ONEY “ONA” JUDGE STAINES, OR, HOW DADDY-O GEORGE FUCKED WITH HIS SLAVES “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Oney “Ona” Staines HDT WHAT? INDEX ONEY “ONA” STAINES ONEY “ONA” JUDGE 1752 July: Upon the death of his half-brother Lawrence Washington, George Washington inherited rights to the Mount Vernon plantation in Virginia, inclusive of 18 slaves. (The ledgers and account books which he kept show that he then bought slaves when necessary and possible, to replenish this original 18. In the account books of Washington, the entries show that in 1754 he bought two males and a female; in 1756, two males, two females and a child, etc. In 1759, the year in which he was married, his wife Martha, brought him 39 “dower-Negroes.” He kept separate records of these Negroes all his life and mentions them as a separate unit in his will. Washington purchased his slaves in Alexandria from Mr. Piper and perhaps in the District in 1770 “went over to Colo. Thos. Moore’s Sale and purchased two Negroes. During Washington’s lifetime, the number of slaves would increase to 200.) It would seem that during Washington’s youth, he would be rather casual in regard to the lives and fortunes of black slaves. For instance, Henry Wiencek reports in AN IMPERFECT GOD: GEORGE WASHINGTON, HIS SLAVES, AND THE CREATION OF AMERICA (NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003) that at one point, the young man found it not to be beneath him, to participate in a lottery some of the prizes of which were slave children! November 4, Saturday: La clemenza di Tito, a dramma per musica by Christoph Willibald Gluck to words of Metastasio, was performed for the initial time, in the Teatro San Carlo of Naples. George Washington joined a whites-only, males-only club, Alexandria Masonic Lodge No. 22 in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and took the 1st step into the mystique of Masonry. (ALERT: For a historian to refer in the 21st Century to a whites-only, males-only 18th-Century club as a whites-only, males-only club constitutes the egregious error which all proper historians decry as presentism.)1 1. The African Lodge of Freemasons, which would start up in 1776 in Boston under the leadership of Prince Hall, would also be segregated by race and gender (!) and yet would be considered clandestine by many Freemasons of the skin color of Washington — although this blacks-only, males-only club would receive a charter from the Grand Lodge in England. Among Freemasons, debates about the authenticity of Prince Hall Masonry would persist into the 20th century. Among the members of these Prince Hall Lodges would be Supreme Court Justice Marshall, Mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles, Dr. Benjamin Hooks of the NAACP, Mayor Andrew Young of Atlanta, and Mayor Coleman Young of Detroit, and yet none of these luminaries would ever be allowed to set foot in a white Masonic lodge. (ALERT: To refer to a blacks-only, males-only club as “segregated” constitutes an egregious error which, unfortunately, as yet lacks a name.) HDT WHAT? INDEX ONEY “ONA” JUDGE ONEY “ONA” STAINES 1755 Hercules, who would be one of George Washington’s personally owned slaves, was presumably born in approximately this year. He would grow up at Mount Vernon. On Nantucket Island, Friend Benjamin Coffin was almost disowned by the Quakers for dragging his feet in regard to the manumission of his three slaves. He would manage to avoid disownment, but eventually the former governor of Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Hopkins, more recalcitrant, would indeed eventually be disowned for such continued slaveholding. (Looking up the inside of his nose: this Hopkins dude, later, would be a signer of our Declaration of Independence — which means that he apparently was willing to tolerate freedom, justice, and the pursuit of happiness at least for some of us at least some of the time.) “The capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity to be free, that is the task.” — André Gide, THE IMMORALIST translation Richard Howard NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970, page 7 HDT WHAT? INDEX ONEY “ONA” STAINES ONEY “ONA” JUDGE 1761 Although by his marriage he had gained control over 17,000 acres of farmland and 286 slaves (this man had previously owned only 30 human beings), and although he had harvested and shipped his first cash crop, George Washington had gone deep into debt — because the British buyers had been unimpressed by the quality of his tobacco. A Quaker counted a total of 1,027 Quaker families in Rhode Island, including Nantucket Island, and a total of 1,146 Quaker families living elsewhere in New England. Despite the continuing ownership of slaves by Quaker families, at this point those who traded in slaves were being disowned. