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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.” (This embarrassing paragraph would of HDT WHAT? INDEX
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course need to be stricken from a succeeding draft the Declaration!2)3
George Washington was a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses during this year while it drafted a petition to the English throne, labeling the importation of slaves into the colonies from the coast of Africa “a trade of great inhumanity” that would endanger the “very existence of your Majesty’s American
2. Although the sentences in question are confidently asserted to have been authored by Jefferson, and confidently asserted to have been stricken from the draft by others, I know of no evidence to support any such speculation. 3. For this and other such maps: http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/search.html HDT WHAT? INDEX
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dominions.”
Maybe this did or maybe this didn’t reflect his personal viewpoint (we know that in this very year the guy was purchasing five additional slaves for labor on his plantations), but we know that a couple of years later he would be personally involved in the composition of the July 1774 “Fairfax Resolves,” one of which was that slaves not be imported into British colonies. He would be one of the signatories “declaring our most earnest Wishes to see an entire Stop forever put to such a wicked cruel and unnatural Trade.” One resolution to this conundrum would be simply that he was one of those who were in favor of slavery and also in favor of restricting fresh imports — because this would effectively protect the market value of slaves already here, and their saleable future progeny.4 INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: Next to South Carolina, Virginia had probably the largest slave-trade. Her situation, however, differed considerably from that of her Southern neighbor. The climate, the staple tobacco crop, and the society of Virginia were favorable to a system of domestic slavery, but one which tended to develop into a patriarchal serfdom rather than into a slave-consuming industrial hierarchy. The labor required by the tobacco crop was less unhealthy than that connected with the rice crop, and the Virginians were, perhaps, on a somewhat higher moral plane than the Carolinians. There was consequently no such insatiable demand for slaves in the larger colony. On the other hand, the power of the Virginia executive was peculiarly strong, and it was not possible here to thwart the slave-trade policy of the home government as easily as elsewhere. Considering all these circumstances, it is somewhat difficult to determine just what was the attitude of the early Virginians toward the slave-trade. There is evidence, however, to show that 4. In this year, it has been estimated by Alexander Boyd Hawes, a record number of ships, 28, were sailing from Rhode Island for the coast of the continent of Africa to obtain fresh bodies 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 well over 3,000 souls were being transported in Rhode Island bottoms alone. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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although they desired the slave-trade, the rate at which the Negroes were brought in soon alarmed them. In 1710 a duty of £5 was laid on Negroes, but Governor Spotswood “soon perceived that the laying so high a Duty on Negros was intended to discourage the importation,” and vetoed the measure.5 No further restrictive legislation was attempted for some years, but whether on account of the attitude of the governor or the desire of the inhabitants, is not clear. With 1723 begins a series of acts extending down to the Revolution, which, so far as their contents can be ascertained, seem to have been designed effectually to check the slave-trade. Some of these acts, like those of 1723 and 1727, were almost immediately disallowed.6 The Act of 1732 laid a duty of 5%, which was continued until 1769,7 and all other duties were in addition to this; so that by such cumulative duties the rate on slaves reached 25% in 1755,8 and 35% at the time of Braddock’s expedition.9 These acts were found “very burthensome,” “introductive of many frauds,” and “very inconvenient,”10 and were so far repealed that by 1761 the duty was only 15%. As now the Burgesses became more powerful, two or more bills proposing restrictive duties were passed, but disallowed.11 By 1772 the anti-slave-trade feeling had become considerably developed, and the Burgesses petitioned the king, declaring that “The importation of slaves into the colonies from the coast of Africa hath long been considered as a trade of great inhumanity, and under its present encouragement, we have too much reason to fear will endanger the very existence of your Majesty’s American dominions.... Deeply impressed with these sentiments, we most humbly beseech your Majesty to remove all those restraints on your Majesty’s governors of this colony, which inhibit their assenting to such laws as might check so very pernicious a commerce.”12 Nothing further appears to have been done before the war. When, in 1776, the delegates adopted a Frame of Government, it was charged in this document that the king had perverted his high office into a “detestable and insupportable tyranny, by ... prompting our negroes to rise in arms among us, those very negroes whom, by an inhuman use of his negative, he hath refused us permission to exclude by law.”13 Two years later, in 1778, an “Act to prevent the further importation of Slaves” stopped definitively the legal slave-trade to Virginia.14
5. LETTERS OF GOVERNOR SPOTSWOOD, in VA. HIST. SOC. COLL., New Ser., I. 52. 6. Hening, STATUTES AT LARGE OF VIRGINIA, IV. 118, 182. 7. Hening, STATUTES AT LARGE OF VIRGINIA, IV. 317, 394; V. 28, 160, 318; VI. 217, 353; VII. 281; VIII. 190, 336, 532. 8. Hening, STATUTES AT LARGE OF VIRGINIA, V. 92; VI. 417, 419, 461, 466. 9. Hening, STATUTES AT LARGE OF VIRGINIA, VII. 69, 81. 10. Hening, STATUTES AT LARGE OF VIRGINIA, VII. 363, 383. 11. Hening, STATUTES AT LARGE OF VIRGINIA, VIII. 237, 337. 12. MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS, 1672-1865, in VA. HIST. SOC. COLL., New Ser., VI. 14; Tucker, BLACKSTONE’S COMMENTARIES, I. Part II. App., 51. 13. Hening, STATUTES AT LARGE OF VIRGINIA, IX. 112. 14. Importation by sea or by land was prohibited, with a penalty of £1000 for illegal importation and £500 for buying or selling. The Negro was freed, if illegally brought in. This law was revised somewhat in 1785. Cf. Hening, STATUTES AT LARGE OF VIRGINIA, IX. 471; XII. 182. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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June: Only a couple of two weeks after purchasing some fresh slaves to use on his estates, George Washington affixed his signature to a document drafted by the “Association for the Counteraction of Various Acts of Oppression on the Part of Great Britain.” The signers were pledging that “we will not import or bring into the Colony, or cause to be imported or brought into the Colony, either by sea or land, any slaves, or make sale of any upon commission, or purchase any slave or slaves that may be imported by others, after the 1st day of November next, unless the same have been twelve months upon this continent.” –This resolution may well have been intended as economic retaliation, with the blacks in question mere pawns in a white power struggle, as the document displays no moral disapproval of slaveholding, or of the domestic slave trade, or of the international slave trade. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.
Oney “Ona” Staines “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1773
By this point George Washington had accumulated claims on more than 20,000 acres of land outside Virginia, land that had originally been set aside as rewards for the faithful service of his enlisted men. This might be considered to be merely a case of “Looking Out for Number One” — except that the process by which this VIP had diverted said land claims into his own pocket was a most questionable one.
Oney “Ona” Judge was born on Washington’s Virginia plantation, Mount Vernon. Her mother Betty was an enslaved black seamstress, and her father Andrew Judge an English tailor and indentured servant — she would be described late in life as “nearly white, much freckled.” Betty had been among the 285 enslaved Africans held by Daniel Parke Custis (1711-1757), Martha Washington’s 1st husband. Following Custis’s death these 285 were part of his estate held in trust for his children but his widow of course had her “widow’s thirds,” in the sense that although she could not sell nor manumit them without the concurrence of George, she owned the lifetime services of 95 of the 285. When she had remarried with George Washington in 1759, she had brought her “dower” slaves with her to Mount Vernon, including Betty and an infant Austin born in about 1758 and thus about 15 years older than his half-sister Ona, father unknown. Because Betty was a “dower” Ona also became a “dower” and would remain so along with any children she herself might bear (unless manumitted by George and Martha acting in concert, which was something that Martha was never ever going to go along with). Virginia law under the principle partus sequitur ventrem adopted in 1662 disregarded not merely skin color but also the legal standing of whoever happened to have been the father. Upon the completion of his indenture Andrew Judge would settle in Alexandria, Virginia some 11 miles from this plantation. Ona’s family on the plantation would come to include a younger sister Delphy born in about 1779, father also unknown.
CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT
Oney “Ona” Staines “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1775
In spite of the fact that both slaves and free men served at Lexington and Concord, the colonists would become increasingly reluctant to have any blacks serving in their Army. The Council of War, under George Washington’s leadership, unanimously rejected the enlistment of slaves and, by a large majority, opposed their recruitment altogether. The Continental Congress decided that the revolutionary army would be a pure white- men-only segregated army. However, the British governor of Virginia, deciding against such a racist policy, extended an offer of freedom to all male slaves who joined his loyalist forces. The eager response of many slaves to Lord Dunmore’s invitation would gradually compel these pure-white colonists to reconsider their stand. Disregarding the instructions of the Continental Congress, therefore, our General Washington eventually would be forced to allow his recruiters to accept the enlistment of free black male Americans. Although many of these white Americans felt that the arming of their slaves was inconsistent with the principles for which their forces were fighting, the colonies with the exceptions of Georgia and South Carolina eventually would be recruiting slaves as well as freedmen. In most cases, such slaves would in fact be granted freedom at the end of their military service. During the war some 5,000 blacks would serve in the Continental Army, the vast majority of these blacks coming from the Northern colonies. “It is simply crazy that there should ever have come into being a world with such a sin in it, in which a man is set apart because of his color — the superficial fact about a human being. Who could want such a world? For an American fighting for his love of country, that the last hope of earth should from its beginning have swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to measure only with God.” — Stanley Cavell, MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY? 1976, page 141 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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July: General George Washington, who in this month was in Cambridge, Massachusetts assuming command over the main American army besieging the British army of occupation of the port of Boston, ordered (and then the Continental Congress in Philadelphia confirmed) that no more Americans of color were to be allowed to participate in our revolution. We are not an equal opportunity employer as that might be unbearably offensive to our white Southron brothers!
CONTINENTAL CONGRESS However, those black Americans already enlisted might be suffered to remain in service to his Continental formations.15 There were already persons of color among the Minutemen of Massachusetts, and thus we saw some swarthy faces among the whites of the militia at the fights in Lexington and Concord: • Peter Salem, who had been the slave of the Belknaps in Framingham MA but had been manumitted expressly that he might enlist in the militia • Pompy or Pomp Blackman of Braintree • Cato Wood of Arlington • Prince of Brookline • Prince Estabrook, belonging to Benjamin Wellington of Lexington, one of those wounded on Lexington common
15. After some debate over whether the commander-in-chief had intended to exclude all blacks on the basis of race, or only slaves on the basis of status, the consensus became that he must of course have meant to exclude all blacks on the basis of race. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Here is the certificate provided to one such soldier of color, Juba Freeman of Connecticut:
NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Oney “Ona” Staines HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1776
Early in the year, General George Washington received a poem from a young woman and wrote that “with a view of doing justice to her great poetical Genius, I had a great Mind to publish the Poem.” He invited her to visit his headquarters in Cambridge.
The poet was of course the now famous Phillis Wheatley, who was then an enslaved Bostonian. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Wheatley is known to have composed 46 poems. Her writing style, based upon that of Alexander Pope, has been characterized as a mixture of “accommodation and protest,” and her work shows her assimilation to the Puritanism of the Wheatley family. In writing of and to her the general made not a single reference to her race,
which is a remarkable omission not only by the standards of his day but also by those of our own. (In private correspondence during the 1780s and 1790s Washington would repeatedly express a devout hope that the state governments would legislate “a gradual Abolition of Slavery; It would prevent much future Mischief.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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This was the year in which General Washington would be entertained at the Black Horse Tavern in South Woburn, Massachusetts.
On this continent, freedom, freedom for the white planters of America such as Washington, freedom from England, was an issue. Freedom, however, for the black slaves from the white planters of America such as Washington, and freedom for the white bond-laborers from the white planters of America such as Washington, were not.
LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Oney “Ona” Staines HDT WHAT? INDEX
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July 22, Monday: The Boston Gazette carried, in addition to its usual advertisements for slaves, the initial distributed printing of the Declaration of Independence, minus of course the incriminating personal signatures which were being collected in the strictest secrecy. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1780
March 1, Wednesday: Pennsylvania made itself the initial state to establish a process to emancipate its slaves by decreeing that no child born in Pennsylvania after March 1, 1780 should be a slave (they would instead be “indentured” to the person who would have been the slavemaster, until the age of 28). The process was extremely slow, designed to continue until the last person enslaved in Pennsylvania in 1780 had finally died in chains. The law immediately prohibited importation of slaves into the state, and required an annual registration of those already held there. It protected the property right of Pennsylvania slaveholders — if a Pennsylvania slaveholder failed to register his slaves they would be confiscated and freed, but so long as he bothered to register them each year, they remained enslaved for the duration of their natural life. A slaveholder from another state could reside in Pennsylvania with his personal slaves for up to six months, but if he held these slaves beyond that deadline, the law allowed them to free themselves if they could. Congress, then the only branch of the federal government, was meeting in Philadelphia in 1780 (it would meet there until 1783), and significantly, this Gradual Abolition Act specifically exempted members of Congress and their personal slaves. It had been Thomas Paine who had authored the preamble on emancipation to this “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery.” READ THE FULL TEXT
It would be during this month that Paine’s THE AMERICAN CRISIS, No. 8 would be published. READ THE FULL TEXT
“An Act for the gradual abolition of slavery.” § 5. All slaves to be registered before Nov. 1. § 10. None but slaves “registered as aforesaid, shall, at any time hereafter, be deemed, adjudged, or holden, within the territories of this commonwealth, as slaves or servants for life, but as free men and free women; except the domestic slaves attending upon Delegates in Congress from the other American States,” and those of travellers not remaining over six months, foreign ministers, etc., “provided such domestic slaves be not aliened or sold to any inhabitant,” etc. § 11. Fugitive slaves from other states may be taken back. § 14. Former duty acts, etc., repealed. Dallas, LAWS, I. 838. Cf. PENN. ARCHIVES, VII. 79; VIII. 720. SLAVERY HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1783
At the age of about 10 Oney “Ona” Judge was brought to the Mansion House at Mount Vernon, presumably to serve as a playmate or plaything for Martha Washington’s granddaughter Nelly Custis. (In her old age she would indicate that during her childhood and youth at the plantation she had obtained no education or religious instruction whatever.)
Inflation was so severe in the former American colonies of England, due to the debts of the war, that George Washington commented, with only a fair degree of exaggeration, that it took a wagonload of paper money going into town, to obtain a wagonload of supplies to take back to the plantation. The expression “not worth a Continental” began to be used.
In the midst of this inflation crisis, the Marquis de Lafayette wrote to Washington to suggest that they join together and “try the experiment to free the Negroes.” The French leader pointed out, sucking up, that “such an example as yours might render it a general practice.” The American leader responded the two men would be meeting again in person and would be able to chat about this proposal (when they would meet and chat in the following year, Washington’s answer would of course be no). SLAVERY EMANCIPATION HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1784
When George Washington’s dentist Jean Pierre Le Moyer needed teeth to insert into his dentures, George supplied him with the teeth of his slaves. He did pay his slaves for these healthy teeth pulled from their gums and in one of his account books for this year we find a entry in the amount of 122 shillings that he disbursed for 9 teeth from “Negroes.”
“Venus” conceived a mulatto infant, West Ford, who would be suspected to be George’s only son. He would be cared for at the Mount Vernon plantation and by 1860 would become, manumitted, the 2d richest person of color of Fairfax County near Washington DC.
After the revolution Washington, reputedly this infant’s daddy-o, would be attempting to drain the Great Dismal Swamp in order to incorporate it into his plantation (however founding daddy-o he was, Faustus it seems he wasn’t to become). Along with others he organized a lumber company called “Adventurers for Draining the Dismal Swamp.” Discovering that Lake Drummond was the highest point in the swamp, they had many ditches dug through the swamp in hopes of draining this lake (several of the ditches remain today, such as the George Washington Ditch and the Jericho Ditch, but Washington’s intent that rice be grown in the swamp after it was timbered off would not succeed).
You know the anecdote that is told about William James, among others, the story in which the invariable punchline is “it’s turtles all the way down”? It is a tall tale about the underpinnings of the universe, in which this world is being supported upon the backs of four giant elephants, which elephants appear to be standing upon the back of one humongous turtle. So what’s that humongous turtle itself standing on? “Sorry, Mr. James, it’s turtles all the way down.”
Well, this seems to be about the right point to introduce material about a developing strain of American humor, so that when this dark humor shows up in Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, you will be prepared for it. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Anderson, John Q. “Some Migratory Anecdotes in American Folk Humor.” Mississippi Quarterly 25 (1977): 447-57: “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
Anderson traces the migration of the hat-in-the-mud tale [as well as other tales] from north to south, east to west, as it passes back and forth between oral tradition and print. The tale begins as a joke about the deplorable conditions of rural roads. The earliest version cited is that of John Bernard, English comedian and theater manager, from a tour of the Southern United States in 1780. A gentleman walking in a swamp bends over to pick up a hat on the ground but hears a voice ordering him to stop. There is a man underneath the hat who announces that he is mounted on a horse, has ridden fifty miles since daybreak, and this is the first firm footing he’s come to. The tale travels widely throughout the “New West.” James K. Paulding borrows the tale in 1831 for a bragging speech by Colonel Nimrod Wildfire in “Lion of the West,” a play which capitalized on the popularity of Davy Crockett. In the mouth of Wildfire, the tale becomes an insider’s joke characterized by rough dialect and extravagant hyperbole — typical frontier tall talk. The punch line, like the speech itself, is exaggerated: there is a second driver and wagon underneath the driver and wagon that Wildfire uncovers. By the 1850’s, variants are so common that a correspondent to the Spirit of the Times can allude to “hats floating upon the surface of the bog” and expect his readers to catch the allusion. Although Anderson does not mention it, Henry Thoreau borrows the tale for his own idiosyncratic purposes in WALDEN. In Thoreau’s version, a traveler asks a boy if there is a solid bottom to the bog. The boy replies “yes,” but when the traveler enters the bog, his horse immediately sinks “up to the girths.” When the traveler complains, the boy explains that the bog does have a hard bottom, but that the traveler hasn’t got half way to it yet. Thoreau’s appropriation of the tale shares little in common with the previous or later uses of the tale that Anderson describes. It works less as a joke than as an exemplum, and in that sense it is characteristic of Thoreau’s tendency to use humor for very serious ends.
(Lane Stiles, Winter 1992) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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PEOPLE OF WALDEN: I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poured a little alloy of bell metal. Often, in WALDEN the repose of my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries. My neighbors tell me of their adventures with famous gentlemen and ladies, what notabilities they met at the dinner-table; but I am no more interested in such things than in the contents of the Daily Times. The interest and the conversation are about costume and manners chiefly; but a goose is a goose still, dress it as you will. They tell me of California and Texas, of England and the Indies, of the Hon. Mr. ______of Georgia or of Massachusetts, all transient and fleeting phenomena, till I am ready to leap from their court- yard like the Mameluke bey. I delight to come to my bearings, – not walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place but to walk even with the Builder of the universe, if I may,– not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. What are men celebrating? They are all on a committee of arrangements, and hourly expect a speech from somebody. God is only the president of the day, and Webster is his orator. I love to weigh, to settle, to gravitate toward that which most strongly and rightfully attracts me; –not hang by the beam of the scale and try to weigh less,– not suppose a case, but take the case that is; to travel the only path I can, and that on which no power can resist me. It affords me no satisfaction to commence to spring an arch before I have got a solid foundation. Let us not play at kittly-benders. There is a solid bottom every where. We read that the traveller asked the boy if the swamp before him had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it had. But presently the traveller’s horse sank in up to the girths, and he observed to the boy, “I thought you said that this bog had a hard bottom.” “So it has,” answered the latter, “but you have not got half way to it yet.” So it is with the bogs and quicksands of society; but he is an old boy that knows it. Only what is thought said or done at a certain rare coincidence is good. I would not be one of those who will foolishly drive a nail into mere lath and plastering; such a deed would keep me awake nights. Give me a hammer, and let me feel for the furring. Do not depend on the putty. Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction, –a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse. So will help you God, and so only. Every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work.
AMIM, THE MAMELUKE BEY HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Since I am including here a WALDEN snip here mentions the springing of an arch, I will include also the following architectural drawing of the parts of an arch, that explains to us what it is to spring an arch:
To Spring an Arch is to Lay its Starting Stones
THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Oney “Ona” Staines HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1785
John Jay and Alexander Hamilton organized the New-York Manumission Society.
Jean-Antoine Houdon, commissioned by the legislature to execute a statue of George Washington, arrived at Mount Vernon; he made a life mask and painstaking measurements of Washington.
As you inspect the above piece of plaster, bear in mind please that it was probably in about this year that the mulatto slave West Ford was being born in Westmoreland County, Virginia. Some speculate that he was the son of Washington with Venus, a daughter of a slave who had been one of George’s childhood playmates. The story is that during a visit by Washington to the plantation on which Venus was a slave during the previous year, this girl had been asked to serve as his bed companion.
Late in this year, Elkanah Watson purchasing a plantation in Edenton, North Carolina and four slaves, and engaged for a 2d time in a commercial enterprise with a merchant of Nantes, François Cossoul, who resided on the island of Haiti.
WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF
Oney “Ona” Staines “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1787
Organization was begun following a paper given by Dr. Benjamin Rush at the home of Benjamin Franklin, entitled, “An Inquiry into the Effects of public punishment upon criminals and upon society.” Although the Quakers have always had a deep influence in Philadelphia, the organization would by no means be limited to Quakers. Dr. Rush for instance was a Unitarian, and Franklin wasn’t much of any religion. The President of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons for its first 40 years would be an Episcopal Bishop, William White.16
Since Franklin might be termed the grandfather of electroshock therapy on the basis of his early suggestion that persons suffering from insanity be shocked into sanity by the application of electricity, I will insert the following item here: in this year Dr. John Birch made the experiment of administering electroshock to a popular singer who was suffering from melancholia — after daily treatments for a month, he recorded, the singer was able to fulfil his engagements that summer “with his usual applause.”
Dr. Benjamin Rush was a member of the “Convention of Pennsylvania for the Adoption of the Federal Constitution.”
In this year Virginia was repealing its incorporation of the Protestant Episcopal Church. Fear of powerful and wealthy churches would induce the Virginia legislature to routinely refuse to incorporate any churches,
16. For those who wish to read more, there are two books by Dr. Negley Teeters of Temple University: THEY WERE IN PRISON, a history of the PA Prison Society, and THE CRADLE OF THE PENITENTIARY. Prior to this point, prison as punishment was not known. The motivation of the experiment was to create a substitute for corporal and capital punishment. This group promotes correctional reform and social justice to this day, although now it deems itself the Pennsylvania Prison Society. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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seminaries, or religious charities whatever. Such provisions for separation of church and state would make their way into the US federal constitution and would continue through a succession of Virginia constitutional revisions, into the 21st Century.
