2 of 3

Another Mount Vernon slave, Anne, was a girl who "probably" frolicked with Washington's stepchildren. She was also the stepchildren's aunt. "Anne was the daughter of Martha [Washington's] father and a woman whose name is not known, of mixed white, Native American, and African blood."

We read here that racial mixing was "extremely distasteful" to Virginia's elite; but it was also ubiquitous, and it wasn't the riffraff who owned the slaves. Thus Wiencek, citing the work of another researcher, tells us that Washington "came of age, and learned to be a master, on a racial borderland where definitions and boundaries of race were dangerously fluid." Southerners protected themselves from this "danger" by intentionally failing to notice it. ("Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody's household but her own," wrote the brilliant diarist Mary Chesnut.) And, like Washington, they often hoarded light pigmentation indoors, while the dark-skinned stayed in the fields. A European visitor to Washington's estate in the 1790s noted that one of Washington's house slaves had hair and skin "so like our own that had I not been told, I should never had suspected his ancestry."

All this is quite wicked, and there's much to regret about it. Washington put it this way: "I can clearly foresee that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union." Jefferson said something similar. The difference is that Washington acted, albeit quite late in the proverbial game.

Preston Jones, a contributing editor to Books & Culture, teaches at John Brown University.

Copyright © 2003 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

An Imperfect God is available at Amazon.com and other book retailers.

Publishers Weekly interviewed Wiencek about the book. C-Span's BookTV has video of him on a panel with Gail Collins, Walter Isaacson, and Evan Thomas.

In a 1999 CT article, historian Mark Noll discussed whether the Revolutionary War was justified.

Christianity Today, Books & Culture, Christian History, and other CTI publications have frequently examined slavery in its historical and contemporary contexts.

Books & Culture Corner appears every Monday. Earlier editions of Books & Culture Corner and Book of the Week include:

I Shop, Therefore I Am | Critics of "consumer culture" are all wet, Virginia Postrel says. The riot of choices available to us resonates with our deepest aesthetic instincts (Oct. 20, 2003)

Back to the Future | A sprawling new novel by the author of Snowcrash and Cryptonomicon goes to the 17th century to investigate the birth of the modern world. (You won't be surprised to learn that the Puritans are among the Bad Guys.) (Oct. 13, 2003)

Poetry, Prayer, and Parable | The playful provocations of Scott Cairns (Oct. 06, 2003)

Terrorists on Trial | How the nation responded to an earlier attack. (Sept. 29, 2003)

The Contemplative Christian | Eugene Peterson calls believers to a life lived with "wholeness, honesty, without contrivance"-against the grain of much that's currently driving the church in America. (Sept. 29, 2003)

Recalling California | Want to understand what's going on in the Golden State? Toss your newsmagazines and pick up Joan Didion's new book (Sept. 22, 2003)

next page... |  2 of 3

share this page

October (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47