America is in the middle of a profound argument about how we are allowed to remember the past. As political movements invoke the Founding Fathers to either defend or challenge today’s power structures, the figure of George Washington sits at the center of it all.
He is the most celebrated man in American history, but also one of its most complicated: a revolutionary who championed liberty while enslaving hundreds of people, a man who freed his enslaved people in his will while actively undermining emancipation laws during his lifetime.
This conversation features historian John Garrison Marks, Vice President of Research and Engagement at the American Association for State and Local History and author of the forthcoming book Thy Will Be Done: George Washington’s Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory. Six years in the making, the book traces how Americans across every era have wrestled with Washington’s relationship to slavery and how those debates reveal far more about the present than the past.
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What you will come to realize is that the battles we think are new are centuries old, and the people who’ve been asking the hardest questions have almost always been the ones with the most to lose.
Conversation Outline (with Timestamps)
0:00 – 2:08: Setting the Stage: Why Washington Still Matters Right Now
I open by connecting the current political moment to the conversation we are about to have. People are dressing up as Founding Fathers to protest authoritarianism, which is a little ironic given what those same founders actually did.
I introduce George Washington as the center of this tension. He is the most celebrated figure in American history, but also the one whose legacy gets debated the hardest. I wanted to dig into why that is.
I bring in John Garrison Marks, who has spent six years writing a book about exactly this. He works with history museums across the country and has been preparing for the 250th anniversary of American independence. His book comes out April 7th.
2:08 – 14:50: This Fight Is 250 Years Old: Who Has Always Pushed Back on Washington?
John explains that people were challenging Washington on slavery while he was still president. A British abolitionist named Edward Rushton wrote him a direct letter calling out his hypocrisy. Quakers, Methodist ministers, even Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette were raising this with him privately.
I stop him here because this point is important. A lot of people online act like the idea that slavery was wrong only came up in 2020. John confirms that is completely false. The moral argument against slavery was alive and loud from the very beginning of the country.
The pattern of who speaks up has been consistent across generations. Black educators like W.E.B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson, Black newspapers, and activists on the left have used every major anniversary as a chance to push the full story forward. The 200th birthday of Washington in 1932 was a prime example.
What made 2020 different was not the argument itself but how many people joined it. For the first time it became a mainstream, multiracial conversation, and that broader buy-in is exactly what made the backlash so intense.
14:50 – 22:05: The “He Set Them Free” Defense: What Washington’s Will Actually Did and Did Not Do
Washington did free 123 people he personally owned in his will, and it had a real impact. The free Black population of Fairfax County grew by about 20 percent overnight. Those individuals went on to found churches, buy land, and raise children born free.
But the emancipation was limited in ways people rarely mention. More than half of the enslaved people at Mount Vernon were legally tied to Martha Washington’s first husband’s estate. Washington had no authority to free them and never tried to get it.
Different groups have used that emancipation for totally different purposes across history. Early abolitionists used it to argue that freedom was the most American thing possible. Florida’s state curriculum recently used it to put Washington on a list with Frederick Douglass and call him an abolitionist. John finds that kind of selective use fascinating and revealing.
The bigger point John makes is that almost nobody talking about Washington is really talking about history. They are using him to win an argument happening right now. That has been true for 250 years.
22:05 – 33:00: Life on the Plantation: What Slavery Actually Looked Like at Mount Vernon
Mount Vernon was not a cotton field. It was a massive 8,000-acre operation made up of five smaller farms. Enslaved people did everything from growing wheat and rye to blacksmithing, weaving, cooking, and serving as Washington’s personal attendants during the Revolution and his presidency. The experience of slavery varied a lot depending on where you were and what you did, but the fundamental oppression was the same.
Washington ran things with a cold economic logic. He figured out the minimum amount of food needed to keep people working. He also rotated enslaved people out of Pennsylvania before they had been there six months, because that state’s 1780 law would have allowed them to claim their freedom. He was writing privately about supporting gradual emancipation at the exact same time.
We also talk about the teeth story. Washington’s dentures did include teeth purchased from enslaved people, but it was not a full set. He appears to have paid money for them, though the power to say no when your enslaver is asking does not really exist. The wooden teeth story is completely made up.
33:00 – 40:00: Whose Side Would You Have Taken? The Enslaved People Who Made Different Choices
William Lee was Washington’s enslaved valet and was at his side for the entire Revolutionary War. He was in the war tent, in the field, through the whole campaign. He is one of the most documented enslaved individuals from the founding era and there is actually a huge painting of him at the MFA in Boston that I covered recently.
Harry Washington made the opposite choice. When a British gunship anchored in the Potomac and offered freedom to any enslaved person who escaped and joined their side, he left Mount Vernon and spent the war fighting against the American revolutionaries.
This moment says everything. For Black people, the British promise of freedom was more real than anything the American Revolution was offering. More Black people fought for the British than for the Americans during the Revolution. That is a fact most people have never been taught.
40:00 – 50:57: Erasing History With a Law: How the Current Moment Is Different From All the Others
John walks me through how memory of Washington’s slavery has been suppressed and revived across different eras. It was buried after his death to protect national unity, used hard by abolitionists before the Civil War, quieted again after Reconstruction, and fought over again during the Civil Rights Movement. The argument keeps coming back.
What makes today different is not the debate itself but how the government is handling it. For the first time, federal power is being used to defund exhibits, flag curricula, and erase National Park Service programs. The view being imposed is actually a minority one. Polling consistently shows that 60 to 70 percent of Americans want the full story, not a cleaned-up version.
John closes by pointing out that every attempt to silence this history has eventually failed. The people who have kept it alive, mostly Black Americans with the most at stake, have been doing so for 250 years against serious resistance. That track record is not going to change now.
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