Notes
A NOTE ON QUOTATIONS AND SOURCES
Quotations from Washington’s correspondence have been taken whenever possible from the authoritative edition, The Papers of George Washington (cited as Papers of GW), which is still in process as this book is being written, with forty-three volumes in print. The editors of the Papers have attempted to publish every item written and received by Washington, preserving the original spelling, grammar, and punctuation. The Papers volumes, edited by W. W. Abbot, Dorothy Twohig, Philander D. Chase, et al., are arranged chronologically in five series: Colonial, Revolutionary War, Confederation, Presidential, and Retirement. The thirty-nine-volume John C. Fitzpatrick edition of The Writings of George Washington (cited as Writings of GW), published in 1931–44, is limited to Washington’s own writings and is less accurate in its transcriptions. With one exception citations of Washington’s diaries refer to the six-volume Diaries of George Washington (Diaries of GW), edited by Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig, rather than to the Fitzpatrick edition.
Occasionally quotations have been taken from an original Washington manuscript in the Library of Congress. Remarkably, the Library of Congress Website makes available images of every Washington item in its collection, often with transcriptions from Fitzpatrick (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gwhtml/gwhome.html). Citations of items in the Papers, except references to editorial notes, are by date rather than page number to enable ready cross-reference to Fitzpatrick and the LC site. The entire Fitzpatrick edition of the Writings is available online in a searchable format (http://etext.virginia.edu/washington/fitzpatrick). The Website of The Papers of George Washington (http://gwpapers.virginia.edu) reproduces certain key documents, provides indexes to the volumes in print, and offers a number of articles, maps, and other resources about Washington. The Mount Vernon Website (http://www.mountvernon.org) also offers research articles and finding aids to its collection.
INTRODUCTION: THE GENERAL’S DREAM
1. Joseph Fields, ed., “Worthy Partner”: The Papers of Martha Washington (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994), pp. 321–22. The original letter has not been located; Fields derives the text from Benson J. Lossing, Mary and Martha: The Mother and the Wife of George Washington (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1886), pp. 324–26.
2. The Papers of George Washington, W. W. Abbot, Dorothy Twohig, Philander D. Chase, et al., eds. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980–), Retirement Series, 4:479.
3. Mount Vernon: A Handbook (Mount Vernon, Va.: Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, 1985), p. 81.
4. Patrick Henry quoted in David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 196; Jefferson to Edward Bancroft, January 26, 1789, quoted in Lucia Stanton, “Those Who Labor for My Happiness,” Peter Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), p. 147.
5. David Humphreys, David Humphreys’ “Life of General Washington,” Rosemarie Zagarri, ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), p. 78.
6. Quoted in John Corbin, The Unknown Washington (New York: Scribner, 1930), title page, p. 24; Abigail Adams and Nelly Custis quoted in Richard N. Smith, Patriarch (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), pp. 377, 25.
7. Sally Foster Otis to Mrs. Charles W. Apthorp, January 13, 1801, quoted in Allan C. Greenberg, George Washington, Architect (London: Andreas Papadakis, 1999), p. 17; Henry Wiencek, Mansions of the Virginia Gentry (Birmingham, Ala.: Oxmoor House, 1988), p. 12.
8. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 268–69.
9. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 1, GW to John Augustine Washington, May 31, 1754.
10. Clifford Dowdey, The Virginia Dynasties: The Emergence of “King” Carter and the Golden Age (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), p. 343.
11. Wendell Garrett, ed., George Washington’s Mount Vernon (New York: Monacelli Press, 1998), p. 60.
12. Mac Griswold, Washington’s Gardens at Mount Vernon (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), p. 95.
13. Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, New York: Scribner, 1948–57), 1:xv.
1. HOME GROUND
1. Wiencek, Mansions of the Virginia Gentry, p. 14.
2. Paul K. Longmore, The Invention of George Washington (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), p. 10.
3. Freeman, George Washington, 1:89.
4. Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 305, 224; Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), p. 145; Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 222.
5. Louise Pecquet du Bellet, Some Prominent Virginia Families (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1976), p. 776.
6. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men, 1850, electronic resource, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/EmeRepr.html, p. 634.
7. Martin H. Quitt, “The English Cleric and the Virginia Adventurer,” in Don Higginbotham, ed., George Washington Reconsidered (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), pp. 15ff.
8. Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, p. 29.
9. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 8, GW to John Posey, June 24, 1767; Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 378.
10. Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 374–78.
11. Carol Berkin, First Generations: Women in Colonial America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996), p. 8.
12. Freeman, George Washington, 1:15ff.
13. Quoted in Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 224.
14. George Washington, “Forms of Writing, and The Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation,” Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, George Washington Papers, 1741–99: Series 1 Exercise Books, Diaries, and Surveys; Subseries A Exercise Books.
15. Grizzard, Frank E., Jr., George Washington: A Biographical Companion (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2002), pp. 326–27.
16. George Washington Parke Custis, Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington, Benson J. Lossing, ed. (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1860), p. 129.
17. Ibid., p. 131.
18. Mason L. Weems, The Life of Washington, Marcus Cunliffe, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. xxxvii, 12. Cunliffe examines the evidence carefully and cannot condemn the cherry tree story: “The cherry-tree incident could have happened to any small boy let loose with a hatchet; the unforgivable offense, in critics’ eyes, was to moralize about it.”
19. Custis, Recollections, pp. 132–34.
20. Ibid., p. 122.
21. C. C. Haven, Thirty Days in New Jersey Ninety Years Ago, quoted in Richard Brookhiser, Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington (New York: Free Press, 1996), p. 30.
22. James Blair, quoted in “Virginia Gleanings in England,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 20 (1912): 373; see Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 318.
23. Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 312.
24. Ibid., p. 318.
25. Ibid., p. 317.
26. Quoted in Brookhiser, Founding Father, p. 122.
27. Ibid., p. 123.
28. Quoted in Longmore, Invention of George Washington, p. 174.
29. Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 317; Cato, A Tragedy, by Joseph Addison, in Ricardo Quintana, ed., Eighteenth Century Plays (New York: Modern Library, 1952).
30. Quoted in Benson J. Lossing, George Washington’s Mount Vernon (New York: Fairfax Press, 1977; reprint of The Home of Washington, 1870), p. 368.
31. Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 316.
32. James Thomas Flexner, George Washington, 4 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965–72), 4:493.
33. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 3, GW to Robert Dinwiddie, April 27, 1756.
34. The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745–1799, John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., 39 vols. (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1931–44), 16:313–14, GW to Robert Howe, September 20, 1779.
35. Writings of GW, 21:295, GW to Armand Louis de Gontaut Brione, Duc de Lauzun, February 26, 1781.
36. Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, Under Their Vine and Fig Tree, Metchie J. E. Budka, ed. and trans. (Elizabeth, N.J.: Grassman Publishing, 1965), pp. 86–87.
37. Writings of GW, 35:296–98, GW to Joseph Whipple, November 28, 1796.
38. Humphreys, Life of General Washington, p. 6.
39. Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake & Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), p. 9 n. 12; Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), p. 80; Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 388.
40. Scott L. Malcomson, One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), pp. 36–37; Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 387.
41. William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619, 13 vols. (Richmond, 1819–23), 2:260.
42. Ibid., 2:490.
43. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, pp. 8–9, 13.
44. Ibid., p. 12; Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 388 n. 14.
45. Pierre Marambaud, William Byrd of Westover 1674–1744 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1971), pp. 168–69.
46. Jordan, White Over Black, p. 82.
47. Marambaud, William Byrd, pp. 170–71.
48. Ibid., pp. 170–71, 167.
49. Ibid., p. 173; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, p. 61, table 10.
50. Freeman, George Washington, 1:88–89; Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book, Edmund Morris Betts, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 46.
51. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, p. 81; Freeman, George Washington, 1:88–89; Grizzard, George Washington, pp. 326–27.
52. Custis, Recollections, p. 15.
53. Freeman, George Washington, 1:84.
54. Daniel Meaders, Dead or Alive: Fugitive Slaves and Indentured Servants Before 1830 (New York: Garland, 1993), p. 60.
55. Freeman, George Washington, 1:90.
56. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, p. 282.
57. Ibid., pp. 356–57.
2. ON THE BORDERLAND
1. Custis, Recollections, pp. 127–28.
2. Westmoreland County Orders, May 31, July 28, September 29, November 29, 1732; February 27, March 29, May 29–30, September 26, November 28–29, 1733; Library of Virginia, Richmond.
