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Sarah Johnson's Mount Vernon brilliantly restores the lives and contributions of African Americans to the legacy of Mount Vernon. Digging beneath the well-known stories of George Washington and the era of America's birth, Scott E. Casper recovers the remarkable history of Sarah Johnson, who spent more than fifty years at Mount Vernon, in slavery and after emancipation. Through her life and those of her family and friends, Casper provides not only an intimate picture of Mount Vernon during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries―years that are rarely part of its public story―but also a window into a community of people who played an essential part in creating and maintaining this American landmark.
- Sales Rank: #1419227 in Books
- Published on: 2008-01-08
- Released on: 2009-01-20
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.27" h x .71" w x 5.83" l, .65 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Schoolchildren, learning that George Washington freed his slaves when his wife died, may believe that slavery then ended at Mount Vernon, but this emancipation was not wholesale. Martha's slaves were not freed, and Mount Vernon remained a slave plantation. Historian Casper relates the complex tale of Mount Vernon's triple identities, home, workplace, and enduring, malleable national symbol, via the lives of its black workers and residents, slave and free, and its owners while he restores African-Americans' essential roles as actors—both as historical persons doing the work of maintaining Mount Vernon and as theater, today playing the roles that maintain an illusion of 18th-century accuracy. Casper uncovers the full breadth of these African-Americans' lives. Sarah Johnson, for example, was not only a slave, a servant and an attendant to the public decades after Washington's death; she was also a wife, mother, seamstress, landowner and default curator of the Mount Vernon residence. Casper succinctly relates how Washington's 18th-century estate became a 19th-century national shrine [and] site of reverent pilgrimage and deftly integrates national political, social and technological transformations into his tale. Unanticipated links and unsolved mysteries engage, while Casper's cautious speculation and meticulous documentation make his book as trustworthy as it is fascinating. illus. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“A fascinating look at a national shrine from another angle.” ―Jules Wagman, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Casper lays bare the unique narrative of America's first sacred shrine, capturing the dizzying complexity of an early American community largely unrecognized and misunderstood.” ―Richard Horan, The Christian Science Monitor
“Now, at last, Casper tells the story of the invisible men and women who worked the 8,000-acre riverfront estate for generations. While innumerable books have been written in recent years about the Founding Fathers, it's refreshing to read one in which slaves play a central part . . . Casper deftly uses the limited sources available to depict Johnson's life with an authenticity that is moving.” ―W. Ralph Eubanks, The Washington Post Book World
“Casper must piece the prism together from many sources . . . The efforts pay off. His account is evenhanded and scrupulously detailed, yet always emotionally connected to the life of housekeeper Sarah Johnson.” ―Erin Aubry Kaplan, Los Angeles Times
About the Author
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.
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
It wasn't until I finished this book that I realized how good it was
By Loves the View
This is a history of Mount Vernon following the death of George Washington. Because it is a story of the everyday life on and operation of the estate, it is a story of 200 years of African American history. There is a parallel history here too, about the pioneer days of the historic preservation movement.
Early vistors to Mount Vernon believed what they wanted to believe. Knowing Washington's will had freed his slaves (upon the death of Martha, who released them early) one could ignore reality and presume that those who labored in the field and encountered visitors were free. For 60 years it bubbles into public consciousness only every now and then that they are not.
In the first part of the book, Sarah is in the background as we learn about Washington's heirs, Martha's dower slaves, crops, the buying, selling and renting of people, and the precursors of the tourist trade yet to come. Sarah becomes the central vehicle for the story in the later half of the book. Sarah is a perfect vehicle for this history because her life illustrates her times.
Augustine Washington assumed control of this estate at age 21. From his mother, he received Sarah's mother Hannah, and noted her additions to his assets when she bore children. In 1844 he hired Hannah out to a cousin for $24 for the year. She returned from this forced labor pregnant and delivered a mulatto child naming her Sarah with her grandfather's last name, Parker. Later, when Mount Vernon was sold to a preservation society, which in part preserved it from the raveges of the Civil War, Sarah was also sold. In freedom she returned to her home, Mount Vernon, and became an employee of the new society.
