most famous Americans. It's a list of all his Property and what he wanted to see happen to it after he died. And that was as interesting to Americans of the 18th and early 19th century as it would be today. But I think there's also this sense, because people think of Washington as being so representative of the nation as a whole, that they look at his will as kind of his parting words to the nation, you know, just as much, maybe, as his. His farewell address from the presidency. His last will and testament is sort of his. His final say on. On some of these issues, especially on the issue of slavery. And it leads the conversation to a really interesting and kind of complex place. And there are some people who have always wanted to point to his decision to free the people he enslaved in his will as absolution for a lifetime of enslaving that, you know, Washington, in the end, he did the right thing and he freed the people he enslaved in his will. And so for them, that's part of the pull of the will is focusing on that document allows them in some way to reconcile the 40 or 50 years that preceded it of enslaving other human beings and of, you know, being so obviously hypocritical of leading a revolution to found a nation that is predicated on the idea of liberty and equality while enslaving other human beings, depriving them of their liberty. And so I think that is a big part of the reason why people have been been drawn to his will.
- [13:45]
A
Well, and kind of contrasted against the volumes dedicated to Washington, you highlight how very little has been written about those he enslaved, referring to it quite beautifully, if I can say so myself, as a reflection of a long history of forgetting. And so how does tracing the lives of the formerly enslaved help provide a better understanding of the Washington myth? And what are the challenges scholars face in attempting to perform this critical work?
- [14:18]
B
Yeah, and there are a lot of scholars who, over, especially over the last 10 or 20 years, who have really tried to investigate the history of the people who were enslaved by Washington. Erica Armstrong Dunbar, her great book about Owna Judge Mary Thompson, the longtime Mount Vernon historian, she wrote a great book about the lives of the people enslaved at Mount Vernon. And the challenge, writing about any population of enslaved people is finding enough evidence to really get a detailed sense of who these people were and what they did. You know, when you're writing about Washington, there is just this overwhelming amount of evidence, and you have to try to focus and make sure you are, you know, not chasing every. Every, you know, every trail that the evidence might lead you down. And it's the exact opposite. When you're trying to research the history of enslaved people, you're hoping, especially when you want to write about a specific person or a specific group of people, it's trying to find enough evidence to read documents between the lines and try to understand who these people were when they didn't leave writing in their own hand. For the most part, and for me especially, I was drawn to these works on Washington and slavery that do reference his decision to free the people he enslaved in the end. But it's always, you know, the last couple paragraphs of a story about Washington because it's his will. He has two different versions of his will. He asked for one to be burned on his literal deathbed and the other to be preserved. And that's the one that frees the people he enslaved. But I wanted to know what would it look like if we put that instead of putting that at the end of a story about Washington, what would it look like if we put that moment at the beginning of a story about the people he enslaved and then freed from slavery? There's a good amount of scholarship that's been done on these, exploring these people's lives while they were enslaved by Washington. But I really wanted to know when. What is the impact of this emancipation moment? You know, this is a huge number of people to be freed all at once. He says they're to be freed after his death and Martha Washington's death. Martha Washington recognizes the tenuous position that this puts her in, and she frees them a year later. She decides within a couple weeks that she's going to free them at the end of 1800. But there's really been very little scholarship or research done on what happens to that group of people. And it's a pretty big cohort of people. It's 123 people. Edna Green Medford, a historian at Howard University, has done some work on this. There's a great article several years ago by Susan Hellman and Mattie McCoy, but there really hadn't been much work done trying to recreate these people's lives and trace them through that first generation and then a second generation to try to understand what actually happened to these people in slavery. And so that was an important part. What I wanted to do in the book was to make this less of a conversation about Washington and more a conversation about the people who were most affected by this decision to free the people he enslaved.
- [17:35]
A
Yeah, it was a fascinating part of the book and I think highlights the critical work of historians. Right. Just the Diving into the archives, tracking people through census records, and trying to guess and investigate what might their lives have looked like post emancipation. So it's a. In my opinion, it was one of the most interesting and critical parts of the book.