3. Westmoreland County Orders, March 26, 1751.
4. Hening, Statutes at Large, 3:87, 4:133.
5. Westmoreland County Orders, May 26, 1752; Anita Wills, “In the Planter’s House: Three Generations of Servants to George Washington’s Family,” African American Genealogical Society of Northern California (AAGSNC), http://www.aagsnc.org/columns/jan99col.htm; James Laray and Robert M. Dunkerly, “Remembering a Servant Family: The Bowdens and Popes Creek Plantation,” White House Studies 1, no. 2:268.
6. Wills, “In the Planter’s House.”
7. Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 187ff.
8. Tommy L. Bogger, Free Blacks in Norfolk, Virginia, 1790–1860: The Darker Side of Freedom (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), pp. 14–17.
9. Wills, “In the Planter’s House.”
10. Flexner, George Washington, 1:41.
11. Freeman, George Washington, 1:198–99.
12. Flexner, George Washington, 1:23–24.
13. Brookhiser, Founding Father, pp. 110–11.
14. Flexner, George Washington, 1:42.
15. The Diaries of George Washington, Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig, eds., 6 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976–79), 1:18.
16. Flexner, George Washington, 1:37.
17. Diaries of GW, 1:33.
18. W. W. Abbot, The Young George Washington and His Papers, lecture presented at the University of Virginia, February 11, 1999 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), pp. 11–15; Grizzard, George Washington, p. 85; Mary V. Thompson, “‘Admiring the … Richness of the Land’: George Washington and the Frontier,” unpublished research paper, Mount Vernon, passim; John E. Ferling, “School for Command: Young George Washington and the Virginia Regiment,” Washington and the Virginia Backcountry, Warren R. Hofstra, ed. (Madison, Wis.: Madison House, 1998), pp. 199–217.
19. Diaries of GW, 1:119–28.
20. Ibid., 1:144, 132; Grizzard, George Washington, pp. 85–86.
21. Diaries of GW, 1:132; Thompson, “Admiring the Richness,” p. 26; Grizzard, George Washington, pp. 116, 118.
22. Grizzard, George Washington, p. 351.
23. Ibid., p. 118.
24. Ibid., pp. 33–35; Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 1, GW to John Augustine Washington, July 18, 1755.
25. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 4, GW to Richard Washington, April 15, 1757.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., vol. 6, “George Mercer to a friend,” 1760.
3. THE WIDOW CUSTIS
1. Niemcewicz, Under Their Vine, p. 103; Flexner, George Washington, 1:191, 230.
2. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, 6:202–09 n.
3. Custis, Recollections, pp. 449–502; LC, GW Papers, Series 5 Financial Papers, 1750–72, Ledger Book 1 (also known as Ledger A), p. 38.
4. Fields, Papers of Martha Washington, pp. xx–xxi; Freeman, George Washington, 2: picture caption after p. 299.
5. James B. Lynch, Jr., The Custis Chronicles: The Virginia Generations (Camden, Maine: Picton Press, 1997), p. 38.
6. Fields, Papers of Martha Washington, p. 90.
7. Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 318.
8. Lynch, Custis Chronicles, p. 39.
9. Ibid.
10. Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 320.
11. Ibid.; Lynch, Custis Chronicles, pp. 50–51.
12. Fields, Papers of Martha Washington, p. 424–25; Lynch, Custis Chronicles, pp. 102, 6, 54.
13. Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 292.
14. Lynch, Custis Chronicles, p. 107.
15. Ibid., p. 95; Philip D. Morgan, “Interracial Sex in the Chesapeake,” Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture, Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, eds. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), pp. 52–55.
16. Lynch, Custis Chronicles, p. 2; Jo Zuppan, “Father to Son, Letters from John Custis IV to Daniel Parke Custis, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, January 1990, p. 99.
17. Lynch, Custis Chronicles, p. 101.
18. Ibid., pp. 96–97.
19. Freeman, George Washington, 2:294–95.
20. Ibid., 2:293.
21. Lynch, Custis Chronicles, p. 112.
22. Freeman, George Washington, 2:291–94.
23. Custis, Recollections, p. 20 n.
24. Lynch, Custis Chronicles, p. 87.
25. Ibid., p. 100; Fields, Papers of Martha Washington, p. 440 n. 93.
26. “Diary of John Blair,” William and Mary Quarterly 7, no. 3 (January 1899): 152; Communication from Dr. David Stone, UVA School of Medicine.
27. Morgan, “Interracial Sex in the Chesapeake,” pp. 53–54.
28. Custis, Recollections, p. 20 n; Henry Wiencek, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 94–98.
29. Freeman, George Washington, 2:293; Flexner, George Washington, 1:189.
30. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 6, GW to John Alton, April 5, 1759.
31. Freeman, George Washington, 3:19–22; Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 6, GW to Robert Cary & Company, May 1, 1759.
32. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, 6:81–93, 202–09.
33. Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 381.
34. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 6, GW to Richard Washington, September 20, 1759.
35. Custis, Recollections, pp. 163, 165–171.
36. Fields, Papers of Martha Washington, p. 126; Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 6, p. 282.
37. Lynch, Custis Chronicles, pp. 131–32.
38. Washington, D.C., Land Records, Liber H, #8, p. 382, Recorder of Deeds.
39. Special Report of the Commissioner of Education on the Condition and Improvement of Public Schools in the District of Columbia, 41st Congress, 2d Session, Ex. Doc. No. 315, submitted to the Senate June 1868 and to the House June 1870 (Government Printing Office, 1871), pp. 203–04.
40. Diaries of GW, 1:222.
4. A LIFE HONORABLE AND AMUSING
1. Diaries of GW, 1:245.
2. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 6, GW to Robert Cary & Company, August 10, 1760.
3. Freeman, George Washington, 3:53, 54, 63.
4. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 7, GW to Robert Cary & Company, September 27, 1763; GW to Robert Stewart, April 27, 1763.
5. The Diaries of George Washington 1748–1799, John C. Fitzpatrick, ed. 4 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 1:27–28.
6. Freeman, George Washington, 3:44.
7. T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 127.
8. Ibid., p. 129.
9. Ibid., pp. 130–31.
10. Freeman, George Washington, 3:48.
11. Breen, Tobacco Culture, pp. 129–30.
12. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 8, GW to Robert Cary & Company, June 6, 1768.
13. Ibid., Invoice from Robert Cary & Company, September 28, 1768.
14. Lorena S. Walsh, “Slavery and Agriculture at Mount Vernon,” Slavery at the Home of George Washington, Philip J. Schwarz, ed. (Mount Vernon, Va.: Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, 2001), p. 56.
15. Breen, Tobacco Culture, p. 128.
16. Freeman, George Washington, 3:64–65; LC, GW Papers, Ledger Book 1 (Ledger A), p. 36.
17. Papers of GW, Confederation Series, vol. 6, GW to Alexander Spotswood, February 13, 1788; Presidential Series, vol. 1, GW to Arthur Young, December 4, 1788.
18. Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories (New York: Noonday Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), p. 321.
19. Fritz Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery: A Documentary Portrayal (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), p. 33; Bernhard Knollenberg, George Washington: The Virginia Period 1732–1775 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1964), p. 90.
20. Diaries of GW, 1:232–34.
21. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 5, Humphrey Knight to George Washington, September 2, 1758.
22. Knollenberg, George Washington, pp. 85, 123–34.
23. Diaries of GW, 2:83.
24. Papers of GW, Retirement Series, vol. 1, GW to James McHenry, May 29, 1797.
25. Ibid., Presidential Series, vol. 1, GW to John Fairfax, January 1, 1789.
26. Writings of GW, 33:11–12, GW “To the Overseers at Mount Vernon.”
27. Diaries of GW, xvii.
28. Quoted in Jean B. Lee, “Mount Vernon Plantation: A Model for the Republic,” Slavery at the Home of George Washington, p. 13; Walsh, “Slavery and Agriculture,” p. 57; Diaries of GW, 1:xvii.
29. Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery, p. 32; Walsh, “Slavery and Agriculture,” pp. 56–59.
30. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 7, Advertisement for Runaway Slaves, August 11, 1761; Robert F. Dalzell, Jr., and Lee Baldwin Dalzell, George Washington’s Mount Vernon: At Home in Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 130.
31. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 9, James Hill to GW, February 5, 1773.
32. Ibid., vol. 7, pp. 67–68.
33. Diaries of GW, 1:309.
34. E-mail communication from Frank Grizzard.
35. Interview with Jinny Fox, January 2002.
36. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 9, James Hill to GW, August 30, 1772.
