Family October Birthday's

Mario - Oct 9

Ismael - Oct 24

Joyceann - Oct 13

Dominique - Oct 8

Goldie - Oct 1

John - Oct 3

George Washington was presented as a conflicted Man about slavery... Forked tongue sound familiar?!

I've posted excerpts of Wiencek's article on George Washington and Slavery.

He fed, clothed, and housed his slaves poorly, candidly admitting that some of the dwellings he provided were so miserable that a white person would never consent to live in them. As a matter of routine, Washington separated husbands and wives, housing male artisans close to the mansion, 

while keeping their wives and children on his outlying farms, miles away. Though women and girls worked in the mansion household as seamstresses, cooks, and maids, the historian Lorena S. Walsh found that about 65 percent of Washington's field slaves were women doing hard labor under the overseers, such as collecting and spreading manure, clearing stumps, making fences, cleaning stables, and breaking ground with hand tools

Clothing shortages occasionally became acute. An overseer reported one December that the children on an outlying farm had no clothes at all. Washington complained about a seamstress making long pants rather than the regulation short breeches because he didn't want to use extra cloth. He was also very sparing of blankets. Mothers received one for each newborn, but slaves had to wait years to get a fresh blanket. 

Washington ordered the slaves to use their blankets to gather leaves for livestock beds: "Let the People, with their blankets, go every evening … to the nearest wood and fill them with leaves." This had to be done, he said, "for the comfort of the Creatures … Make the Cattle lay warm and comfortable. The hogs also in pens must be well bedded in leaves."

The Washingtons followed elite Virginia custom and staffed their household with mulatto, or mixed-race, servants. A foreign visitor to Mount Vernon encountered a small boy "whose hair and skin color were so like our own that if I had not been told, I should never have suspected his [African] ancestry. He is nevertheless a slave for the rest of his life."

Descendants of the slave West Ford have long claimed that George Washington was his father, but a compelling argument can be made that Ford's father was the general's nephew Bushrod Washington. Ford's mother, Venus, lived on the Westmoreland County plantation owned by George Washington's brother John Augustine Washington Jr. When Bushrod Washington, an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, inherited Mount Vernon, he made Ford his manager. In his will, he bequeathed 160 acres of land to Ford, who had been manumitted at the request of Bushrod Washington's mother, Hannah Bushrod Washington. While George Washington may not have been Ford's father, there is little doubt that, through Bushrod Washington, he had black kin. Martha Washington, meanwhile, owned a half-sister, her slave Ann Dandridge.

Washington's will decreed that all 123 of his slaves be freed upon the death of his wife. This action was made possible by a Virginia law passed in 1782 that allowed slaveholders to manumit their slaves at will, without government approval. Washington conspicuously noted that it was not "in my power" to manumit the Mount Vernon slaves owned by the Custis heirs, perhaps urging the Custis family to follow his example and manumit the dower slaves themselves. Washington never articulated any other strategy for freeing the dower slaves, but some scholars speculate that Washington could have followed Virginia law and financially compensated the Custis estate for the slaves' manumission (with one historian estimating the total cost to Washington as 6,000 pounds sterling). Pointing out that his slaves had intermarried with Custis slaves, Washington predicted that his manumission would cause "the most painful sensations"­­—the forced breakup of long-established families—unless the Custis heirs joined him in freeing their property, which they did not do.

 Martha Washington chose to enact the will's manumission instructions a year after Washington's death, but the Custis slaves did indeed remain enslaved.

Washington's public actions as president did nothing to dismantle southern slaveholding society, including his signing of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act

Ten years before his death, Washington told David Humphreys that, with the proper opportunities, "the rising generation" of slaves could create for themselves "a destiny different from that in which they were born"

• Wiencek, H. George Washington and Slavery. (2015, March 25). In Encyclopedia Virginia. Retrieved from http://www.EncyclopediaVirginia.org/Washington_George_and_Slavery.
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Group Raising Funds for Nebraska Historical Marker

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Group Raising Funds for Nebraska Historical Marker on Highway 83

Spot near North Loup River on Hwy 83 in where the marker may be placed.

 Descendants of a legendary Sand Hills settlement, the Cherry County Historical Society and a Nebraska-born author are teaming up to have a historical marker placed along Highway 83.

The Nebraska State Historical Society recently approved a roadside historical marker for DeWitty, the longest lasting, most successful African-American rural settlement in Nebraska.

DeWitty — in later years called Audacious — was first settled in the early 1900s by a group of homesteaders along the North Loup River in Cherry County, just west of present-day Brownlee. They were taking advantage of the Kinkaid Act of 1904, which allowed settlers to claim 640 acres of land, or one square mile, in the 37 counties that comprised the Sand Hills.