- [18:04]
B
Yeah. Thank you. And it's funny, that was the chapter that I felt most confident in my ability to do. My first book was a study of free black people in Charleston, South Carolina, and Cartagena de Indios, Colombia. And so that sort of social history work of trying to put a story together using these census records and tax records and property records and city directories and things like that, that's sort of where I cut my teeth as a historian. And so I felt like I could do this. And that's where I started the book really was trying to tell that story. And then it quickly led me into this other very, very different but related story about how people have made sense of both Washington's enslavement and his emancipation.
- [18:49]
A
Yeah, it definitely is a chapter that shines. So thank you.
- [18:54]
B
Thank you.
- [18:55]
A
And so kind of moving forward in that timeline, how was Washington's legacy invoked in the debates over slavery in the run up to the Civil War? And how did this reveal the ambiguity of his relationship to the institution?
- [19:11]
B
Yeah, this is. Was one of my favorite chapters in the book to research because Washington is getting invoked all the time in the debate over slavery from the 1820s through the. Through 1860 through the Civil War. And he's being pulled into the debate by people with very different opinions on the institution of slavery and its future in the United States and people. And it's being pulled in in different ways that are really fascinating. So on the anti slavery side, all throughout the middle of the 19th century, you have some Americans who are highlighting Washington's statements opposing slavery and highlighting his emancipation in his last will and testament to make the case that freeing people from slavery is fundamentally American.
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A
Right.
- [19:57]
B
If it was, if this was good enough for George Washington, if Washington saw fit to free the people he enslaved, then we should all be freeing the people we enslaved. Clearly, ending slavery is something that is, is fundamentally American. And yet at the same time, you had abolitionists who ruthlessly criticize Washington for his involvement with slavery as a way of making the case that racial injustice, the institution of slavery, are really woven into the very fabric of the United States. If Washington is so implicated in the institution of slavery, then clearly this is a systemic problem that is going to take great effort and, and radicalism to try to root out. And so even though both of these groups want to see the end of slavery in the United States. They are bringing Washington into the conversation in totally opposite ways. One group is criticizing him as a hypocrite and a villain. The other group is praising him as this early great emancipator, both as part of their effort to try to end the institution of slavery. But you have pro slavery Southerners too, who are bringing Washington into the conversation in order to support their position that the institution of slavery is good, that it should always have a future in the United States, and that they would be justified seceding from the United States in order to continue institution of slavery. It's really remarkable. You see, in 1862 when the Confederacy inaugurates its permanent government in Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate president Jefferson Davis inaugurates that government on February 22, on Washington's birthday. And he does it underneath a huge statue of George Washington. And he tells the crowd that their cause, the cause of slavery, is fitly associated with the day and the setting. They put George Washington right in the middle of the seal of the Confederate States of America. Washington's on Confederate money and he's at the top of Confederate newspapers. Right. They see Washington as a slaveholder, just like them, a Southerner just like them, and a person who fought a revolution to overthrow tyranny. And that's how they saw the federal government. That's what they. How they interpreted the election of Lincoln in 1860, that the federal government was going to interfere with their. Their enslave other human beings. And as a result, they invoke Washington and say we are justified in founding this new nation dedicated to human bondage.
- [22:34]
A
Yeah, it was, it was again, another chapter that I just felt like I just kept coming back to. I wanted to dive more into. It was a very strong page turning chapter. So kudos to you for that.
- [22:49]
B
Thank you so much. There's so much of it that ended up on the, you know, in my big scraps file because I had to remind myself like, you don't need six examples of this happening. But, you know, the number of times I have abolitionists saying Washington was a slaveholder to the day of his death is, you know, in the dozens. Right. And the number of times they favorably compare John Brown with George Washington is in the dozens. And so there is. It was just a really rich source base for writing that chapter that is always the dream to have more than you can use and not trying to find just enough to actually have a full chapter.
- [23:30]
A
Yeah, well, okay. And then another of my favorite chapters, not to be Completely fangirling. Here was the chapter that you wrote about the celebration of Washington's 200th birthday. So can you talk about the celebrations surrounding the birthday and how the search for the kind of quote unquote true character further highlights this kind of ongoing disagreement Americans had about the first president?
