Transcript
Kelly Therese Pollack (0:00)
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollack. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app so you never miss an episode. And please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen to. When future general founding father and President George Washington was 11 years old, his father, Augustine Washington, died. Augustine was a wealthy planter and merchant, and when he died, he left young George several bequests in his complicated will, including a 280 acre farm in Virginia and 10 enslaved people. After his older half brother died, George acquired Mount Vernon and he continued to increase his holdings of both land and people. In 1759, when he was 26, Washington married wealthy widow Martha Dandridge Custis. Upon their marriage, Washington gained control of even more enslaved people, the dower slaves that remained tied to the Custis estate. Washington was not a passive slaveholder. He directed physical punishments and even occasionally hit enslaved people himself, he wrote in a letter in 1797, if the Negroes will not do their duty by fair means, they must be compelled to do it. When physical punishment wasn't enough, he occasionally sold enslaved people to plantations in the Caribbean and in what was known to be brutal conditions. When Washington lived as president in Philadelphia, then the nation's capital, he brought enslaved people with him. Because Pennsylvania law at the time granted the right to freedom to any enslaved person who had been resident in Philadelphia for six months or more, Washington directed a system of shifting enslaved people back and forth between Philadelphia and Virginia to ensure that they couldn't claim their freedom. In 1796, one of those enslaved people in the Washington presidential home escaped. Martha Washington's maid, Ona Judge, fled when they were preparing to return to Mount Vernon for the summer. Three years earlier, Washington had signed into law the Fugitive Slave Law, which gave enslavers the right to recapture by force if necessary, their slaves, who escaped even across state lines. And for years, Washington tried to track down and recapture Judge. At one point she promised to return, but only if the Washingtons promised to emancipate her after their deaths. Washington did not agree, writing, to enter into such a compromise with her, as she suggested to you, is totally inadmissible, for however well disposed I might be to gradual abolition or even to an entire emancipation of that description of people, if the latter Was in itself practicable at this moment. It would neither be politic nor just to reward unfaithfulness with a premature preference and thereby discontent beforehand the minds of all her fellow servants, who by their steady attachments are far more deserving than herself, of favor, unquote. Judge was never caught, and Washington's response highlights his contradiction. In thinking privately, though never publicly, Washington expressed concern about the institution of slavery both in terms of the morality of owning human beings and also in terms of the economic reality. By 1799, Washington felt he enslaved more people than he could profitably employ, and yet by that point, he was principled against selling negroes as you would do cattle in the market, unquote. And he especially did not want to separate family members. Washington never resolved these contradictions in his life. In December 1799, Washington died at age 67 of a throat infection, likely made worse by his doctor's treatments of bloodletting. As he was dying, Washington sent Martha to his study to retrieve two versions of his will. Once she returned with them, he reviewed both of them and instructed her to burn one in the fireplace and save the other. In Washington's final will, signed six months before he died, he wrote, upon the decease of my wife, it is my will and desire that all the slaves which I hold in my own right shall receive their freedom. Unquote. Of the 317 enslaved people at Mount Vernon at the time, 123 were owned outright by Washington and emancipated by his will, which also ensured that those too old or too young to support themselves would continue to be fed and clothed by his heirs. One person, his former valet William lee, was granted immediate freedom and an annuity of $30 for his faithful services during the revolutionary war. Despite his desire to avoid breaking up families, Washington's will did just that. The 123 enslaved people he freed and the dower slaves that he could not free lived as one intermixed community at Mount Vernon. In December 1800, Martha Washington signed a deed of manumission, freeing the 123 on January 1st of the following year. When she died in 1802, around 150 dower slaves were dispersed among her first husband's heirs. The 41 individuals Washington had been renting were also returned to their plantations and remained in slavery. The other three Virginia founding PresidentThomas, Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe all condemned slavery while themselves enslaving people. None of the three took the step Washington did to emancipate the people they enslaved upon their deaths, although Jefferson did emancipate a few people in his will, notably his own Sons. In 1929, the Mount Vernon Ladies association placed a commemorative marker at the site of the African American burial ground at Mount Vernon, though the marker referred to the enslaved people buried there as faithful colored servants of the Washington family. In 1983, a new memorial was installed at the site, designed by David Edge, an architecture student at Howard university. As of 2025, archaeologists have documented 87 unmarked burial site there. It's unknown how many enslaved individuals were buried at Mount Vernon because of the activism of the community of descendants of the enslaved people. A podcast called Intertwined explored the histories of the people enslaved at Mount Vernon, and a permanent exhibit at the site called Lives Bound Together tells the stories of some of those individuals. I'm joined in this episode by Dr. John Garrison Marks, the vice President of research and engagement at the American association for State and Local History and author of Thy Will Be George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory.
