The Permanent Resident: Excavations and Explorations of George Washington's Life

By Philip Levy

No figure in American history has generated more public interest or sustained more scholarly research around his various homes and habitations than has George Washington. The Permanent Resident is the first book to bring the principal archaeological sites of Washington's life together under one cover, revealing what they say individually and collectively about Washington’s life and career and how Americans have continued to invest these places with meaning.

Philip Levy begins with Washington’s birthplace in Westmoreland County, Virginia, then moves to Ferry Farm—site of the mythical cherry tree—before following Washington to Barbados to examine how his only trip outside the continental United States both shaped him and lingered in local memory. The book then profiles the site of Washington’s first military engagement and his nation-making stay in Philadelphia. From archaeological study of Mount Vernon, Levy also derives fascinating insights about how slavery changed and was debated at Washington's famous home. Levy considers the fates of Washington statues and commemorations to understand how they have functioned as objects of veneration—and sometimes vandalism—for more than a century and a half.

Two hundred years after his death, at the sites of his many abodes, Washington remains an inescapable presence. The Permanent Resident guides us through the places where Washington lived and in which Americans have memorialized him, speaking to issues that have defined and challenged America from his time to our own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Jul 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9780813948522

Book preview

Cover Page for The Permanent Resident

The Permanent Resident

Early American Histories

Douglas Bradburn, John C. Coombs, and S. Max Edelson, Editors

The Permanent Resident

Excavations and Explorations of George Washington’s Life

Philip Levy

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2022 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2022

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Levy, Philip, author.

Title: The permanent resident : excavations and explorations of George Washington’s life / Philip Levy.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2022. | Series: Early American histories | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022001424 (print) | LCCN 2022001425 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813948515 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813948522 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Washington, George, 1732–1799—Homes and haunts—Virginia. | Washington, George, 1732–1799—Homes and haunts—Pennsylvania. | Excavations (Archaeology)—Virginia. | Virginia—Antiquities. | Virginia—History—18th century. | Excavations (Archaeology)—Pennsylvania. | Pennsylvania—History—18th century.

Classification: LCC E312.5 .L476 2022 (print) | LCC E312.5 (ebook) | DDC 973.4/1092—dc23/eng/20220126

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022001424

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022001425

Cover art: Detail from Citrus George, Philip Levy, 2009.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Fires of Pope’s Creek