- [23:59]
B
Yeah, I really loved writing this chapter. And this was at the point where I was getting out of my sort of comfort zone. I'm, you know, a historian of the 19th century United States, I'm a historian of slavery. And so I was getting into territory that I wasn't as familiar with and was just blown away by the material around the 1932 George Washington Bicentennial. This was a huge deal and it was really, it kind of set the model for a lot of big commemorations that were going to follow before 1932. A big part of what Americans expected was this kind of World's fair approach to major anniversaries, that it was going to be, you know, these shows of industrial might and everyone would come to some, you know, one single location. And they decided their federal commission, they established in, in 1926, a few years before the anniversary in 1932, they say, no, we're going to bring the, the celebration to the people. It's going to be a nationw thing and it's going to be a year long thing to, to celebrate George Washington. And I was really struck by the fact that the planners of this anniversary at the federal level, even people like Calvin Coolidge, who first announced this commission in 1926 with the major radio address, he kind of recognized and speaks to the fact that the version of Washington that they had received by the early 20th century was this really fake version of Washington. Right. They recognized that it was this myth and this idea of Washington cast in, in bronze and marble that they, they had received. You know, I, I think I say in the book it's, it's like Theseus's ship, right? So much of Washington's story has kind of been replaced over time that they came to a point at the 1930s where they're like, is this really Washington that we're that. And they really tried to set themselves to finding the, what they would call the real George Washington. And to their credit, this commission was responsible for finding, for publishing versions of Washington's writings, for really trying to get back to some of the primary sources. They really did seem dedicated to trying to find this more historical version of Washington. But it was an all white planning commission. And nowhere in the thousands and thousands of pages of material that they produced in the. You know, among the millions of people who participated in commemorating this anniversary. You know, I go through in the chapter and just. And try to describe how all encompassing this effort was. Nowhere do they address the institution of slavery. This was something that they were, you know, they spent years planning for. They built the highway from D.C. to Mount Vernon. This was when George Washington gets put on the quarter. This is when the George Washington Bridge from New Jersey to Manhattan gets named after George Washington. Like, it was this all encompassing national celebration. And for the most part, the federal commission responsible for planning it had no interest in exploring Washington's involvement with slavery. But this is also the era of Jim Crow violence. This is also the early years of the Great Migration. And you have African American scholars, people like W.E.B. du Bois and Carter G. Woodson, the founder of, you know, what's now Black History Month, African American newspaper editors who all stood up and said, yes, we should find the real George Washington as part of this commemoration. And understanding the real George Washington means addressing the institution of slavery and his involvement in it. And you see this outpouring of new scholarship and newspaper columns and essays all exploring Washington's involvement with slavery in a way that really had not been done before. People had talked about Washington's involvement with slavery, but it was done in a way that was more dedicated and more long lasting during this Washington bicentennial than we had seen at any point prior to that. And so it really becomes this story of commemoration and counter commemoration between white Americans and black Americans about what it meant to engage with the real George Washington.
- [28:24]
A
Yeah, it was, again, a really great chapter. I just kept wanting to, like, wanted to reread it, wanted to digest it, really. It had me like, well, and I think too, in this moment where we're at, it was a. It's a very timely book in terms of public memory and how we choose to commemorate and how we choose to engage in these conversations. And I just thought it was so well written, so well crafted. So I just. Again, kudos. Not to be a complete fangirl here, but it was a very strong chapter.
- [28:58]
B
Thank you so much. You know, writers and historians spend so long by themselves working on this stuff that it is very gratifying to hear that what I thought I was doing is in fact what I was able to accomplish.
- [29:11]
A
Yes, most definitely. And you bring this book kind of into the present moment. You talk about how Washington figures into some of the more contemporary debates about, quote, unquote, traditional versus patriotic history education. And so how are these Debates connected to longer arguments about education in Washington's legacy.
