This excerpt was posted yesterday on History News Network:

GW's slaves? Mount Vernon confronts the issue now

Source: Michael Beschloss in Newsweek (9-3-07)

Shortly before George Washington retired as president in 1797, two of his
cherished house slaves—Martha's helper Oney Judge and their chef,
Hercules—ran away. Tracked down at Washington's order, Oney tried to set
strict conditions for her return, which the old general refused. As for
Hercules, he just disappeared.

Despite Washington's indignation over the "disloyalty" of his "Negroes,"
slavery was one of the few subjects in his life that the first president
was ambivalent about. Financially he knew that he and Martha could not run
the presidential house in Philadelphia or his beloved estate Mt. Vernon in
Virginia without their several hundred slaves. But in his later years,
Washington came to hate slavery for dividing families and undermining the
best ideals of the Revolution.

The Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, which in 1858 heroically rescued
Washington's by then weedy, decaying estate (the front portico was being
held up by a sailboat's mast), was itself long ambivalent about how to
treat the subject—especially during the civil-rights era of the 1950s and
1960s.

This month a replicated Mt. Vernon slave cabin—home to Washington's slaves
Silla and Slamin Joe and their six children—will open, one of the final
touches on a $100 million effort to augment Washington's mansion and
gardens with exhibits providing context for Americans who, with each
passing generation, sadly seem to know less and less about their first
president.

Posted on Friday, August 31, 2007



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Dr. Jon Kukla, Executive Vice-President
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