2. The Many Houses of Washington’s Boyhood Home

3. Perfectly Ravished: The Washingtons of Barbados

4. Washington’s Red Coats of Wool and Walls of Oak: The Remnants of War

5. Slavery, Housing, Memory, and the Mixed Messages of Mount Vernon’s North Lane

6. What Hides in Plain Sight at Philadelphia’s President’s House

Conclusion: We Need to Talk about George

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

So many people and institutions have helped make this book possible. A short list includes the many helpful and informative people from the National Park Service, such as Nancy Smith, Jane Clark, Cliff Nelson, Melissa Cobern, Deborah Lawton, Scott Hill, Jed Levin, Karie Diethorn, and Courtney Christner. George Wllashington’s Mount Vernon and the Fred W. Smith National Library were vital to this project. I especially want to thank Douglas Bradburn, Curt Viebranz, Kevin Butterfield, Adam Erby, Sarah Meyers, Joseph Stoltz, Molly Kerr, Dawn Bonner, Thomas Reinhart, Samantha Snyder, Mary Thompson, Stephen McLeod, Rebecca Baird, Jim Ambuske, Susan Doyle, Kurt Bodling, and Luke J. Pecoraro. The George Washington Foundation in Fredericksburg, Virginia, has been helping my research at every level since my interests in Washington sites began. I want to thank William E. Garner, Laura Galke, Mara Kaktins, Paul Nasca, Alma Withers, and Melanie Healy-Marquis. At the George Washington House and Museum in Bridgetown, I want to thank Martin Miller and Mikala Hope-Frankyn. I also want to thank other Barbadians who helped me with this project, including Karl Watson, Harriet Pearce, Penelope Hyman, Paulavette Atkinson, Orlando Ince, and Radical Love. Lynn Price Robbins and Alicia K. Anderson were invaluable guides through Washington’s Barbados diary. Much gratitude to the University of Virginia Press’s Richard Holway, who saw the potential in this book, and to Nadine Zimmerli and Morgan Myers, who helped actualize it. Friends and colleagues at the University of South Florida have always made for a fabulous academic community. I especially thank Fraser Ottanelli, William Murray, Giovanna Benadusi, Theresa Lewis, and Tami Davis. Professional friends and colleagues across the land and across fields have always provided support and encouragement—often when it was most needed—and have offered insights and direction by example and in words, both written and spoken. Special thanks to E. K. Gray, Daniel Ingram, Jon Kukla, Gretchen Adams, Larry Cebula, Lindsey Chervinsky, Esther White, Dennis Pogue, Eleanor Breen, Bruce Ragsdale, Robert Paulette, Dell Upton, Susan Boettcher, Clint Schemmer, Barbara Little, Martha Zierden, Mary Beaudry, Brad Hatch, Hank Lutton, Robert Blair St. George, James O’Neil Spady, William Fehrling, Raymond Cannetti, Lydia Mattice Brandt, Francois Furstenberg, Louis P. Nelson, Richard Brookhiser, James L. Axtell, Mark Wenger, Erin Holmes, and Lawrence and Rebecca Latane. Gratitude to John C. Coombs for always being his steadfast self, and to Ryan Smith for his valuable insights and advice. Julia King has been both a role model and a supporter, and I am forever grateful for her guidance and friendship. Thanks, as well, to Keith Wright for the chats over coffee and to Ryan Thurmond and Nate Fryburger for the miles. Special thanks to Alena Pirok, who began helping with this project as a graduate student and has along the way became a first-rate historian and an even better friend. Likewise, so much gratitude for Anthony DeStefanis, who has been there to share ideas and commiseration literally daily since the start. Many thanks to my family and their wonderful additions: Natalie, Jerry, Mathew, Michelle, Carla, David, Charlotte, and Rami. All of this would be much more confused and confusing without the aid and efforts of the line editor I married, Sarah Carleton. Thanks, as well, to Young Israel of Tampa and to Rabbi Uriel Rivkin and Rebbetzin D’vorki Rivkin. Many students took part in the work behind this book, including about 150 University of South Florida students who have excavated at Ferry Farm since 2002. Some students, though, did even more work on the project that led to this book. Meredith Kambic and Mechelle Morgan braved heat and spiders to better understand Building X, and Alaina Scapicchio and Lady Marie Bulilan endured cramped daily car trips to better understand the Washington birthplace. Most importantly, I have to thank the Muracas—Dave, Amy, Isabel, and Rosie—for all they have done for me over years. Dave and Amy have been the best friends and the most supportive mentors and colleagues anyone could ask for.

This book is dedicated to the loving memory of Vaughan Mairs.

The Permanent Resident

Introduction

In 1996, Walmart announced its plans to build a new mega supercenter right atop the site where George Washington had passed much of his childhood. This meant that the warm pink glow of LED parking lot lights would soon bathe the place where the Father of His Country first learned mathematics, read about military glory, and—according to Mason Locke Parson Weems—chopped at his father’s favorite cherry tree. Once word of the plan was out, the historically minded folk of Fredericksburg, Virginia, just across the Rappahannock River, mobilized to stop the bulldozers before their drivers could turn their engines over. A national campaign rapidly took shape amid cries of No Walmart by George, and the energy of corporate interest ran smack into a wall of Washington-preservation enthusiasm that turned out to be pretty immovable. A coalition of groups—local and national—came together and raised the money needed to spare Ferry Farm from becoming a cherry tree-themed shopping plaza. After more than a decade of archaeological study, the landscape had revealed many of its secrets. Heavy machinery finally made it to Ferry Farm, but now their charge was to carefully carry cut Aquia sandstone and other construction goodies that went into making a brand-new, eighteenth-century-style foundation for a reconstructed Washington family home.¹

