The home of our first president has come to symbolize the ideals of our nation: freedom for all, national solidarity, and universal democracy. Mount Vernon is a place where the memories of George Washington and the era of America's birth are carefully preserved and re-created for the nearly one million tourists who visit it every year. But, behind the familiar stories lies a history that visitors never hear. Sarah Johnson's Mount Vernon recounts the experience of the hundreds of African Americans who are forgotten in Mount Vernon's narrative.
Historian and archival sleuth Scott E. Casper recovers the remarkable history of former slave Sarah Johnson, who spent more than fifty years at Mount Vernon, before and after emancipation. Through her life and the lives of her family and friends, Casper provides an intimate picture of Mount Vernon's operation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, years that are rarely part of its story. Working for the Washington heirs and then the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, these African Americans played an essential part in creating the legacy of Mount Vernon as an American shrine. Their lives and contributions have long been lost to history and erased from memory. Casper restores them both, and in so doing, adds a new layer of significance to America's most popular historical estate.
"Scott E. Casper lays bare the unique narrative of America's first sacred shrine, capturing the dizzying complexity of an early American community largely unrecognized and misunderstood."
The Christian Science Monitor
"A fascinating look at a national shrine from another angle…. Casper deftly weaves his story of slaves and free blacks of Mount Vernon into the larger story of the plantation and its owners."
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Now, at last, Casper tells the story of the invisible men and women who worked the 8,000-acre riverfront estate for generations.... Casper deftly uses the limited sources available to depict Johnson's life with an authenticity that is moving."