Franklin was again reelected President of Pennsylvania and went as delegate to the Philadelphia convention for the framing of a Federal Constitution. Here is an indication of the lifestyles of the people who attended this convention. Note that George Mason of Virginia, J. Rutledge of South Carolina, and George Washington of Virginia were three of the largest slaveholders in North America, and that in all, 17 delegates to this convention owned the lives of some 1,400 human beings: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Franklin, who owned slaves and acted as a slave-trader in Philadelphia out of his print-shop, went to the constitutional convention in part as the official representative of the anti-slavery cause — and never once raised this vital issue. Fifty years later, when the sealed proceedings would be disclosed to the American public and it would be revealed that he had betrayed us in this fundamental respect, there would be the greatest outrage at his conduct, and a debate would begin which would be germane to the origin of our civil warfare, a debate as to whether the federal Constitution was a pact with Satan which ought to be dissolved. That is to say, the activities (or lack of activities, for he was possibly already on opium at the time) of Franklin at the constitutional convention would lead directly to the foundation of the Northern Disunionist faction. But he spent his valuable time at this important convention arguing for banal nonce items such as having several executives rather than one and one legislature rather than several. The more important stuff, that he was supposed to be talking about, was precisely what the guy wasn’t talking about. As a practical Pennsylvania politician he had found it was sometimes useful to ally with the local Quakers, if this helped him neutralize the Brit influence, and we may observe in the following quotation from his AUTOBIOGRAPHY not only this government’s general attitude toward people who have been pacified but also this “antislavery delegate” Franklin’s attitude toward people who have been negrofied: Ben Franklin’s “Autobiography”
One afternoon, in the height of this public quarrel, we met in the street. “Franklin,” says he, “you must go home with me and spend the evening; I am to have some company that you will like;” and, taking me by the arm, he led me to his house. In gay conversation over our wine, after supper, he told us, jokingly, that he much admir’d the idea of Sancho Panza, who, when it was proposed to give him a government, requested it might be a government of blacks, as then, if he could not agree with his people, he might sell them. One of his friends, who sat next to me, says, “Franklin, why do you continue to side with these damn’d Quakers? Had not you better sell them? The proprietor would give you a good price.” “The governor,” says I, “has not yet blacked them enough.” He, indeed, had labored hard to blacken the Assembly in all his messages, but they wip’d off his coloring as fast as he laid it on, and plac’d it, in return, thick upon his own face; so that, finding he was likely to be negrofied himself, he, as well as Mr. Hamilton, grew tir’d of the contest, and quitted the government.
We can get a glimpse, in the above, of how it would come to be that Dr. Franklin could go off to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 as the designated representative of the civil rights people of his day — and then, precisely 50 years later, when the articles of secrecy the delegates had sworn to had expired, it would be discovered that this politician had betrayed the people he was supposed to be representing by uttering not one single word at any time during that convention in opposition to the “peculiar institution” of chattel slavery.17 James Madison took very detailed minutes throughout the Convention, but they were subject to a secrecy READ MADISON’S NOTES
conspiracy to keep the electorate in the dark, with a sworn duration period of precisely 50 years, which was adhered to by all participants. Madison had turned over his notes on the Convention to George Washington, who kept them at Mt. Vernon, and Madison’s notes would not see the light of day until 1845. No member of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 would publish any account of the Convention’s important deliberations until two years after the death the last member of the Constitutional Convention, Madison, when the notes of Luther Martin of Maryland and of Robert Yates of New York would be published in 1838 as SECRET PROCEEDINGS AND DEBATES OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION, 1787. NOTES OF ROBERT YATES HDT WHAT? INDEX
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When Madison’s records were opened on schedule, there was the greatest outrage. We felt totally betrayed. A Northern disunion party of sorts originated, and would constitute one of the causes of the frictions leading eventually to the US Civil War. We found out, belatedly, suddenly, that our Franklin had gone to the convention in part as the representative of the anti-slavery position, and –old, terminally ill, possibly already under the influence of opium, desiring some peace in his time– he had simply sold us out. Our guy hadn’t even so much as raised the central issue of American slavery for discussion. We were so surprised, here we’ve got this slavemaster guy who used to keep the unwanted surplus slaves of his friends and business associates in a pen behind his print shop in Philadelphia, offering their bodies for sale to the highest bidder, and we trust him and we go and send him off to our constitutional convention to be our spokesperson against slavery — and we’re so surprised and we feel so betrayed fifty years after the fact! There’s now a book out that alleges that Ben more than any other human being was responsible for the American Revolutionary War. Per the book this was allegedly based upon his resentment at having been being fired as the colonial postmaster general, and publicly humiliated and scorned in Whitehall, on irrefutable charges having to do with the stealing of other people’s correspondence. Well, I don’t know about that issue — but, if I had to select out one American citizen who, more than any other, was responsible for the bloodshed of the US Civil War, I think I’d nominate Founding Father Benjamin Franklin for the honor. Well, maybe not. Anybody want to attempt to make a case for Nat Turner? Roger Taney?
Slavery is never directly mentioned in the US Constitution, although the document explicitly regard people coming into the nation from Africa to constitute cargo rather than to constitute prospective citizens. Also, Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons. (Art. I, Sec. 2)
17. Yes, children, it was our trusted and revered Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, as much as any single American, who caused the bloodletting of our Civil War. Was the guy on drugs during this convention? —No, we don’t know for certain sure that he began his heavy use of opium before the year after this one. The only drug we can be quite certain he was on at this point, besides fatheadedness, was racism.
Son of so-and-so and so-and-so, this so-and-so helped us to gain our independence, instructed us in economy, and drew down lightning from the clouds.
Incidentally, in using the trope “peculiar institution” today we tend to make an implicit criticism of enslavement. Not so originally! In its initial usages, to refer to slavery as “peculiar” was not in any way to attack it but rather proclaim it to be defensible. “Peculiar,” in this archaic usage, indicated merely that the legitimacy of the system was based not upon any endorsement by a higher or more remote legal authority, but based instead upon the “peculiar conditions and history” of a particular district of the country and a particular society and a particular historically engendered set of customs and procedures and conventions. This trope went hand in hand with the Doctrine of States Rights, and went hand in hand with the persistence of the English common law. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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This is usually telegraphed by some comment such as “Our founding fathers believed that black people were 3 subhuman, and evaluated them as /5ths of a human being.” That would have been bad enough, but this section is open to another, more accurate, and more pejorist, interpretation. Consider the key words here, “Representatives ... shall be apportioned” in the light of the end of this paragraph, which assigns the number of representatives each state would have until the first census could be taken, and ask yourself the question “So, how many representatives does each state initially get in the US Congress? The formula that was used is that representation was proportional to population, except that only 60% of the slaves were counted. Representatives represent those who elect and re-elect them. Blacks, free white children, and free white women were not allowed to cast ballots. The proper critical question to ask of this passage would not be, Why 3 were slaves counted at only /5ths, when free white children and free white women were counted as whole units? The question would be, Why were they counted at all? Their inclusion in the census only served to inflate the representation of the free citizens of the slave-holding states. It certainly did nothing to promote the representation of the slaves in Congress. It could easily be demonstrated that the political interests of the free white men who were casting ballots had a significant amount of overlap in that period with the political interests of free white children and free white women, but it would be significantly harder to demonstrate a significant amount of overlap between the interests of slaveholders and the interests of their slaves. Of the actual voters in slave-holding states, how many held the same political opinions as the slaves? It might be a good guess that the answer is, close to zero. So why were these voters allowed extra representation, as if they could speak for 60% of the slaves? If we want to make a slogan of it, we shouldn’t 3 be saying that the founding fathers considered a slave to be /5ths of a person. We should be saying that they considered a slave a nonperson who increased someone else’s, the possessor’s, political worth by 60%. Bear in mind that what we are considering here is an era in which voting rights and property rights were still conceptually entangled — simply because in any event only men of property were entitled to cast a ballot.
3 3 Why /5ths? –Because on an average you can only get about /5ths as much work out of a slave, through a motivational system primarily consisting of punishments and the threat of punishment, that you can get out of a free person, through a motivational system primarily consisting of rewards and the prospect of rewards! 3 (Also, very practically, because both the North and the South were willing to compromise at /5ths whereas 5 the northern colonies would never have entered the Union had Southern slaves been weighed at /5ths and the 0 southern colonies would never have entered the Union had their slave property been weighed at /5ths.)
On the popular but quite incorrect interpretation of Art. 1 Sec. 2 of the US Constitution, whatever benefit 3 a population received from being counted, the slave population was to receive but /5ths of that benefit. On a more accurate interpretation, the slave population was to receive no positive benefit at all, or was to receive a negative benefit, from being thus counted, for you will notice that the benefit that accrues from 3 counting /5ths of the slave population is a benefit which is assigned to the free voting population of the same state, which is thus even more powerful — and even more capable of abusing those being held in captivity.
In a November 9, 2000 op-ed piece in the New York Times, “The Electoral College, Unfair from Day One,” Yale Law School’s Akhil Reed Amar would argue that intent of the Founding Fathers in creating the electoral college which was so perplexing us during the Bush/Gore presidential election, like their intent in creating the 3 /5ths rule, had been to protect America’s southern white men from the vicissitudes of majority rule: In 1787, as the Constitution was being drafted in Philadelphia, James Wilson of Pennsylvania proposed direct election of the president. But James Madison of Virginia worried that such a system would hurt the South, which would have been outnumbered by the North in a direct election system. The creation of the Electoral College got around that: it was part of the deal that HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Southern states, in computing their share of electoral votes, could count slaves (albeit with a two-fifths discount), who of course were given none of the privileges of citizenship. Virginia emerged as the big winner, with more than a quarter of the electors needed to elect a president. A free state like Pennsylvania got fewer electoral votes even though it had approximately the same free population. The Constitution’s pro-Southern bias quickly became obvious. For 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency. Thomas Jefferson, for example, won the election of 1800 against John Adams from Massachusetts in a race where the slavery skew of the Electoral College was the decisive margin of victory. The system’s gender bias was also obvious. In a direct presidential election, any state that chose to enfranchise its women would have automatically doubled its clout. Under the Electoral College, however, a state had no special incentive to expand suffrage — each got a fixed number of electoral votes, regardless of how many citizens were allowed to vote. With the assistance of abolitionist Quakers, in this year the newly freed slaves of the city of Philadelphia formed a Free African Society. The society was intended to enable mutual aid and nourish the development of a cadre of black leaders. The immediate cause of organization of this Free African Society was that in this year the St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia had segregated its colored members from its white communicants. Blacks to the back: African worshipers were sent to the church’s gallery. One Sunday as the African members knelt to pray outside of their segregated area they were actually tugged from their knees, so they understood that they needed to form this new society — and out of this came an Episcopalian group and a Methodist one. The leader of the Methodist group was Richard Allen, and from his group would derive in 1816 the African Methodist Episcopal denomination. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Pennsylvania enacted a gradual emancipation act providing that no child born in Pennsylvania after March 1, 1780 should be a slave. (It would still be possible to purchase and sell slaves in Pennsylvania after the passage of this act, and in fact we can find frequent sale ads in Pennsylvania newspapers as late as 1820. Pennsylvania slaves could not, however, any longer be legally sold out of the state. Anyone who was a slave prior to the passage of this Gradual Emancipation Act was still a slave for life, even if he or she had been a mere newborn infant as of February 1780. Slaveholders could still sell the time of young people born to slave mothers after 1780, subject to the ban on out-of-state sales, until they reached the manumission age of 28. Therefore, as late as the 1830 census, Pennsylvania still sported some 400 slaves. There were many conflicts over enforcing the law, including with slaveholders who attempted to transport pregnant slaves to Maryland so that a child would be born a slave rather than born merely a servant until the age of 28. Slaveholders initiated arguments about whether the grandchildren as well as the children of slaves would be bound to serve until age 28. “Sojourning” slaveholders from other states would raise issues of the status of slaves brought into Pennsylvania. “It is simply crazy that there should ever have come into being a world with such a sin in it, in which a man is set apart because of his color — the superficial fact about a human being. Who could want such a world? For an American fighting for his love of country, that the last hope of earth should from its beginning have swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to measure only with God.” — Stanley Cavell, MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY? 1976, page 141
THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Oney “Ona” Staines HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1788
Amidst growing dissatisfaction with the Articles of Confederation, General George Washington corresponded with James Madison and others to consider how the federal government might be formally strengthened.
