Hanover Square Press
432 Pages
In all three dozen or so books I’ve read on my George Washington portion of my Presidential Reading Project, First Family by Cassandra A. Good has to be the most disappointing and least fulfilling of them all. Good is supposedly an accomplished historian, but I wonder by what measure she was judged because this book is just poorly done. I always try to find redeeming qualities in all the books I review, but this one just does nothing for me. If this is the future of history writing in this country then we are in for a new Dark Ages in historical knowledge.
The subtitle of this book is the first part that really intrigued me when I saw this book: George Washington’s Heirs and the Making of America. While Washington did not have any children of his own, he adopted his wife’s two children from her first marriage. Even beyond that, they were the de facto adoptive parents of some of their grandchildren. How did these children fare living in the immense shadow of the father of our country. There was a lot of potential here. Instead, the book ended up being far more salacious than I expected. It was more fitting of a checkout aisle magazine than an accredited history book. Good revelled in the fact that Martha Washington’s children and grandchildren weren’t perfect.
For far too long, biographies of Washington and his family have been firmly in the realm of hero worship, often ignoring or glossing over most of the unsavory portions of their lives. I understand that more of the human side, with all our foibles, need to be researched and investigated. It helps to make a more nuanced biography over blind devotion. However, Good dwells on these facts like nothing else in their lives mattered other than their misdeeds. Like the neighborhood gossip peering over the fence, Good details these dark moments with sadistic glee while humbly reporting other issues with minimal explanation.
There is a trend in modern histories to minimize the stark realities of some of the ugly moments in our history. Authors and publishers don’t want to offend the fragile psychies of modern readers. In my opinion, this minimizes the impact of such events and diminishes the lives that were affected. At the same time that Good focused on the “evils” of Washington’s heirs, she minimized the effects of slavery on those very people. In the introduction, she called her credibility into question when she refused to type the word “slave,” instead opting to use (among other words) the word “bondsman.” The fact that she so misrepresented that latter word and that it passed the editors is reprehensible.
At one point in the book, she declared that Martha Washington would have a hard time making dinner after their chef “left one Sunday on a search for freedom.” This hippy-dippy attitude greatly diminishes the plight of the enslaved person. Her words make it sound like he was out on a Sunday drive rather than running away so he could be a free human being. Good’s words minimize the horrors of slavery, which actually undermines her argument of how awful it really was. Readers should be shocked by this ugly truth to help ensure it never happens again. Good fails as an historian in this matter and refuses to challenge the senses of her readers..
Another issue I have with this book is that there isn’t much narrative. Good simply cuts and pastes events onto the page rather than integrating it into the tapestry of the day. As a result, the timeline is disjointed and cumbersome. There is little to no flow in this book, which makes it difficult to digest. She offers little new information, and that which she does, she does poorly. This is an example of the worst of new history books, and is a trend which needs to cease.
I had high hopes for First Family by Cassandra A. Good when I first saw it on the bookshelf. However, those hopes were dashed with only a handful of pages read. This disjointed, vague, and emotionless history is a slap in the face to real history and history authors. The fact that it was nominated for the 2024 George Washington Prize shows me that standards have been lowered considerably. That is a dangerous slippery slope. In the age of misinformation, this book fails to rise above the fray to add anything of substance to the narrative of the lives of Washington and his family. Her pithy attempts to temper the truth only reinforce this brutal concept of misinformation.
Craig Bacon tries to find the best in every book. This one just didn’t have it. He believes that readers shouldn’t be protected from things they don’t like or understand. We will never learn or grow until we start to learn to be uncomfortable.
NEXT UP: A Revolutionary Friendship by Francis D. Cogliano