The Ghosts of Mount Vernon: George Washington's Heirs and the Untold Legacy of Slavery

In The Ghosts of Mount Vernon, award-winning historian Gregory May traces the George Washington family’s relationship with his slaves from his final years through the Civil War, revealing in the process that the story that he liberated all his slaves upon his death in 1799 is as much a myth as his cutting down the cherry tree in his youth. May demonstrates how Washington’s adopted son, Wash Custis, abused those slaves—sexually and otherwise—and how Wash’s son-in-law Robert E. Lee tried to delay the freedom Custis promised them when he died. By the time Lee released them just days before Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, most had already freed themselves. No one has ever before assembled the pieces of this story into a single, intimate, and compelling narrative about how this great Founding Father’s inability to shed chattel slavery haunted his heirs and the whole American nation.