An amendment to Pennsylvania’s manumission law closed loopholes, such as prohibiting a Pennsylvania slaveholder from transporting a pregnant woman out of the state so that her child would be born enslaved, and prohibiting a non-resident slaveholder such as George Washington from cheating by rotating his slaves in and out of the state to prevent them from establishing the 6-month Pennsylvania residency required to qualify for freedom. (This last point will become important to Oney Judge, this being the sneaky little thing he had played on her.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1789
At the age of about 16 Oney “Ona” Judge was made a body slave (attendant) to First Lady Martha Washington in the presidential households in New-York and then in 1790 in Philadelphia (the Washingtons brought to New-York not only Ona but also her older half-brother Austin, Giles, Paris, Moll, Christopher Sheels, and William Lee, and then took to Philadelphia with the relocation of the national capital Ona, Austin, Giles, Paris, Moll, Christopher Sheels, “Postilion Joe” or Richardson, Hercules, and Richmond).
During this year 5 black male domestic servants would slip away from the John Brown mansion in Providence, Rhode Island and its associated workshops, going to Boston and attempting to merge into the free black community. Three of these 5 men, facing destitution, would soon return to slavery, promising their slavemaster that they would “behave better” in the future.
CONSTITUTION OF A SOCIETY FOR ABOLISHING THE SLAVE-TRADE. WITH SEVERAL ACTS OF THE LEGISLATURES OF THE STATES OF MASSACHUSETTS, CONNECTICUT AND RHODE-ISLAND, FOR THAT PURPOSE. Printed by John Carter. Providence, 1789. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE
March 4, Thursday: At the 1st meeting of Congress, in New-York, the federal congress declared the United States Constitution to be in effect. The congress also adopted a “Resolution of the First Congress Submitting Twelve Amendments to the Constitution.” READ THE FULL TEXT
Conveniently, no laws in this city or state restricted slaveholding. In 1790, however, the national capital would need to transfer to Philadelphia for a decade while a permanent national capital city was under construction on the banks of the Potomac River. With the move, there would arise an uncertainty about whether Pennsylvania’s slavery laws would apply to officers of the federal government. By a strict interpretation of this Pennsylvania statute, only officers of the Congress could hold personal slaves there, but there were slaveholders among the officers of the Supreme Court, who were not members of the Congress, and the executive branch (which did not yet have a name), such as the President of the United States, George Washington. –How to bend this Pennsylvania statute so as to prevent the freeing of the personal slaves of these judges and administrators?
President Washington would argue privately that since his presence in Philadelphia was solely a consequence HDT WHAT? INDEX
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of the city being the temporary seat of the federal government, this locale was for him a temporary work station at which he was on perpetual “per diem” or something, remaining a resident of Virginia not bound by this Pennsylvania law regarding slavery. The guy did know how to chop logic to his advantage! When his Attorney General, Edmund Randolph somehow misappreciated the Pennsylvania law, and his personal slaves were able to gain their freedom, he rushed to warn his President: you need to prevent your house slaves from establishing a continuous 6-month residency in Pennsylvania by rotating them out of the state. Atta boy, good little Attorney General! This was directly contrary to Pennsylvania’s 1788 amendment to its statute but the President (he was, after all, the father of his nation) would get away with it cold. He would continue to rotate his house slaves in and out of Pennsylvania throughout his presidency. He also made sure not to himself spend any 6 continuous months in Pennsylvania so that no-one could challenge his Virginia residency. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1790
November: President George Washington and Mistress Martha Washington brought eight of their domestic slaves to work in the President’s House in Philadelphia. Since the slave ledgers they kept at Mount Vernon generally failed to list the births or deaths of slaves, such information being of no particular importance, the ages we have assigned are approximate: • MOLL - 51, single, maid to Martha Washington and probably nanny to her grandchildren. • HERCULES (“Herculas,” “Uncle Harkless”) - late 30s, widower with three children (two at Mount Vernon), principal cook, reportedly one of the finest chefs in the country. • RICHMOND - 13, Hercules’ son, scullion (kitchen worker). • AUSTIN - early 30s, married with wife and five children at Mount Vernon, probably waiter for the family meals and part-time stable worker. • ONEY JUDGE - 16, single, half-sister to Austin, maid and body servant to Mrs. Washington. • GILES - early 30s, probably single, stable worker. • PARIS - 18, single, stable worker. • CHRISTOPHER SHEELS - 15, body servant to Washington, nephew of BILLY LEE, Washington’s previous body servant.
Although George Washington is generally credited with “freeing his slaves in his will,” not one of these eight would ever receive a manumission document. Most of the slaves at Mount Vernon and the Washingtons’ other plantations, and in the President’s House in Philadelphia, actually were “dower” slaves, owned not by the Washingtons but by the estate of Martha Washington’s first husband. She had the use of them during her lifetime, and then, after her death in 1802 –upon her wish since she did not at all sympathize with their known desire to be free, a desire that to her had always been incomprehensible and preposterous– all approximately 150 of these dower slaves would pass into the ownership of her grandchildren. The slaves in the President’s House in Philadelphia slept in three distinct areas. We suppose that Hercules, Richmond, and Christopher slept in a room in the attic of the main house, while Moll and Oney slept with Mrs. Washington’s grandchildren in two rooms over the kitchen and Giles, Paris, and Austin slept in a room Washington had had created between the smokehouse and the stable, behind the kitchen. Within a year, George Washington would decide that Richmond was lazy, and that the teenage Paris had become insubordinate, and that Giles, so seriously injured that he could no longer ride a horse, had become useless, and the three would be sent back to Mount Vernon to labor under supervision. The total number of slaves the Washingtons had in Philadelphia was down from eight to five. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1791
May: President George Washington was on his Southern Tour when the 1st six-month deadline approached, at which he needed to shuffle his house slaves out of the state of Pennsylvania for awhile to avoid their becoming free. He had brought Giles and Paris out of Pennsylvania with him in April. Therefore it was Austin and Richmond whom he sent back to Mount Vernon prior to the deadline to prevent them from obtaining freedom. Of course, they would have been given no idea what was going on, for them it was all “do as you are told.” Martha Washington took Oney Judge and Christopher Sheels to Trenton, New Jersey for two days to interrupt their Pennsylvania residency. Moll and Hercules wound up remaining in Pennsylvania for a couple days beyond the deadline before journeying back to Mount Vernon with the First Lady but, as nobody told them what was going down, they were unable to take advantage of this slip-up.
A proposal would be considered in the Pennsylvania legislature to amend its Gradual Abolition Act to exempt the personal slaves of all federal officers whether or not their owners were members of the legislative branch of the government, but as you may imagine this ran into some heated opposition from the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Eventually the US Supreme Court would need to rule that Pennsylvania’s 1788 amendment to its Gradual Abolition Act was contrary to the federal constitution, in that it deprived citizens of their property without due process.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, William Godwin was planning AN ENQUIRY CONCERNING POLITICAL JUSTICE, AND ITS INFLUENCE ON GENERAL VIRTUE AND HAPPINESS. It’s just as well that he didn’t know about any of this crap that was going down in our land of the free and home of the brave! GODWIN’S POLITICAL WRITINGS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1792
October 13, Saturday: George Washington was absent when the Masonic ceremony was held for the laying of the cornerstone for the Executive Mansion in the District of Columbia, later to be called the White House (most of the rest of the work of construction there would be done by black slaves). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1794
December: Austin, one of George Washington’s slaves at the President’s House in Philadelphia, was allowed to return from Philadelphia to Mount Vernon to spend Christmas with his family, but while on this trip back home, he died. The total number of slaves the Washingtons had in Philadelphia was down from eight to four. There is documentation of escape attempts by three of the remaining four. Since Hercules was owned by Washington, he might have been freed in his will, but since Hercules’s late wife had been a dower slave, his children also were dower slaves, and thus would have remained enslaved. Richmond was implicated in a theft of cash for what may have been a planned attempt by the father and son to run away. Following Washington’s presidency Hercules did manage to escape at the last possible moment, somewhere between Philadelphia and Chester on the final trip back to Mount Vernon. Oney “Ona” Judge fled with help from other people of color in Philadelphia, as the Washingtons were preparing to sojourn in Virginia between sessions of Congress. Her mistress Martha had let her know that she was to be given as a wedding present, to the First Lady’s granddaughter. Judge would recall in an 1845 interview: “Whilst they were packing up to go to Virginia, I was packing to go, I didn’t know where; for I knew that if I went back to Virginia, I should never get my liberty. I had friends among the colored people of Philadelphia, had my things carried there beforehand, and left Washington’s house while they were eating dinner.”
Henry Wiencek reports in AN IMPERFECT GOD: GEORGE WASHINGTON, HIS SLAVES, AND THE CREATION OF AMERICA (NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003) that Washington who could not tell a lie concocted a fiction that she had been stolen from him by a Frenchman, in order to legitimate use of illegal means in his search to recover her and force her return to his household (evidently this fiction was concocted on the basis of a popular novel that Martha had just been reading). When this fugitive from injustice was tracked down in New Hampshire, she attempted to negotiate with her white master to return if she too could be freed in his will — but of course the father of our nation refused to bargain about such a thing. Christopher seems to have known how to read and write after a fashion, since Washington discovered notes in which he was outlining his plot to escape from Mount Vernon. Ona is the only one of the eight whose whereabouts would be traceable after Mrs. Washington’s death. She would settle in New Hampshire, have a family and live a long life, and would be interviewed by abolitionist newspapers in the 19th century. Hercules would never be found or heard from again. The fate of the rest, of Hercules’ children, and of those of the late Austin (all dower slaves) is not known. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1795
In the Virginia colony of the North American seaboard, a white planter named George Washington was advertising for the capture of one of his slaves, who had escaped from his plantation. The planter stipulated for some reason, however, that this advertisement should not appear north of Virginia.
The Reverend Nathaniel Whitaker died in Virginia.
NATHANIEL WHITAKER, son of David Whitaker, was graduated [at Harvard College] in 1730. After being some time employed as a minister at Norwich in Connecticut, he went to England in 1765 or 1766, accompanied by Sampson Occum, the first Indian educated by the Rev. Mr. Wheelock, afterwards President of Dartmouth College, to solicit donations for the support of Mr. Wheelock’s school “for the education of Indian youth, to be missionaries and school-masters for the natives of America.” He was installed July 28, 1769, over the 3d Church in Salem. In 1774 his meeting- house was burnt, and a division in his society took place. He and his friends erected a new house, and called it the Tabernacle Church in 1776; but, difficulties having arisen, he was dismissed in 1783, and installed at Canaan, Maine, September 10, 1784. He was again dismissed in 1789, and removed to Virginia, where he died.18
18. Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy (On or about November 11, 1837 Henry Thoreau would indicate a familiarity with the contents of at least pages 2-3 and 6-9 of this historical study.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1796
The dentist Jean Pierre Le Moyer pulled George Washington’s last tooth. When he needed teeth for his dentures, George had been supplying his dentist with the teeth of his slaves. He did pay his slaves for these healthy teeth pulled from their gums and in one of his 1784 account books we find a entry in the amount of 122 shillings that he had disbursed for 9 teeth from “Negroes.”
