During the summer of 2020, as protestors rallied against racial injustice, at least two dozen monuments of Confederate soldiers and slave owners were “torched, occupied, or removed.” In Portland, protestors toppled a George Washington statue on the lawn outside the German American Society, erected to commemorate the sesquicentennial. Six years later, and the Trump administration is fighting in court to remove plaques in Philadelphia that commemorate Washington’s history of enslaving people.

These two sides of the argument over how we remember Washington are the inspiration for John Garrison Marks’s new book, Thy Will Be Done: George Washington’s Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory.

Thy Will Be Done, released this week, explores how Americans have struggled to grapple with the complex role slavery plays in Washington’s legacy for 250 years. While revered for helping found the nation, Washington was a prolific enslaver, who owned 123 people, signed the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act and evaded Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act by moving his slaves in and out of the state every six months so they wouldn’t have to be legally freed. Yet, Marks, a historian and American Association for State and Local History senior staff member, notes that Washington’s feelings about slavery weren’t necessarily always positive. In private letters, Washington wrote about his “growing objection” to buying and selling enslaved people because it often broke up families. However, he still served as an active participant in the institution, and his slaves were only emancipated in his will after he and his wife died.

To better understand how we’ve reckoned with this complicated legacy over our history, Marks searched through archives, newspaper and magazine articles, pamphlets, and books to track how debates surrounding Washington’s involvement with slavery have changed over time. What he discovered is that we’ve been having some version of the same argument over Washington and slavery since Washington was alive.

At the center of Thy Will Be Done is a question of how understanding Washington’s relationship with slavery helps us better understand our nation. “What is it, exactly, that Washington left to us?” Marks asks in the introduction. “Our current struggle to make sense of George Washington and slavery reflects a broader struggle to understand our relationship to the American past and what it should mean for us in the present.”

In our conversation, Marks discussed the arguments that surround Washington’s involvement in slavery, how these conversations can’t happen in a vacuum, and why unpacking this history should be a community effort. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

In the book you talk about reviewing the past decade of commentary about Washington and slavery, and it being clear to you that little progress has been made over the past two centuries.

I think it’s really remarkable to look at the historical........

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