Intertwined: The Enslaved Community at George Washington’s Mount Vernon

Now Available on all platforms! In this new podcast from the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon, we'll explore George Washington as both President and precedent. From the very origins of the US presidency at the Constitutional Convention to Washington’s final warnings in his Farewell Address, we will break down how one man shaped the Presidency—and the many times that it could have all fallen apart.

Learn more at ⁠www.georgewashingtonpodcast.com.

What did George Washington write in his personal copy of the Constitution? Who left behind messages inside some of Washington’s books? How did Washington learn to become a professional soldier?

Mount Vernon introduces its latest podcast and video series, The Secrets of Washington's Archives. Come explore the books, manuscripts, and maps found inside the George Washington Presidential Library’s special collections and hear stories about George Washington, the American Revolution, and the Presidency.

Learn more at www.georgewashingtonpodcast.com.

Music by SoulProdMusic at Pixabay.

In Intertwined Stories, we’re taking a deeper dive into the history behind the podcast Intertwined: The Enslaved Community at George Washington’s Mount Vernon by bringing you extended versions of some of the interviews with the series' contributors. 

The Quander Family can trace its roots in Virginia and Maryland back to the early seventeenth century. This family became part of the Mount Vernon story in the early nineteenth century when a free Black man named Charles Quander married Nancy Carter, a woman formerly enslaved by George Washington. 

But the connection didn’t end there. In more recent times, family members have played key roles in interpreting the history of slavery at Mount Vernon, and reconstructing the long history of the Quander family in America. In one of our final interviews for Intertwined, we talked to Judge Rohulamin Quander about his family’s history, his efforts to preserve it, and the work that remains to be done. 

This is our final episode of Intertwined Stories and the last of the entire Intertwined series. On behalf of our entire team, we want to thank you very much for joining us on this journey. But as Judge Quander reminds us in this episode, there is so much more to the story, and there is more work to be done. 

Intertwined is narrated by Brenda Parker and is a production of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and CD Squared. Full transcripts, show notes, and bibliographies for Intertwined are available at www.georgewashingtonpodcast.com.

In Intertwined Stories, we’re taking a deeper dive into the history behind the podcast Intertwined: The Enslaved Community at George Washington’s Mount Vernon by bringing you extended versions of some of the interviews with the series' contributors.

Mount Vernon was as much Martha Washington’s home as it was George Washington’s. It was Martha’s wealth, after all, that helped fund the plantation’s expansion and allowed George to claim his place among the Virginia elite. Like so many Virginia women in the period, Martha was already a widow when she married George in 1759. In fact, she had life rights to one-third of the property of her first husband’s estate, who had been very wealthy.

But she brought much more than money to her new marriage; she brought enslaved people to Mount Vernon as well.

Few people know Martha Washington better than Dr. Lynn Price Robbins. She’s a historian of early America and one of the editors of Martha’s papers and of George’s Barbados diary. We talked to Dr. Price Robbins in the early days of making Intertwined to understand Martha as a plantation manager, and what the Washingtons’ marriage meant for the lives of Mount Vernon’s enslaved community.

Intertwined is narrated by Brenda Parker and is a production of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and CD Squared. Full transcripts, show notes, and bibliographies for Intertwined are available at www.georgewashingtonpodcast.com.

In Intertwined Stories, we’re taking a deeper dive into the history behind the podcast Intertwined: The Enslaved Community at George Washington’s Mount Vernon by bringing you extended versions of some of the interviews with the series' contributors.

As a child, Ann Chinn didn’t understand her family’s connection to Mount Vernon, the Washingtons, or the Custis Family. But later in life, she came to learn that she was a descendent of Sall Twine. Twine was a woman assigned to work as a field laborer on Dogue Run Farm. She was owned by the estate of Martha Washington’s first husband. Twine’s husband was named George. He was owned by Mary Ball Washington, George Washington’s mother. Together, the couple had seven children. And after the Washingtons died, Twine was inherited by one of Martha’s grandchildren.

We spent a delightful afternoon talking to Chinn about her family’s history and her journey to find out more about her family’s relationship to Mount Vernon. You’ll first hear a little bit about Chinn herself, before we travel back to the 18th century to learn about her ancestor, Sall Twine, and her life as a woman enslaved in Virginia.

Intertwined is narrated by Brenda Parker and is a production of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and CD Squared. Full transcripts, show notes, and bibliographies for Intertwined are available at www.georgewashingtonpodcast.com.

In Intertwined Stories, we’re taking a deeper dive into the history behind the podcast Intertwined: The Enslaved Community at George Washington’s Mount Vernon by bringing you extended versions of some of the interviews with the series' contributors. 

The origins of Mount Vernon’s enslaved community are linked directly to the early history of slavery in Virginia. Although the first enslaved people arrived in Virginia in 1619, slavery did not become the dominate labor system in the Chesapeake Bay region for more than a century. 