As the Washingtons were sitting in the dining room of their home on High Street in Philadelphia chewing away happily at their supper, Martha Washington’s personal slave, a woman named Oney Judge known familiarly as “Ona,” with the aid of Philadelphia’s free black community, was seizing this opportunity and stealing herself away to the freedom of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
(But Martha was so nice, such a sweet lady, why would anyone ever want to run away from her? Ona left no Farewell Address To Our Nation explaining her conduct, but she did comment later, while living in old age and poverty in New Hampshire, to the effect that a moment of freedom was better than a lifetime of enslavement — something like that or more or less in that vein.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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May 21, Saturday: Oney “Ona” Judge escaped from the home of the President of the United States of America in Philadelphia.
(The site from which Ona made her escape, on High Street, now houses our Liberty Bell! You will discover no commemorative plaque at this locale, noticing and commenting upon such an intimate relationship between our American slavery and our American liberty and our American sense of irony.)
(Speaking of commemorative plaques, you will notice also, of course, that although at least 2,400 racist lynchings have been documented in the United States of America, as yet in point of fact there are precious few roadside markers commemorating such events, the very 1st such roadside marker having been dedicated only in 1999 on US Highway 78 near Monroe, Georgia — and this sign is entirely undecipherable and unalarming unless you actually get out of your car and walk right up to it and put on your reading glasses! We are such a HDT WHAT? INDEX
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very selective people.)
May 24, Tuesday: George Washington took out an advertisement in The Pennsylvania Gazette about his slave Oney “Ona” Judge who had recently escaped from the President’s House in Philadelphia. She had “no provocation” for doing this (being enslaved isn’t provocation). We’ll pay you $10 if you will help this light mulatto girl return to her home here with us:19 Absconded from the household of the President of the United States, ONEY JUDGE, a light mulatto girl, much freckled, with very black eyes and bushy hair. She is of middle stature, slender, and delicately formed, about 20 years of age. She has many changes of good clothes, of all sorts, but they are not sufficiently recollected to be described — As there was no suspicion of her going off, nor no provocation to do so, it is not easy to conjecture whither she has gone, or fully, what her design is; but as she may attempt to escape by water, all masters of vessels are cautioned against admitting her into them, although it is probable she will attempt to pass for a free woman, and has, it is said, wherewithal to pay her passage. Ten dollars will be paid to any person who will bring her home, if taken in the city, or on board any vessel in the harbour; — and a reasonable additional sum if apprehended at, and brought from a greater distance, and
19. We are at liberty to imagine on the basis of this advertisement, that such circumstances were not considered at the time to be even the least little bit embarrassing. Hmmm. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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in proportion to the distance. FREDERICK KITT, Steward. May 23 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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June 3, Friday: Captain John Bowles was in the business of sailing his sloop Nancy back and forth between Portsmouth and the federal capital in Philadelphia, bringing leather products such as harnesses, bridles, and saddles to be sold in the stores of New Hampshire. On this day his sloop arrived back in New Hampshire and he was advertising his cargo and announcing an intention to sail again on June 25th (he made these circuits monthly). We don’t know that Oney Judge arrived with him on this late May circuit or whether she would remain in hiding until the Washingtons left town and then sail north on his late June circuit or his July circuit. Captain Bowles must have been aware he was helping a fugitive slave but we are not sure he was informed she belonged to somebody as connected and determined as American Commander-in-Chief George Washington (since harbouring and abetting runaways was considered in the same category as horse theft, if caught out a plagiarist might well meet the same fate).
Summer: Summer 1796: Seemingly having arrived at safe haven in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the escaped mulatto Oney “Ona” Judge was recognized on the streets of Portsmouth by Elizabeth Langdon, teenage daughter of Senator John Langdon and a friend of Ona’s obligate white childhood “playmate” during her childhood in slavery, Nelly Custis.20
November: Richmond, son of Hercules the Washington family’s slave cook in Philadelphia, was implicated in the theft of some cash at Mount Vernon. President Washington inferred from this that Hercules and Richmond were plotting an escape from enslavement. Therefore, when Washington would return after Christmas with his staff of personal servants from the new seat of federal government in the District of Columbia to the existing seat of federal government in Philadelphia, he would leave his cook behind, assigning him and his son as farm laborers.
20. Amazing, isn’t it, how like real life the childhood game of “hide-and-seek” can become! HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1797
January: In New Hampshire, Oney Judge met and got married with Jack Staines, a free black sailor. Their marriage
was listed in the town records of Greenland and published in the local newspaper. In the 7 years before the husband’s death this union would produce 3 children: • Eliza Staines (born 1798, died February 14, 1832, New Hampshire, no known offspring) • Will Staines (born 1801, death date & location unknown, no known offspring) • Nancy Staines (born 1802, died February 11, 1833, New Hampshire, no known offspring) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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The minutes of Rahway and Plainfield Monthly Meeting show that in the next month the case of the older mulatto worshiper Cynthia Miers was resumed, and in the following month she was received into membership. Friend John Hunt, who served on the committee, wrote of the decision as having been held back 20 years though there had never been anything to prevent her acceptance other than the color of her skin.21 There was that felt which raised the testimony in this respect, over all opposition, although the spirit of prejudice which had been imbibed on account of colour, had kept it back above twenty years within which time, [many or] divers black and mulatto people have requested to have a right among Friends, but till now have been [rejected and] put by, on account of their colour.
Among those who spoke in favor of admission were two foreign Quakers, Martha Routh of England and Jean de Marsillac of France. Friend Martha described the event as follows: At this season the further consideration of admitting black people into membership with friends, was revived; and a large committee was appointed wherein concerned women friends were admitted. Their weighty deliberations felt to me evidently owned of Truth; the result whereof was, that no distinction of colour should be an objection when such as requested to be joined to us, appeared to be convinced of the principle we profess. This being spread before the Yearly Meeting was united in, without a dissenting voice. Here is a Silhouette of Public Friend Martha Routh (1743-1817), as she appeared when she was visiting the New World:
Friend Stephen Grellet of France, later to become well known, was 23 years of age and attending annual
21. The data elements for this series on the acceptability of persons of mixed race as Quakers are from Henry Cadbury’s “Negro Membership in the Society of Friends” in The Journal of Negro History, Volume 21 (1936), pages 151-213. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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meeting for the first time, having just joined the Society. He wrote in his characteristic evangelical language: The Yearly Meeting came to the conclusion that any people of colour, becoming convinced of our principles, and making application to be received as members of our society, ought to be treated as white persons, without any distinction on account of colour, seeing that there is none with God, who has made all nations of the earth of one blood and that Jesus Christ has died for all, and is the saviour of all who believe in Him, of whatever colour or nation they may be.
Evidently there had been other cases of applicants of color and evidently these also had been delayed for many years. Not very many Negro members were immediately accepted on the basis of this Yearly Meeting ruling once it was embodied in the Book of Discipline. For nearly a century, rather than being generally distributed, this had been a mere manuscript kept by one member of each Monthly Meeting; in this year, however, arrangements were made for printing it, and so in the first printed form of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Discipline the outcome of the decision on Cynthia Myers came to be embodied in a paragraph under “Convinced Persons” ending “The said meetings are at liberty to receive such (persons) into membership, without respect to nation or color.” This paragraph would remain in the Discipline not only until the separation of 1828 but in each branch of Friends in every edition for nearly a century longer, and would then mysteriously disappear. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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February 22, WednesdayAs the slave cook Hercules escaped from the kitchen at Mount Vernon to Philadelphia, he was obliged by these straited circumstances to leave behind his 6-year-old daughter (since her mother Alice was a dower slave of Martha Washington, even when her father would be made free by virtue of George Washington’s will, she would still remain a dower slave of Martha –and indeed would remain enslaved for her entire life– and she would need to struggle to maintain her love for an absent father who had been obliged to abandon her to this life).
Kitchen slaves of course will always sneak enough to adequately nourish themselves, but at Mount Vernon the other slaves were being allowed merely one peck of Indian maize per week per adult for their sustenance, plus a half of a peck per week for each of their children. In addition each of these slaves were receiving 20 small salt herring per month. They were being permitted to supplement their diets by keeping small personal gardens but were not being permitted to keep fowl or pigs.
Their only taste of meat during the year would arrive at harvest time. But we’re very sure that had these slaves applied themselves harder, or worked smarter — we want to believe that George and Martha, such fine folks, would have been very willing to allow them more food, or nicer food! HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1798
Eliza Staines was born to Jack and Oney Judge Staines in New Hampshire.
Frederick Kitt, house steward to the Washingtons at Mount Vernon, informed the white family that their escaped cook Hercules was living in Philadelphia.
September: Burwell Bassett Jr., a nephew of George and Martha Washington, traveled to New Hampshire on business and tried to convince Oney Judge Staines to return with him. By this point, she was married to the free seaman Jack Staines who was away at sea, and was the mother of the infant Eliza. She of course refused to return to Virginia with him. Bassett was Senator Langdon’s houseguest, and in the course of a dinner revealed his plan to kidnap her and return her securely to her enslavement at Mount Vernon. (I have no idea whether Burwell’s plan contemplated his kidnapping also her newborn Eliza Staines, who would likewise under existing law have been born as Martha’s dower property — but wouldn’t it have been unthinkably cruel to tear this newborn infant from its mother’s breast and abandon it in New Hampshire to starve?) This time Langdon helped Ona, secretly sending word for her to immediately go into hiding. Bassett was obliged to return to Virginia without her. Although George and Martha Washington could have used the federal courts to recover Staines — the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act which he had signed into law required a legal process to return an escaped slave over state lines and any such court case would be part of the public record and would attract unwelcome attention.
With Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth issued LYRICAL BALLADS. Coleridge’s contributions included “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “The Nightingale.”
The publication may function for us to illustrate the nature of our culture’s myth of sole authorship, for it appeared without any author’s name attached to it. Within this volume several references of the prefatory Advertisement were to monolithic constructs such as “the author,” “his expressions,” “his personal observation,” “his friends,” and to “the author’s own person,” yet the volume included poems bearing the titles “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Tintern Abbey” which we now routinely ascribe to different British poets. There would be subsequent editions, in 1800, in 1802, and in 1805, in which the prefatory materials would mention “the assistance of a Friend,” but the title page would be extended only to mention “By W. Wordsworth” and the name “S.T. Coleridge” would nowhere appear. Only in 1817 would Coleridge obtain credit for his “The Ancient Mariner” and “The Nightingale” and other poems. Why was this? —For two overlapping reasons, neither of which has to do with Wordsworth wanting to take undue credit for another’s productions. First, in a very important respect the affiliation between these two poets and their writerly HDT WHAT? INDEX
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collaboration was so intense that in a very important manner a number of these poems actually were co- authored, and, second, the myth of solitary genius which was prevalent in those days, a myth inherited from the legitimation myth current for sacred scripture, and the myth of undivided authorial authority which was prevalent in those days, a myth inherited from the legitimation myth current for kingship or sole-leader status (Führerprinzip), were so overwhelming, that they simply had to be deferred to as the default understanding
This famous book, which included Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” introduced Romanticism into England.