37. Writings of GW, 33:188–95, GW to William Pearce, December 18, 1793; 33:252–56, GW to Pearce, January 26, 1794; LC, GW Papers, Pearce to GW, Plantation Report, February 1, 1794.
38. Writings of GW, 33:195–207, GW to Pearce, December 22, 1793.
39. Writings of GW, 33:309, GW to Pearce, March 30, 1794.
40. Mary V. Thompson, “And Procure for Themselves a Few Amenities: The Private Life of George Washington’s Slaves,” Virginia Cavalcade 48, no. 4 (Autumn 1999): 183.
41. Writings of GW, 33:132–33, GW to Henry Lee, October 16, 1793; Papers of GW, Presidential Series, vol. 9, GW to Charles Vancouver, November 5, 1791.
42. Writings of GW, 34:501–02, GW to Pearce, March 20, 1796.
43. Quoted in Mary V. Thompson, “‘I Never See That Man Laugh to Show His Teeeth’: Relationships between Blacks and Whites at George Washington’s Mount Vernon,” unpublished research paper, Mount Vernon, pp. 3–4.
44. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 9, GW to Daniel Jenifer Adams, July 20, 1772; Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery, pp. 12, 18.
45. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 9, GW to Gilbert Simpson, February 23, 1773; Simpson to GW, July 1773.
46. Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 209–12.
47. Dalzell and Dalzell, George Washington’s Mount Vernon, pp. 132–34.
48. LC, GW Papers, Ledger Book 1 (Ledger A), pp. 37, 230; Papers of GW, Revolutionary Series, vol. 2, Lund Washington to GW, November 24, 1775; Colonial Series, 10:137, 138 n. 2, “List of Tithables,” c. July 1774; Retirement Series, 4:528, “Negros Belonging to George Washington.”
49. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 9, James Hill to GW, July 2, 1773.
50. Anne Gorham, “The People Shall Be Cloathed,” unpublished research paper, Mount Vernon.
51. Papers of GW, Retirement Series, 4:463–64.
52. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 9, James Hill to GW, August 30, 1772; Hill to GW, July 1773; Hill to GW, December 13, 1772.
53. Writings of GW, 32:366, GW to Whiting, March 3, 1793.
54. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 9, James Hill to GW, February 5, 1773; Hill to GW, May 11, 1773.
55. Writings of GW, 33:193, 309, GW to William Pearce, December 18, 1793, March 30, 1794.
56. Writings of GW, 33:188–95, GW to William Pearce, December 18, 1793; 33:308–10, GW to Pearce, March 30, 1794.
57. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 7, Cash Accounts: January 1762, August 1763, April 1766, May, August 1766, June 1767; Lund Washington to GW, March 30, 1767.
58. Nan Netherton, Donald Sweig, Janice Artemel, Patricia Hickin, and Patrick Reed, Fairfax County, Virginia: A History (Fairfax, Va.: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 1977), pp. 66–67.
59. Fairfax County Orders, November 21, 1771, Library of Virginia.
60. Fairfax Parish Vestry Book, November 27, 1766, November 28, 1768, Library of Virgnia.
61. Fairfax County Orders, November 21, 1771.
62. Ibid., December 23, 1770, November 22, 1768, October 24, 1769, July 1765; August 23, 1765, May 20, 1766.
63. Fairfax County Minute Book, October 21, 1765, Library of Virginia.
64. Fairfax County Orders, February 20, 1770.
65. Ibid., February 20, 1770, March 19, 1770.
66. Ibid., May 21, 1770, November 21, 1770, March 19, 1771.
67. Ibid., February 21, 1769, December 19, 1769.
68. Quoted in Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 367.
69. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 8, Cash Accounts, October 1767, May 1768; LC, GW Papers, Ledger 1, p. 261.
70. Ibid., vol. 7, Cash Accounts, June 1766; GW to Joseph Thompson, July 2, 1766.
71. Writings of GW, 32:366, GW to Whiting, March 3, 1793.
5. A SCHEME IN WILLIAMSBURG
1. Diaries of GW, 2:190; Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 8, Cash Accounts: November, December 1769; GW to Robert Cary & Company, August 20, 1770.
2. Diaries of GW, 2:58–59, 193–203; Jane Carson, “Plantation Housekeeping in Colonial Virginia” (Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1974), microform, p. 69; Mary R. M. Goodwin, “Washington in Williamsburg” (Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1954), microform, n.p.
3. Carl Bridenbaugh, Seat of Empire: The Political Role of Eighteenth-century Williamsburg, (Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1950), p. 32.
4. Flexner, George Washington, 1:236–37, 267.
5. Diaries of GW, 2:196.
6. Henry Wiencek, The Smithsonian Guides to Historic America: Virginia and the Capital Region (New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1989), pp. 188–89.
7. William Clinton Ewing, The Sports of Colonial Williamsburg (Richmond: Dietz Press, 1937), pp. 11, 13–14.
8. Dowdey, Virginia Dynasties, p. 175.
9. Elizabeth Cometti, Social Life in Virginia During the War for Independence, Edward M. Riley, ed. (Williamsburg, Va.: Virginia Independence Bicentennial Commission, 1978), p. 12; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, p. 99.
10. Landon Carter, The Diary of Colonel Landon Carter of Sabine Hall, 1752–1778, Jack P. Greene, ed., 2 vols. (Richmond: Virginia Historical Society, 1987), 2:618, August 21, 1771.
11. Ewing, Sports of Colonial Willamsburg, pp. 17–20.
12. Cometti, Social Life in Virginia, p. 19; Ewing, Sports of Colonial Williamsburg, p. 33.
13. Ewing, Sports of Colonial Williamsburg, p. 3; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, pp. 99–100.
14. Humphreys, Life of General Washington, p. 62; Gretchen Schneider, “Public Behavior at the Governor’s Palace, A Look at Eighteenth-century Gentle Persons” (Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1981) microform, pp. 14–15.
15. Schneider, “Public Behavior,” pp. 17–18.
16. Ibid., pp. 3–14.
17. Humphreys, Life of General Washington, p. 60.
18. Michael Olmert, Official Guide to Colonial Williamsburg (Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1985), p. 43.
19. Wiencek, Virginia and the Capital Region, 196; Bridenbaugh, Seat of Empire, pp. 29, 32; Wiencek, Mansions of the Virginia Gentry, p. 14 caption.
20. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 8, Cash Accounts, May 1769, p. 194 n. 10; Carson, “Plantation Housekeeping,” p. 20; Breen, Tobacco Culture, pp. 208–09; Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, July 23, 1767, October 27, 1768.
21. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 8, GW to Jonathan Boucher, May 30, 1768; December 16, 1770.
22. Ibid., Boucher to GW, May 21, 1770.
23. Ibid., Boucher to GW, November 19, 1771; vol. 9, Boucher to GW, January 19, 1773; Knollenberg, George Washington, p. 175 n. 26.
24. Custis, Recollections, pp. 34–35.
25. Fields, Papers of Martha Washington, p. 147.
26. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 8, GW to Boucher, July 27, 1769.
27. Diaries of GW, 2:194–95; Lynch, Custis Chronicles, pp. 133–34.
28. Diaries of GW, 2:199–200.
29. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 9, GW to Burwell Bassett, June 20, 1773.
30. Freeman, George Washington, 3:130.
31. Flexner, George Washington, 1:250–51.
32. Netherton et al., Fairfax County, p. 69.
33. Knollenberg, George Washington, p. 101.
34. Ibid., pp. 101–2.
35. Ibid. Much of this section on Washington’s elections is based on the analysis of Paul Longmore in The Invention of George Washington, pp. 56–67.
36. Longmore, Invention of George Washington, pp. 64–65.
37. Bridenbaugh, Seat of Empire, pp. 7, 36.
38. Ibid., pp. 2–3, 6, 7.
39. Ibid., p. 17.
40. Ibid., p. 10.
41. Edmund S. Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” Journal of American History 59, no. 1 (June 1972): 29.
42. Ibid., pp. 22–24.
43. Ibid., pp. 6, 27–29.
44. Longmore, Invention of George Washington, pp. 73–74.
45. Netherton et al., Fairfax County, p. 84.
46. Bridenbaugh, Seat of Empire, p. 13; Freeman, George Washington, 3:113–23.
47. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 10, GW to Bryan Fairfax, August 24, 1774.