The saga of Sarah's family, a metaphor for the contemporaneous sagas of thousands of African Americans, is told against the growth of Mount Vernon as a national shrine and tourist destination. While Mount Vernon is buffered, it cannot help but be effected by the successionist fervor, the civil war, the war's unsettling aftermath, Jim Crow, and World Wars I and II. Scott Casper takes the reader through all this, up to the present nascent awareness of the role of African Americans in history. On p. 219 there is a eloquent piece on Sarah who we know she was and who she may have been.
This is a short book, but its ideas will stay with you a long time.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
The story after the story...
By Cynthia K. Robertson
I'm the type of reader who wants to know the story after the story. So after reading Ron Chenow's Washington: A Life, I thought Sarah Johnson's Mt. Vernon: The Forgotten History of an American Shrine by Scott E. Casper to be a good choice.
Sarah Johnson was born a slave in 1844 belonging to Augustine Washington, one of George Washington's nephews. While long after Washington's death, she lived at Mt. Vernon over 50 years--longer than our nation's first president. Casper relates the history of Mt. Vernon after Washington's death. It was owned and managed for long periods of time by nephews Bushrod Washington and then Augustine Washington. When the house reached a level of shabbiness that Augustine had not the money to address, he sold the mansion and 200 acres to the newly formed Mt. Vernon Ladies Association (MVLA) in 1858. After the Civil War, the MVLA had trouble finding enough local employees, so they hired Sarah and many of her family and friends. She worked at Mt. Vernon until 1892, and even after that, she returned once a year to cook and care for the members of the MVLA at their annual meeting.
Casper tells parallel stories in Sarah Johnson's Mt. Vernon. There's the story of Mt. Vernon, the house. Washington didn't build Mt. Vernon, but he did make it what we see today. Nobody knew the house better than the former slaves who served the Washington nephews, and Sarah was often consulted about original features. There's the story of Mt. Vernon, the workplace. Although Sarah was freed after the Civil War, she often worked harder for the MVLA than she did as a slave. And then there is the story of Mt. Vernon, the shrine. The story of the MVLA is fascinating, and they should be given credit for purchasing and preserving Mt. Vernon. But these women weren't preservationists or historians and soon, the mansion "became a Victorian cabinet of curiosities...a hybrid historic house, suspended between alternative visions of nationhood and between conflicting notions of authenticity."
Casper also documents the story of African Americans and Mt. Vernon. As Jim Crow got a foothold in the late 1890s, the MVLA slowly phased out their black employees, although they did offer help to some of their long-time staff. This help consisted of the paying of medical bills, keeping sick and dying employees on salary, and sometimes contributing money toward their funeral expenses. Mt. Vernon also had to reinvent itself--especially in terms of "acknowledging its African American past and reversing its--and America's--history of omissions and distortions."
While today we consider Mt. Vernon to be the product of George Washington's labors, Casper shows us that the African Americans who lived and worked at Mt. Vernon are equally responsible for this historic home. "Their daily labors maintained Mt. Vernon no less than MLVA's fund raising and governance did. Their carefully honed performance shaped the Father of His Country whom visitors saw as well as the image of slavery days." After reading Sarah Johnson's Mt. Vernon, I can't wait to visit there for the first time.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
behind the scenes at a shrine
By Concord
As other reviewers have noted the basic story here, I will note that Casper has found out a lot of information about African Americans who lived and worked on the grounds of Mount Vernon through the 1800s. He is not interested in trashing George Washington, but in getting at the lives of "unsung" people and then using their lives to discuss larger themes in American life. It's a nice blend of local and national history, with the emphasis on the local.
Two small points, one good, one less good. On the bright side there is humor here--especially the pilfering tourists who want to take just a little piece of the place home with them. My only complaint was that somehow I missed the point that the chapters were chronological in order, not by theme or person, and I was baffled for the first few dozen pages until I figured that out. Maybe my bad, maybe it could be clearer.
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