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT Oney “Ona” Staines “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX ONEY “ONA” JUDGE ONEY “ONA” STAINES 1766 A slave by the name of “Negro Tom” had attempted, unsuccessfully, to run away from his owner, a plantation master and miller named George Washington. –Well, maybe this wasn’t our founding father, but some other Virginian of coincidentally the same name?– This slavemaster engaged in the international slave trade by sending this recalcitrant slave off to the West Indies, to be traded fair and square on some escape-proof island. What did this Virginia slavemaster want in exchange for his troublesome human being? — He suggested a hogshead of “molasses, rum, limes, tamarinds, sweet meats, and good old spirits.” (Was this unusual behavior for Washington? — Was it unusual, for our Founding Father to be equating in such a manner the life of a human being with a hogshead of sweetmeats and spirits? Unfortunately, it was not. For instance, according to Henry Wiencek’s AN IMPERFECT GOD: GEORGE WASHINGTON, HIS SLAVES, AND THE CREATION OF AMERICA, at one point in his life, in need of dental work, he would not be above having sound teeth yanked from the jaw of one of his slaves, without anesthesia, to be fashioned into a denture for SWEETS him to wear! –But probably it was not Negro Tom but someone else among his numerous slaves, who would WITHOUT supply these sound white teeth for the mouth of the white master.) SLAVERY During this year, in Rhode Island harbors, it has been estimated by Alexander Boyd Hawes, some 15 vessels were being fitted out for the international slave trade. If an average cargo of slaves was 109 –as we have estimated on the basis of a number of known cargos– then a total of more than 1,630 souls were transported during this year in Rhode Island bottoms alone. Examples from this year include the Rhode Island sloop Hope, carrying a cargo of 100 slaves, the brig Nelly, carrying a cargo of 130, and a sloop of unknown name carrying 60. During this year, according to the 1822 revision of the PUBLIC LAWS OF RHODE ISLAND (page 441), we have an indication that the colony’s legislature enacted some sort of “restrictive measure” that had to do with the “Slave Trade.” However, neither the title or the text of this ever having been found — we have no clue as to its substance. HDT WHAT? INDEX ONEY “ONA” STAINES ONEY “ONA” JUDGE 1772 Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Lee, and other leading men of the Virginia colony were desiring to “get rid of the great evil” represented by the presence of black people in America. “The interest of the country,” it was said in a discussion in the Virginia House of Burgesses –by “interest of the country” meaning of course not the interests of people in general but merely the interests of the white male propertied citizens of that colony– “manifestly requires the total expulsion of them” — by “them” meaning of course not merely slaves but black people in general. The governor of Virginia, Francis Fauquier, had in correspondence with the Board of Trade on June 2, 1760 mentioned that some “old settlers who have bred large quantities of slaves and who would make a monopoly of them by a duty which they hoped would amount to a prohibition” had proposed the difficulties be placed in the way of the importation of new Africans. The Virginia Assembly needed to address King George III of England on this because, in council on December 10, 1770, he had warned them not to interfere with the importation of slaves. They pleaded with him on April 1, 1772 to remove his restraints upon their efforts to stop the importation of slaves, which they referred to for some reason as “a very pernicious commerce” (we don’t know, they may have meant that it was damaging the lives of black people, or perhaps they may have meant that it was damaging the lives of white people). The monarch who “stood in the path of humanity and made himself the pillar of the colonial slave-trade” made no reply to this appeal of the Virginians (we don’t know, he may have desired to damage the lives of black people, or he may have simply desired that he and his friends continue to make inordinate profits on their participation in the international slave trade). The conduct of the King would cause the initial draft of the Declaration of Independence to contain a complaint that “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, capturing and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur a miserable death in their transportation thither.