But as stonemasons were setting those new foundations atop the survivals of the originals, another Washington-themed preservation fight was being lost a few hundred miles to the north. This new battle was over a corner of the Princeton Battlefield. Much of that site is preserved as a state park, but not all of it. The battle of January 3, 1777, was a rare thing in the early stages of the Revolutionary War—a win for Washington against British regulars. The day was going poorly for the Americans due to the death of General Hugh Mercer and the routing of his men. That death itself has an odd connection to Ferry Farm, as Fredericksburg resident Mercer purchased the old family home from Washington and was the place’s owner on the day he was gruesomely bayonetted to death. The angry redcoats mistakenly thought they had caught Washington himself.² Seeing the result of his neighbor’s death, Washington rallied the fleeing men and, with fresh troops, pressed on to the center of the British line. That counterattack reversed fortunes, and soon it was the British who were on the retreat. The exact spot of the clash, though, sits outside the state park’s borders on a few acres locals call Maxwell’s Field. Its owner is Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), the scholarly body best known for its association with Albert Einstein and other noted intellectuals exiled during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.

Since its 1930 founding, the IAS has vastly expanded its mission, and it now regularly welcomes dozens of scholars in a range of disciplines the world over. These visiting scholars need places to live and that need set the stage for the Second Battle of Princeton. Beginning around 2003, the IAS began to eye Maxwell’s Field as the best location for new housing. For years thereafter, a group of preservationists called the Princeton Battlefield Society did all it could to block the plan with court challenges, historical research, public talks, and even environmental law. But David often has a notoriously hard time facing Goliath. In 2016, with permits in hand, work crews hired by the IAS began to prepare the ground for a set of new residences close to the edge of the state park. Several historians even gave the plan their blessing, arguing that the fighting on January 3, 1777, took place over such a wide area that it was all but impossible to define one corner as more vital than another. Historian Mark Peterson raised questions about the preservationists’ assertion that Maxwell’s Field was so vital, claiming that the idea that this set of acres was the centerpiece of the battle is a misunderstanding on its face of what the whole thing was.³ Theodore Crackel, former editor of the Papers of George Washington, argued that development had already taken such a toll on the site that any chance to commemorate the entire field was long lost, unless you want to tear down a third of Princeton University’s buildings.⁴ What difference would the loss of a few more acres make? With the papers signed, the bulldozer engines humming, and even historians saying let’s roll, the project at last seemed a done deal.

But as with Ferry Farm, there is a special power to George Washington’s name. Edges of American battlefields and historical locations of all kinds are routinely built over or pushed aside in favor of all manner of projects. It is a rare county commission that can keep the dollar signs out of their eyes when developers spin yarns about job creation and increased tax revenue. Yet somehow, Washington, well deployed, can still turn preservation defeat into victory. At the Second Battle of Princeton, Washington’s rallying of the troops came in the form of a skillful publicity and fundraising campaign by the Princeton Battlefield Society, the Save Princeton Coalition, and the Civil War Trust, which produced four million dollars to buy 14.85 acres—about two-thirds of Maxwell’s Field—with the intention of turning the land over to the Princeton Battlefield Park for perpetuity.⁵ By the spring of 2018, the IAS had embraced a changed plan that placed the new housing on a different part of their land, and all agreed that the result was a win-win.⁶

Ferry Farm and Maxwell’s Field tell similar stories of history, forgetting, and remembering. The arc of a historical place’s memory is often steep at its sides. It rises from obscurity to prominence quickly, stays at that vaunted height for a short while, and then falls—often quite rapidly—back into obscurity. The pattern repeats itself all over the American historical landscape: moments of consequence are often followed by forgetting, until later generations discover anew the merit of a place in their own way and on their own terms. Once in a while, though, something attaches to a place that lends to the height a bit of needed loft—a burst of historical consequence that outweighs the force of forgetting’s gravity and overshadows other quotidian needs. Other times, the faint whispers of memory linger until they can again find voice. Like a buried treasure, they rest dormant, awaiting the real or metaphorical shovel to dig them up again and return them to a wider consciousness.

