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Subject:
Re: GW's slaves? Mount Vernon confronts the issue
From:
Jane Steele <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Jane Steele <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Tue, 4 Sep 2007 17:38:15 -0400
Content-Type:
text/plain
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Dear Dr. Kukula:  This is good news.  Jane Steele.

-----Original Message-----
>From: Jon Kukla <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Sep 1, 2007 10:08 AM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: [VA-HIST] GW's slaves? Mount Vernon confronts the issue
>
>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
>
>
>
>-- 
>Dr. Jon Kukla, Executive Vice-President
>Red Hill - The Patrick Henry National Memorial
>1250 Red Hill Road
>Brookneal, Virginia 24528
>www.redhill.org


Lillian Jane Steele

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