An Imperfect God

[Dave Monroe]

On NPR's "Fresh Air" today ...

Wincek, Henry.  An Imperfect God: George Washington,
   His Slaves, and the Creation of America.
   New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2003.

When George Washington wrote his will, he made the
startling decision to set his slaves free; earlier he
had said that holding slaves was his "only unavoidable
subject of regret." In this groundbreaking work, Henry
Wiencek explores the founding father's engagement with
slavery at every stage of his life--as a Virginia
planter, soldier, politician, president and statesman.


Washington was born and raised among blacks and
mixed-race people; he and his wife had blood ties to
the slave community. Yet as a young man he bought and
sold slaves without scruple, even raffled off children
to collect debts (an incident ignored by earlier
biographers). Then, on the Revolutionary battlefields
where he commanded both black and white troops,
Washington's attitudes began to change. He and the
other framers enshrined slavery in the Constitution,
but, Wiencek shows, even before he became president
Washington had begun to see the system's evil....

http://www.holtzbrinckpublishers.com/FSG/search/SearchBookDisplay.asp?BookKey=1092088

http://www.fsgbooks.com/

Monday , November 10, 2003 

Historian Henry Wiencek 

His new book is An Imperfect God: George Washington,
His Slaves, and the Creation of America. It explores
Washington's moral struggle with the issue of slavery.
Wiencek won the National Book Critics Circle Award for
biography for his book The Hairstons: An American
Family in Black and White. 

http://freshair.npr.org/day_fa.jhtml;jsessionid=AE21J0STMDBDLLA5AINCF4A?todayDate=current

http://freshair.npr.org/

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