- [29:34]
B
Yeah, I felt like this. I had to write a chapter about education and Washington and slavery in the classroom. This has been such a big part of the last several years of our kind of big public discourse about what history should be and how students should learn about the history of the United States, about the history of the founding, about the history of slavery. And so I started to look at, you know, how has this story evolved in classrooms and textbooks over time? And it was, you see, in the 19th century, mostly school books are ignoring Washington's involvement with slavery. If they're addressing it at all, it's to celebrate him as this kind of early emancipator to, you know, connect him to. Back to this story of liberty. But it's really during the civil rights movement that I focus most of the chapter and that you really start to see these conversations come through in the public in a way that they just hadn't before. I think the Washington bicentennial in the 1930s puts this conversation and this idea that you have to confront slavery kind of back into the public consciousness with a staying power that we hadn't seen before. And then during the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, you have this huge outpouring of scholarship on the institution of slavery, on African American history that then gets. Begins to get kind of introduced into school curriculum, school textbooks, things like that. And almost right away you have some very conservative voices who are complaining about what they are doing to, to our heroes, to the founders, to George Washington, really pushing back on this idea that students should learn at all about Washington's history with slavery. And the, the. This debate kind of surfaces these very different ideas about what the purpose of history class is. Right. You have some voices who are saying we need to learn about the foundations of the nation. That means understanding the institution of slavery and the founders involvement in it. And then you have other people who say, no, the purpose of learning about the past is to find inspiring stories, is to spark a love of country, is to spark patriotism. And if people learn too much about Washington's involvement with slavery, he's going to cease to be a kind of functional, inspiring symbol for students. And that is too, too big a loss for some voices, almost exclusively conservative voices, to bear. And then that plays out in different ways, you know, in the years since the civil rights movement. But I think it's really interesting where we've arrived now. The most recent controversies about it have been in the state of Florida's high school social studies Curriculum which points to washing solely as this emancipator. It points to his will, it points to his decision to free the people he enslaved at the end of his life and puts him in a conversation with some of the most prominent anti slavery figures in American history. And so it seems like they have arrived at this notion or that this recognition that they can't totally ignore Washington and slavery. And so they choose to talk about it in a way that lifts him up as this great emancipator, which sort of brings us right back to where things were in the 19th century and some of the very earliest American history textbooks. But it also weirdly puts, you know, conservative education reformers in the 21st century in a camp with some anti slavery activists from the 19th century. They're both making this case that George Washington's emancipation is the lesson we should learn and that ending slavery is kind of core to American history and, and trying to balance those those two ideas at the same time is, is really challenging and I think speaks to the many, many ways that Washington's history with slavery gets used and twisted and wielded by different groups over time.
- [33:40]
A
Well, and you end your analysis at Mount Vernon. And so how has Washington's former estate evolved on its interpretation of slavery? And how does it mirror America's broader struggle to kind of wrestle with how to square slavery's proper place in Washington's legacy?
- [34:05]
B
Yeah, I really loved writing this chapter. I think I took a slightly different approach, you know, more as a journalist and less as a historian in writing it, because so much of it is about what's happening right now and what's happened in the last couple of years. But I think Mount Vernon deserves a ton of, of credit for the work that they are doing to tell the story of slavery. It was really interesting in researching this chapter. You know, Mount Vernon is one of the first historic sites in the country to acknowledge a burial ground of enslaved people at the site. It was 1929 that they installed the first historical marker at that burial ground for the enslaved. That came from a genuine place of desire for historic preservation. They didn't want to see this spot get totally forgotten. They didn't want people to, to forget that was there. The language that they use on this marker. Thanks the. The faithful colored servants of the Washington family. And so it is kind of dripping with this lost cause ideology, this sentimentality about slavery that was typical of, of white people in the early 20th century, but it's still a marker to the people who were enslaved there. One of the Things I found most interesting was that the installation of this marker got no coverage in the local newspaper. Right. They covered everything in the Alexandria Gazette. People getting appendicitis and six year olds having birthday parties and someone going to visit their aunt and a judge getting a new chair or whatever. It's all in the newspaper, you know, in some. Getting some kind of mention. But then you have this quarter ton slab of granite that's being brought up the hill to the house of its most famous resident, and it gets absolutely nothing in the newspaper. And so that was just really, really interest to see. And one of these moments of trying to interpret silence in the archive in order to make meaning of