In this month the boy friends, and Dorothy Wordsworth, went together to Germany to learn of Herr Professor Immanuel Kant’s Transcendental idealism. Coleridge would prepare himself in Germany to argue, for the benefit of his friends in England, that as soon as we knew enough about universal science, and the manner in HDT WHAT? INDEX
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which attractive and repulsive forces created a web of interactions throughout nature, both our ideas about matter and our ideas about deity would be seen as subsumed within one simple explanatory structure, as “different modes, or degrees in perfection, of a common substratum.” This would impress almost everyone. Coleridge, in Germany in this year and the next, would be studying under Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the professor of natural history who had in the 1770s classified the human races into 28 varieties and attributed the differences between these varieties to varying sorts of degeneration or deterioration on account of influences of gender, of geography, or both gender and geography, from a uniform originary white male standard. However, while Herr Professor Blumenbach had thus laid the groundwork for the Nazi racial thinking which would come later by coined the term “Caucasian,” the term “Aryanism” had not yet come into being and he presumed Semites to be a portion of his honorable white race.22 As [Martin] Bernal has argued in one of the most interesting parts of [BLACK ATHENA: THE AFROASIATIC ROOTS OF CLASSICAL CIVILIZATION. VOLUME I, THE FABRICATION OF ANCIENT GREECE 1785-1985 (London: Free Association Books, 1987, page 220)], the curious and disturbing fact is that the rise of professional scholarship and the transmutation of knowledge into the different forms of academic disciplines, decisively established at the University of Göttingen (founded in 1734) and then in the new university of Berlin and elsewhere, was intimately bound up with the development of racial theory and the ordering of knowledge on a racial basis. As [Edward W.] Said observes, “What gave writers like [Joseph Ernest] Renan and [Matthew] Arnold the right to generalities about race was the official character of their formed cultural literacy” [ORIENTALISM: WESTERN REPRESENTATIONS OF THE ORIENT (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978, page 227)]. The blunt fact that has even now not been faced is that modern racism was an academic creation. What we are dealing with here is the dominance of racial theory so widespread that it worked as an ideology, permeating both consciously and implicitly the fabric of almost all areas of thinking of its time. This racialization of knowledge demonstrates that the university’s claim to project knowledge in itself outside political control or judgement cannot be trusted and, in the past at least, has not been as objective as it has claimed; the university’s amnesia about its own relation to race is a sign of its fear of the loss of legitimation.
22. Refer to THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL TREATISES OF JOHANN FRIEDRICH BLUMENBACH [1775-1795], edited and translated by T. Bendyshe and published by the Anthropological Society in London in 1865. Young, Robert J.C. COLONIAL DESIRE: HYBRIDITY IN THEORY, CULTURE AND RACE (London: Routledge, 1995, page 64). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1799
September 1, Sunday: At this point the slavemaster George Washington had been informed of Oney Judge Staines’s hidey-hole in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for he wrote Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Jr. to have her captured and returned to enslavement by ship. At Wolcott’s request Joseph Whipple, Portsmouth’s collector of customs, would interview this escaped mulatto and report back to him. The kidnap/capture plan would need to be abandoned, Whipple warned, because should news of such an abduction leak out there would be an instant riot on the docks by all the local supporters of the abolition of the American institution of life servitude. Bad publicity for the father of his nation! Although Whipple refused to remove this escapee against her will, he relayed to Wolcott that she was offering to return voluntarily to the household of her slavemasters — if they would merely pledge to free her upon their deaths rather than make her the property of their grand- daughter Nelly Custis, her childhood playmate. ... a thirst for compleat freedom ... had been her only motive for absconding. — Joseph Whipple to Oliver Wolcott, October 4, 1796
An indignant Georgibus would himself find the time in his busy schedule to respond to Whipple: I regret that the attempt you made to restore the Girl (Oney Judge as she called herself while with us, and who, without the least provocation absconded from her Mistress) should have been attended with so little Success. To enter into such a compromise with her, as she suggested to you, is totally inadmissible, for reasons that must strike at first view: for however well disposed I might be to a 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 or just to reward unfaithfulness with a premature preference [of freedom]; and thereby discontent before hand the minds of all her fellow-servants who by their steady attachments are far more deserving than herself of favor.
December 18, Wednesday: The body of George Washington was placed in the family tomb at Mount Vernon (in 1831 all remains in this structure would be transferred to the inner vault of a new such tomb; it seems possible that the remains of West Ford, reputed to be Washington’s only son, would be placed after his death in 1863 not in the slave graveyard on the plantation but in the emptied old family tomb).
In his 1799 will George Washington had directed that his 124 slaves be manumitted, although this action would not be carried out until January 1, 1801 and the 153 or so “dower” slaves at Mount Vernon would remain enslaved. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1801
Peter “Old Captain,” a slave, founded Kentucky’s 1st church for blacks.
Will Staines was born to Jack and Oney Judge Staines in New Hampshire (death date and location unknown, no known offspring).
January 1, Thursday: The Dutch East India Company was dissolved and the Netherlands East Indies became a Dutch colony.
In his Palermo observatory, Giuseppe Piazzi became the 1st person to discover an asteroid. He would name this object Ceres (Ceres had been the Roman goddess associated with Sicily).
Although on this day the 124 personal slaves of the deceased George Washington were formally and collectively manumitted, in all likelihood the escaped cook Hercules, by this time living covertly in New-York, would never learn that he had thus become free, and would never qualify for his own personal freedom document.
The Act of Union of Great Britain (England + Scotland) and Ireland came into force, with the 3-cross Union Jack hoisted on the Tower of London to the firing of guns as the official flag of that United Kingdom. Hereafter, the nation would be styled The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, with the 3-cross Union Jack its symbol. George III assumed the title King of Great Britain and Ireland. The Irish Parliament was abolished — theoretically, but of course only theoretically, two islands were to form one nation. For instance, due to this union, it began to be a flaming question in British politics whether any Catholic would ever be allowed to hold any government office.
The 1st census put the population of England and Wales at 9,168,000, of Britain at nearly 11,000,000 (75% rural) — the Irish population meanwhile was at 5,000,000. London, population 864,000. Paris, population 547,000.
December 15, Tuesday: We know from a letter by Martha Washington that she had learned that the escaped cook Hercules, who had on January 1st become legally free by the terms of her late husband’s will, was living in New-York. (We don’t know that she did anything to let Hercules know that he had become a free man, and we don’t know that she passed along any information about his relatives who were still enslaved at Mount Vernon — such as Hercules’s daughter by his wife Alice.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1802
Along the Roanoke River in Virginia, slave boatmen plotted servile insurrection.
The mulatto slave West Ford, whom some consider to be the only son of George Washington, was brought to Mount Vernon with his new owner, Bushrod Washington. At Mount Vernon, West would be befriended by Washington’s old valet, the crippled mulatto William Lee whom Washington had manumitted in his last will and testament, and would wind up as the caretaker of Washington’s original tomb. Refer to http:// www.westfordlegacy.com/home.htm.
Nancy Staines was born to Jack and Oney Judge Staines in New Hampshire.
May 22, Saturday: Martha Dandridge Custis Washington died. Upon her death her “dower” slaves reverted to the Custis Estate and would be divvied up among the Custis heirs, her grandchildren. Oney Judge Staines would thus remain a “dower” all her life and legally her children also, property of the Custis Estate. The fact that their father, Jack Staines, was a free man, was an irrelevancy under slavery law in which the condition of the children followed the condition of their mother. Article IV, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution guaranteed such property rights of slaveholders. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 — passed overwhelmingly by Congress and signed into law by Washington — established the legal mechanism by which a slaveholder could recover his property. The Act made it a federal crime to assist an escaped slave or to interfere with his capture, and allowed slave-catchers into every U.S. state and territory. Following Washington’s 1799 death, Ona probably felt reasonably secure in New Hampshire, as no one else in his family was likely to mount an effort to take her, but legally she and her children would remain fugitives until their deaths (her daughters would predecease her by more than a decade, and it is not known what became of her son). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1803
October 19, Wednesday: A convention was signed by France and Spain calling for the neutrality of Spain.
The Reverend Joseph Emerson of the Third Congregational Church in Beverly, Massachusetts remarried with one of his pupils in Framingham, Miss Nancy Eaton — she would die in Beverly on June 15, 1804 and her gravestone would bear the inscription “A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband.”
Jack Staines, free sailor husband of Oney Judge Staines and father of her three children Eliza, Will, and Nancy, died after fewer than 7 years of married life. As a widow Ona would be unable to support her children and needed to move in with the family of John Jacks, Jr. After the elder Jacks died, Rockingham County, New Hampshire would donate firewood and other supplies to Ona and the Jacks sisters, by then too old to work. Her daughters Eliza and Nancy became wards of the town of Greenland and hired out as indentured servants while her son Will, after being apprenticed as a sailor, we suppose never returned. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1807
In accordance with Quaker practice, the Hopkins family in Anne Arundel County, Maryland manumitted the slaves on its tobacco plantation “Whitehall.” This meant considerable sacrifice — such as no funds for the higher education of their son Johns Hopkins.
Following Oney Judge’s escape, her younger sister Delphy had been substituted as the wedding present to Martha Washington’s granddaughter Eliza Custis. In this year Eliza Custis Law and her husband manumitted Delphy and her children. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1832
February 14, Tuesday: Eliza Staines died in New Hampshire. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1833
February 11, Monday: Nancy Staines died in New Hampshire. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1835
August 10, Monday: At Niblo’s Garden in New-York Phineas Taylor Barnum started to exhibit blind and paralyzed black slave Joyce Heth under the pretense that it had been she who had nursed our illustrious founding father George Washington.
Dr. Reuben Crandall was arrested after Harry King, a Georgetown, Virginia man, called on him in his office while he was unpacking some crates and boxes of stuff. The young man sighted “a pamphlet on anti-slavery BOTANIZING lying on the table.” There were several such papers lying around, which the botanist had been using to press his plant specimens. He asked if he might have one to read, and “Dr. Crandall told him he might.” For this, Dr. Crandall would be held in the local lockup for almost nine months awaiting trial for his life for the treason of incitement to servile insurrection (the same statute, written by Thomas Jefferson, under which Captain John Brown would be tried and hanged) — and while living under these conditions he would acquire the HDT WHAT? INDEX
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“consumption,” or pulmonary tuberculosis, that would destroy him.
Francis Scott Key, the District of Columbia’s DA, would attempt to persuade the judge to impose the death penalty upon Prudence Crandall’s younger brother.
Dr. Crandall had been charged with promulgating a false doctrine that the black American had equal rights with the white, with casting reflections on the chivalry of the south, and with intent to cause unrest among HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Negroes.23 It was suggested that he had himself authored publications urging immediate emancipation of slaves. Clearly this Un-American agitator deserved to be dead. A crowd of white Navy Yard workers therefore went to the Washington County Jail where he was being held, to agitate for his lynching, and along the way a free black tavernkeeper, Beverly Snow, made some sort of derogatory remark about their wives. The crowd began by thoroughly trashing Snow’s tavern, and then over two days and three nights of rioting, it smashed the windows of Negro churches, the Negro school, and various homes.
Drastic legislation would follow this “Snow Riot” in DC — legislation further restricting the rights of free Negroes to assemble.24
As part of the legal process, Dr. Crandall would be interrogated about his attitudes toward people of other races. There was a concern that he might share to some degree in the radical attitudes of his notorious elder sister Prudence. He assured his captors that “he would break up the school if he could, but his sister was a very obstinate girl.” He informed them that he had another sister, younger, who was sharing in his older sister’s attitudes, but that he had been hoping “that he could, in all events, get her away” from this bad influence.
