McNamara: Augustine Washington, who comes into possession of Mount Vernon before the Civil War, encounters a real nuisance, which is that all these visitors keep arriving.
Casper: What was really the case for all the Washingtons who owned Mount Vernon after George Washington, they all, in their own way, found the visitors to be a double-edged sword. Many of the visitors were coming out of patriotic respect, but they were also tramping around the grounds of what was, literally and legally, private property.
And so when Augustine Washington starts running the place in 1841, he’s experiencing what his parents, and before that, Bushrod did, the mixed feeling about all these visitors. And the more visitors who come, the more upkeep there is to do. And that requires money, and they don’t have a lot of money.
They have property, and they have human property in the form of slaves. But they don’t have a lot of liquid cash, as far as I can tell, to maintain the place the way visitors want it to be maintained. Which then means visitors are complaining that the place isn’t being kept up very well. So it’s a kind of circle.
McNamara:And he’s being criticized not so much for being a slave owner as for letting Mount Vernon get, as everyone seems to say at the time, “dilapidated.”
Casper: Precisely.
McNamara: When the Mount Vernon Ladies Association starts to form before the Civil War, there are fears that Phineas Barnum, or a Barnum imitator, will get his hands on it. Even in the 1850s there was a fear that Mount Vernon would become what today we would call “Disneyfied.”
Casper: Oh, absolutely. In those decades before the Civil War, you see not just P.T. Barnum with all his various shows, but different kind of amusement spots for people that Americans would go to, whether it was Niagara Falls or some of the other popular spots that were becoming increasingly commercialized.
And Mount Vernon had all of these patriotic implications. But what if it, like those others, became kind of a commercial theme park, sort of “George Washington Land”? As opposed to the spot where people could come and worship at Washington’s tomb, and really revere the father of the country and revere the nation?
And Augustine Washington needed money, and there was a concern that he would sell to the wrong people. And the Ladies Association played on those concerns to demonstrate its own fidelity to American patriotism, and demonstrate its own worthiness to be the keepers of Washington’s legacy.
McNamara: One of the ironies is that Augustine Washington essentially unloads the place, and then with the money he makes from selling Mount Vernon, he buys more slaves. Which people did not realize at the time, but had they known, it would have provoked outrage.
Casper: The way I figured that out was really by following the money. He sells 200 acres at Mount Vernon to the Ladies Association. But he keeps another thousand acres at Mount Vernon, which is basically farmland, not the historic part.
But then he buys another plantation for his family to live on, two counties west, and that plantation had 866 acres. So you realize that, first of all, he had two plantations to run, not one. And secondly, you start looking at his slave lists and realize when he’s buying people, and it’s in the months right after he’s getting money from the Ladies Association.
And you realize, well, of course, he’s buying people for the second plantation. And in some cases, when you trace that money, you realize the people he’s buying slaves from live near the new plantation, not near Mount Vernon. So he’s buying people to work the second plantation.
McNamara: It’s rather touching in the book when the African-American community re-congregates around Mount Vernon after the the Civil War.
Casper: Right. It’s their home.
McNamara: You mention a writer named J.T. Trowbridge, who visited Mount Vernon not long after the end of the Civil War. I looked up his book at Google Books, and I read his account of his visit. And there's a young girl, who is the Sarah of the book's title. So it is amazing that these people now have names.
Casper: Yes, Trowbridge, of course, never mentions her name. He never named her, but thanks to census records and Mount Vernon’s own employment records, it was possible to figure out whom he was talking to.
