In the 21st century, we’ve come to expect more honest, accurate, and diverse history writing, in the same way that we’ve replaced antiquated gadgets with laptops, iPhones, digital TVs, and streaming music. Back then, 99% of them were written about some famous white man who was duly placed upon a pedestal to be worshipped.Įducated people and mainstream publishers have long since upended such nonsense. As a kid in the 1960s, I read plenty of such “history” books. They often created fictional dialogue, indulged in prejudice, marginalized women, and treated suppositions and possibilities as historic fact. In the days of black and white TVs, landline telephones, and vinyl LPs, authors of history books for children frequently took great liberties in their writing. George owed his riches to the marginalized enslaved.” But if he hadn’t owned humans and forced them to do what he wanted, he would not have been as wealthy. George was immensely proud of his home and his lands. Mount Vernon became a showplace, for sure, a mansion with a fancy red roof and black iron weather vane that visitors could see from miles away. If he wanted wooden barrels to be made, or laundry to be washed, or vegetables to be picked, or tools to be forged, he used the enslaved. If he wanted fabric made from linen, he used the enslaved to cut the flax, pull it through steel-nail combs, and eventually spin it to create the thread. If George wanted to create a gravel pathway in his gardens, he used the enslaved to move the earth and crush the gravel. Perhaps even way back then, among people who supported slavery wholeheartedly, this choice of words implied that somewhere, deep in their conscience, they knew it was wrong.) (Slave owners, including the Washingtons, referred to their human property as ‘servants,’ not slaves. By 1773 there were close to two hundred slaves living at Mount Vernon. When he married Martha, who was a widow, he increased his landholdings-and his ownership of the enslaved. This number got larger as George grew older and the amount of land he owned spread farther and farther. “George’s entire life had been dunked in the miserable water of slavery he had inherited ten slaves when he was just eleven, when his father died. “There’s a river running sweat right through our land.ĭriven by a man with a bullwhip in his hand.Īnd I’ve taken just as much as I can stand.” Richie’s Picks: NEVER CAUGHT, THE STORY OF ONA JUDGE: GEORGE AND MARTHA WASHINGTON’S COURAGEOUS SLAVE WHO DARED TO RUN AWAY by Erica Armstrong Dunbar and Kathleen Van Cleve, Aladdin, January 2019, 272p., ISBN: 978-1-5344-1617-8 When she was told that she was going to be given as a wedding gift to Martha Washington’s granddaughter, Ona made the bold and brave decision to flee to the north, where she would be a fugitive.įrom her childhood, to her time with the Washingtons and living in the slave quarters, to her escape to New Hampshire, Erica Armstrong Dunbar, along with Kathleen Van Cleve, shares an intimate glimpse into the life of a little-known, but powerful figure in history, and her brave journey as she fled the most powerful couple in the country. In this narrative, Erica Armstrong Dunbar reveals a behind-the-scenes look at the Washingtons when they were the First Family-and an in-depth look at their slave, Ona Judge, who dared to escape from one of the nation’s Founding Fathers.īorn into a life of slavery, Ona Judge eventually grew up to be George and Martha Washington’s “favored” dower slave. The story of Ona Judge, George and Martha Washington’s runaway slave, who risked everything for a better life-now available as a young reader’s edition!
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