John Garrison Marks
John Garrison Marks is a historian and writer exploring history, museums, and the ways Americans engage with the past. His most recent book, Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory, tells the story of how Americans have thought, and fought, over George Washington’s involvement in slavery for the past 250 years. He has written in The Atlantic, TIME, The Washington Post, Defector, Smithsonian magazine, and elsewhere. He earned his PhD in history from Rice University. He is a New Jersey native currently living outside Washington, DC.
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John Garrison Marks
Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory
The ongoing struggle over Washington’s legacy as enslaver and emancipator.
How should we remember George Washington’s entanglement in slavery? Americans have argued over that question for nearly 250 years. More than any other Founding Father, Washington’s ties to slavery have vexed us. He enslaved more people than any of his fellow founders, yet he was the only one of them to emancipate the people he held in bondage. Since his death, Americans have grappled with this contradiction, shaping and reshaping our collective memory of Washington and slavery—along with our understanding of the nation.
In Thy Will Be Done, historian John Garrison Marks tells the story of Americans’ long, fraught struggle to come to terms with Washington’s legacy of slavery. He traces how politicians, abolitionists, educators, activists, Washington’s former slaves and their descendants, and others have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated slavery’s place in Washington’s story, and how they have wielded versions of that story in the political and cultural fights of their time. Marks shows how generational struggles over our collective memory of Washington and slavery have always been part of a bigger conversation about defining the United States and its people. As debates about the founders’ participation in the system of slavery continue to roil public discourse, Marks shows with new clarity that Americans have never collectively reconciled Washington’s conflicted legacy. By truly grappling with Washington’s role as enslaver and emancipator, we may come to better understand the nation and ourselves.
