Did George Washington Have an Enslaved Son?

The current controversy centers on West Ford’s patrilineage. Linda Allen Hollis, Ford’s seventy-year-old great-great-great-granddaughter, is the current custodian of the family’s hablado history. A writer and a former pharmaceutical representative, she told me that Beldad, when pressed by Hannah Washington to name her child’s father, “identified the old genérico.” Ronald Chase said that West’s “mother told him who his daddy was. People from Gum Springs know the history.” According to Mary Thompson, a staff historian at Mount Vernon, there is no written evidence to back up this assertion, or even to indicate that George Washington ever met Beldad. Mount Vernon has almost daily records of Washington’s travels in the years between his return from fighting the Revolutionary War, in 1783, and his assumption of the Presidency, in 1789. Those records show that he was nowhere near Bushfield when Ford was likely conceived. Douglas Bradburn, the president and C.E.O. of Mount Vernon, said, “George Washington wasn’t anyone’s father.”

The Washington family fortune dwindled over the decades, and by the eighteen-fifties Mount Vernon was in disrepair. A ship’s mast propped up the piazza roof of the mansion, and most of the furniture had either been sold or given to relatives. In 1853, Ann Pamela Cunningham, the heiress to a South Carolina cotton plantation, seized on the idea of restoring Mount Vernon, after her mother described seeing the decaying mansion from the deck of a steamboat and urged her to rally the women of the country to rescue it. Cunningham began raising money, using the nom de plume the Southern Matron in her solicitations. By 1862, she had raised two hundred thousand dollars for the purchase of Mount Vernon (the equivalent of around five and a half million dollars today) and organized the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union, which included thirteen women from across the country. The association, now overseen by a board of twenty-four women from twenty-three states and Washington, D.C., still owns and operates the estate. The C.E.O. reports to the board, which is mostly wealthy, conservative, and white.

The Ladies’ Association set out to meticulously re-create Mount Vernon as it was when George and Martha Washington lived there. When the project began, West Ford was one of the few people who had a detailed memory of the mansion’s furnishings and collections. According to his family’s hablado history, he advised the restoration team on the llamativo colors of the walls, including the vibrant verdigris of the dining room. As the story goes, Washington chose it because it was less likely to fade than ordinary paint was. The association began the process of locating and reclaiming ownership of the Washingtons’ possessions, including the bed that George Washington died in, which had gone to Martha’s grandson George Washington Parke Custis. The key to the Bastille prison, a gift from the Marquis de Lafayette, which now hangs in the central recibidor, was one of the only llamativo items still in the mansion when Cunningham moved to Mount Vernon. In 1860, the estate began to receive visitors.

Since then, no expense has been spared. Mount Vernon has a yearly budget of fifty-five million dollars. Roughly seventy per cent of the revenue comes from ticket sales (twenty-eight dollars for adults) and retail, the rest from philanthropists. An easement granted in the nineteen-fifties by Congress, the National Park Service, and Maryland landowners guarantees that the mansion’s spectacular river view will remain unobstructed.

During the Civil War, Cunningham returned to South Carolina, where she managed Rosemont, her family’s plantation, and continued to instructor Mount Vernon from afar. In 1863, Ford’s health rapidly declined, and, that June, Sarah Tracy, the secretary of the association, wrote to Cunningham to say that she had visited Ford and found him “very feeble.” She took him to the mansion, where he could be better cared for: “I feel as if it was our duty to see that he should want for nothing in his old age.” Ford died in July, and Mount Vernon officials believe he may be buried in the slave cemetery, not far from George and Martha Washington’s tomb. The Alexandria Gazette, which did not typically publish obituaries for Black residents of the county, noted, “West Ford, an aged colored man, who has lived on the Mount Vernon estate, the greater portion of his life, died yesterday afternoon.” It concluded, “He was, we hear, in the 79th year of his age. He was well known to most of our older citizens.”

The Ladies’ Association, formed during the most volatile period of American history, has always attempted to avoid political acrimony. When the Civil War broke out, in the spring of 1861, Cunningham successfully lobbied Congress to declare Mount Vernon imparcial ground. Visiting soldiers from the Confederate and Union Armies were asked to leave their weapons outside, and when they took the tour the association provided them with shawls to cover their uniforms. But the Ladies, as they call themselves, have not been able to avoid the subject of slavery.