48. Freeman, George Washington, 3:169–70; Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), pp. 94–95.
49. Longmore, Invention of George Washington, p. 80.
50. John E. Ferling, The First of Men: A Life of George Washington (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), p. 97.
51. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 8, GW to George Mason, April 5, 1769.
52. Freeman, George Washington, 3:208 n. 151.
53. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 7, GW to Robert Cary & Company, August 10, 1764; Longmore, Invention of George Washington, p. 72.
54. Rind’s Virginia Gazette, June 1, 1769; Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 82–84; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, p. 251.
55. Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), p. 137.
56. Ibid., p. 139.
57. Ibid., pp. 137–39; http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/images/vc36p1.jpg: Howell v. Netherland, April 1770, Reports of Cases Determined in the General Court of Virginia (Charlottesville, 1829), pp. 90–93.
58. Bruton Parish Register, Births and Baptisms, Swem Library Special Collections, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Va., pp. 53–65.
59. Thomas N. Ingersoll, “‘Releese us out of this Cruell Bondegg’: An Appeal From Virginia in 1723,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d. ser., 51, no. 4 (October 1994): 777–82.
60. Dan Eggen, “A Taste of Slavery Has Tourists Up in Arms: Williamsburg’s New Skits Elicit Raw Emotions,” Washington Post, July 7, 1999, Final Edition, p. A1.
61. Colonial Williamsburg Interpreter 20, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 29–30.
62. Ibid., p. 29.
63. Ibid.
64. Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991), p. 366.
65. Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), p. 12.
66. Ibid., pp. 12, 36.
67. Leon F. Litwack, “Forgotten Heroes of Freedom,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1999, p. 116.
68. Mark R. Wenger, Carter’s Grove: The Story of a Virginia Plantation (Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1994), p. 16.
69. Henry Wiencek, Plantations of the Old South (Birmingham, Ala.: Oxmoor House, 1988), p. 15.
70. Helen Jones Campbell, Diary of a Williamsburg Hostess (New York: Putnam, 1946), p. 4.
71. Ibid., p. 26.
72. Eliza Baker, “Memoirs of Williamsburg, Virginia,” report taken by Elizabeth Hayes of a conversation between Eliza Baker and the Reverend Dr. W.A.R. Goodwin, May 4, 1933, Dr. W.A.R. Goodwin Records, Colonial Williamsburg Archives, Williamsburg, Va.
73. Kammen, Mystic Chords, pp. 368, 552.
74. Christy Coleman Matthews, “A Colonial Williamsburg Revolution,” History News 54, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 6; James Oliver Horton, “Presenting Slavery,” Public Historian, Fall 1999, pp. 19ff.
75. Colonial Williamsburg Interpreter 20, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 30.
76. Rind’s Virginia Gazette, April 14, 1768, October 19, November 23, 1769.
77. The other raffle managers who sat in the First Continental Congress were Richard Henry Lee, Benjamin Harrison, and Edmund Pendleton.
78. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 8, Guardian Accounts, May 1769, Cash Accounts, June 1770; David John Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 1721–1803: A Biography, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), 1:144, 182, 205–06, 335 n. 152; Freeman, George Washington, 3:111, 192–93.
79. Freeman, George Washington, 3:165–76; Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, pp. 95–96; Breen, Tobacco Culture, pp. 103–05.
80. Knollenberg, George Washington, p. 103; Holton, Forced Founders, pp. 79–82; Freeman, George Washington, 3:264–65.
81. Rind’s Virginia Gazette, October 19, 1769.
82. Freeman, George Washington, 3:240 no. 64.
83. Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, pp. 63–64.
84. Rind’s Virginia Gazette, November 2, 1769.
85. Rind’s Virginia Gazette, October 13, 1768, advertisement for a sale on the 31st; Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, p. 97.
86. Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 1:335 n. 169.
87. Karen E. Sutton and Kathy Thompson, “Corrected Research Plan for ‘Forever Here,’ Williamsburg, Virginia, Slave Descendants Oral History Project, February 11, 2000,” unpublished research report, pp. 19–20.
88. Papers of GW, Revolutionary Series, vol. 2, Lund Washington to GW, December 3, 1775.
89. Jefferson quoted in Ferling, First of Men, p. 257.
6. “SO SACRED A WAR AS THIS”
1. Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), pp. 17–19.
2. Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. xxix; Philip D. Morgan and Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, “Arming Slaves in the American Revolution,” from a forthcoming work edited by Christopher L. Brown and Philip D. Morgan on arming slaves from antiquity to the modern era, to be published by Yale University Press; I am grateful to Professor Morgan for allowing me to consult the manuscript (unpaginated).
3. Kaplan and Kaplan, Black Presence, p. 34.
4. Brookhiser, Founding Father, pp. 177, 179; Pete Maslowski, “National Policy Toward the Use of Black Troops in the Revolution,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 73 (1972): 3.
5. Otis quoted in Gary B. Nash, Race and Revolution (Madison, Wis.: Madison House, 1990), p. 8.
6. Adams quoted in Kaplan and Kaplan, Black Presence, p. 15.
7. GW quoted in Ferling, First of Men, p. 103.
8. Ibid., pp. 86–87.
9. Knollenberg, George Washington, p. 108.
10. Flexner, George Washington, 1:322, 324, 326.
11. Ibid., 1:324–25, 327.
12. Ibid., 1:328.
13. Netherton et al., Fairfax County, pp. 105, 107.
14. Papers of GW, Colonial Series, vol. 10, GW to George William Fairfax, May 31, 1775.
15. Flexner, George Washington, 1:331.
16. Ibid., 1:334, 342–43.
17. Papers of GW, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 1, GW to Martha Washington, June 18, 1775.
18. Flexner, George Washington, 1:344–45.
19. Ferling, First of Men, p. 124.
20. Papers of GW, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 1, GW to Richard Henry Lee, July 10, August 29, 1775; GW to Lund Washington, August 20, 1775; Ferling, First of Men, p. 127.
21. Ferling, First of Men, p. 127.
22. John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), pp. 126–27, 305 n. 19.
23. Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, p. 72; Philip S. Foner, Blacks in the American Revolution (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975), pp. 96, 175.
24. Morgan and O’Shaughnessy, “Arming Slaves”; Shy, A People Numerous and Armed, pp. 36–37.
25. Morgan and O’Shaughnessy, “Arming Slaves.”
26. Shy, A People Numerous and Armed, pp. 126–27.
27. Kaplan and Kaplan, Black Presence, p. 21.
28. Ibid., p. 19.
29. John C. Dann, ed., The Revolution Remembered: Eyewitness Accounts of the War for Independence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 27–28.
30. Maslowski, “National Policy,” p. 2.
31. Papers of GW, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 1, GW to John Hancock, July 10–11, 1775, Council of War, July 9, 1775.
32. Maslowski, “National Policy,” p. 2.
33. Swett quoted in Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, p. 14; Papers of GW, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 2, Council of War, October 8, 1775.
34. Papers of GW, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 2., General Orders, November 12, 1775.
35. Dann, Revolution Remembered, pp. 392–93.
36. Maslowski “National Policy,” p. 4; Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, pp. 19–32.
37. Papers of GW, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 2, GW to Richard Henry Lee, December 26, 1775; Maslowski, “National Policy,” p. 4.
38. Papers of GW, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 2, GW to Lund Washington, December 3, 1775.
39. Ibid., General Orders, December 30, 1775.
40. Ibid., GW to John Hancock, December 31, 1775.
41. Arabus case quoted in Hartford Courant: http://courant.ctnow.com/projects/bhistory/arabusa.htm; Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, p. 184; Ferling, First of Men, p. 132.
42. Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, pp. 16–17.
43. Papers of GW, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 2, Phillis Wheatley to GW, October 26, 1775.
44. Ibid.
45. Sparks quoted in William H. Robinson, Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982), p. 52.
46. Papers of GW, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 3, GW to Joseph Reed, February 10, 1776.
47. Memoir of Margaretta Matilda Odell, quoted in William H. Robinson, Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings (New York: Garland, 1984), p. 431.
48. Charles W. Akers, “Our Modern Egyptians,” Journal of Negro History, July 1975, p. 398; Kaplan and Kaplan, Black Presence, p. 182.
49. Robinson, Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings, pp. 19, 433.
50. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Mister Jefferson and the Trials of Phillis Wheatley,” 31st Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, March 22, 2000, Washington, D.C., n.p.; The Poems of Phillis Wheatley, Julian D. Mason, Jr., ed., rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 53.
