Slaves of the Founders

Reading a feature article recently in Dec. issue of Vanity Fair on Nikole Hannah-Jones who wrote the 1619 Project feature in the Sunday New York Times a couple of years ago. That issue sold out on the newstands, and was sold even over the internet! It was so popular, she enlarged it into a book.

To me, the main point was a familiar one to a woman, that is the erasure of our presence in history in general and American history. She begins by stating the fact that the first enslaved Africans came to America in 1619, before the Mayflower, and needless to say their labor made thiss country what it became. Their unpaid labor powered the agricultural wealth of the South. It must be mentioned ago, that the unopaid labor of enslaved people BUILT the United States Capitol!It goes without saying that I cannot summarize the entire magazine in this blog - you should get a copy or as soon as the book is avvailable you should get that - I certainly plan to!

What I wanted to mention here were the slaves of two particular presidents: George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. Two of the enslaved people of George Washington escaped slavery and were never recovered. One was Hercules, Washington's famously talented chef. When Washington brought his enslaved workers up north, he circulated them back to his plantation to make sure that they didn't meet any legal circumstances to achieve their freedom. The second one to escape from George Washington was Ona Judge, Martha's talented seamstress. Neither escaped person was ever recovered though George Washington spent a fortune on slave hunter/Investigators to get them back. There is a book about Ona Judge which I bought and read on the recommendation of a fellow volunteer from Red Bank Battlefield.

Thomas Jefferson took as a concubine a young enslaved woman named Sally Hemmings, very near the age of his own daughters and a companion to them. Jefferson was the father of several children with Sally Hemmings, some of whom were freed at adluthood, others not until Jefferson died. His descendants claimed for decades that the rumors that the Hemmings were Jefferson descendants was a scurrilous lie and that Thomas Jefferson would NEVER have sexual intercourse with a Black slave. Well DNA tells a different story an the best book I have seen on that final reckoning is written by Annette Gordon-Reed.

the STORY of History is written by the people with education, college degrees, professorships and access to print media. Until the days of my own college education, women were often locked out of the access to either of these routes to see that our own part in history was acknowledge. Now, of course, thanks to the Women's Movement, we are a force in higher education, we have the degrees, the access to print media, and the access to publication and for women in general there has been a great effort to even out the narrative since the 1970's. Being locked out of literacy, first, and later through poverty, access to higher education also kept African Americans from being able to participate in the creation of the narrative of history, so they were left out as well, and now we experience the bits of pieces here and there that remediate this lsos. think of the emergence of the stories such as the Tuskegee Airmen, or the Code Talkers - bits of hero history that were buried until revealed by the new pioneers of history.

I joyfully bought the books that introduced me to my own progenitor female heroes many of whom I have mentioned in previous blogs, women like Margaret Sanger, and Clara Barton, Harriet tubman and Sojourner Truth, the names could go on and on to the bottom of the blog but that isn't my point in this entry. My point in this entry is my own appreciation of reclaiming my lost and erased female history has made me appreciate the effort to reclaim African American history and so I have made it a point to read it when I come across it. For example CASTE, by Isabel Wilkerson, was one of my most recent readings in the study of the lost history of African Americans in the United States.

The Vanity Fair article mentioned several books that Nicole Hannah-Jones read and that we could also read, that introduce us to the story of African Americans in the time of the Revolution. i plan to get a few of these and here are some I can list for you if you want to make the effort to balance the story of our history!

The Negro in the American Revolution by Benjamin Quarels, Forced Founders, by Woody Holton, The Internal Enemy by Alan Taylor, the Counter Revolution of 1776 by Gerald Horn, Propaganda and the American Revolution by Patriia Bradley, Slave Nation by by Alfred Blumrosen, These Truths, by Jill Lepore.

I want to know the whole story, or as much of it as I can find. I have always made an effort to balance the story with readings in the FArm Workers Movement, and Indigenous Culture and Politics and will continue to do so. I hope you love history that way too - the way that it is always enhanced, expanded, made more inclusive!

Happy Trails! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com