23. THE TRIAL OF REUBEN CRANDALL, M.D., CHARGED WITH PUBLISHING AND CIRCULATING SEDITIOUS AND INCENDIARY PAPERS, &C. IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, WITH THE INTENT OF EXCITING SERVILE INSURRECTION . . . BY A MEMBER OF THE BAR. Washington DC, Printed for the Proprietors, 1836. (This 48-page pamphlet alleged that “The Trial of Crandall presents the first case of a man charged with endeavoring to excite insurrection among slaves and the free colored population that was ever brought before a judicial tribunal.”) 24. Provine, Dorothy Sproles. THE FREE NEGRO IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA 1800-1860. Thesis Louisiana State University Department of History, 1959, 1963 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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September 5, Saturday: A blind and paralyzed black slave, Joyce Heth, was placed on exhibit in Boston’s Concert Hall by Phineas Taylor Barnum under the pretense that it had been she who had nursed our illustrious founding father George Washington.25
Penny Magazine:
http://www.history.rochester.edu/pennymag/220.htm
25. It seemed to startle no one in Boston, that this person was the personal property of P.T. Barnum. Had his claim been truthful, Ms. Heth would have at this point been in the 162d year of her age. To demonstrate the truthfulness of his claim, he would on February 25, 1836 be submitting her corpse to the indignity of a public autopsy in the City Saloon of New-York, admission price 50¢. When at the conclusion of the autopsy the surgeon David L. Rogers would announce that in his estimation Ms. Heth hadn’t been more than 80 at death, Barnum would counter that the corpse wasn’t her, that she was still alive, that in fact at that moment she was on tour in Europe. Later, he would acknowledge that this had indeed been the deceased Ms. Heth, while asserting that subsequent to this autopsy he had provided the remains a decent burial (we of course must believe him, him being a white man and all that). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1836
February 19, Friday: Joseph Fieschi, Pierre Morey, and Theodore Pepin were guillotined for their part in the attempted assassination of King Louis-Philippe of France during the previous July. Hours before his head was to be removed Pepin revealed his membership in a hitherto unknown radical republican group, the “Societe des Familles.” HEADCHOPPING
Joyce Heth, the elderly slave woman Phineas Taylor Barnum had been exhibiting under a pretense that she had been our illustrious founding father George Washington’s wet-nurse, died.
Prime Minister Mendizabal ordered closure of all monasteries and convents in Spain.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6th day 19th of 2 M 1836 / I have had this morning to look a little over my past life & to commemorate the goodness & many mercies of Kind Providence towards me — I hope I shall never distrust his power nor despair of his goodness & mercy - for many times when it looked as if all resources were coming to an end, something has opened, whereby I was enabled to look a little ways a head - I am now writing of temporal prospects, for tho’ at this time I have nothing to elate, but rather to depress my feelings -yet as way has always singularly opened I can but feel a faith in the Power of God who has so wonderfully opened the way for me to live comfortably & even respectably among men — & even if I should be brought to more narrow limits - may I endure the privation as becomes a Man & a Christian - he knows what is best for us, & deals kindly even with his rebellious Sons - but I know it will not do - it is not safe to presume on his mercy, & yet continue in rebellion & disobedience - he requires a cheerful a willing & yet as pure offering & that of the Whole heart My heart is humbled under a Sense of the many Mercies I have received while I write this - much much more presenting to view than I have mind to relate at this time — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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February 25, Thursday: Richard Henry Dana, Jr. and the Alert sailed for Santa Barbara, California.
AND NOW, FOR SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT, A REPORT FROM OUR SAILOR: Thursday, Feb. 25th. Set sail for Santa Barbara, where we arrived on Sunday, the 28th.
Samuel Colt received a US patent for a “revolver,” eventually to be colloquially referred to as a “sixshooter” (although some of them were capable only of five shots).
By arrangement of Phineas Taylor Barnum (her owner), the body of Joyce Heth, the elderly slave woman he been exhibiting under a pretense that she had been our illustrious founding father George Washington’s wet- nurse was subjected to public autopsy. The autopsy was performed by a surgeon hired for the occasion, Dr. David L. Rogers, in the presence of 1,500 spectators who had paid 50¢ admission each, in New-York’s City Saloon (drinks not on the house). When this hired surgeon proclaimed that Barnum’s age claim for this woman had been fraudulent, that she was nowhere near 161 years old at the time of her death, the hoaxer proclaimed that the body autopsied had not been that of Joyce Heth, that in fact she was still alive and well on tour in Europe.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 25 of 2nd M / With my young friend Thomas Nichols rode to Portsmouth & attended Monthly Meeting - It was a most Violent windy day, clouds & very uncomfortable riding being very cold & a part of the way muddy & heavy traveling — The First Meeting was silent & small & not a time of much life to me. — In the last we had but little buisness & the Meeting was not detained long. — We went with Henry & Thomas Gould to Josiah Chases & dined & got home before sunset. — I have of late felt my mind engaged to write our friend Robert Comfort of Wheatland State of NYork who attended our last Yearly Meeting, he was a true & honest friend & one with whom I felt much unity & Sympathy I have also in the course of the Week written to my friends Thos Evans of Philada. - It is a time of great streight in society, & it becomes necessary for those who can to commune together. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1845
May 22, Thursday: Brigham Young “got married with” Mary Elizabeth Rollins, his 5th for the year.
An interview by the Reverend T.H. Adams with Oney Judge Staines was published in The Granite Freeman, an abolitionist newspaper of Concord, New Hampshire. She described the Washingtons, their attempts to capture her, her opinions on slavery, her pride in having learned to read, and her strong religious faith. When asked whether she was sorry that she left the Washingtons, since she labored so much harder after her escape than before, she said: “No, I am free, and have, I trust been made a child of God by the means.” There is now living in the borders of the town of Greenland, N.H., a runaway slave of Gen. Washington, at present supported by the County of Rockingham. Her name at the time of her elopement was ONA MARIA JUDGE. She is not able to give the year of her escape, but says that she came from Philadelphia just after the close of Washington’s second term of the Presidency, which must fix it somewhere in the [early?] part of the year 1797. Being a waiting maid of Mrs. Washington, she was not exposed to any peculiar hardships. If asked why she did not remain in his service, she gives two reasons, first, that she wanted to be free; secondly that she understood that after the decease of her master and mistress, she was to become the property of a grand-daughter of theirs, by name of Custis, and that she was determined never to be her slave. Being asked how she escaped, she replied substantially as follows, “Whilst they were packing up to go to Virginia, I was packing to go, I didn’t know where; for I knew that if I went back to Virginia, I should never get my liberty. I had friends among the colored people of Philadelphia, had my things carried there beforehand, and left Washington’s house while they were eating dinner.” She came on board a ship commanded by CAPT. JOHN BOLLES, and bound to Portsmouth, N.H. In relating it, she added, “I never told his name till after he died, a few years HDT WHAT? INDEX
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since, lest they should punish him for bringing me away. …” Washington made two attempts to recover her. First, he sent a man by the name of Bassett to persuade her to return; but she resisted all the argument he employed for this end. He told her they would set her free when she arrived at Mount Vernon, to which she replied, “I am free now and choose to remain so.” Finding all attempts to seduce her to slavery again in this manner useless, Bassett was sent once more by Washington, with orders to bring her and her infant child by force. The messenger, being acquainted with Gov. [then Senator John] Langdon, then of Portsmouth, took up lodgings with him, and disclosed to him the object of his mission. The good old Governor. (to his honor be it spoken), must have possessed something of the spirit of modern anti- slavery. He entertained Bassett very handsomely, and in the meantime sent word to Mrs. Staines, to leave town before twelve o’clock at night, which she did, retired to a place of concealment, and escaped the clutches of the oppressor. Shortly after this, Washington died, and, said she, “they never troubled me any more after he was gone. … The facts here related are known through this region, and may be relied on as substantially correct. Probably they were not for years given to the public, through fear of her recapture; but this reason no longer exists, since she is too old and infirm to be of sufficient value to repay the expense of search. Though a house servant, she had no education, nor any valuable religious instruction; says she never heard Washington pray, and does not believe that he was accustomed to. “Mrs. Washington used to read prayers, but I don’t call that praying.[”] Since her escape she has learned to read, trusts she has been made “wise unto salvation,” and is, I think, connected with a church in Portsmouth. When asked if she is not sorry she left Washington, as she has labored so much harder since, than before, her reply is, “No, I am free, and have, I trust been made a child of God by the means.[”] Never shall I forget the fire that kindled in her age- bedimmed eye, or the smile that played upon her withered countenance, as I spake of the Redeemer in whom there is neither “bond nor free,” bowed with her at the mercy seat and commended her to Him “who heareth prayer” and who regards “the poor and needy when they cry,” I felt that were it mine to choose, I would not exchange her possessions, “rich in faith,” and sustained, while tottering over the grave, by “a hope full of immortality,” for tall the glory and renown of him whose HDT WHAT? INDEX
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slave she was. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1847
January 1, Thursday: Major James Duncan Graham of the US Army’s Corps of Topographical Engineers was breveted as a lieutenant-colonel “for valuable and highly distinguished services, particularly on the boundary line between the United States and the provinces of Canada and New Brunswick.” CARTOGRAPHY
The Reverend Benjamin Chase interviewed Oney Judge Staines for The Liberator. She described the Washingtons, their attempts to capture her, her opinions on slavery, her pride in having learned to read, and her strong religious faith. When asked whether she was sorry that she left the Washingtons, since she labored so much harder after her escape than before, she said: “No, I am free, and have, I trust been made a child of God by the means.” I have recently made a visit to one of Gen. Washington’s, or rather Mrs. Washington’s slaves. It is a woman, nearly white, very much freckled, and probably, (for she does not know her age,) more than eighty. She now resides with a colored woman by the name of Nancy Jack … at what is called the Bay side in Greenland, in New-Hampshire, and is maintained as a pauper by the county of Rockingham. She says that she was a chambermaid for Mrs. Washington; that she was a large girl at the time of the revolutionary war; that when Washington was elected President, she was taken to Philadelphia, and that, although well enough used as to work and living, she did not want to be a slave always, and she supposed if she went back to Virginia, she would never have a chance of escape. She took a passage in a vessel to Portsmouth, N.H. and there married a man by the name of Staines, and had three children, who, with her husband, are all dead. After she was married, and had one child, while her husband was gone to sea, Gen. Washington sent on a man by the name of Bassett [Burwell Bassett, Jr., Washington’s nephew], to prevail on her to go back. He saw her, and used all the persuasion he could, but she utterly refused to go with him. He returned, and then came again, with orders to take her by force, and carry her back. He put up with the late Gov. [John] Langdon, and made known his business, and the Governor gave her notice that she must leave Portsmouth that night, or she would be carried back. She went to a stable, and hired a boy, with a horse and carriage, to carry her to Mr. Jack’s [John Jack, a free black], at Greenland, where she now resides, a distance of eight miles, and remained there until her husband returned from sea, and Bassett did not find her. She says that she never received the least mental or HDT WHAT? INDEX
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moral instruction, of any kind, while she remained in Washington’s family. But, after she came to Portsmouth, she learned to read; and when Elias Smith first preached in Portsmouth, she professes to have been converted to Christianity. She, and the woman with whom she lives, (who is nearly of her age,) appear to be, and have the reputation of being imbued with the real spirit of Christianity. She says that the stories told of Washington’s piety and prayers, so far as she ever saw or heard while she was his slave, have no foundation. Card-playing and wine- drinking were the business at his parties, and he had more of such company Sundays than on any other day. I do not mention this as showing, in my estimation, his anti-Christian character, so much as the bare fact of being a slaveholder, and not a hundredth part so much as trying to kidnap this woman; but, in the minds of the community, it will weigh infinitely more. Great names bear more weight with the multitude, than the eternal principles of God’s government. So good a man as Washington is enough to sanctify war and slavery; but where is the evidence of his goodness? This woman is yet a slave. If Washington could have got her and her child, they were constitutionally his; and if Mrs. Washington’s heirs were now to claim her, and take her before Judge Woodbury, and prove their title, he would be bound, upon his oath, to deliver her up to them. Again — Langdon was guilty of a moral violation of the Constitution, in giving this woman notice of the agent being after her. It was frustrating the design, the intent of the Constitution, and he was equally guilty, morally, as those who would overthrow it. Mrs. Staines was given verbally, if not legally, by Mrs. Washington, to Eliza Custis, her grand-daughter. These women live in rather an obscure place, and in a poor, cold house, and speak well of their neighbors, and are probably treated with as much kindness and sympathy as people are generally in their circumstances; but not with half so much as it is the duty and interest of people, in better outward circumstances, to treat them. I greatly enjoyed my visit to them, and should rather have the benediction they pronounced upon me at parting, than the benediction of all the D.D.’s in Christendom. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1848
February 25, Friday: Oney Judge Staines died in Greenland, New Hampshire. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1860
By this point the manumitted mulatto West Ford, reputed to be the only son of George Washington, had made himself the 2d richest person of color in Fairfax County near Washington DC. Isn’t America wonderful!