51. Akers, “Our Modern Egyptians,” pp. 406–07.
52. Frank Shuffelton, “On Her Own Footing: Phillis Wheatley in Freedom,” Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould, eds. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), p. 187.
53. Papers of GW, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 3, GW to Phillis Wheatley, February 28, 1776.
54. Robinson, Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings, p. 52.
55. Jefferson quoted in Mason, Poems of Phillis Wheatley, p. 30.
56. Walter H. Mazyck, George Washington and the Negro (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1932), pp. 44–45.
57. Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery, pp. 90–91; Grizzard, George Washington, pp. 347–49.
58. Shy, A People Numerous and Armed, p. 127; Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 18–19; Morgan and O’Shaughnessy, “Arming Slaves.”
59. Foner, Blacks in the American Revolution, p. 186.
60. Mark M. Boatner III, Encyclopedia of the American Revolution (New York: David McKay, 1966), pp. 647–57; David McCullough, “What the Fog Wrought,” What If? The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, Robert Cowley, ed. (New York: Putnam, 1999), p. 193.
61. McCullough, “What the Fog Wrought,” p. 197.
62. Ibid., p. 199.
63. Kaplan and Kaplan, Black Presence, p. 46.
64. Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery, p. 148.
65. Ibid., pp. 148–49; Boatner, Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, p. 424.
66. John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), p. 38.
67. Ibid., pp. 47, 57, 58.
68. Gregory D. Massey, John Laurens and the American Revolution (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000), p. 133.
69. Ibid., p. 89.
70. Ibid., pp. 8–11; Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), pp. 190–91.
71. Massey, John Laurens, p. 93.
72. Quarles, Nergo in the American Revolution, p. 60; Massey, John Laurens, pp. 93–95.
73. Massey, John Laurens, p. 63; Maslowski, p. 7.
74. Maslowski, “National Policy,” p. 8.
75. Massey, John Laurens, pp. 96–97.
76. Marshall Smelser, The Winning of Independence (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972), pp. 269–70.
77. Massey, John Laurens, pp. 130–31.
78. Grizzard, George Washington, p. 144; Massey, John Laurens, p. 125.
79. Harold C. Syrett, ed., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 27 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961–87), 2:17–18, Hamilton to John Jay, March 14, 1779.
80. Writings of GW, 14:267 n, Laurens to GW, March 16, 1779.
81. Ibid., 14:267, GW to Laurens, March 20, 1779.
82. Ibid., 10:400, GW to The Committee of Congress with the Army, January 29, 1778.
83. Writings of GW, 14:147–49, GW to Lund Washington, February 24, 1779.
84. Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery, pp. 27–28; LC, Ledger Book 2 (Ledger B), p. 156.
85. http://memory.loc.gov/ammen/amlaw/lwjc.html—Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–89, 18:385–89, March 29, 1779.
86. Massey, John Laurens, p. 133.
87. Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, pp. 63–64.
88. Massey, John Laurens, p. 156.
89. Foner, Blacks in the American Revolution, p. 64.
90. Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, pp. 64–65; Foner, Blacks in the American Revolution, pp. 64–65.
91. Foner, Blacks in the American Revolution, p. 64; Massey, John Laurens, p. 208; William W. Freehling, “The Founding Fathers and Slavery,” American Historical Review 77, no. 4 (February 1972): 84; Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders, p. 143.
92. Papers of GW, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 3, GW to Burwell Bassett, February 28, 1776.
93. GW quoted in Thomas Fleming, Liberty! The American Revolution (New York: Viking, 1997), p. 200.
94. James McHenry quoted in Gerald Edward Kahler, “Gentlemen of the Family: General George Washington’s Aides-de-Camp and Military Secretaries,” M.A. thesis, University of Richmond, 1997, p. 84.
95. Shy, A People Numerous and Armed, p. 161.
96. Boatner, Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, pp. 400, 426–30; Flexner, George Washington, 2:237.
97. Boatner, Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, p. 1137.
98. Ibid., pp. 1056–57, 1137.
99. Patricia L. Hudson and Sandra L. Ballard, The Smithsonian Guide to Historic America: The Carolinas and the Appalachian States (New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1989), pp. 83–87.
100. Boatner, Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, pp. 1034–37, 1152–55, 1029, 1152.
101. Diaries of GW, 3:356.
102. Kaplan and Kaplan, Black Presence, p. 34; Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, p. xxviii.
103. Catherine Read Williams, Biography of Revolutionary Heroes; Containing the Life of Brigadier General William Barton, and Also, of Captain Stephen Olney (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1839), p. 276.
104. Freeman, George Washington, 5:370.
105. Robert A. Selig, “Storming the Redoubts,” MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History 8, no. 1 (Autumn 1995): 18–27; Burke Davis, The Campaign That Won America: The Story of Yorktown (New York: Eastern Acorn Press, 1997), pp. 225–29; Williams, Biography of Revolutionary Heroes, pp. 273–79; Brendan Morrissey, Yorktown 1781: The World Turned Upside Down (Oxford, England: Osprey, 1997), pp. 64–71; Henry P. Johnston, The Yorktown Campaign and the Surrender of Cornwallis 1781 (New York: Eastern Acorn, 1981), pp. 140–47.
106. Freeman, George Washington, 5:372; Johnston, Yorktown Campaign, p. 147.
107. Robert A. Selig, “A German Soldier in America, 1780–1783: The Journal of Georg Daniel Flohr,” William and Mary Quarterly 50, no. 3 (July 1993): 575–90; Selig, “The Revolution’s Black Soldiers,” Colonial Williamsburg 19, no. 4 (Summer 1997): 15–22 (online: www.AmericanRevolution.org).
108. Johann Ewald, Diary of the American War: A Hessian Journal, Joseph P. Tustin, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 335–36; Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), p. 130.
109. Fenn, Great Smallpox Epidemic, p. 130.
110. Selig, “The Revolution’s Black Soldiers.”
111. Condemned slave quoted in Malcomson, One Drop of Blood, p. 187.
7. A DIFFERENT DESTINY
1. Writings of GW, 21:385, GW to Lund Washington, March 28, 1781; Flexner, George Washington, 2:445–47.
2. “A Poem on the Death of General Washington,” quoted in Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery, p. 72.
3. Ellen Gibson Wilson, The Loyal Blacks (New York: Capricorn Books, 1976), p. 52.
4. Dictionary of American Negro Biography, Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston, eds. (New York: Norton, 1982), pp. 16–17; John Salmon, “A Mission of the Most Secret and Important Kind: James Lafayette and American Espionage in 1781,” Virginia Cavalcade, Autumn 1981, pp. 78–85.
5. Salmon, “Mission of the Most Secret,” p. 80.
6. Ibid., pp. 82–85.
7. Massey, John Laurens, pp. 165–66, 201, 211, 287 n. 59.
8. Wilson, Loyal Blacks, p. 48, 59 n. 23.
9. Ibid., p. 43.
10. Ibid., pp. 43, 49; Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, pp. 167–81.
11. Wilson, Loyal Blacks, p. 49.
12. Writings of GW, 26:370, GW to Governor Benjamin Harrison, April 30, 1783.
13. Wilson, Loyal Blacks, pp. 52–55; Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, pp. 168–69; Writings of GW, 26:401, GW to Harrison, May 6, 1783.
14. Wilson, Loyal Blacks, pp. 55–56.
15. Ibid., pp. 56–57; Wiencek, Hairstons, p. 48.
16. Wilson, Loyal Blacks, p. 41; Selig, “The Revolution’s Black Soldiers.”
17. Mary Beth Norton, “The Fate of Some Black Loyalists of the American Revolution,” Journal of Negro History 58, no. 4 (October 1973): 404–09; Wilson, Loyal Blacks, pp. 41–42, 47.
18. Lamin Sanneh, Abolitionists Abroad (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 98; Wilson, Loyal Blacks, pp. 383–96.
19. Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery, pp. 122–23.
20. Lafayette quoted in Lloyd Kramer, Lafayette in Two Worlds (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 201; Mount Vernon: A Handbook, p. 50.
21. Lafayette quoted in Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery, p. 121; Lafayette to John Adams, February 22, 1786, quoted in Lafayette College Website: http://ww2.lafayette.edu/∼library/special/specialexhibits/slaveryexhibit/onlineexhibit/lifetimepassion.htm.
