Intertwined Stories: The Origins of Slavery in Virginia

04/05/22 • 19 min

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

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.

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Intertwined Stories: Living and Laboring

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.

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Intertwined Stories: Rediscovering Families

As a child, Ann Chinn didn’t understand her family’s connection to Mount Vernon, the Washingtons, or the Custis Family. But later in life, she came to learn that she was a descendent of Sall Twine. Twine was a woman assigned to work as a field laborer on Dogue Run Farm. She was owned by the estate of Martha Washington’s first husband. Twine’s husband was named George. He was owned by Mary Ball Washington, George Washington’s mother. Together, the couple had seven children. And after the Washingtons died, Twine was inherited by one of Martha’s grandchildren.

We spent a delightful afternoon talking to Chinn about her family’s history and her journey to find out more about her family’s relationship to Mount Vernon. You’ll first hear a little bit about Chinn herself, before we travel back to the 18th century to learn about her ancestor, Sall Twine, and her life as a woman enslaved in Virginia.