Historical Empathy at George Washington’s Mount Vernon
By Allison Wickens, Educator & Historian
At George Washington’s Mount Vernon, we strive to help educators transform Washington, the marble man, into a human being in the eyes of their students. This tactic of humanizing historic figures whose legacies have been locked into American History narratives presents a challenge. A challenge that can be overcome using the teaching technique of historical empathy.
This is not an article about getting students to imagine themselves as Washington; empathy is often conflated with the concept of “walking in someone else’s shoes.” Historical empathy is the process of using historical thinking skills to understand Washington’s world and his decisions so that students can draw their own conclusions about his legacy. When done in good practice, this approach creates a deeper and more complex understanding of the individual, the times he lived in, and student’s own meaningful relationship with George Washington’s legacy and role in history. Empathy provides a greater understanding of the 18th century world.
One should always start with a puzzling or paradoxical question, something that contrasts the decisions of the historic figure from present day conventions and stimulates the curiosity of the students.[1] In this example, I would like to explore the question: “Did George Washington value anything more than National Unity when he gave up power in 1783 and 1797?” Since Washington’s legacy is born from his role in founding the nation and ensuring its ultimate success, this question challenges the students to think critically about the marble foundation to his statue-like persistence in our national narrative.
It’s a challenging question and if students think of contemporary political and military figures, they might identify a range of things that leaders today prioritize more than national unity, (national security, representing their political party’s interests, family life). By applying historical empathy, students should be able to put George Washington’s decisions in the context of his own time and not in comparison with national leaders today.
After posing the question, be sure you provide your students with solid context and chronology for the 18th century — both George Washington’s life and the young United States. An overview of his military, civic, and personal life along with the journey the nation went on during his leadership years. In this overview, do not shy away from the competing truths in the narratives we tell about the founding era. The regional, cultural, and racial differences within the nation provide rich context for students to grapple with this question.
Historical Empathy requires a wide range of sources, both primary and secondary. Mount Vernon has a digital encyclopedia that can provide rich background on any event or person central to Washington’s life. Primary sources that would shed light on this question should range from national founding documents to personal papers of Washington. I would recommend including three seminal public documents Washington put forward that express his opinion — The Circular to the States, the Farewell Address, and his Last Will and Testament. Students should ask not only what these documents say, but when were they written, for whom, and why. If students are to draw their own conclusions about his legacy, they should look at more than the documents he chose for the public to read and consider. Material produced by other historical figures and the popular press should provide multiple narratives. Personal correspondence about family life, business practice, and farm management may introduce a narrative more important than national unity since he decided not to run for President a third time.
A strong student response to this assignment should have a well-grounded argument but a tentative conclusion. The temporal distance that history demands ensures that the conclusion accepts the decisions of the historical figure because of the historical context. A figure like George Washington provides a wealth of written material, from his perspective, and from people who knew him well. Yet we cannot ever definitively conclude what he believed.
Another exercise in historical empathy is to do a similar exercise but with individuals who left no written record of their own. George Washington’s Mount Vernon tells not only the story of Washington, but also all the people that lived and worked at Mount Vernon in its 280 year history. In 1799, this included over 300 enslaved people working and living on the estate.
One of the challenges educators face in teaching about the institution of slavery is that the individuals it most greatly affected, the enslaved, are often dehumanized by the broad strokes used to describe the economic system that ensured their bondage. The challenge is counter to the exercise just outlined above in which we teach about George Washington with historical empathy, but in both cases, the goal is to make the historical figure and their decisions more human and understandable.
One question many students ask is “Why didn’t every slave just fight back or run away?” Historical empathy allows students to explore sources that create an understanding of a complex human being that has other factors affecting their life decisions, beyond their enslaved status. Once a student gains an understanding that a slave is more than their status of being owned, that they are family members, entrepreneurs, and community leaders, in addition to being enslaved, he or she has more factors to consider in interpreting the reasons for an individual slave’s decision.
Providing context, chronology, sources, and asking students to answer their question about a specific enslaved person is critical to this exercise in historical empathy. Our scholars at Mount Vernon have combed through thousands of small bits of evidence to provide narratives that illustrate individual lives that were previously hard to discern. In providing those sources to students the questions change”Why didn’t Kitty fight back?” “Why didn’t William Lee run away?” “Why did Ona Judge run away?” Individualizing the question and sources provides scaffolding to increase the complexity of student inquiry. Most notably, many of the primary and secondary sources help students see the familial relationships between these individuals and can ensure their thinking about the individual person as a family member as well as someone who is enslaved. Identifying new interpretations for historical figures ensures the complexity through which we see their decisions.
George Washington and his enslaved valet William Lee are historical figures whose choices do not always make sense by 21st century standards. Historical empathy is the tool to ensure students have a greater opportunity to gain a reliable third-person view of their goals, their reasoning, and the actions they took to solve the problems in their 18th century lives. This, in turn, will also give the students a deeper perspective on the unique nature of the time and place in which they currently live.
[1] Stuart J. Foster, “Historical Empathy in Theory and Practice,” in Historical Empathy and Perspective Taking in the Social Studies, ed. O.L. Davis Jr., Elizabeth Anne Yeager, Stuart J. Foster (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2001), 175.
Allison Wickens is Vice President of Education at George Washington’s Mount Vernon.
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