22. Kramer, Lafayette in Two Worlds, p. 218.
23. Writings of GW, 26:300, GW to Marquis de Lafayette, April 5, 1783.
24. Papers of GW, Confederation Series, vol 2., William Gordon to GW, August 30, 1784; ibid., vol. 3, Lafayette to GW, July 14, 1785, February 6, 1786; Peter Buckman, Lafayette (London: Paddington Press, 1977), pp. 122–23.
25. Papers of GW, Confederation Series, vol. 4, GW to Lafayette, May 10, 1786.
26. Buckman, Lafayette, p. 123; Dorothy Twohig, “‘That Species of Property’: Washington’s Role in the Controversy Over Slavery,” http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/articles/slavery/index.html, also in George Washington Reconsidered, Don Higginbotham, ed. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001).
27. Jefferson quoted in Shy, A People Numerous and Armed, p. 24; Papers of GW, Confederation Series, vol. 4, GW to John Jay, August 15, 1786.
28. Writings of GW, 28:503, GW to the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, August 1, 1786; ibid., 29:51, GW to James Madison, November 5, 1786; Ferling, First of Men, pp. 348–52, 355.
29. Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery, p. 171.
30. Farrand quoted in Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery, p. 172.
31. Ferling, First of Men, p. 357.
32. The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Max Farrand, ed., searchable by key words in the quotations at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwfr.html.
33. Ibid.
34. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, p. 62.
35. Joseph Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York: Knopf, 2000), p. 94; Twohig, “That Species of Property.”
36. Records of the Federal Convention.
37. Ibid.
38. Papers of GW, Confederation Series, vol. 4, GW to Lafayette, May 10, 1786.
39. Ibid., vol. 3, GW to James McHenry, August 22, 1785.
40. Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery, p. 177.
41. GW’s Letter to Congress, September 17, 1787, in Records of the Federal Convention.
42. Ellis, Founding Brothers, p. 119; Papers of GW, Confederation Series, vol. 6, GW to Lafayette, February 7, 1788: GW actually wrote, “It appears to me, then, little short of a miracle, that the Delegates from so many different States … should unite in forming a system of national Government.”
43. LC, Thomas Jefferson Papers Series 1, General Correspondence, Thomas Jefferson to Walter Jones, January 2, 1814, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/mtjhtml/mtjhome.html.
44. Butler quoted in Ferling, First of Men, pp. 362–64.
45. Humphreys, Life of General Washington, p. 78.
46. Ibid., p. xxii. Rosemarie Zagarri, editor of the Humphreys biography, concludes that the “direct quotes and paraphrases of private conversations” most likely date between the fall of 1788 and April 1789.
47. Writings of GW, 33:385, GW to Tobias Lear, May 6, 1794.
48. Ibid., 14:147–49, GW to Lund Washington, February 24, 1779.
49. Ellis, Founding Brothers, pp. 85, 97, 99.
50. Ibid., pp. 117–18.
51. Writings of GW, 31:28–30, GW to David Stuart, March 28, 1790.
52. Ibid., 33:78–79, 174–83, GW to Arthur Young, September 1, December 12, 1793.
53. Ibid., 31:49 n. 93, Stuart to GW, March 15, 1790; GW to Stuart, June 15, 1790.
54. Ibid., 34:47, GW to Alexander Spotswood, November 23, 1794.
55. Humphreys, Life of General Washington, p. 54.
8. “A SORT OF SHADOWY LIFE”
1. Virginius Dabney, Liberalism in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1932), pp. 76–77.
2. Chesnut quoted in Donna Lucey, I Dwell in Possibility: Women Build a Nation 1600–1920 (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2001), p. 86.
3. Carter quoted in Lucey, I Dwell in Possibility, p. 90.
4. Mrs. Edward Carrington, “A Visit to Mount Vernon,” William and Mary Quarterly, April 1938, p. 201.
5. Interview with Mary V. Thompson, Research Specialist, Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association.
6. Marcia Carter to Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, January 7, 1981, Mount Vernon Curatorial Records, Washingtoniana Unowned.
7. Marcia Carter to Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, January 21, 1981.
8. Album, Elizabeth L. Van Lew, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond; e-mail communication from Professor Elizabeth R. Varon, Wellesley College.
9. John Parke Custis to Martha Washington, July 5, 1773, quoted in Papers of GW, Colonial Series, 9:266 n. 2; Knollenberg, George Washington, pp. 76, 174 n. 17.
10. John Parke Custis to GW, August 8, 1776, quoted in Custis, Recollections, p. 537.
11. Lossing, Mary and Martha, pp. 150–51 n.
12. Ellen McCallister Clark, Martha Washington: A Brief Biography (Mount Vernon, Va.: Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, 2002), p. 39; Lynch, Custis Chronicles, pp. 155, 158.
13. Ann’s husband had the last name of Costin and an unknown first name. Since they were slaves, their marriage was extralegal and no official record of it was kept. There is no mention of a Costin in Mount Vernon’s records, but GW seldom recorded surnames of slaves and, furthermore, slaves often kept their surnames private. The Costin name appears in records of Accomack County on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, where the Custis family had property, suggesting that Ann’s husband was a Custis slave with roots on the Eastern Shore. The marriage ended either by death or by separation; Ann later used the surname Holmes, apparently from a second marriage. For Law’s emancipations, see Washington, D.C., Land Records, Liber H, #8, p. 382; Liber R, #17, p. 288.
14. Thomas Law to Mrs. Tucker, July 1, 1829, Papers of Thomas Law, Tracy W. McGregor Library, 1803–34, Accession #2801, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.
15. Law to Charles Rumbold, January 10, 1832, Papers of Thomas Law.
16. Donald M. Sweig, “‘Dear Master’: A Unique Letter from West Ford Discovered,” Fairfax Chronicles 10, no. 2 (May–July 1986): 1–5.
17. Eugene A. Foster et al., “Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Last Child”; Eric S. Lander and Joseph J. Ellis, “DNA Analysis: Founding Father,” both in Nature 396, no. 6706 (November 5, 1998), pp. 27, 13; Foster et al., “The Thomas Jefferson Paternity Case,” Nature 397, no. 32 (January 7, 1999), p. 32; Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Research Committee, Report on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (Charlottesville, Va.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 2000), p. 10. The West Ford story had garnered some publicity earlier: Robert Jackson, “George Washington in Family Apple Tree, Black Sisters Say,” Rocky Mountain News (Denver), November 4, 1996, p. 24A; Lucy Howard and Carla Koehl, “Tracing a Very Familiar Face?” Newsweek, November 25, 1996, p. 8. The story gained much wider currency in the wake of the Jefferson-Hemings controversy.
18. Nicholas Wade, “After Jefferson, a Question About Washington and a Young Slave,” New York Times, July 7, 1999, p. A12; Reed Irvine, “Mainstream Media Allows Smear of Washington, But Not Bill Clinton,” August 9, 1999, via LexisNexis search; Richard Brookhiser, “Father of His Country, Only; George Washington Faces a Bad Rap,” National Review 51, no. 15 (August 9, 1999): 28.
19. [Benson J. Lossing,] “Mount Vernon As It Is,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 18, no. 106 (March 1859): 444–45; Lossing, George Washington’s Mount Vernon, pp. 352–53.
20. Description of West Ford in free register quoted in Henry S. Robinson, “Who Was West Ford?” Journal of Negro History 66, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 171.
21. Linda Allen Bryant, I Cannot Tell a Lie: The True Story of George Washington’s African-American Descendants (San Jose: Writer’s Showcase, 2001), p. 411; Illinois State Register (Springfield), January 17, 1937. The Website westfordlegacy.com contains an archive of articles and other information about West Ford.
22. J. A. Rogers, Sex and Race: A History of White, Negro, and Indian Miscegenation in the Two Americas, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, Fla.: Helga M. Rogers, 1942), vol. 2: Sex and Race: The New World, p. 222.
23. Thomas Grubisich, “Register of Freed Slaves Bares Fairfax County ‘Roots,’” Washington Post, February 8, 1977, p. B1.
24. Judith Saunders Burton, “A History of Gum Springs, Virginia: A Report of a Case Study of Leadership in a Black Enclave,” Ed.D. dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1986, p. 21.
25. Wade’s New York Times article states, “the cousins say that they have known one another only since 1994,” but Bryant’s book (I Cannot Tell a Lie, pp. 397–98) suggests that the Allens and Burton made contact by telephone in 1985 after the National Enquirer published an article about West Ford that mentioned Burton.
26. Frontline, May 6, 2000; Jeremy Manier, “Father of Our Country May Have Been a Dad: Family from Peoria Is Pursuing Genetic Link to Washington,” Chicago Tribune, March 26, 2000, p. 1; CBS Sunday Morning, February 29, 2000.