that moment. But then you see over the course of the middle of the 20th century and into the 21st, that as scholarship and scholarly focus on African American history and the history of slavery evolves, you see Mount Vernon wanting to keep up and wanting to build that into their interpretation. There's a moment in the 1960s where one of the regents of the Mount Vernon Ladies association, one of their board members, says, there's a sense that we're not keeping up with the times. And they don't necessarily want to be out front doing the most progressive work in telling the story of slavery, but they don't want to fall behind either. And that seems to be part of what is spurring a lot of this action along the way. Not just during the era of the civil rights movement, but moving into, you know, moving into the late 20th and early 21st century of. They recognized the need to keep up with scholarship and to be able to tell this story. I think, you know, Mount Vernon has probably spent more money and more time investigating the history of slavery than probably any historic site in the country. Their work has been really incredible. They've done so much to try to research and tell the history of slavery there, but it's still a site that tries to do more than that. I think there are a lot of people who see Mount Vernon as first and foremost a plantation, which it was, as a site of enslavement, which it was. And they expect that this is going to be a site where slavery is the primary and central story that is getting told. And that's not what they do at Mount Vernon. You know, they're telling a much bigger story about Washington. Slavery is part of that story. I think you can probably still go to Mount Vernon and avoid that story if that's what you want to do. But they do deserve a lot of credit for the kind of investment that they have. Have made in the institution of slavery? And I think, you know, people. To get to the second part of your question, you know, I think a lot of people have a lot of opinions about what Mount Vernon does well, what it does poorly, what it should do, what it shouldn't do. And, you know, that conversation about how Mount Vernon should acknowledge Washington's involvement with slavery is really a kind of. Of distilled version of the bigger conversation that the whole book is talking about, of what is the proper place of slavery in George Washington's legacy. How should we think about slavery's place in Washington's history, in American history, in the foundations of the United States? And depending on how you see American society today, depending on how you see the past and the legacy of race and slavery and racial injustice in American history, you're going to come to a different, different answer on that question. And what I think I appreciate about the historic sites that are trying to tell the history of slavery are, you know, trying to make sure that visitors are encountering this history in the way that Mount Vernon is, is that even if they're not saying this is fundamentally how we should understand George Washington, I. I hope that they're at least creating space for other people to have that conversation.
- [39:19]
A
Yeah, well, and I think this is kind of. Of touching on your previous answer and giving you a chance to expand a little bit. So how can public history help facilitate those conversations about complex historical figures and topics to maybe help Americans better understand and connect with the past?
- [39:43]
B
Yeah, it's a great question. I think one of the most interesting and for me, most encouraging trends that I've seen in public history over the last decade or so. Is this increasing interest among museums and historic sites to be forums for those kinds of conversations? I think there's still a lot of museums and historic sites who say, we're going to show you the history and you can make sense of it on your own time. And I think there are a growing number now who say, no, we are going to have you experience the history and ground you with a kind of shared foundation with your fellow visitors. But then we are also going to be the place that facilitates a conversation about what that means to you. And you might learn from, you know, the person who is on the tour with you, who's going through the museum at the same time with you, that they're getting something very different out of this experience than you were. You might learn a little bit more about how other people are coming to that institution, are coming to this history, are interpreting it for themselves because they have a different lens on the present and the different lens on the past. And I think seeing that work happening at museums and historic sites is really, really valuable. The American public trusts museums more than almost any other institution in American life. They trust museums more than college professors. They trust them more than the media, more than politicians, more than anyone other than, basically, family members. People trust museums. And I think there's a responsibility for public history institutions to. To make the most of the trust that the public has put into us by saying, we are a place that can host these kinds of conversations. They're important to have. And because people trust us so much, we have a responsibility to serve our community, whether that's at the local level, the state level, or the national level, to serve that community by being a host of those conversations, by facilitating understanding. And maybe it's not bringing people to one shared view or a. A totally shared understanding, a total agreement, but it at least can foster a better understanding of what are the different ways that we might come at this question. Why might people draw different conclusions than I do? And I think that's really healthy for our understanding of history and healthy for American democracy. Yeah.
- [42:08]
A
And what parallels do you see between America's struggle with Washington's legacy and the upcoming commemoration of the nation's 200 150th anniversary?
