Sarah Johnson's Mount Vernon: The Forgotten History of an American Shrine - Hardcover

Scott E. Casper is a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is the author of Constructing American Lives, which won the 1999 Book History Prize from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing.

Scott E. Casper is a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is the author of Constructing American Lives, which won the 1999 Book History Prize from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing.

ONE

To most visitors, Oliver Smith was the slave who had seen George Washington die. Again and again, pilgrims to Washington's tomb in the 1830s described this "venerable colored man" in his seventies, whose gray hair alone suggested an authentic connection to the past. One writer claimed to repeat Smith's own words: he was "as familiar with the General as with the palms of his own hands." Oliver Smith told of Washington's character and habits, so methodical and exacting that the slaves respected him better than they liked him. On the piazza of the mansion, overlooking the Potomac, Smith reminded visitors that Washington had walked the same floorboards. Most compellingly, he described George Washington's last day on earth. He was there when the general breathed his last, Smith explained. Tears in his eyes, he told of his own "deserted and desolate" present condition, and he "hobbled onwards ... talking continually of time gone by."1 There was only one problem with his story: Oliver Smith had come to Mount Vernon in 1802, three years after George Washington's death, with Washington's nephew Bushrod. He got his knowledge secondhand, from one of the slaves present at the deathbed.

Oliver Smith told an utterly different story to an abolitionist traveler in 1834. He had been Bushrod Washington's pet, he explained, and now belonged to Bushrod's niece Jane Washington, the new owner of Mount Vernon. He had had nine children, one of them now Mount Vernon's gardener and two dead. Where were the other six? inquired the writer. "Sold into Georgia." Wasn't it hard to part with them? "O, itwas like cutting off my own limbs," Smith replied, almost in tears. Smith's sense of desertion and desolation had another cause entirely. His own children were gone, sold by Bushrod Washington's heirs. In the day of judgment, he opined, all of America's slaves would appear before the bar, and slaveholders would have to answer for their sins.2

It is fair to take Oliver Smith at his word--his family's dispersal felt akin to dismemberment in every sense. At the same time, Smith was an expert in fulfilling visitors' fantasies of Mount Vernon. No other recorded encounter with him suggests such a protest against the institution of slavery or even discloses his family's story. Nor was he telling the abolitionist writer everything. Like thousands of other slaves across the South who learned early to assume different faces for different listeners, Oliver Smith had alternate scripts for encounters with Mount Vernon's visitors. He calibrated those versions of the past to the scripts that visitors brought with them. No matter what he said, however, Smith's very presence belied the fundamental incongruity of his standard script. If George Washington had famously freed his slaves, why were people still enslaved at Mount Vernon?

The story of Oliver Smith's family begins to reveal the answer. When he was born around 1760, Oliver belonged not to George Washington but to his brother John Augustine, commonly called Jack. Jack Washington and his wife, Hannah Bushrod, lived at Bushfield plantation in Westmoreland County, ninety-five miles southeast of Mount Vernon in Virginia's tidewater. They owned more than 130 slaves by the early 1780s, when their eldest son, Bushrod, approached adulthood and Oliver and his wife, Doll, became his personal servants. As a "waiting man" Oliver Smith was Bushrod's closest attendant, seeing to his master's needs and running errands near and far. After Jack died in 1787, Bushrod Washington legally inherited Oliver and Doll and thus any children they would have, beginning with a son named Phil in 1790. Bushrod brought the Smiths to live with him when he inherited Mount Vernon from his uncle George. He also brought another family, its anchors a woman named Sinah (born in 1761) and her brother Ham (1773), also inherited from Jack and Hannah Washington's estate. Sinah and her husband, Joe, another Bushfield house servant, had eight children, two sons-in-law, and eleven grandchildren at Mount Vernon by 1815. Ham and his wife, Pat, started their family there witha son in 1807 and three more children in the next eight years. Sinah, Ham, and their family lived at Union Farm, one of the outlying Mount Vernon farms that Bushrod inherited along with the "mansion house" property. About half of his slaves, seventy-nine in all in 1815, including people he had purchased from relatives and neighbors, lived and worked there.3

In the two decades between 1815 and the abolitionist's visit, three dramatic events reshaped the contours of Oliver Smith's family and community: a massive, traumatic slave sale; an apparent crime and its grueling aftermath; and finally the dismantling of Bushrod Washington's estate. By the 1830s, when he guided visitors around Mount Vernon, Oliver had become the place's foremost living, speaking link to two pasts: George Washington's world and the saga of his own broken family.

 

 

Bushrod Washington was bound to suffer by comparison with his uncle. An 1823 visitor estimated Bushrod "as unlike the General, as any man in the United States." He was short, slight, pale-faced, and blind in one eye, the result of overwork. One observer thought he looked "nervous and feeble." Another called him "a little dryed up Virginian." In two deeper ways, though, he resembled George Washington. Both men devoted enormous care to raising children not their own. Much as George had superintended and loved Martha's children Jacky and Patsy Custis and then Jacky's children Nelly and Wash, Bushrod made Mount Vernon a home for at least a half dozen orphaned nieces and nephews. George Washington and Bushrod Washington also shared a commitment to public service. After enlisting in the Revolutionary War, Bushrod studied law with James Wilson, one of the new nation's foremost legal minds and a leader at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Bushrod was elected to the Virginia General Assembly in 1787 and to the state's ratifying convention for the Constitution a year later. His legal work in the 1790s earned wide admiration, and in 1798 President John Adams offered him Wilson's seat on the Supreme Court after John Marshall declined it. Washington and Marshall, who became chief justice three years later, had been friends since their college days at William and Mary. Together they formed the bulwark of the Federalist Supreme Court that affirmed a strong national government in thenation's fledgling years. Appointed at thirty-six, Bushrod Washington was one of the youngest justices in American history, and he served one of the longest tenures, thirty-one years.4

In two other ways, uncle and nephew differed significantly. First, Bushrod was a lawyer, not a farmer. When he died, his books and pamphlets were appraised at $5,553.75, more than double the value of all the work animals, livestock, crops, and farm equipment at Mount Vernon combined. He lived away from home most of the year because justices of the Supreme Court were required to sit with the federal circuit courts and Bushrod made his circuit in Philadelphia and New Jersey Judicial duties, his work as an executor of his uncle's will, and guardianship of nieces and nephews all crowded agricultural management from Bushrod's attention.5 George Washington, by contrast, had known every detail of the farms: when to accomplish any task; how to make best use of slave labor; how many bricks it would take to build a sixteen-sided barn. George Washington's care saved Mount Vernon from the fate of so many other Virginia estates (notably Thomas Jefferson's Monticello), deep indebtedness and ultimately sale.

Even if Bushrod had been a farmer, his hand would have been far weaker than his uncle's. Northern Virginia had entered an agricultural...