This book is about places like Maxwell’s Field and Ferry Farm—places that sit solidly in the shadow of Washington’s life and legacy but also have undergone their own cycles of memory and forgetting.⁷ The Eastern Seaboard of the United States is dotted with such places, thanks to the man’s wide-ranging surveying career, his military campaigns, and two presidential tours of the new nation. His native Virginia, of course, and West Virginia as well, have many places with long Washington associations; the homes he occupied in New York and Philadelphia are gone, but memory still resides there; even distant Barbados has a home it proudly calls the George Washington House. Add to that a long list of battlefields, headquarters, gentry homes, taverns, and places claiming that Washington slept here—an assertion that often has more merit than the phrase’s long-standing punchline suggests.

In some way, Washington made each of these places a place, and in turn, the places have kept Washington front and center. His having stayed in a place, having visited there, fought there, or built there, has so often taken what were in most respects ordinary homes or fields and granted them a new status of being historical—and from that has flowed interest, commemoration, documentation, and excavation. This book’s title—a quotation from Washington himself late in life and one I discuss in more detail in chapter 5—touches on the way that Washington’s presence at these many places has long outlasted his sojourn and even the years of his life. Americans have put such weight on Washington that no matter who might own a property or live in a home at a given time, its Washington associations will overshadow all others and make him enduringly the permanent resident.

Washington, a man of restless energy, with access to vast resources including enslaved labor, ceaselessly worked to change everything around him to better match his evolving vision of how his world should look and function. That parade of changes, rebuilds, replacements, and additions are often seen most prominently in the ground. The Washington we see most clearly there is the one who never tired of making changes to his material world by building, adding, and modifying the homes he occupied and the areas around them. The places we will visit in the following chapters therefore share another dimension of their common Washington association: all of them have been the subject of archaeological investigations.

Some of these excavations date back to the middle of the 1800s; others are still ongoing. Virtually every technique and development of the craft has been tried out at one time or another on Washington sites. Generations of excavators have explored a huge range of landscape features and amassed uncounted thousands of artifacts. The sites themselves may be far apart and their stories quite different, but they are all still linked together by Washington’s larger story; his life and its impact and memory align all of these disparate places and their own local stories. Considering Washington’s life and memory through the material record they have left behind is itself a sort of unrecognized subfield spreading across several institutions and many different scholars’ research agendas. The details of decades of excavation findings appear in articles, dissertations, books, and many, many reports. Reports of park, house, and site repairs and improvements abound as well, but rarely do these get beyond the hands of select professionals. There is an occasional awareness in this writing that all of these many Washington places are in some way linked one to the other, but for the most part, local reporting stays local. This book is the first to treat them—or at least many of them—as parts of a whole in order to see what they have to say about Washington, his world, the people who surrounded him, and vitally, his legacy and memory.

This is the stuff of what I call Washingtonology: the study of the many and varied material survivals of Washington’s time on earth as they are found, recalled, used, and reimagined from the banks of the Ohio River to the cane fields of Barbados.⁸ My term also can include the objects and places themselves—in the same way that archaeology might refer to a practice, a discipline, and the material under study. I find the term useful, in part, because it keeps me from having to write, sites, places, and objects associated with George Washington and his memory over and over again—an economy of language for which you, dear reader, should be grateful. My term also highlights something that people working at Washington sites have long known but seldom discussed: all these places share a sort of specialized vocabulary, a distinct set of concerns, and a cast of canonical characters stemming from the places having been linked by a single biography. The term also signals that, to me, Washington’s eighteenth-century life as well as its later discussion and material remains are part of single collective whole; they all fit together, and they make the most sense when treated as part of a whole. Most importantly, therefore, the term highlights the connected nature of all of these places and objects linked together by a life story and its many and varied retellings.