Now that the marker has been approved, the group is trying to raise the $5,100 the state historical society requires to pay for it.

Donations can be mailed to or dropped off at:

Security First Bank

PO Box 480

Valentine, Nebraska 69201

Make checks payable to: “DeWitty Historical Marker Fund.”

The first group of DeWitty settlers came from Overton, Nebraska, in Dawson County. But they were originally from Kent County, Ontario, where many escaped slaves and free people of color resided. One of the first to claim land near the North Loup was the family of Charles and Hester Meehan, an interracial couple, who had met and fell in love in Canada. Charles was a first-generation Irish-American, and Hester Freeman, of African decent. Others from different parts of the country joined them. The barber, Robert Hannahs, had been born into slavery. DeWitty had a baseball team and band. Both played all over the Sand Hills. The settlement placed a high value on educating its children, an ethos they had brought from Canada. More than 100 families lived in the settlement during its roughly 20 years of existence.

“The homesteaders of DeWitty were just that —Audacious,” says Catherine Meehan Blount, one of the Meehans’ last two living grandchildren. “They were Audacious for believing that the American dream belonged to them, too, and they were Audacious for committing all they had to attain that dream.  Remembering DeWitty pays homage to those who confronted barriers in the pre-civil war United States, in Canada and in the Nebraska Sand Hills with a ‘we can’ attitude. Remembering DeWitty gives anyone who knows their story a reminder that they can, too.”

Joyceann Gray, great granddaughter of DeWitty homesteaders William Walker and Charlotte Hatter, says:

“When we can clearly mark where our ancestors have been — and by name — we can ensure the full story will be told and we can then better understand the purpose of our journey.”

Example of Nebraska State Historical Society marker

“This is really the tale of two communities: DeWitty and Brownlee,” says Stew Magnuson, former Nebraska nonfiction book of the year winner, and author of The Last American Highway: A Journey Through Time Down U.S. Route 83: Nebraska-Kansas-Oklahoma, which has a chapter on DeWitty. “Relations between the two communities were by all known accounts, excellent. The mostly Danish settlers of Brownlee and the African-Americans in DeWitty held a July 4^th picnic together every year. Some of the one-room schoolhouses were integrated. There is a photograph in history books that shows the Brownlee residents on the day they came to help build the DeWitty church. People had to depend on each other in that remote, harsh land,” says Magnuson.

Blount added: “My dad, Bill Meehan, was born in Overton but spent most of his youth in DeWitty.  He told the story of DeWitty’s renaming to Audacious with much prideful laughter because, he we certain, it had been renamed for him when he was about 12 years old.”

Magnuson first encountered the DeWitty story in a Nebraskaland Magazinearticle he found in his grandparent’s home in Stapleton, Nebraska, when he was a teenager.

“The thought that there was a black settlement in the Sand Hills blew my mind because I had been raised on a diet of Hollywood westerns and TV shows that portrayed the American West as populated only by white folks and Indians. The towns and homesteads were in fact far more multi-cultural and racially integrated than the media and history textbooks have portrayed.I hope the sign does a little to dispel that myth,” he says.

The Spirit of the Enslaved Person

Many of the people of western Virginia-based their op- position to Negro slavery on the principles of the Declaration of Independence. 

 James McDowell was one of these, he says: 

"You may place the slave where you please,-
You may dry up to the utmost the foundations of his feelings, the spring of his thought-
You may close upon his mind the avenue of knowledge and cloud it over with artificial might-
You may yoke him to your labor as an ox which liveth only to work and worketh only to live-
You may put him under any process, which, without destroying his value as a slave, will debase and crush him as a rational being-
You may do this and the idea that he was born to be free will survive all. 
It is allied to his hope of immortality-
It is the ethical part of his nature which oppression cannot reach-
It is the torch lit up in his soul by the hand of Deity and never meant to be extinguished by the hand of man."

Ambler, C. (1933). A history of West Virginia, (pp. 230-231). New York: Prentice-Hall.

Slave Name Roll Project

Slave Name Roll Project

March 4, 2015

Schalene Jennings Dagutis of  Tangled 

Roots and Trees started the Slave Name 

Roll Project. 



She is listing the slaves that have Names in 



her ancestors' wills and property records. 

She is inviting others to contribute to the 



project as well. 

You can read more about this project in her 

Post-Introducing the Slave Name Roll 

Project.

http://tangledrootsandtrees.blogspot.com/p/sl

ave-name-roll.html

She will take your links anytime.