John Garrison Marks is a historian, whose latest book is Thy Will Be Done: George Washington’s Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory.
Show notes:
- John Garrison Marks
- Thy Will Be Done: George Washington’s Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory
- DEVONthink
- Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation
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John Garrison Marks is a historian whose latest book is Thy Will Be Done: George Washington’s Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory.
Every American knows George Washington. He’s on dollar bills, and every American kid learns about the cherry tree and the wooden teeth. But most people don’t know that Washington was "one of the most prolific enslavers in American history. There are few people through the entirety of American slavery who ever enslaved more people than George Washington."
John Garrison Marks’s book looks at the history of George Washington and slavery, as well as how Washington’s involvement with slavery has been seen over time. As part of his work with history museums, he "started thinking about how we think about George Washington today. How do we understand who this person is? How do we think about his involvement with slavery? He is the father of his country." Most people aren’t aware of Washington’s ownership of slaves. "The slavery is incidental to his history because he did so much good. I wanted to understand that dynamic in the present, but I also had an inkling that there was more to this story if we look at how it was talked about in the past."
The discussion of Washington and slavery isn’t new. "I was really fascinated and could not have guessed that this argument about how to understand Washington’s involvement with slavery has been part of the discourse since Washington himself was alive. This has been something that people have been arguing over and fighting over for 250 years."
It’s hard to open up conversations about this issue. "George Washington is fascinating to study and talk about because, for so many people, he is the avatar of the United States. George Washington is America. So if you criticize George Washington, you are criticizing America, you are criticizing Americans. There is this inability to think of George Washington as a human being for a lot of people. He ceases to be a person who existed, and he becomes this unassailable figure that people can’t talk about in the way that they would talk about normal people."
This is similar to the age-old question of whether we separate the art from the artist. We can’t ignore that Washington owned slaves. We can’t separate his art – in his case as a military leader and founder of the United States – from the rest of his person. I asked John why it is so hard for people to accept both sides of a person. "I think people struggle with ambiguity in all aspects of their lives, certainly in discussions of history, and certainly in discussions of the foundingist father of them all, of George Washington, that his legacy is really ambiguous."
John’s book is both a history and a historiography. He talks about the history of Washington and slavery, and about how this issue has been viewed over time. The different views seem to correspond more with the political balance in America; when certain people are in power, Washington is considered one way, and when other people are in power, we look more closely at his slavery.
"I was surprised and found it really fascinating while I was researching the book that, for as much as Americans have talked about George Washington’s history with slavery, they are rarely talking about it so that they can understand the history. It’s usually about ‘how can I use this history to win the fight of today?’ And so it’s so much about how people are wielding his history in service of a particular cultural or political project."
Since this book is based on a huge amount of research among archives, I asked John if he started at the beginning and wrote to the end, or started in the middle and jumped around. "To me, this is the most important use of Scrivener: it makes it easy to move pieces around, so I never had to start at the beginning of the chapter. I didn’t have to start at the beginning of the book. I could start wherever I wanted to.
"The ability to create sections, to move sections from one chapter to another, to talk about evidence before I knew exactly where I wanted to put it, was a really important feature for me. I have a day job that does not involve writing books. "
Scrivener’s features also fit well with John’s schedule. "I did my writing work for this book between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. for about 18 months. I have two little kids, and every day it was a race to see how much work I could get done before they woke up. And Scrivener makes it really easy for writers to just jump in and say, ‘I am going to write about this piece of evidence, or I’m going to jump into this part of the book, or I’m going to start working on this chapter without having to know how it fits into the rest of the piece.’"
Kirk McElhearn is a writer, podcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener. He also offers one-to-one Scrivener coaching.