People can learn.

George Washington certainly learned... a lot. In An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America by Henry Wiencek, readers can nearly plot the curve. Students of Washington know that, when he died in 1799, he specified in his will that all his slaves be given freedom and generations of his admirers have ultimately excused, rationalized, or explained away an entire lifetime of full participation in the evil practice. And too often the issue gets largely ignored as if it somehow doesn't square with the mythical image of the Founding Father.

Henry Wiencek will have none of it. His book is an unflinching, comprehensive, and groundbreaking story of Washington's journey from slave master to emancipator, from routine buyer and seller of human beings to a man absolutely convinced that the whole institution was dehumanizing to all parties.

Wiencek examines Washington's life from ambitious and anxious youth, to military prominence, to national leadership in war and peace, and finally to an exalted retirement.

At every stage of his life Washington was involved with slavery and questions of race, and the author proves expert at examining old and new evidence that is simultaneously exciting, distressing, and frequently surprising. (The on again-off again story of General Washington's attitude about the use of black soldiers during the revolution is likely to produce a book or two.)

What emerges is a very human individual with a reassuring capacity to learn and an unusual determination to act. Washington's decision to free his slaves had almost no impact on the immediate history of his era. Except within his family and among other Virginia planter classes, it was largely unknown or simply ignored.

Henry Wiencek has delivered a serious study of George Washington's moral transformation on the evil question of slavery in America. The scholarship that backs the work is impressive, the writing is provocative and stimulating in the best sense, and Washington gets fair treatment. A generation ago this kind of biography might have been controversial in spite of the above strengths.

But, like Washington, we seem to have learned - and like him, we can do better.

A major new biography of Washington, and the first to explore his engagement with American slavery

When George Washington wrote his will, he made the startling decision to set his slaves free; earlier he had said that holding slaves was his "only unavoidable subject of regret." In this groundbreaking work, Henry Wiencek explores the founding father's engagement with slavery at every stage of his life--as a Virginia planter, soldier, politician, president and statesman.

Washington was born and raised among blacks and mixed-race people; he and his wife had blood ties to the slave community. Yet as a young man he bought and sold slaves without scruple, even raffled off children to collect debts (an incident ignored by earlier biographers). Then, on the Revolutionary battlefields where he commanded both black and white troops, Washington's attitudes began to change. He and the other framers enshrined slavery in the Constitution, but, Wiencek shows, even before he became president Washington had begun to see the system's evil.

Wiencek's revelatory narrative, based on a meticulous examination of private papers, court records, and the voluminous Washington archives, documents for the first time the moral transformation culminating in Washington's determination to emancipate his slaves. He acted too late to keep the new republic from perpetuating slavery, but his repentance was genuine. And it was perhaps related to the possibility--as the oral history of Mount Vernon's slave descendants has long asserted--that a slave named West Ford was the son of George and a woman named Venus; Wiencek has new evidence that this could indeed have been true.

George Washington's heroic stature as Father of Our Country is not diminished in this superb, nuanced portrait: now we see Washington in full as a man of his time and ahead of his time.

Henry Wiencek, a nationally prominent historian and writer, is the author of several books, including, most recently, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White, which won the National Book Critics' Circle Award in 1999. He lives with his wife and son in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Imprint: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Distributor: MPS
Publication Date: 09-03-2004
Pages: 416
Measurements: 8.25in X 5.50in X 1.06in