Intertwined: The Enslaved Community at George Washington’s Mount Vernon

Episode 6: “Leaving”

Nancy Carter Quander was just a child when George Washington died in December 1799, but his death changed her life forever. Washington’s decision to emancipate his enslaved people in his will had consequences for Mount Vernon’s enslaved community and their descendants that persist into our own time. In this episode, we look at the meaning of freedom for a community intertwined through marriage and kinship, its continued evolution after Martha Washington’s own death in 1802, and how members of the descendent community are recovering their family histories.

Featuring:

• Jessie MacLeod, Associate Curator, George Washington’s Mount Vernon
• Mary V. Thompson, Research Historian, Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington
• Dr. Cassandra Good, Assistant Professor of History, Marymount University
• Dr. Bruce Ragsdale, former Director of the Federal Judicial History Office
• Dr. Lynn Price Robbins, historian of George and Martha Washington and Early America
• Judge Rohulamin Quander, President and Founder, Quander Historical and Educational Society
• William Norwood Holland, Jr., J.D., retired, National Labor Relations Board
• Ann Louise Chinn, Founder, The Middle Passages Ceremonies and Port Markers Project
• Stephen Hammond, Syphax Family Historian and Scientist Emeritus, The United States Geological Survey
• Dr. Scott Casper, President, The American Antiquarian Society

Full transcripts, show notes, and bibliographies available at www.georgewashingtonpodcast.com.

Episode 5: “Resisting”

In May 1796, Ona Judge self-emancipated by fleeing from President George Washington’s Philadelphia home. Her escape was just one example of the many ways that Mount Vernon’s enslaved community resisted their bondage. Some acts were subtle and easy to miss, others were much more dramatic, regardless the threat of punishment was ever present. In this episode, we follow Judge’s flight to freedom, and explore the stories of Hercules Posey and Harry Washington, to examine how enslaved people defied George and Martha Washington’s authority.

Featuring:

• Jessie MacLeod, Associate Curator, George Washington’s Mount Vernon
• Dr. Marcus Nevius, Associate Professor of History and African Studies, University of Rhode Island
• Mary V. Thompson, Research Historian, Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington
• Dr. Cassandra Pybus, Professor of History Emerita, The University of Sydney
• Ramin Ganeshram, Executive Director, Westport Museum for History and Culture

Full transcripts, show notes, and bibliographies available at www.georgewashingtonpodcast.com.

In Intertwined Stories, we’re taking a deeper dive into the history behind the podcast Intertwined: The Enslaved Community at George Washington’s Mount Vernon by bringing you extended versions of some of the interviews with the series' contributors.

Labor dictated life for enslaved communities at Mount Vernon and beyond. And yet despite their enslavement, people like Sambo Anderson, Kate, and Carolina Branham carved out time for themselves, created families, and forged relationships – sometimes across vast distances – that brought them comfort and some sense of control over their own lives.

As we heard throughout Intertwined, reconstructing the lived experience of slavery is a difficult task. We have few surviving accounts from the people who were enslaved, so we must use a variety of sources and evidence to interpret the past.

To help us better understand what life was like in Virginia and throughout the Atlantic world, we chatted with Dr. Brenda Stevenson, who is an expert on the history of slavery, family, and gender in the early United States.

Dr. Stevenson is the inaugural Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair in Women’s History at St. John’s College at Oxford University. Jeanette Patrick was in the host’s chair for our interview with Dr. Stevenson, and we talked to her just before she made her move across the Atlantic in the summer of 2021.

We pick up our chat with her about living conditions and daily life in Virginia before exploring how enslaved people formed families and communities. Intertwined is narrated by Brenda Parker and is a production of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and CD Squared. Full transcripts, show notes, and bibliographies for Intertwined are available at www.georgewashingtonpodcast.com.

Intertwined is a story about the entangled lives of Mount Vernon’s enslaved community, the Washington Family, and the legacies of slavery at the historic plantation today. The stories we tell in the series are stories of a shared past that continues to shape us all.

Music was an essential part of life in eighteenth-century America. It remains so our in own time. Music helps us to experience collectively life’s great joys and its darkest moments in a way that generations past would still recognize.

The soundtrack for Intertwined captures the spirit of each individual episode and the journey we take together over the course of the series. We’ve assembled a collection of artists whose modern work and vocal performances draw us into the past from the perspective of our present. We invite you to listen here.

• Trailer: "Deer" by ANBR (Artlist) - 01:29
• Main Title: "A Tender Heart" by The David Roy Collective (Artlist) - 04:38
• Episode 1: "Sin's Deceitfulness" By Jordan Hatfield (Artlist)- 06:34
• Episode 2: "In The Clouds" by Be Still The Earth (Artlist) -14:32
• Episode 3: "The River Brethren" by Doug Kaufman (Artlist) - 18:29
• Episode 4: "Songbird" by Doug Kaufman (Artlist) -22:52
• Episode 5: "Close" by Eleven Tales (Artlist) - 25:26
• Episode 6: "Valhalla" by Searching for Light (Artlist) - 30:49
• Episode 7: "Perception" by Borrtex (Artlist) - 32:25
• Episode 8a: "Those Who Wait" by We Dream of Eden (Artlist) - 37:54
• Episode 8b: "Sit Down Servant, Sit Down" performed by Larry Earl Jr., Christina Lane and Willie Wright (MVLA) - 40:36

All music, except for "Sit Down Servant, Sit Down," was sourced from Artlist.io. "Sit Down Servant, Sit Down" is a production of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association.

Intertwined is narrated by Brenda Parker and is a production of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and CD Squared. Full transcripts, show notes, and bibliographies for Intertwined are available at www.georgewashingtonpodcast.com.

In Intertwined Stories, we’re taking a deeper dive into the history behind the podcast Intertwined: The Enslaved Community at George Washington’s Mount Vernon by bringing you extended versions of some of the interviews with the series' contributors.

The origins of Mount Vernon’s enslaved community are linked directly to the early history of slavery in Virginia. Although the first enslaved people arrived in Virginia in 1619, slavery did not become the dominate labor system in the Chesapeake Bay region for more than a century.

As we heard in Episode 1 of Intertwined, race-based slavery developed slowly in the Chesapeake. Colonists, merchants, and competing nations made a series of choices that interwove slavery into the fabric of Virginia’s society and economy.

To learn more about how and why this happened, we talked to Dr. John C. Coombs, a professor of history at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. We also chatted about the connections between Barbados and Virginia that made Virginia an important part of the transatlantic slave trade long before it was a site of mass enslavement.

Intertwined is narrated by Brenda Parker and is a production of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and CD Squared. Full transcripts, show notes, and bibliographies for Intertwined are available at www.georgewashingtonpodcast.com.