"Before elaborate monuments and lavishly funded libraries preserved the memories of our presidents, there was Mount Vernon. After George Washington's death in 1799, his home and tomb in Virginia became the first temple to a U.S. president, an 'American Westminster Abbey,' in the words of University of Nevada history professor Scott E. Casper. Yet, for many years the history of slavery at Mount Vernon remained hidden in plain sight behind its graceful, carefully maintained facade. Now, at last, Casper tells the story of the invisible men and women who worked the 8,000-acre riverfront estate for generations. While innumerable books have been written in recent years about the Founding Fathers, it's refreshing to read one in which slaves play a central part. Washington may have helped create our republic, but slaves built and upheld its economic infrastructure. In Sarah Johnson's Mount Vernon, Casper reminds us that they were founders, too . . . Casper builds his narrative largely around Sarah Johnson, who was born a slave at Mount Vernon in 1844 to a teenage mother and was trained as a domestic servant. After emancipation, she was employed by the Ladies Association as a cook and maid, keeping the estate ready for its daily visitors. She ?drew upon lessons from slavery days,' Casper writes, and ?played a featured role in the Mount Vernon that visitors saw, as she courteously sold them milk for five cents a glass.' On Sarah Johnson's death in 1920, the flags at Mount Vernon flew at half mast. The superintendent who ordered this gesture 'meant no statement about racial equality,’ Casper notes. 'In his words, the flag commemorated a "faithful ex-servant of M.V.," a woman who had earned respect by knowing her place.' But during her lifetime, she went from slave to landowner and even took on some managerial duties at Mount Vernon. Like most former slaves, Johnson was illiterate, which presents a challenge in telling her story; she did not leave behind any letters or diaries. The details of her life are drawn from the papers of people who owned her and those who eventually employed her, as well as documents and agreements that may have been read to her but that she could sign only with an 'X.' For a historian, it's difficult to capture a subject's voice without her own words. But Casper deftly uses the limited sources available to depict Johnson's life with an authenticity that is moving. At the same time, he intertwines her story with accounts of other black men and women who tended Mount Vernon over the years, many of them her relatives. And he shows how the lives of African Americans at Mount Vernon mirrored the changes taking place beyond the presidential shrine. By the time Johnson and her relatives left Mount Vernon, visitors were no longer arriving by integrated steamboats but by segregated street cars, a sign of the rise of Jim Crow. There is no marker at Mount Vernon commemorating Sarah Johnson's contribution to its preservation. Fortunately, Scott Casper has given her a written memorial, and it is altogether fitting and proper."?W. Ralph Eubanks, The Washington Post Book World

"[A] well-researched and welcome attempt to flesh out yet another national moment that fails to include the participation of African Americans?here, the efforts to preserve and protect the estate of George Washington. The choice of Mount Vernon as backdrop for an all-too-common story of black marginalization has more ironies than usual; the home of America’s first president and formative leader, Mount Vernon is a shrine that has functioned as a kind of stem cell for America itself?the source of its beginning and all its noble possibilities. But it is also the source of some of America’s foibles, starting with slavery. It is the space between the two that Casper explores, through the prism of black life at Mount Vernon. It’s a tough assignment. Casper must piece the prism together from many sources: newspapers, ledgers, court records, correspondence among the members of Mount Vernon’s governing body. But the efforts pay off. His account is evenhanded and scrupulously detailed, yet always emotionally connected to the life of housekeeper Sarah Johnson (1844-1920) and dozens of other blacks, slave and free, who lived and worked at Mount Vernon for generations in virtual anonymity. Casper is not as overtly indignant as, say, David Blight in his seminal book Race and Reunion, which recounts how the cause of black freedom and a black narrative were buried after the Civil War. Yet Casper argues for that narrative on every page, revealing small but significant facts?who moved in or moved on, who accepted what duties, who bought what land, who might be feeling hopeful or discouraged?that have cumulative power. Mount Vernon was a far more complicated place for black residents than for whites, because it represented three fundamentals that blacks were constantly trying to establish: work, home and a sense of national pride . . . Casper likens Mount Vernon to a theme park more than once. The danger of such a sacred place being turned into a 'catchpenny' circus was a concern voiced frequently by the MVLA as it struggled to stay above the forces of politics, economic reality and technological advances that eventually brought crowds to Mount Vernon on streetcars instead of Potomac River steamboats. Blacks admired for their old-time gentility and authenticity were also accused of running hustles, such as selling canes purportedly made from Mount Vernon’s trees. (Casper notes that visitors routinely cut their own canes and pilfered other souvenirs from Mount Vernon without being similarly condemned.) Blacks constantly strove to balance such burdens of representation with personal ambitions they realized whenever and however they could. But Casper admits that they were undermined both by Mount Vernon’s history and a larger national destiny of racial inequality. As Jim Crow became the law of the land, Sarah Johnson and other black employees were largely replaced by whites. The streetcars that appeared around the turn of the 20th century featured separate-but-equal seating. At Sarah’s death, the flag at Mount Vernon flew at half-mast?but she was buried in a black cemetery, several miles away. Today, Casper writes on the last page with a mixture of mettle and regret, 'Sarah Johnson’s name appears nowhere on George Washington’s hallowed grounds. But it will always be her Mount Vernon too.'"?Erin Aubry Kaplan, Los Angeles Times

"In Sarah Johnson's Mount Vernon, historian Scott E. Casper lays bear the unique narrative of America's first sacred shrine, capturing the dizzying complexity of an early American community largely unrecognized and misunderstood. After all, Mount Vernon, writes Casper, is 'a story not just of Washington but also of bla...