What follows takes the shape of history—my primary style of writing—with diversions into art history, folklore, or museology. In this book, though, archaeology plays a special role. I first came to my long study of Washington through archaeology when I began work at Ferry Farm in 2002. For me, that approach holds special appeal. It is highly intimate; physical contact with relics of the past is a special and unique experience. It is highly rigorous; through archaeology, one learns to respect the power of patterns and the weight of data. It is also always in discussion with many other ways to understand the past. Mute objects beg us to reach out to a multitude of other sources and streams to give them voice; archaeology makes us read other records differently and that makes us look at the archaeology in new ways.⁹ All of these traits make for an archaeologically informed approach to the past that serves as both a source of information and a metaphor for how this book depicts Washington.

One the most useful concepts to come through archaeology is the geological idea of stratigraphy. Archaeological sites are stratified—that means that they are made up of layers of all different sorts, all superimposed on one another. As one digs down, one moves through each layer from top to bottom, newest to oldest. As much as an excavator may want to focus on the remains of one particular epoch, the material encountered along the way—the bits and pieces of other times, events, and lived lives—are also part of their professional charge. The notion of stratigraphy is central to the kind of history this book offers. Washington is a unifying theme and overarching subject, but as a topic, he is just too big to restrict to only the years of his life. A vital pillar of Washingtonology is recognizing that the ways generations of people have made use of Washington as a symbol are at least as important as the actual lived life of the man himself.¹⁰ With that in mind, I invite you to think about Washington, his century, and their memory stratigraphically and consider his posthumous memory and recalling as being every bit as interesting, significant, and worthy of your consideration as the man himself. Let’s go a step further: why not look at all historical sites this way? All are made up of layers of the old resting atop, alongside, and attached to the older. For the historically minded, stratigraphy is everywhere.

Memory is another way we can think of these layers. Historians only began to take memory seriously fairly recently. Usually, memory and history are imagined as different things even though both are ways that people engage with the past.¹¹ Whereas scholars once saw them as opposites, in reality they are more like cousins—relations that share some traits and ancestry but use those to different ends. History is a discussion of the past that is self-consciously a discussion of sources—those documents and other fragments that have survived from the past. History is about reading those sources in dialogue with the work of others who are doing the same and, in so doing, reaching a broader understanding of innovations in fields such as philosophy, social theory, politics—anything, in fact, that might pry out a new insight or open a new avenue of inquiry. History always changes because we—the people asking the questions—change, and with us change our interests and points of reference.

Memory, though, takes a more personal, introspective view of the past. It is less concerned with method, rigor, and novelty than history is. Rather, memory is best understood as those things we just know—things about the past we learned from loved ones, cultural heroes, and what some now call heritage.¹² History is a process—largely written—and one that by its very nature is ever changing as scholars, always a patricidal lot, seek to overturn received assumptions and replace them with new insights that make sense in the now. Memory pulls hard against that impulse and works to keep alive and vital those most cherished received ideas about the past. History turns the remnants of the past over and over to see what new insight will drop out; memory gathers up those remnants to enshrine and celebrate them. It is easy to write a few sentences claiming to mark a line between history and memory. In practice, though—in the real-world trenches where people fight over the past, its places, and its memorials—it is almost impossible to hold to some sort of line. It might not even be advisable to try. Memory’s emotional bond with the past inspires some of the best historical inquiry, while scholarship is constantly enlisted in memory’s cause. The two are not separate at all—they are linked; they flow into one another; they too are layered.

This book is layered as well, just as the Washington sites themselves are. The basic chapter order uses Washington’s life as a sort of spine. Birth precedes youth, war precedes presidency, and so on as we move through Washington’s life site by site. A structure that works from the ground up spreads the story out differently than a traditional biography might. It produces different highlights and points of emphasis. It teases out different moments on which to focus, and sometimes it chooses to prioritize something biographers might not. While Washington’s life sets our narrative guideposts, not everything herein is narrowly chronological. My goal is to share with you the best and most resonant stories of the places we will visit. Each place has its own story to tell about remembering and forgetting and how these concerns intersect with Washington’s life and what it left behind. What follows is not a complete review of sites and their findings, although quite a few come up for discussion. Instead, consider this book a guided tour through some of the most prominent and visit-worthy sites of Washington’s life.

