This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History

Gage discusses George Washington’s travels through the newly founded United States of America as its first president. In 1789 and beyond, he toured the new states to foster a sense of national unity among a disparate people. Following his example, Gage began her own journey in her home region of Delaware County, Pennsylvania. Her first stops were Revolutionary War sites near Philadelphia. At the Brandywine Battlefield, she learned about a significant 1777 defeat for the Continental Army. She visited Valley Forge, the army’s bleak winter encampment of 1777-78. The site has been interpreted as the crucible where a disorganized militia was forged into a disciplined fighting force, largely through the efforts of the Prussian officer Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben.

In Philadelphia, Gage toured the Museum of the American Revolution, opened in 2017, which features Washington’s field tent as a central artifact symbolizing his democratic leadership. The museum presents the revolution from multiple perspectives, including those of white patriots, enslaved Black people, and the Oneida Nation, one of the few Indigenous communities that sided with the revolutionary troops. The exhibits reveal that the British, not the Americans, first offered freedom to enslaved men who joined their cause. They also show that the US failed to honor the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, which had guaranteed the Oneida’s claim to their land after the war. Gage concludes that founding documents like the Declaration of Independence were tools to aid future generations, including abolitionists and women’s rights advocates, in the fight for their own versions of liberty.

Gage explores the paradox of freedom and slavery in the early US through the story of Ona Maria Judge. Enslaved by the Washingtons, Judge was brought from Mount Vernon to serve as Martha Washington’s personal attendant in the presidential households in New York and Philadelphia. There, George Washington regularly rotated the enslaved members of his household out of the state to skirt the Pennsylvania law that required enslavers to free any enslaved people residing in the state for more than six months. In May 1796, rather than return to lifelong enslavement in Virginia, Judge self-emancipated and lived the rest of her life as a free woman in New Hampshire, successfully evading Washington’s attempts to recapture her.

Gage traveled to Virginia to see how this contradiction is handled at other historic sites. She found that Colonial Williamsburg now openly discusses its past as a town where more than half the population was enslaved. At Mount Vernon, she noted the interpretive shift from ignoring slavery to offering specific tours about the enslaved community, as well as adjustments in language from “slave” to “enslaved” and “plantation” to “forced-labor camp” (28). Gage notes that in his will, Washington arranged to free the 123 people he personally enslaved, but only after his wife’s death. 

Gage details how the tours of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello now incorporate the story of Sally Hemings, his late wife’s enslaved half-sister with whom he fathered at least six children. At James Madison’s Montpelier, visitors learn about Paul Jennings, who was enslaved by Madison but eventually purchased his freedom with help from Senator Daniel Webster and wrote the first White House memoir. Gage notes that a brief post-revolutionary period of voluntary emancipation in Virginia ended abruptly after the panic caused by Gabriel’s Rebellion, a planned uprising of enslaved people in 1800.

In 1824, the Marquis de Lafayette returned for a celebratory tour of the US. He visited the Virginia presidents and expressed his distaste for slavery before continuing west to Tennessee to meet a rising political star, Andrew Jackson, whom Lafayette praised as a worthy successor to George Washington. Gage traveled to Nashville, Tennessee, to explore Jackson’s legacy, which has undergone a dramatic reassessment. Once celebrated as a champion of the “common man,” Jackson is now widely seen as a symbol of American settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing.

Jackson built his reputation as a ruthless military commander, most notably in his 1814 campaign against the Red Sticks, a faction of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. His signature presidential policy was the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which mandated the expulsion of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee, and Seminole nations from their ancestral lands in the Southeast. The Cherokee Nation mounted a sophisticated resistance, adopting a US-style constitution, establishing a capital at New Echota, and creating a written language (syllabary) invented by Sequoyah.

The Removal Act narrowly passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 102 to 97; Tennessee Congressman David Crockett was the only member of his delegation to vote against it. In 1838, after a minority of Cherokee leaders signed a removal treaty under duress, the US Army forcibly removed more than 16,000 Cherokee people from their homes. They were forced to march west to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) on the Trail of Tears, a brutal journey on which as many as one in five people died.