When I first began this journey towards being a history geek four years ago, I knew very little about George Washington. In the first book I read about him and his role in the French and Indian War, I was not impressed. At first glance, he seemed arrogant and aloof, and I didn’t get what the big deal was about him. In the four years that have followed I have come to understand him better, and the more I know, the more impressive he becomes to me. There is, however, one negative that I struggle with (like many people!) and that I have a hard time teaching about, and that is that The General was a slave owner.
This afternoon our group participated in a Slave Life Tour here at Mount Vernon. I am not sure I have enough words to tell about how impressive the tour guide was and how he managed to help me understand in a new way. Our guide’s name is R.T. Mance. He is a retired bus driver who became an historic interpreter at the Estate ten years ago. He is retiring at the end of this month, so if you can hop on a plane and come to hear his tour before the end of the month, I highly suggest it!
Ted Mance describes himself in this way, “I am not an African American. I am an American.” He is the descendant of a slave, and his skin is much darker than mine but his heart and soul are the same. I loved how he presented George Washington’s participation in slavery. He described how GW was born into a family who owned slaves. At age 11, GW’s father died, leaving him ten slaves. Imagine, (as Mr. Mance so clearly put it), you are a child of eleven years with adults telling you what to do, but who also has ten adults to tell what to do. In order to thrive in that situation, a person would need to dehumanize and depersonalize the people enslaved to you in order to make sense of your world. “It was the culture that was fed to him.”
I loved, too, that Mr. Mance didn’t make GW some sort of heroic victim of the system. He described the high expectations he had for the work his slaves completed. He expected them to be at work “by the time the sun warms the earth” and to work until dark. He did have slaves whipped, he was a hard task master. He described the fact that slaves were given one set of clothes for summer and one set for winter each year and were given one pair of shoes per year and only moderate daily rations. You could hear the irritation in Mr. Mance’s voice when he discussed the fact that people say the GW was a ‘good slave owner”. His answer to that was that “You can’t be arrogant enough to own a human being and then think yourself good to the slave.”
On the other hand, our guide was quick to talk about how George Washington grew and changed through his life. He grew to truly hate slavery and wanted very much to be “quit of the institution”. He was the only one of the Founding Fathers to free his slaves. (He freed them in his will, stating they should be freed at the death of Martha Washington.) You could hear the respect in his voice when Mr. Mance described how visitors of the Estate sometimes refer to The General as George. He explained that Mr. Washington was a great man who deserves our respect and should never be called George. Not even Mrs. Washington referred to him as George in her letters. Our guide’s last word on the whole issue is this, and I think it is powerful: He didn’t excuse Mr. Washington for being a slave owner, but instead realized that he was a human being who was a product of his time and culture. “Slavery was not George Washington’s legacy. He was the architect of a successful revolution and the Father of our Country.” Amen.
