Mary V. Thompson. “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret”: George Washington, Slavery, and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon. Matthew R. Costello. The Property of the Nation: George Washington’s Tomb, Mount Vernon, and the Memory of the First President.

Abstract

Who was George Washington? How has he been remembered? Two senior presidential scholars, ­­Matthew R. Costello and Mary V. Thompson, provide answers in two carefully crafted books. Washington, says Costello, was an aristocratic, affluent Virginian who found the concept of democracy “worrisome” (1). Fearing that demands for democratic expansion would destabilize the nation, he worked for a ­­republic grounded in social and political hierarchy. But soon after his death in 1799, Washington’s reputation metamorphosed into that of a champion of democracy, an image that still holds. Thompson depicts Washington as a slaveholder whose military experience informed his style of ­­plantation management but who “changed into ­­someone who saw that slavery was wrong” (329) and made an end-of-life decision to free the ­­people he enslaved at Mount Vernon, who endured the ­­deprivation and brutality common to Virginia’s large eighteenth-century plantations. Thompson hopes her honest rendering of Washington’s slaveholding will “give readers...