My goal in each chapter is to work outward from objects and remains to buildings and monuments—what scholars call the material record—in order to share with you stories that otherwise would stay hidden. In some cases, a site’s Washingtonology might have fascinating and new things to say about Washington in his day. Fort Necessity in western Pennsylvania is just such a place and story. At other sites, the most revealing stories may have little to do with Washington’s lived life other than how it was remembered and invoked long after his 1799 death. The George Washington Birthplace National Monument in Westmoreland County, Virginia, is such a place. Still other stories move back and forth between Washington’s day and the ways that bits of Washingtonology functioned later. Sometimes our tour will challenge the common wisdom about a place. Other times, we will see something entirely new or something vital that has been hidden in plain sight. In all cases, though, it is my most sincere hope that I can inspire you to visit these places for yourself and ask new questions of what you see.

We begin with Washington’s birth at a home somewhere close to the banks of Pope’s Creek off the Potomac River. There has been a long debate about just where that home was and what it might have looked like. In the 1920s and ’30s, there were competing visions of the home fed by different, but sometimes overlapping, streams of information. The end result was a commemorated landscape owned by the National Park Service (NPS) that boasted two Washington homes. The conflict between these rival buildings and their advocates has been the main focus of people writing about the site. Small wonder—it is a great story. But something has always been missing in the many retellings of that tale of conflict over Washington memory, and that is the gap I address here. In 2013, the NPS commissioned a new assessment, and chapter 1 rests on that new view of the site’s archaeology. There are few Washingtonology sites where fact and fiction have flowed together so freely. That might be because few other places have attracted fraudsters and forgers in the same way.

In chapter 2, we move up the Northern Neck of Virginia to Washington’s childhood home on the Rappahannock River, known as Ferry Farm. By 1833, nothing remained aboveground from the years between when the Washingtons had owned the land. What did remain most indelibly, though, was Parson Weems’s tale of the little boy who chopped at his father’s favorite cherry tree. That story and that tree have long been a heavy burden at Ferry Farm. I was fortunate to play a role in excavations of the site that began after Walmart was turned away, and the land became a protected place. Two decades of study has produced a remarkable full-scale replica of the home, built on the foundations of the original. Ferry Farm’s new Washington home brings together a complicated archaeological record and decades of study of the region’s architectural styles to make a highly informed, dynamic assessment of how the original home looked and functioned. it also has a lot to say about the character of Washington’s upbringing.

In chapter 3, we then visit what is unquestionably the most exotic Washington site. When Lawrence Washington’s weak lungs began their final, fatal decline in 1751, his father-in-law, William Fairfax, pulled a few strings to send him and George to Barbados to pass the winter. The trip to the island was the only time Washington traveled off the North American continent. Thanks to a still-standing home and a set of excavations there, Barbados is a full-fledged producer of its own species of Washingtonology. The question has usually been: what did Barbados mean to Washington? Crucially, in answering this query I will also reverse it and ask what Washington meant to Barbados. It is, after all, the only nation other than the United States to have its own independent, organic, on-site relationship with the man.

In chapter 4, we look at sites associated with Washington’s military career. There is no denying that Washington in uniform is one of the most powerful and enduring images in our shared national culture. General Washington, as he is still called at Mount Vernon, has cast a long shadow. There are many places, such as Princeton’s Maxwell’s Field, Valley Forge, and Yorktown, Virginia, that have become regular stops for the historically minded tourist. But it was Washington’s first military endeavor in the hills and forests of western Pennsylvania that has produced some of the most compelling Washington archaeology. The summer of 1754 was not exactly Washington’s finest moment. In fact, his campaign was an abject failure that left him and his surviving men, defeated and mud stained, surrendering to a larger French force. In the eyes of many, Washington’s name was mud, too. And mud is the key, because it was the unique soil here that allowed for the survival of some of the most remarkable bits of Washingtonology—large fragments of the wood that made up the walls of the odd little fort he built in the middle of marshy meadow and christened Fort Necessity. Those logs help us to look deep into the mind and values of the Virginia gentry that produced the young, in-over-his-head officer who brought on the Seven Years’ War in a muddy field in Pennsylvania.