27. Grizzard, George Washington, pp. 179–80, 328–29, 331; Gerald T. Dunne, “Bushrod Washington and the Mount Vernon Slaves,” Yearbook 1980, Supreme Court Historical Society, pp. 25–29.
28. Bushrod Washington’s will quoted in Robinson, “Who Was West Ford?,” p. 170.
29. John Terry Chase, Gum Springs: The Triumph of a Black Community (Fairfax, Va.: Heritage Resources Program of the Fairfax County Office of Comprehensive Planning, 1990), p. 13; Burton, “History of Gum Springs,” pp. 14–16; Robinson, “Who Was West Ford?,” p. 170.
30. List of Tithables and Taxable Property taken by order of the Westmoreland County Court of March 28, 1786, filed June 27, 1786 (I am grateful to Prof. Philip J. Schwarz, Virginia Commonwealth University, for providing me with a transcription of this document). The 1831 Fairfax County register of free blacks states Ford’s age as forty-seven, suggesting a birth date in 1784; the register entry dated 1839 gives his age as fifty-four, for a birth date of 1785; Lossing’s Harper’s article stated vaguely that in 1858 (the year of the interview) Ford was in his seventy-second year, for a birth date of 1786 or 1787; Ford’s 1863 obituary in the Alexandria Gazette puts his age at seventy-nine for a birth date in 1784. Hannah Washington’s will is recorded in Westmoreland County Deeds and Wills, Book 20, April 26, 1801, p. 211; the clause relating to West Ford is quoted in Robinson, “Who Was West Ford?,” p. 167; Robinson’s transcription omits a crucial phrase: “my dear husband left me in his will the following slaves to dispose of as I chose at my death provided I gave them to our own children the slaves are as follows.…” (emphasis added). Miriam Caravella, “The Black Heirs of George Washington,” 1975, unpublished research report, author’s collection.
31. John W. Wayland, The Washingtons and Their Homes (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 1998; reprint of 1944 edition), pp. 122–25.
32. Westmoreland County Deeds and Wills, Book 18, pp. 6–10. The version of John Augustine Washington’s will in the county’s book is not the true original of the will; it is a copy made by county clerks from the original sheaf of papers in the testator’s handwriting, which was presented to the court by Bushrod and Corbin. The will was recorded in a confusing way. It has two parts: the 1784 will on pp. 6–8 and the 1785 codicil on p. 9 (p. 10 is an appendix stating that bond was posted). Pages 6–8 present an apparently seamless document written all at once, but p. 9 makes it clear that the testator added interlineations to the original 1784 document in 1785. After inserting phrases between the lines, John Augustine wrote the codicil attesting to the authenticity of the additions. When the clerks copied the document, they incorporated the insertions without identifying them as such. Wayland copied the text from pp. 6–8 and made only passing reference to the codicil. Thus his published version is misleading as to the chronology of the will’s composition.
33. William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (New York: Vintage, 1990), pp. 250, 254.
34. Wayland, The Washingtons and Their Homes, pp. 122–23.
35. Hannah’s will quoted in Robinson, “Who Was West Ford?,” p. 167.
36. Mount Vernon’s research on this point is cited in Wade, “After Jefferson, a Question.”
37. Papers of GW, Confederation Series, vol. 3, John Augustine Washington to GW, July 17, 1785.
38. Papers of GW, Confederation Series, vol. 2, John Augustine Washington to GW, July 1784, alludes to Corbin’s July 1784 visit to Mount Vernon. It is unlikely that GW would have engaged in an illicit sexual encounter when his wife might discover it. In October 1784 Martha was confined to bed with a severe illness: on his return to Mount Vernon from his trip in early October, the general found “a very sickly family … Mrs Washington has been very unwell—Miss Custis very ill”: ibid., GW to William Gordon, November 3, 1784.
39. Lucey, I Dwell in Possibility, p. 114; Alex Bontemps, “Seeing Slavery: How Paintings Make Words Look Different,” www.common-place.org, vol. 1, no. 4, July 2001.
40. Visiting officer, William North, quoted in Flexner, George Washington, 3:24; former slave, Rev. Ishrael Massie, quoted in Charles L. Perdue, Jr., et al., eds., Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), p. 207.
41. Writings of GW, 34:501–02, GW to William Pearce, March 20, 1796.
42. Papers of GW, Presidential Series, vol. 1, GW to Arthur Young, December 4, 1788.
43. Diaries of GW, 5:439. The family resemblance is indeed startling: in Wade’s New York Times article (“After Jefferson, a Question”) Philander Chase, editor of the George Washington papers, is quoted as saying, “If you compare pictures of West Ford with Bushrod Washington they look a lot alike.”
9. THE GREAT ESCAPE
1. Jack D. Warren, Jr., The Presidency of George Washington (Mount Vernon, Va.: Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, 2000), p. 1; Flexner, George Washington, 3:173; Peter R. Henriques, America’s First President: George Washington (Fort Washington, Pa.: Eastern National, 2002), p. 38.
2. Freeman, George Washington, 6:165.
3. Henriques, America’s First President, pp. 43–44; Ellis, Founding Brothers, pp. 120–121.
4. Brookhiser, Founding Father, pp. 73–75.
5. Evelyn B. Gerson, “A Thirst for Complete Freedom: Why Fugitive Slave Ona Judge Staines Never Returned to Her Master, President George Washington,” M.A. thesis, Extension Studies, Harvard University, June 2000, p. 53.
6. Ibid., p. 58.
7. Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery, p. 72.
8. Gerson, “Thirst for Complete Freedom,” pp. 65–66; Custis, Recollections, p. 422–24.
9. Flexner, George Washington, 4:432. Flexner believes a runaway servant named John Cline was a slave, but no slave by that name appears in GW’s records.
10. Writings of GW, 37:573–74, GW to Tobias Lear, April 12, 1791.
11. LC, GW Papers, Tobias Lear to GW, June 5, 1791.
12. Henriques, America’s First President, p. 45; Brookhiser, Founding Father, p. 76.
13. Brookhiser, Founding Father, p. 76.
14. Warren, Presidency of George Washington, p. 13; Henriques, America’s First President, p. 46.
15. Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery, p. 191.
16. Ibid., pp. 176–77.
17. Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders, p. 99.
18. Edward Lawler, Jr., “The President’s House in Philadelphia: The Rediscovery of a Lost Landmark,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 126, no. 1 (January 2002): 5–96; Stephan Salisbury and Inga Saffron, “Echoes of Slavery at Liberty Bell Site,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 24, 2002; Stephan Salisbury, “Proposed Wording on Slave Quarters Draws Fire,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 31, 2002; Dinitia Smith, “Slave Site for a Symbol of Freedom,” New York Times, April 20, 2002; Associated Press, “Dispute As Slavery Is Not Mentioned,” November 1, 2002; www.ushistory.org/presidentshouse; Stephen Mihm, “Liberty-Bell Plan Shows Freedom and Slavery,” New York Times, April 23, 2003, p. G22.
19. Gerson, “Thirst for Complete Freedom,” p. 75 n. 101.
20. Ibid., p. 82.
21. Ibid., p. 87.
22. “Washington’s Runaway Slave,” Granite Freeman (Concord, N.H.), May 22, 1845, p. 1.
23. Writings of GW, 35:201, GW to the Secretary of the Treasury, September 1, 1796.
24. Fields, Papers of Martha Washington, p. 287; Gerson, “Thirst for Complete Freedom,” p. 112; “Washington’s Runaway Slave,” Granite Freeman, p. 1.
25. LC, GW Papers, Joseph Whipple to Oliver Wolcott, Jr., September 10, 1796; Writings of GW, 35:201, GW to the Secretary of the Treasury, September 1, 1796.
26. LC, GW Papers, Whipple to Wolcott, October 4, 1796.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Writings of GW, 35:296–98, GW to Joseph Whipple, November 28, 1796.
31. Ibid.
32. “Washington’s Runaway Slave,” Granite Freeman, p. 1.
33. Gerson, “Thirst for Complete Freedom,” pp. 93–95.
34. Gerson, “Thirst for Complete Freedom,” p. 147.
35. LC, GW Papers, Bartholomew Dandridge to GW, June 1, 1796; Writings of GW, 35:135, GW to John Dandridge, July 11, 1796.