- [42:19]
B
Yeah, I mean, just like during the 1932 bicentennial, I think people's view on what this anniversary should do and accomplish is very much influenced by their assessment of the current state of American society. And so people who think that there are, like I do, that there are ongoing issues with racial violence and injustice and inequality, there is ample opportunity to use Washington and his involvement with slavery to try to tell that story. People who don't want to acknowledge that those problems exist, who want to celebrate American exceptionalism and American greatness, don't have time for telling that story and want to see it removed from public conversation. And I think that's part of what we saw in Philadelphia in January with the removal of the slavery exhibit at the President's house site, the removal of the story of slavery at other Park Service sites, and the pressure that's building for public history institutions to avoid these conversations. I think the 250th. I've been working on developing resources for institutions since 2017. So for nine years now, I've been thinking about the 250th. And from the very beginning, I've said that I hope it offers an opportunity for people to arrive at a more inclusive and more full understanding of American history. And I still think that that's possible. You know, there is so much great work that is happening at the state level, at the local level. I think there are going to be ample opportunities for people to do that. But again, people are going to come to that anniversary with lots of different ideas and from lots of different perspectives. And I hope that people are spending the time to look around and see what's out there and see what different types of museums are doing, because I think there will really be a. A full and complete and thoughtful exploration of the country's history, even if that's not what we're getting from the federal commemoration.
- [44:22]
A
And you share this in your opening pages, but what do you hope readers take away?
- [44:28]
B
Yeah, that's a great question. I think for me, what struck me most about researching this book was that we have been having the same conversation about Washington and slavery for almost 250 years. You know, the ways that people are talking about Washington now to praise him, the ways that people are talking about Washington today to criticize him, are no more vitriolic or no more celebratory than some of the things that were being said about him while he was alive or in the first decade after his death. I think time after time, generation after generation, people think that now is the time we can finally address Washington's involvement with slavery. They see it as something that has been erased for all of history up to that moment. And they think of themselves as kind of at the vanguard of this unprecedented moment. And it was fascinating to see different groups arrive at that conclusion time after time. And my hope is that by putting that conversation into historical context, by helping people see how this conversation has evolved over time, we can take a step back from that. We can break ourselves out of that cycle of saying, Washington is a villain and a hypocrite, Washington is a hero and a legend. And we can instead that conversation to somewhere more productive to have an actual conversation about Washington and what this history should mean for us in the present. There's no piece of evidence. There's no one story that's going to emerge that helps us settle this issue once and for all. We're never going to agree on what this history should look like because we don't agree on what American society should look like. But I hope that we can instead have a conversation that is more productive and more thoughtful and more grounded in a genuine desire for understanding than just two versions of Washington, the hero and the villain. And even if that conversation doesn't bring us any closer to an agreement about slavery's place in Washington's legacy. I hope it can at the very least help us understand ourselves and our neighbors and our fellow Americans a bit, little bit better.
- [46:43]
A
Yeah. And where should people go once they've finished your book and they want to learn more about you and the work that you do?
- [46:51]
B
You can find links to my social media presence and my book events and my other writing@john gmarks.com j o h n g m a r k s.com that's where you can find everything about me. And I hope people will read the book. I hope they enjoy it and hope it sends them down a path reading some of the other great work that's being published this year for the 2 50th.
- [47:13]
A
And I can definitely plug the social media follow. He's a great social media follow everybody, so definitely follow him. He's, he publishes great videos and we've, we've covered a lot of ground here. But just in case, is there anything we haven't covered that you want future readers to know?
- [47:30]
B
I think we've, we've done a pretty good job covering the bases here. But I hope people will will recognize that today's conversation about history is really in very major ways shaped by our history. And I hope my book helps recognize that a little bit better.
- [47:46]
A
Yeah. Well said. So for the listeners out there, make sure to grab a copy of they Will Be Done. It is a timely, thoughtful analysis of historic memory and I think is really a perfect book to be reading as the nation prepares for its semi quincentennial. And thank you again Dr. Marks for coming on and for sharing your fantastic
- [48:07]
B
yeah, thank you so much for having me.
- [48:09]
A
My thanks again to Dr. Marks for spending his time with me. Thy Will Be Done is set to be published on April 7, so if you can please consider pre ordering this book. As I mentioned during the interview, I think it is a timely analysis and such a critical text as Americans Prepare for the 250th anniversary of the United States. And as a reminder, you can pre order the book via my affiliate shop on bookshop.org I have provided a link in the show notes for the episode. Thanks peeps. I'll see you next time. Thanks for sitting down with me as I explored this chapter of American history. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and share with your friends. I look forward to our next cup of coffee together.