Hinton Rowan Helper’s THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT, which had been published in 1857 in Baltimore, was republished in New-York (it having been found to be quite impossible to publish such material any longer out of Baltimore) with factual corrections as to the US economy (as if mere facts had anything to do with anything, in this contest of racial attitudes and orientations), and with (temporary) suppression of some of the more extreme of the pending consequences of this racist abolitionist attitude. This new 1860 edition was being published under the title COMPENDIUM OF THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH. BY HINTON ROWAN HELPER OF NORTH CAROLINA.26 The cost of publication was 16 cents the copy, and the book was expected to sell at 25 cents the copy. (Most copies would be distributed at cost.)
HINTON ROWAN HELPER
The book expanded upon what we now have come to regard as a pleasant conceit –the idea that oppression actually is unprofitable to the oppressor– and favorably quoting Waldo Emerson among other of our nation’s
26. Hinton Rowan Helper. THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT. ENLARGED EDITION. New York, 1860. This book has been republished in Miami FL in 1969. His earlier book has been republished in Cambridge MA in 1968. For more on this guy and his not-all-that-novel conceit that the victims were victimizing him and needed to be trumped, see Bailey, Hugh C. HINTON ROWAN HELPER: ABOLITIONIST-RACIST (University AL: 1965). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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prime politicians and metaphysicians.
This Emerson-admirer was an egregious case of what you would term an Antislavery Racist. –Which is to say, he was a Southern white man, from North Carolina, who owned no slaves, whose fixation was that he and other white men like him were victims of society. It wasn’t the blacks who were being harmed by slavery, it was real decent folks like him who were being harmed by slavery. All these slaves, who belonged to other people, were impacting his life! He hated the nigger who was doing him wrong, he hated the slavemaster who was doing him wrong, what he needed most urgently was a lily-white, pure America of which he could be proud, an America where he could stand tall. Slavery was a tainted and archaic social system that was standing in the way of white people’s cultural and material progress. Blacks were a tainted and inferior group who had no business being here in our New World in the first place. His new book was pretty much of a piece with the masterpiece he had issued as of 1857, THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT. This author needed to ensure in his preface that his readers were going to understand, that it was no part of his abolitionist stance to display any special friendliness or sympathy for the blacks. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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(OK, Hinton, fellow, I guess we’ve all grasped that now.)
“History, among its many ironies, often places enemies in life into various positions of posthumous conjunction.” — Stephen Jay Gould Meanwhile, The National Democratic Quarterly Review in Washington DC was attempting to neutralize Helper’s racist abolitionism by issuing Louis Shade’s A BOOK FOR THE “IMPENDING CRISIS!” APPEAL TO THE COMMON SENSE AND PATRIOTISM OF THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES. “HELPERISM” ANNIHILATED! THE “IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT” AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.
Meanwhile, the South was attempting to neutralize Helperism by publication of Samuel M. Wolfe’s HINTON ROWAN HELPER’S IMPENDING CRISIS DISSECTED.
Meanwhile, an economist’s argument for holding the sections of the nation together was being offered by Thomas Prentice Kettell’s SOUTHERN WEALTH AND NORTHERN PROFITS AS EXHIBITED IN STATISTICAL FACTS AND OFFICIAL FIGURES: SHOWING THE NECESSITY OF UNION TO THE FUTURE PROSPERITY AND WELFARE OF THE REPUBLIC. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1863
July 20, Monday: The manumitted mulatto West Ford, formerly enslaved, who is suspected to have been the only son of George Washington, had been being cared for at the Mount Vernon plantation during his old age. In this year he died and his obituary appeared in the Alexandria Gazette. His body possibly was placed in the emptied older tomb of Washington, which during his lifetime he had tended. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1996
Descendants of the manumitted mulatto slave West Ford went public with their story that their ancestor had been sired upon the slave Venus by George Washington in 1785. Articles about their allegation appeared in Newsweek, TIME, and Der Spiegel.
Meanwhile, articles on Thomas Jefferson appeared in The Atlantic Monthly:
• An Excerpt of Query XIV from the NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA (1781) by Thomas Jefferson • The “Blood of Patriots and Tyrants” letter from Jefferson to William Smith, Paris, November 13, 1787 • The “Adam and Eve” letter from Jefferson to William Short, Philadelphia, January 3, 1793 • 1862: A.D. White’s “Jefferson and Slavery.” Through examination of Jefferson’s public writings and personal letters, White makes a case for the image of Jefferson as both an abolitionist and a champion of human rights. • 1873: James Parton’s “The Art of Being President.” the author examined “the leading traits of Mr. Jefferson’s administration, with a view to getting light upon the question, whether he satisfied the people of his time by doing right, or by adroitly pretending to do right.” • 1992: Douglas Wilson’s “Thomas Jefferson and the Character Issue.” As the 250th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson’s birth approaches, a Jefferson scholar reflects on Jefferson’s life — and in particular on the enigma at its core: that a slave holder should be the nation’s most eloquent champion of equality. To understand how this could be so, the author explains, is to appreciate the perils of “presentism” and the difficulties that may impede the historical assessment of motive and character. • 1994: Merrill D. Peterson’s “Jefferson and Religious Freedom.” Peterson asserts that Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom is “one of the main pillars of American democracy and a beacon of light and liberty to the world.” • October 1996: Conor Cruise O’Brien’s “Thomas Jefferson: Radical and Racist,” drawn from his book THE LONG AFFAIR: THOMAS JEFFERSON AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, 1785-1800 (U of Chicago P, 1996). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1998
The allegation that George Washington had sired a mulatto son West Ford, his only child, on a black slave named Venus in 1785, appeared in major US newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and USA Today. There were a number of television broadcasts including live feature stories on MSMBC and on Denver’s Channel 9. The allegation was mentioned on the TV program “Saturday Night Live.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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2000
March: There was a meeting at Mount Vernon between descendants of the manumitted mulatto slave West Ford, possibly the only son of George Washington, and Mount Vernon staff.
At the launch of a replica of the schooner La Amistad, in Mystic, Connecticut, the keynote speaker was Samuel H. Pieh, head of an organization working to improve relations between Africa and the USA, the “Mid-South Africa Link” (Mr. Pieh being a great-grandson of Joseph Cinqué).
JOSEPH CINQUÉ
May: PBS broadcast a documentary featuring the allegation that the manumitted mulatto slave West Ford was the only son of George Washington and posted a mini-documentary, “George and Venus.”
Four pieces of inconsequential cultural bric-a-brac that had been looted by French and British troops before the torching or the Old Summer Palace on the outskirts of Beijing in 1860 were offered at auction in Hong Kong by their present possessors. A bronze monkey head and a bronze ox head were auctioned off for $16,000,000HK (roughly US$2M), and a bronze tiger head fetched $15,400,000HK. These figures had been spouts in an attractive and/or grandiloquent zodiac calendar fountain in the garden of the palace. The attitude of the government of the People’s Republic of China had been that such “cultural treasures” should be confiscated, rather than paid for, since they helped define what it is to be Chinese, so when these private parties who had bought the looted items allegedly in order to make them available to the nation turned out to be having difficulties in raising the requisite millions within the auction deadlines, the PRC expected the government of the Hong Kong Special Autonomous Region to pony up the cash. The activity was analogized to a hypothetical auctioning, in Tel Aviv, of Jewish art treasures looted by the Nazis during WWII, with the proceeds going to the current “possessors” of the loot. The newspapers speculated that this ponying up of cash would be considered to be “a suitable punishment” for the “one China two systems” officials who had been legitimating this fencing of stolen goods as an exercise in “free enterprise capitalism.” It “added insult to injury,” even if it did mean that these loose pieces of bric-a-brac would henceforward be dusted with great regularity. The auction house, Sotheby’s, issued a public statement, declaring that it was in fact “extremely sensitive to stolen property issues in China.” It characterized its auction as “legal.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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2001
September: A History Channel special focused on the claims made in a new book by Linda Allen Bryant, a descendant of the manumitted mulatto slave West Ford, entitled I CANNOT TELL A LIE: THE TRUE STORY OF GEORGE WASHINGTON’S AFRICAN AMERICAN DESCENDANTS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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2002
Ann Rinaldi’s novel TAKING LIBERTY.
Emory Wilson’s drama THIRST FOR FREEDOM was produced at the Player’s Ring Theater of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. ONEY JUDGE HDT WHAT? INDEX
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2007
Emily Arnold McCully’s THE ESCAPE OF ONEY JUDGE.
Diane D. Turner’s MY NAME IS ONEY JUDGE.
Thomas Gibbons’s A HOUSE WITH NO WALLS was performed at the InterAct Theater in Philadelphia, and at regional theaters throughout the states. ONEY JUDGE HDT WHAT? INDEX
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2008
February 25, Monday: On the 160th anniversary of Ona’s death, at the President’s House site, some fun people of Philadelphia celebrated the first “Oney Judge Day,” The ceremony included speeches by historians and activists, a proclamation by Mayor Michael A. Nutter, and a memorial citation by the City Council (also in this year, standup comic Jen Kirkman would reprise Ona’s life as a FUNNY OR DIE web video)! HDT WHAT? INDEX
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2010
David Kaczynski’s and Ted Kaczynski’s book of poems A DREAM NAMED YOU (New York: Troy Books).
Feral House’s TECHNOLOGICAL SLAVERY: THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF THEODORE J. KACZYNSKI, A.K.A. “THE UNABOMBER,” made up of an interview conducted in 2001 and a collection of correspondence up to 2006, as assembled by Ted Kaczynski and David Skrbina of the University of Michigan at Dearborn.
PARALLEL DESTINIES by choreographer Germaine Ingram, composer Bobby Zankel, and visual artist John Dowell, a dance/theater piece about real slavery and real freedom that is a work-in-progress at the Philadelphia Folklore Project. ONEY JUDGE
May 21, Friday: “Oney Judge Freedom Day” was celebrated at the President’s House site in Philadelphia on the 214th anniversary of this slave’s escape to freedom.
December: The President’s House Commemoration: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation opened at 6th & Market Streets in Philadelphia. This installation included a video about Oney Judge and information about all 9 of the Americans who had been held in slavery in this house (alert: their video is not as amusing as this YOUTUBE clip).
“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Oney “Ona” Staines HDT WHAT? INDEX
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2015. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: February 18, 2015 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with