Description
"An Imperfect God," a biography of George Washington, holds that understanding Washington's relationship to African Americans is crucial to understanding his character and his role in founding the nation. Knowledge of Washington's contact with blacks and mixed-race people--slaves, indentured servants, and free people--remained dim and incomplete. "An Imperfect God" documents and describes the strange racial borderland inhabited by Washington, and delves into the psychology of the slaveholder. By meticulous examination of the documents, it attempts to reconstruct Washington's encounters with African Americans, and evaluates the oral history of Washington slave descendants who have long asserted that a slave named West Ford was the son of Washington and a slave named Venus. The evidence, while not conclusive, does suggest strongly that Ford was the son of one of the white Washingtons. This intensive analysis of documents such as county records, Washington's plantation records and private papers, and the papers of his relatives and families who did business with him became the core of "An Imperfect God."
