An Imperfect God cover art

An Imperfect God

George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

An Imperfect God

By: Henry Wiencek
Narrated by: Rick Adamson
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

 Washington was born and raised among blacks and mixed-race people; he and his wife had blood ties to the slave community. Yet as a young man he bought and sold slaves without scruple, even raffled off children to collect debts (an incident ignored by earlier biographers). Then, on the Revolutionary battlefields where he commanded both black and white troops, Washington's attitudes began to change. He and the other framers enshrined slavery in the Constitution, but, Henry Wiencek shows, even before he became president Washington had begun to see the system's evil, and he understood that the problem of this "peculiar institution" would be central to the American experience.

Wiencek's revelatory narrative, based on a meticulous examination of private papers, court records, and the voluminous Washington archives, documents for the first time the moral transformation culminating in Washington's determination to emancipate his slaves. He acted too late to keep the new republic from perpetuating slavery, but his repentance was genuine. And it was perhaps related to the possibility, as the oral history of Mount Vernon's slave descendants has long asserted, that a slave named West Ford was the son of George and a woman named Venus.

In this superb, nuanced portrait we see George Washington hi full both as a man of his time and a man ahead of his time.

©2003 Henry Wiencek (P)2003 Audio Renaissance, A Division Of Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC Americas Historical Military Modern Political Science Politicians Politics & Activism Politics & Government

Critic reviews

"The process of fathoming Washington's moral evolution is not a simple one...[Wiencek] rises to the challenge." ( The New York Times)
"This work of stylish scholarship and genealogical investigation makes Washington an even greater and more human figure than he has seemed before." ( Publishers Weekly)
"This gripping story of moral reform adds greatly to our understanding of this most remote of Founders." ( The Wall Street Journal)
No reviews yet