In chapter 5, we visit the unquestioned flagship of Washington sites: Mount Vernon. Washington’s home on the Potomac River occupies a special place in his life story. In this chapter, we will focus on how Washington’s ceaseless construction and renovation projects came to bear on the lives of the enslaved people who also called Mount Vernon home. We will look at a set of buildings that sat on North Lane on what Washington called the Mansion House Farm—the acres immediately surrounding Mount Vernon’s home. This farm was the home and workplace of the largest number of Washington’s enslaved people, and the archeological discoveries made about the living quarters that stretched along the farm’s North Lane make up an overlooked text about Washington’s changing and contradictory attitudes towards enslavement, as we will see.

In chapter 6, we explore the site of the President’s House in Philadelphia. When the National Park Service set about building a new home for the Liberty Bell in the early 2000s, their plans ran smack into local opposition fueled by research showing that the proposed new building would sit atop the remains of where Washington’s enslaved people lived. It was, of course, an irony not lost on Philadelphia’s influential African American community that, with a host of allies, rallied to stop the plan. Excavations produced almost nothing that dated from the time of Washington’s sojourn. But as we will see, what is there speaks directly to the issues of social control that loomed over a home for enslaved people in a city that was singularly hostile to slavery.

We conclude our tour by looking at issues now swirling around physical commemorations of George Washington. When Alexandria’s Christ Church announced plans to move a plaque dedicated to Washington to another part of the building, there arose a small howl of protest. Washington statues, plaques, and mementos have long been subject to relocation, neglect, misplacement, and outright vandalism. In the litany of abuse and misuse, that of Christ Church barely warrants a mention. But as recent actions to recontextualize Washington places and statues show, Washington’s iconic image and power are as strong as ever.

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Why Washington? Good question. In 1860, Harvard University president Cornelius C. Fenton felt his head very nearly explode when he read British author William Makepeace Thackery’s fictionalized version of Washington in the latter’s 1858 novel The Virginians. At issue was that, in his novel, Thackery wrote Washington had agreed to a duel—something with no historical grounding. Washington was not like other men Fenton fumed, insisting that to bring Washington’s lofty character down to the level of the vulgar passions of common life was to give the lie to the grandest chapter in the uninspired annals of the human race.¹³ That is a bit much for modern sentiments, but there is a greater truth lurking therein. A century later, Washington biographer Marcus Cunliffe encapsulated this long-held view, writing that to admit failings in Washington was therefore to attack the very fabric of America.¹⁴ Stated another way, what we say about Washington we in some way say about the nation he helped found. There are few topics in American history or culture that do not have some sort of Washington angle to them. Virtually the entire history of the presidency, or American politics writ large, is one or two degrees of separation from something Washington said or did. And even if he seems remote in a given cause or moment, there has never been a shortage of politicians who knew that to rhetorically enlist Washington in their project was to take a step closer to winning the point.

Likewise, from the Navy to the Purple Heart, Washington’s influence on the United States military is often more overt than covert. Washington’s economic projects and ambitions have set others in motion and have served as a model for generations.¹⁵ As a slaveholder and a sometime critic of the institution and staunch supporter of the laws that enshrined it, Washington’s imprint on this deep divisive theme in the national story is as significant and indelible as it is inescapable. The great painters of his day, such as Gilbert Stuart and Charles Wilson Peale, made sure that Washington’s seemingly grimacing visage would be a fixture in art history. Later artists—high, commercial, and subversive, from Currier and Ives to Grant Wood to