John Garrison Marks — Thy Will Be Done
Historian John Garrison Marks and writer Clint Smith discuss George Washington's use of enslaved labor — and the contradictions that shaped America's founding mythology.
Why we picked this
A historian takes on Washington's slaveholding not as an asterisk to his legacy but as central to understanding what he actually built — and Clint Smith, one of the most thoughtful voices on American historical memory, is exactly the right interlocutor.
John Garrison Marks’s Thy Will Be Done examines George Washington’s relationship with slavery as a window into the compromises and contradictions embedded in the American founding. Drawing on archival research, Marks traces how Washington’s use of enslaved labor shaped his thinking about liberty, property, and governance — and how that legacy continues to structure American political life.
Clint Smith, whose How the Word Is Passed became one of the defining books about how Americans remember (and misremember) slavery, joins as conversation partner. Smith’s own work on historical sites of memory makes him an ideal interlocutor for a book grappling with what it means to build monuments to men whose lives were entangled with profound moral failures.
The event takes place at the Wharf, a few miles from Mount Vernon and blocks from the monuments the conversation interrogates. That geography is not incidental — this is the city Washington built, and this conversation is about what it cost.