Happy Hump Day POU!
For years we’ve heard about George Washington’s black descendants, but through his adopted son with Martha. But there is the rumor that George himself fathered children with a slave (and white historians just refuse to acknowledge it).
Descendants of West Ford
From a 1999 New York Times article:
Did George Washington father a son with Venus, a young slave who lived on the estate of his half brother John Augustine Washington?
Three descendants of Venus’s son, who was called West Ford, say that according to a family tradition two centuries old, George Washington was West Ford’s father. They hope to develop DNA evidence from descendants of the Washington family and Washington’s hair samples to bolster their case.
Historians are skeptical, saying there is no documentary evidence to suggest that Washington ever met Venus, whose son was born four or five years before Washington became President, and several reasons to consider any such liaison improbable. In addition, Washington, 26 when he married Martha, then 27, had no children with her. But Martha bore four children in her first marriage, suggesting that Washington may have been sterile.
Yet there is reason to believe that if the child’s father was not Washington, it might have been someone closely related to him. The cousins’ claim has several elements of truth, enough to set up a historical mystery as to the identity of West Ford’s father and to add a new strand to the emerging links between the black and white sides of slave-owning families.
As far as the family of the adopted son goes, the National Park Service has acknowledged that black side of the family, putting to bed any pretense that’s its just “rumors”.
The Founding Fathers may have declared that all men were created equal, but when it came to slaves, they sang a different tune. Many of these men, including George Washington, owned hundreds of slaves on their farms and plantations. Now, the National Park Service is acknowledging centuries-old rumors that Washington’s adopted son fathered children with slaves, making the family biracial to its roots.
Washington never fathered any biological children, but before marrying the future first president, Martha Washington had been previously married and she had children and grandchildren—one of whom became orphaned just a few years into the American Revolution. Named George Washington Parke Custis, or “Wash” for short, the infant was taken in by his grandmother and Washington formally adopted him as his son, Matthew Barakat reports for the Associated Press.
“There is no more pushing this history to the side,” Matthew Penrod, a National Park Service ranger and programs manager at the Arlington House estate, which belonged to the Washingtons, tells Barakat.
Parke Custis had a complicated family tree. Not only did he father children with several of Washington’s slaves, but his own son-in-law was Robert E. Lee, Sarah Pruitt reports for History.com. In fact, Lee once lived at Arlington House after it was given to him by Parke Custis, who built it as a kind of shrine to Washington. For years, tour guides at the site were instructed to gloss over this aspect of life at Arlington House. However, the site’s administrators recently decided that it was time to be up front about this part of Washington’s legacy.
“We fully recognize that the first family of this country was much more than what it appeared on the surface,” Penrod tells Barakat.
Though they may have been ignored by the history books, many descendants of Parke Custis’ illegitimate children are around today. For them, their heritage was no secret.
“My aunt told me that if the truth of our family was known, it would topple the first families of Virginia,” ZSun-nee Miller-Matema tells Barakat. After careful research, Miller Matema found that she was a descendant of Caroline Branham, one of Washington’s slaves and the mother of one of Parke Custis’ children.