Founding sinners

While Thomas Jefferson never freed his slaves, George Washington did, despite his wife's wishes. Historians are finally coming to terms with America's oldest wound.

By Laura Miller

Nov 25, 2003 | "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negros?" said Samuel Johnson, no fan of the American Revolution. The legitimate question behind the jeer has never gone away, mostly because Americans have long avoided answering it. As Garry Wills writes in his new book, "Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power," "Through much of our history Americans have shied away from slavery as too divisive or hot an issue, leading to a great national amnesia about its impact and reach." This means not that Americans have literally pretended that slavery never happened, but that our historians have traditionally avoided asking what slavery really was and what it tells us about our past. That "great national amnesia," however, is coming to an end.

For many decades, American history engaged in the secular canonization of the Founding Fathers. (Sometimes the canonization has been not so secular; defenders of Judge Roy Moore's Ten Commandments monument cite the religiosity of the nation's founders, seemingly unaware that many of them -- Jefferson, for example -- were deists, or proto-Unitarians, and arguably not Christians.) Making saints of liberty out of men who were, after all, only human didn't just gloss over the inconvenient truth that Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry, John Marshall, James Monroe and -- most revered of all -- George Washington were slave owners, but also egged on iconoclasts to tear down the idols of previous generations. And so, to bookend earlier hagiographies of Jefferson, we have essays like Conor Cruise O'Brien's 1996 portrait, "Thomas Jefferson: Radical and Racist," a furious indictment of the third U.S. president.

Replacing the semi-deified vision of Jefferson with the image of a white supremacist hypocrite, while an understandably angry reaction to discovering some of Jefferson's disgraceful ideas about and actions toward African-Americans, is just that: a reaction. It breeds counterreaction, more excessive glorification of Jefferson and excuses for his failings, and in turn more indignation. Serious debate about the nation's formative years descends to the level of Sunday morning political talk shows.

So Wills' book, along with Henry Wiencek's "An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves and the Creation of America," are most welcome. They represent a trend in American history that is, in Wills' words, "finally coming to grips with the vast octopus that was slavery, with the tentacles it spread through every part of our nation and its political life." Both authors admire their subjects. Wills has devoted a goodly portion of his career to praising Jefferson; "His labors to guarantee freedom of religion would in themselves be enough to maintain his place in my private pantheon," he writes. And Wills insists that he does not mean for "Negro President" to "join an unfortunate recent trend toward Jefferson bashing."

Yet neither Wills nor Wiencek flinches from scrutinizing the moral compromises made by the great men they study, and those compromises were often grotesque. "Negro President" takes as its central idea the assertion that Jefferson would not have won the 1800 presidential election without the Electoral College votes provided by the "three-fifths clause" in the Constitution, and that Jefferson knew this all too well. (The clause counted each slave as three-fifths of a person in apportioning representation to each state.) "Negro President" goes on to offer a vigorous critique of Jefferson's inglorious efforts to preserve and extend slavery.

For his part, Wiencek tries to pin down the moral evolution of George Washington. The stately Virginian -- more worshipped in his day than any other leader of the Revolution -- went from a man who could participate in the raffling off of a debtor's slaves (thereby arbitrarily tearing apart families) to become the only Founding Father who posthumously freed all of his slaves.

Yet these two books couldn't be more different. Wills is an old-fashioned historian in focus and voice if not always in his ideas; "Negro President" concerns itself with intrigues and maneuvering on the highest levels. It sets Jefferson against a Massachusetts native, Timothy Pickering, who was one of slavery's staunchest foes, and dissects the shaking out of diplomatic, electoral and constitutional conflicts between the two men with so much detail and familiarity that the general reader must struggle to keep up.

Wiencek's is the more emotional and intimate book, and this makes it a fine example of another new approach to America's past. Wiencek started out as a popular historian of great old houses. He wrote National Geographic and Smithsonian Guides, essentially guidebooks and coffee-table volumes. While not the kind of work that leads to Guggenheim and MacArthur grants, researching such books rousts a scholar out of Ivy League university libraries. It means driving around the countryside where history actually happened and meeting the descendants and neighbors of the people who built and inhabited those great houses. This led in turn to Wiencek's National Book Critics' Circle Award winner, "The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White," the story of a planter who willed his entire estate to his daughter by a slave woman, and the white family members who claimed for generations that he was insane.

So, when Wiencek writes that "the history of slavery is in large part the history of families," he knows whereof he speaks. When he continues, "the recovery of that history has become today, most powerfully, the work of white and black families trying to piece together their history and understand themselves," he gives credit to a category of amateur historians and genealogists whose most visible members are the descendants of Sally Hemings, a slave who DNA tests show almost certainly gave birth to at least one child by Jefferson. (Her family had been claiming as much for years.)

Wiencek's own family doesn't enter into "An Imperfect God," but he's the kind of writer who attends reunions where the black descendants of Southern plantation owners are finally being invited to mingle with their white kin. He is a hands-on historian in more ways than one. After gathering figures about the workload required of Mount Vernon's slaves from Washington's diaries and wondering just how hard their duties were, Wiencek heads off to Mount Vernon itself to put in a day's work at the model farm there, using period tools.

This kind of history isn't better than Wills' painstaking study of the records of the Federal Convention of 1787 or the letters and other papers of nearly forgotten figures like Pickering, just different. It creates a fuller picture of the Founding Fathers and, as important, a more immediate sense of the connection between their times and ours. Wiencek's down-to-earth techniques expand our range of feeling about the past and make it real. In "Negro President," slavery is a moral issue to get outraged about; in "An Imperfect God," it's a rotten taste in your mouth, something to gag on.

Ordinary Americans get this visceral sense of slavery's atrocity in "living history" museums like Colonial Williamsburg, where they can see interpreters acting out the parts of 17th century Williamsburg residents. "An Imperfect God" features a short history of the site's tricky relationship to the truth about Williamsburg. When the site was first restored and established as a living history site in the 1930s, Americans jangled by modernity sought "a historical refuge, a place of repose" in its idealized portrait of noble, gracious life in the old South. (A visitor in the '40s objected indignantly when a guide suggested that Jefferson might have "made merry" in the local tavern.) But, as Wiencek puts it, "the yearning for a history that 'makes sense' has collided with actual historical reality. Slavery wrecks the simple heroic narrative of the Founding."

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