On the evening of Dec. 14, 1799, somewhere between 10 and 11, George Washington took his last breath. On his mahogany-trimmed death bed in the south wing of his Mount Vernon mansion, the 67-year-old icon of American liberty passed his final moments surrounded by loved ones—his wife Martha, friends and his devoted personal secretary.
They weren’t the only people in the room. Washington’s enslaved valet stood watch over his bedside while three enslaved housemaids attended to his care and the mourners’ needs.
But who, exactly, were they mourning?
The inspiring military leader of a ragtag army that defeated the world’s greatest superpower? The visionary statesman who forged a new republic founded on the ideals of freedom?
Or the enslaver who, at his death, held 317 people in bondage at Mount Vernon? The conqueror who relentlessly pursued Native American land, trampled on Indigenous culture and embraced an Indian title meaning “town destroyer”?
Those are the seeming contradictions that George Washington University Associate Professor of History Denver Brunsman has grappled with throughout his career—as a Washington scholar, an instructor who’s led an undergraduate class at Mount Vernon for the last 15 years and the author of the new book “George Washington and His World.”
From an academic standpoint, Brunsman calls Washington “inescapable” in his historical scope and influence—his shadow looming, for better or worse, over every aspect of early American history. And whether on the page or in the classroom, Brunsman’s approach to the man and his legacy remains the same:
Don’t run away from the complexity—embrace it.
“George Washington was a slaveholder and he destroyed Native American communities, but he ensured liberty and representative government for the United States,” said Brunsman, chair of the History Department at the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. “Multiple things can be true. I don’t think one of these cancels out—or excuses—the other.”
Indeed, for students like Allie Jacobs, a senior international affairs and history major, Brunsman’s course upends assumptions about Washington—and challenges her to reconsider what she thought she knew about the Founding Father. “Washington isn’t a person who can be understood in black or white,” Jacobs said. “Engaging with those contradictions…makes our understanding of him more complete.”
No halo, no hatchet
Washington became a founding myth almost immediately after his death. With no national history to draw on, young America adopted Washington “as the King Arthur, the Romulus for the country,” Brunsman said. Writers and artists rushed to sanctify him as a secular saint. Nearly one-in-five books in the early 19th century related to Washington. In his painting “The Apotheosis of Washington,” artist John James Barralet invoked Jesus in depicting Washington rising from his coffin assisted by an angel and Father Time. The goddess Liberty and a Native American maiden mourn beside his tomb.
Others had little patience for the emerging cult of personality—like Abigail Adams who advised, “Simple Truth is his best, his greatest Eulogy.”
But uncovering that truth means stripping away centuries of baggage. The Founding Father’s legacy has been irrevocably clouded by slavery, a practice which Brunsman called “inseparable from the man.” Washington not only bought, sold and rented enslaved workers. He managed slave raffles, condoned physical violence and doggedly hunted runaways.
At the same time, he freed some slaves in his will—the only one of eight U.S. presidents who practiced slavery while in office to do so. And he permitted free Black people to serve in the Continental Army, presiding over the last integrated American Army until the Korean War.
“There is a surprising amount of good about him,” Jacobs said. “However, this certainly doesn’t outweigh the dramatic bad.”
He was hardly a friend to Native Americans either. Washington proudly inherited the nickname “Conotocarious”—the “town destroyer” title the Susquehannocks gave his great-grandfather. As president, he orchestrated a punitive philosophy that became the hallmark of American Indian policy for the next 100 years, highlighting forcible seizures of native land. Between 1790 and 1796, the U.S. spent $5 million—almost five-sixths of the total federal budget—fighting wars against Native Americans.
But in his class and his book, Brunsman points out Washington’s commendable qualities too. Derided by John Adams as “too illiterate, unlearned, unread for his station and reputation,” Washington was nevertheless exalted by Enlightenment voices for emphasizing free thought. By his death, his library contained an impressive 1,200 titles. He championed religious freedom, pledging that the American government “gives to bigotry no sanction.” And he valued the contributions of women, calling them “the best patriots America can boast.” He voluntarily gave up military power after the Revolutionary War and, Brunsman maintained, essentially invented the American presidency.
“I hope my students come to appreciate the humanity of George Washington,” Brunsman said. “He was somebody who had insecurities, who had aspirations and frustrations, who wrote bad love poetry. He was a three-dimensional person.”
Where Washington walked
On Monday mornings in the fall—as he has for the last 15 years—Brunsman takes his students to Washington’s Mount Vernon home in Virginia, about 20 miles south of Foggy Bottom, as part of his George Washington and his World class.
Touring the estate’s mansion, mill, farms and gardens, they trace the documents and the tangible objects that shaped his days—like the nets he used to support a lucrative fishing business and the foot-pedal fan chair he devised to cool himself in the sweltering Virginia summers.
“They literally walk where Washington walked,” said Brunsman, who came to GW specifically to teach the class and manage the department’s relationship with Mount Vernon. “I think you can’t help but feel a connection here.”
Students show up at his class with different views of Washington. Some are steeped in his mythology. Others barely know the cherry tree story. “Before taking the class, I was aware that there were a lot of myths surrounding Washington that were false, like the wooden teeth,” said Maggie Buttrick, a junior political science and history major, “but I was shocked to learn just how much of Washington, the man, was exaggerated into this monumental, untouchable figure.”
Washington’s reputation has waxed and waned with historical flashpoints. He was claimed by both the Union and Confederacy during the Civil War (the Confederacy put him on its currency) and by both pro-Nazi groups and Franklin Delano Roosevelt during World War II. In recent times, he’s been romanticized by the musical “Hamilton” and cast as a symbol of racial injustice in the wake of the 2020s Black Lives Matter movement.
“People project their own values and interpretations onto Washington,” Brunsman said. “They turn him into whomever they want him to be.”
Brunsman’s students are no different. When he started teaching the class, some were so devoted to the first president that he challenged them to think more critically about his historical record. Recently, many students are prepared to cancel his life and legacy on day one—with Brunsman encouraging them to consider his positive legacy.
“I’ve had students on both ends of the spectrum,” Brunsman said. “I try to help them see the full range of the things that he did. And I always stress that understanding him is not the same as excusing him.”
Brunsman’s own views have evolved as well—along with the way he teaches the course. Today, he emphasizes slavery more, a subject so central to Washington’s life that Brunsman can’t limit it to a week or two on the syllabus.
Ultimately, Brunsman said, Washington’s story is not confined to the past. While writing the book, he recognized reflections of today’s political polarization in the tensions that defined the father of the republic. “Maybe taking a close look at this remarkable life can help us appreciate the complexities in our country and ourselves,” he said.