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

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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.

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.

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.

We found this book to very interesting and very detailed. Scott Casper's research was superb!

Casper artfully unravels the layers of mythology and reality at Mount Vernon. Sarah Johnson's Mount Vernon is accessible to lay readers and driven by the compelling stories of the black and white residents of a national shrine.

A dangerous book, couched as it is in the rhetoric of revealing a forgotten history, but which relies on historical evidence created by the oppressors and agents of marginalization-- along with feigned empathetic but anachronistic emotive imaginings that fail to take into account contemporary critical scholarship on slavery as an institution and related perspectives on race as a political project.

Casper's book is appallingly naive in its romanticized prose treating on complicated and frequently violent histories.

This book is hard to get into. There's a little too much background. Getting right into Sarah Johnson's story would have been much more interesting.

Its a very interesting book-we had no problems in receiving the book and it arrived in great condition.