A census of the enslaved community at Mount Vernon was compiled in 1786 and in the summer of 1799, months before George Washington's death.1 These censuses revealed demographic information about the enslaved community at Mount Vernon and other properties owned by Washington. Nearly two thirds of all adults enslaved at Mount Vernon and outlying farms considered themselves married. Marriages among the enslaved and other relationships produced a significant number of children enslaved at Mount Vernon and other Washington and Custis family properties, with at least 293 children were born to enslaved women between 1750 and 1799.2
While acknowledged by their enslaver and community, marriages among enslaved people were not recognized or protected by the legal system, as enslaved people were considered property in the eyes of the law. As a result, enslaved people were unable to enter into legal contracts such as marriage. There is no indication that these marriages were arranged. Of the ninety-six married enslaved people on the five farms at Mount Vernon in 1799, only thirty-six lived in the same household as their spouse and children. Another thirty-eight had spouses living on one of Washington's other farms, a situation related primarily to work assignments as most lived had to live at the property where they worked.3
In 1799, twenty-two of those enslaved at Mount Vernon married individuals who lived and worked on other properties. With Sunday as their weekly day off, the individuals involved in long-distance marriages could see one another on Saturday night and during the day on Sunday, as well as during other holidays throughout the year. If they were also separated from their children, they would be able to see them during this time as well.
For those enslaved at Mount Vernon, marriage represented the opportunity to exercise agency through family formation. However, even this decision had limitations. When one member of a couple was enslaved by someone outside of the Washington family, the pair planning to marry first needed permission from both enslavers, as long-distance marriages necessitated a certain amount of traveling back and forth between the two properties. Getting the permission of an enslaver would have been in keeping with a 1785 Virginia law that stated that enslaved people could not travel away from home without a pass or letter of authorization from an enslaver, employer, or overseer.4
There were also enslaved people of mixed race on the estate. There is evidence that a number of these people were the result of relationships between enslaved women and hired indentured men. In these instances, the child shared the same legal status as the mother, so if their mother was enslaved, they were subsequently born into slavery. Mount Vernon was similar in this regard to Virginia as a whole. Around the time of the American Revolution, roughly 5% of people enslaved in Virginia were of a mixed background.
At least 293 children were born to enslaved women at Mount Vernon between 1750 and 1799 as recorded in various census and in other documentation. In 1799, nearly three-quarters of these children lived in households headed by single parents who were almost always female. In many of these instances, often their respective father and husband lived and worked on another Washington property.
In 1799, on the four outlying farms, the average age of the enslaved workers was 20.94 years. Only 8.68% of the people were sixty years old or more, while 58.45% were under the age of nineteen. 34.70% of those enslaved were younger than nine.5 With their mothers away from home for most of the dawn-to-dusk workday, children completed jobs for an overseer, cared for younger children, and completed chores to maintain the living quarters of the enslaved. Depending on the rate at which they grew, these children were given more formal work assignments when they were between eleven and fourteen years old. However, many children began assisting parents with their assignments or training in specific skills at an earlier age.
Upon his death in 1799, George Washington manumitted those he enslaved, and his wife Martha subsequently freed them in 1801 before her own death.6 However, those enslaved by Martha prior to her marriage to Washington remained enslaved by her and her descendants. In this process, some had relatives who became freed while they remained enslaved, separating these families and larger communities.
Mary V. Thompson, Research Historian George Washington's Mount Vernon, Updated by Zoie Horecny 19 March 2025
Notes:
1. “Washington’s Slave List, June 1799,” Founders Online, National Archives.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Virginia, The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619, Vol. 13, ed. William Waller Hening (Richmond, VA, 1823), 182; see also a similar law of October 1784 in Virginia, Statutes at Large, Vol. 6, 109.
5. “Washington’s Slave List, June 1799,” Founders Online, National Archives.
6. “George Washington’s Last Will and Testament, 9 July 1799,” Founders Online, National Archives.
Bibliography:
Philip D. Morgan and Michael L. Nicholls, "Slave Flight: Mount Vernon, Virginia, and the Wider Atlantic World," in George Washington's South, eds. Tamara Harvey and Greg O'Brien (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2004), 212.
Gutman, Herbert, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925, Knopf Day Publishing Group, 1977.
Hunter, Tera W, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Marriage in the Nineteenth Century, Harvard University Press, 2019.
Morgan, Philip D. “‘To Get Quit of Negroes’: George Washington and Slavery.” Journal of American Studies, 39, no. 3 (December 2005): 403-29.
Schoelwer, Susan P., ed. Lives Bound Together: Slavery at George Washington's Mount Vernon. Mount Vernon, VA: Mount Vernon Ladies Association, 2016.
Thompson, Mary V. “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret”: George Washington, Slavery, and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2019.
