Independence Day - Built On Slavery

"Plain as Dirt: History Without Gimmickry"

An Excavated Passage Leads Visitors Deep Into the Story of Washington and His Slaves

[ But tunnels have a fascination that transcends their pragmatic explanations. For historians and archaeologists, the discovery of the tunnel was an interesting new bit of knowledge about the house, and a reminder that Washington kept slaves while he lived there in the 1790s. For others, it seemed to suggest that a man whose name is synonymous with probity was trying to deceive both his neighbors and history about his deep involvement with the peculiar institution of slavery.

"People jumped to the conclusion that Washington was hiding slaves," says Levin. "But he couldn't." He couldn't because they cooked his meals, cleaned his stables, tended his carriage and managed just about every mundane detail of life. But he wasn't advertising their extended presence in Philadelphia either. Pennsylvania had a law that required slaves to be freed after six months of residence. So Washington was forced to shuttle his slaves back and forth between Philadelphia and Mount Vernon to evade the residency clause -- which he hoped in vain could be done without his slaves realizing the reason.

"I wish to have it accomplished under pretext that may deceive both them and the Public," he wrote to his secretary, an act that author and Washington biographer Henry Wiencek called "perhaps the only documented incident of George Washington's telling a lie." Perhaps even more disturbing than Washington's lie was his very vigorous pursuit of slaves who escaped his service. When Ona Judge, a slave who tended primarily to Martha Washington, carefully planned and successfully executed an escape to New Hampshire, Washington was furious and attempted to use his prestige to pressure a federal official to help recapture her.

"Everything about this was illegal," wrote Wiencek in "An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America."

Agitation for a memorial that included discussion of Washington's slaves and women such as Judge, who lived with Washington at the President's House, was fueled by a sense that the Park Service was hiding this history. With discovery of the foundations of the original house and evidence of the tunnel, it seemed as if the city of Philadelphia had discovered a bombshell bit of new history: that the father of the country kept slaves in the first executive mansion. But this was well known. The archaeological dig merely brought forth visible, tangible evidence of a house that, like so many houses at the time, was what a later president would call "divided against itself." ]