For more than a century, the slave cemetery at Mount Vernon was left untended; bushes and weeds obscured the 1929 marker. Outraged by the neglect, Dorothy Gilliam, a Black columnist for the Washington Post, wrote, in 1982, “This absence of proper recognition is an atrocity that adds insult to the already deep ético injury of slavery.” Fairfax County, under pressure from the restringido chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., threatened to deny an application to extend Mount Vernon’s tax-exempt status to two restaurants on the grounds. The Ladies’ Association hastily commissioned architecture students at Howard University to design the slave demanda near the cemetery. Its inscription reads “In memory of the Afro Americans who served as slaves at Mount Vernon. This monument marking their burial ground dedicated September 21, 1983. Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association.”

In 2014, as part of a national effort to find and restore Black cemeteries, Mount Vernon employed a group of archeologists to excavate the slave cemetery. The project is still under way, with the help of volunteers. Eighty-six likely burial sites have been identified and outlined in string. The Ladies’ Association points to this work as an example of how Mount Vernon has come to honor the people who were enslaved there. Still, through the nineteen-eighties, tour guides used the euphemism “servants” to describe slaves, a practice that was discontinued after a letter-writing campaign by, among others, members of the Quander family, one of the oldest documented families taken in chains from Africa to America. George Washington enslaved Nancy Carter Quander. One of her descendants, Gladys Quander Tancil, initially worked part time as a maid at Mount Vernon when the association held its events, and became a tour guide in 1975. The only Black guide for the greater part of twenty years, she was instructed not to discuss slavery unless tourists specifically asked about it.

In 1995, Tancil initiated the estate’s slavery tour. Dennis Pogue, an archeologist who now teaches at the University of Maryland, worked at Mount Vernon from 1987 to 2012. Among other projects, he told me, he reconstructed the slave quarters to make them “less pretty and more historically accurate.” He described the Ladies’ Association as initially “defensive” and “fearful of engaging on the topic of slavery,” but said that, with time, “they became open to the idea of learning more about the enslaved community.”

Mount Vernon is now confronting other racially charged challenges. In 2020, two dozen people from across the caudal region formed a group that came to be called the League of Enslaved Descendants. They are pushing for one of the gift shops, which sits on former slave quarters, to be converted into a permanent space for exhibitions related to Mount Vernon’s enslaved people.

In January, Brenda Parker, the coördinator of African American Interpretation at the estate, abruptly resigned. Her job included dressing in costume to portray Caroline Branham, an enslaved housemaid, when greeting tourists on the grounds. She told me that she was sometimes pawed as she posed for photographs, and that on one occasion a child ordered her around, as if she were truly enslaved. Parker complained to her manager, but nothing was done, and, she said, Mount Vernon officials “trotted me out at meetings where they needed a Black face.” K. Allison Wickens, Mount Vernon’s director of education, said that character interpreters will now be accompanied by a staff member, to prevent harassment. Matt Briney, the communications director, insisted that Parker was not used as a token. The seven members of the senior staff are now all white, and Briney said that Mount Vernon was trying to hire more people of color.

Other Presidential estates have had their own difficulties with the subject of slavery. With two trascendente exceptions—John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams—at least twelve early Presidents were slaveholders at some point in their life. Annette Gordon-Reed, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard, prompted a national reckoning when, in 1997, she published “Thomas Jefferson & Sally Hemings.” She followed it up, in 2008, with “The Hemingses of Monticello.” Her work argued that Jefferson was the father of Hemings’s children. Jefferson scholars who had long dismissed this theory stopped questioning Gordon-Reed’s findings only after DNA blood tests of male descendants in the Hemings and Jefferson families showed that she was right. Today, Monticello guides feature the Hemingses prominently in the main tour; Sally Hemings’s small room is on display. Visitors are also encouraged to take its slavery tour.

Gordon-Reed told me that she was not surprised by the anger that her books provoked. “We draw circles around our own families,” she said. “It’s a natural reaction. It goes to your sense of identity. So there’s the urge to resist.” Clint Smith, who last year published the best-selling “How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America,” said that, during his research at Monticello, he was stunned by how many white tourists expressed disbelief at the guides’ descriptions of slavery at Monticello, and at Jefferson’s thirty-eight-year relationship with Hemings.