36. Writings of GW, 35:296–98, GW to Joseph Whipple, November 28, 1796.
37. LC, GW Papers, Joseph Whipple to GW, December 22, 1796.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Papers of GW, Retirement Series, vol. 4, GW to Burwell Bassett, Jr., (August 11), 1799.
41. Gerson, “Thirst for Complete Freedom,” pp. 109–11.
10. MRS. PETER’S PATRIMONY
1. Armistead Peter, Tudor Place (Georgetown [Washington, D.C.], 1969), p. vii.
2. Peter, Tudor Place, pp. ix, 38, 40, 50; Sarah Booth Conroy, “Washington’s Granddaughter Slept Here,” Washington Post, June 5, 1988, p. F1.
3. Peter, Tudor Place, pp. 75, 79.
4. Account Book of Thomas Peter, MS-2, Thomas and Martha Custis Peter Papers, Box 1, Folder 19, Tudor Place Manuscript Collection.
5. The slaves Arbour, Toney, and Dinah appear in GW’s farm records; members of the Twine family are mentioned in his records, a letter, and his will.
6. Writings of GW, 34:452, GW to David Stuart, February 7, 1796; LC, GW Papers, David Stuart to GW, February 25, 1796 (I am grateful to the editors of the Papers for providing an accurate transcription of this crucial, unpublished letter).
7. Writings of GW, GW to William Pearce, January 27, 1796.
8. GW quoted in Warren, Presidency of George Washington, p. 88; Todd Estes, “The Art of Presidential Leadership: George Washington and the Jay Treaty,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 109, no. 2 (2001): 127–58.
9. The letters between GW and Stuart reveal that even GW did not understand the legal technicalities of the division of the Custis slaves, a transaction made extremely complex by ambiguities in a 1778 contract between Jacky Custis and the Washingtons (Lynch, Custis Chronicles, pp. 147–48) and by a 1785 change in Virginia’s inheritance laws (I am grateful to Mary Thompson for information on the 1785 legal revision). Papers of GW, Retirement Series, vol. 1, GW to Samuel Stanhope Smith, May 24, 1797; Lynch, Custis Chronicles, pp. 229–31. G.W.P. Custis had children with slaves: Lynch, Custis Chronicles, p. 5, Thompson, “‘I Never See That Man Laugh’,” pp. 39–41.
10. Writings of GW, 34:500, GW to William Pearce, March 20, 1796.
11. THE JUSTICE OF THE CREATOR
1. Flexner, George Washington, 4:339.
2. Niemcewicz, Under Their Vine, 102–3.
3. Ibid., p. 84.
4. Ibid., p. 92.
5. Ibid., p. 93.
6. Ibid., pp. 87–88.
7. Ibid., p. 103.
8. Louis Philippe, Diary of My Travels in America, translated from the French by Stephen Becker (New York: Delacorte Press, 1977), pp. 32–33. A visitor to Mount Vernon in 1833 made a similar observation: “Among the females was a Mulatto so light as to show the red in her cheeks, very modest and intelligent. The blood of some offshoots of the W. family no doubt ran in her veins”: Tap. Wentworth to John S. Burleigh, March 12, 1833, Mount Vernon Collection, A-259, M-1294.
9. Parkinson quoted in Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery: 58.
10. Writings of GW, 34:193, GW to William Pearce, May 10, 1795; ibid., 32:277, GW to Anthony Whiting, December 23, 1792.
11. Writings of GW, 34:379, GW to Pearce, November 29, 1795; ibid., 34:12, GW to Pearce, November 2, 1794; ibid., 31:465, GW to Oliver Evans, January 25, 1792; ibid., 34:145, GW to Pearce, March 15, 1795.
12. Writings of GW, 33:196, GW to Pearce, December 22, 1793; Anthony Whiting to GW, January 16, 1793, quoted in Mary V. Thompson, “‘A Mean Pallet’: Housing of the Mount Vernon Slaves,” unpublished research report, Mount Vernon, p. 11; Writings of GW, 33:177–78, GW to Arthur Young, December 12, 1793; Papers, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 2, Lund Washington to GW, December 10, 1775.
13. Niemcewicz, Under Their Vine: 104; LC, David Stuart to GW, February 25, 1796.
14. Fairfax County Will Book H, pp. 180–81.
15. GW’s remarks to John Bernard quoted in Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery, p. 78.
16. Papers of GW, Retirement Series, vol. 4, GW to Lawrence Lewis, September 20, 1799; ibid., GW to Robert Lewis, August 17, 1799.
17. Fields, Papers of Martha Washington, pp. 272–73, 321–22; Flexner, George Washington, 4:149. The authenticity of the dream letter has been challenged by the Washington scholar Peter Henriques, who points out several questionable elements, including reference to “the summer house,” a structure that did not exist at Mount Vernon in Washington’s time: Peter R. Henriques, The Death of George Washington: He Died As He Lived, Mount Vernon: Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, 2000, p. 77, n. 23. I believe the dream’s occurrence is factual. Lossing derived much of his information from G.W.P. Custis and his daughter, Mary Custis Lee, the wife of Robert E. Lee. It is likely that the story was passed orally from Martha to her Custis descendants, who conveyed it to Lossing, who framed the story in a fictitious letter as a literary device, adding sentimental details. Lossing’s text appears in Mary and Martha, pp. 324–26. The editor of MW’s letters, Joseph E. Fields, guardedly accepted its authenticity. The letter illustrates the difficulty of evaluating an apparently garbled and edited oral history and the danger of discarding it because of inconsistencies. Similarly, Freeman wrestled with evaluating the historical value of G.W.P. Custis’s memoir of Washington. Referring to a story in Custis’s Recollections, which had been challenged: “[It] is florid and is somewhat overwritten but it is the testimony of Mrs. Washington’s grandson and it either must have come from her or must have been invented.… In all probability it was told Parke Custis by Mrs. Washington.… [A] long lapse of time bars Custis’s story as historical evidence of a sort to be accepted in all detail but does not necessarily brand it as evidence to be disregarded altogether. Known facts are in part confirmatory.” (Freeman, George Washington, 2:402–3.) Likewise, the disputed dream letter mentions an illness Martha is known to have suffered in September 1799.
18. Henriques, The Death of GW, passim; White McKenzie Wallenborn, M.D., “George Washington’s Terminal Illness: A Modern Medical Analysis of the Last Illness and Death of George Washington,” http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/articles/wallenborn/index.html.
19. Clark, Martha Washington, pp. 52–53.
20. Custis, Recollections, pp. 157–58; The Last Will and Testament of George Washington and Schedule of His Property: To Which Is Appended the Last Will and Testament of Martha Washington, John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., Mount Vernon: Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, 1992, p. 61; John P. Riley, “Written with My Own Hand: George Washington’s Last Will and Testament,” Virginia Cavalcade, vol. 48 no. 4, Autumn 1999, pp. 171–72; Edward Coles to James Madison, January 8, 1832, Edward Coles Papers, Princeton University Library. No descriptive account of the emancipation of GW’s slaves has been found. Mary V. Thompson writes, “In December 1800, Martha Washington signed a deed of manumission for her deceased husband’s slaves, a transaction which is recorded in the abstracts of the Fairfax County, Virginia, Court Records. They would become free on January 1, 1801”: Mary V. Thompson, “‘The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret’: George Washington and Slavery,” np, http://mountvernon.org/library/research/Regret.html.
21. LC, Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820.
22. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia [electronic resource], Charlottesville: University of Virginia Library, Electronic Text Center, 1993, transcribed from: Writings, selected [and edited] by Merrill D. Peterson, New York: Literary Classics of the U.S., Library of America 1984, Query XIV, p. 192, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/JefBv021.html.
23. Ellis, Founding Brothers, p. 105; LC, Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, June 12, 1796.
24. LC, GW to Sir John Sinclair, December 11, 1796.
25. Jordan, White Over Black: 320–21.
26. Netherton et al., pp. 33, 35; Gordon Wood, “Early American Get-Up-and-Go,” New York Review of Books, June 29, 2000.
27. First Lincoln vs. Douglas Debate, August 21, 1858, Ottawa, Illinois, http://www.oberlin.edu/history/GJK/H103syl/HouseDivided.html.
28. Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 30 vols. (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1950–), 28:568, “Notes of a Conversation with Edmund Randolph,” dated by the editors “after 1795.”
29. Jefferson, Notes, Query XVIII, p. 227.
30. Second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln, March 4, 1865, quoted in The Avalon Project at Yale Law School, http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/presiden/inaug/lincoln2.htm.
