The View from the Slave Quarters

Abstract

After a speaking engagement at Mount Vernon, George Washington's Virginia estate, in 2007, prominent historian and Washington biographer, John Ferling, was invited to take a candlelight tour of the mansion. He had made many trips to this site in the past, but this time he viewed the house and grounds from a somewhat different perspective. About this cold snowy evening, he recalls, the long walk over from the auditorium to the mansion, we went through the area that had been the slave quarters. I don't mean to suggest that it was an epiphany, but it had a powerful impact on me. While viewing the mansion from a vantage point once held by Washington's long-deceased slaves, Ferling could not help wondering about what it must have been like to have had to live in those squalid quarters in such weather, and to have no hope of ever achieving anything better. He remembers, As we completed our walk through the quarters and rounded a bend, there in the snow, with candles burning in each window, was Washington's huge mansion, looking warm and secure, and inviting.1 In many ways, Scott Casper's Sarah Johnson's Mount Vernon: The Forgotten History of an American Shrine is an attempt to flesh out this view from the slave quarters, an imaginary glimpse of which temporarily startled Ferling on that frigid winter night. The main characters in Casper's tale are the African Americans who worked on the estate both as slaves and later as freedpeople for more than a century after Washington's death. The title is an obvious play on Robert F. Dalzell, Jr. and Lee Baldwin Dalzell's 1998 book, George Washington's Mount Vernon: At Home in Revolutionary America. The Dalzells endeavored to decode the property looking for its essential set of clues, which could enable Washington admirers to discover the real man behind the public figure.2 Casper's quietly subversive allusion to the Dalzell book is an effort to depose Washington of his role as the estate's sole and perpetual proprietor and to remind present-day visitors and interpreters to seek the alternative histories and counter-narratives furtively embedded in America's founding.