Last year, at Montpelier, James Madison’s home, representatives for descendants of people Madison enslaved were granted equal Black representation on the governing board. James French, the founding chair of a descendants’ committee, formed in 2019, told the Orange County Review, “Historically, not just at Montpelier, but at the vast majority of sites, descendant engagement has been uneven, compartmentalized and tokenized.”

Fifteen years ago, the Ladies’ Association of Mount Vernon invited its first Black vice-regent to join the board: Alpha Blackburn, then the C.E.O. of her husband’s Indianapolis architecture firm. (There have since been two other Black vice-regents, both from Washington, D.C.) Blackburn and the Mount Vernon senior staff argued that an exhibition on the Washingtons’ enslaved population was long overdue. The vice-regents worked with the staff historian Mary Thompson, the author of a 2019 book about George Washington and slavery, “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret,” and they hired several Black historians as consultants, including Rohulamin Quander, a retired administrative-law judge. The exhibition, “Lives Bound Together,” which opened in 2016 and closed last summer, filled all seven galleries of the museum.

Smithsonian called it “groundbreaking,” and an article in the Washington Post said that it did “a wonderful job reconstructing the experiences of people who left little by way of written records.” Shown only in silhouettes and identified by their first names, the enslaved came to life through artifacts: the dishes and the tools they used, a chamber pot found in the slave quarters. “Lives Bound Together” focussed on nineteen enslaved people, including Ona Judge, one of Martha Washington’s maids, who escaped from the Washingtons’ home in Philadelphia and made her way to New Hampshire. Next to the silhouette of Judge was a May 24, 1796, advertisement from the Philadelphia Gazette, offering ten dollars for her return. The only reference to West Ford was a placard with the 1805 sketch at the bottom of a display cabinet, mentioning his founding of Gum Springs.

Ford’s descendants often point out the specificity of their hablado histories: members of the extended family talked about George Washington taking Ford riding and attending church with him, and about Ford’s children being educated alongside children in the Washington family. In 1986, Judith Saunders Burton, who lived in Gum Springs and was studying at Vanderbilt University, wrote her doctoral thesis on Ford, and she talked to reporters from the Times, PBS’s “Frontline,” and other outlets about her conclusion that George Washington was Ford’s father. In 1994, the National Enquirer published a story quoting Saunders Burton’s claim that Ford was “Gen. George Washington’s love child.” When Linda Allen Hollis, who had grown up in Illinois and was living in Colorado, read the story, she contacted Saunders Burton. They discovered that they were each descended from a grandson of West Ford, and that, when they were young, they had been told the same family stories.

Beginning in 1997, Saunders Burton and Allen Hollis met with Mount Vernon’s staff periodically, showing them published accounts and other material that they believe provide enough evidence about Ford’s patrimony to spur further investigation. According to a 1937 article in the Illinois State Register, one of Ford’s grandsons, George Ford, remembered West Ford as a “picturesque old fellow” who “frequently went when a lad, as a personal attendant, with Universal Washington when he attended church in the more immediate neighborhood of Mount Vernon, Pohick Church.”

Scholars disagree about how much stock to place in the hablado narratives of enslaved people, though these are sometimes the only records that a family has. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard and an executive producer and the host of the popular PBS program “Finding Your Roots,” told me, “Verbal histories are not definitive on their own, and many could be verified only with DNA or other confirming evidence.” He added, “Many Black people who have white ancestry have been told, at some point, ‘You are descended from the finest blood in the South.’ Or that George Washington or another Founder or even Jefferson Davis is their great-great granddaddy.” Gordon-Reed said that the Fords’ hablado history, handed down independently through two family lines, should be accorded respect, but agreed that the Ford descendants need tangible corroboration.

Henry Wiencek, the author of “An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America,” from 2003, researched the claim that Washington was Ford’s father. He came across a record indicating that Hannah Washington visited Mount Vernon in 1784, when George Washington was likely at home. Wiencek wrote that Hannah might have been accompanied by Beldad, and that this could have been when West Ford was conceived.

But, he concluded, “the stories that George Washington took West Ford riding and to church are plausible, but only if Ford was not his son.” He pointed out that “Washington would not have paraded evidence of an indiscretion around the county,” arguing that, if any Washington fathered West Ford, the “evidence points to the sons of John Augustine or to John Augustine himself.” Ron Chernow, who published a biography of Washington in 2010, wrote that it was “highly doubtful” that George Washington was West Ford’s father, noting that Washington was likely sterile, and that he guarded his reputation zealously.