As we heard in Episode 1 of Intertwined, race-based slavery developed slowly in the Chesapeake. Colonists, merchants, and competing nations made a series of choices that interwove slavery into the fabric of Virginia’s society and economy. 

To learn more about how and why this happened, we talked to Dr. John C. Coombs, a professor of history at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. We also chatted about the connections between Barbados and Virginia that made Virginia an important part of the transatlantic slave trade long before it was a site of mass enslavement. 

Intertwined is narrated by Brenda Parker and is a production of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and CD Squared. Full transcripts, show notes, and bibliographies for Intertwined are available at www.georgewashingtonpodcast.com.

In Intertwined Stories, we’re taking a deeper dive into the history behind the podcast Intertwined: The Enslaved Community at George Washington’s Mount Vernon by bringing you extended versions of some of the interviews with the series' contributors. 

Labor dictated life for enslaved communities at Mount Vernon and beyond. And yet despite their enslavement, people like Sambo Anderson, Kate, and Carolina Branham carved out time for themselves, created families, and forged relationships – sometimes across vast distances – that brought them comfort and some sense of control over their own lives. 

As we heard throughout Intertwined, reconstructing the lived experience of slavery is a difficult task.  We have few surviving accounts from the people who were enslaved, so we must use a variety of sources and evidence to interpret the past. 

To help us better understand what life was like in Virginia and throughout the Atlantic world, we chatted with Dr. Brenda Stevenson, who is an expert on the history of slavery, family, and gender in the early United States. 

Dr. Stevenson is the inaugural Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair in Women’s History at St. John’s College at Oxford University. Jeanette Patrick was in the host’s chair for our interview with Dr. Stevenson, and we talked to her just before she made her move across the Atlantic in the summer of 2021. 

We pick up our chat with her about living conditions and daily life in Virginia before exploring how enslaved people formed families and communities. Intertwined is narrated by Brenda Parker and is a production of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and CD Squared. Full transcripts, show notes, and bibliographies for Intertwined are available at www.georgewashingtonpodcast.com.

In Intertwined Stories, we’re taking a deeper dive into the history behind the podcast Intertwined: The Enslaved Community at George Washington’s Mount Vernon by bringing you extended versions of some of the interviews with the series' contributors. 

Historians are in constant conversation with each other about the past. As we uncover evidence, ask new and better questions of our sources, and think about history in relation to our own present, the way that we interpret the past can and does change over time. We call this collective body of past interpretations “historiography,” or the history of history. We must understand what previous historians have said about a subject, before we can offer a new interpretation. 

The study of people who were enslaved and the institution of slavery is no different. To better understand what questions inspired historians of the past, and what excites them now, we turned to Dr. Marcus Nevius, an Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Rhode Island. Nevius is an expert on the Great Dismal Swamp and marronage, another way of describing an enslaved person’s flight from slavery. He helped us understand the history of history about slavery, where he thinks historians are taking the field now, and the language we use to describe enslavement. 

Intertwined’s co-creator Jeanette Patrick joined Jim Ambuske in this interview with Nevius. We start by talking about resistance in the Great Dismal Swamp before considering how historians have interpreted the history of slavery, and what work they are doing now to complicate our view of the past. 

Intertwined is narrated by Brenda Parker and is a production of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and CD Squared. Full transcripts, show notes, and bibliographies for Intertwined are available at www.georgewashingtonpodcast.com.

In Intertwined Stories, we’re taking a deeper dive into the history behind the podcast Intertwined: The Enslaved Community at George Washington’s Mount Vernon by bringing you extended versions of some of the interviews with the series' contributors.

In Episode 6 of Intertwined, we began to explore what happened to the enslaved community after January 1, 1801, the day that Martha Washington emancipated the people once enslaved by her late husband.

That day transformed the community forever. While it meant freedom for the people George Washington enslaved, it meant continued enslavement for the people owned by the estate of Martha’s first husband. She had no power to free the latter, and her death a year later fractured the community further still.

To help us understand how and why, and what it meant for families, we turned to Dr. Cassandra Good, who is an Assistant Professor of History at Marymount University, and a leading scholar on the Washington and Custis families in the early United States.

Jim Ambuske sat in the host’s chair for our conversation with Dr. Good, and was joined by Intertwined’s co-creator Jeanette Patrick, along with Curt Dhal, our lead producer.

We start off with the events of January 1, 1801, a day of joy, and a day of sorrow, before more about what we know happened to these families, and just how research remains to be done.

Intertwined is narrated by Brenda Parker and is a production of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and CD Squared. Full transcripts, show notes, and bibliographies for Intertwined are available at www.georgewashingtonpodcast.com.

In Intertwined Stories, we’re taking a deeper dive into the history behind the podcast Intertwined: The Enslaved Community at George Washington’s Mount Vernon by bringing you extended versions of some of the interviews with the series' contributors.

Throughout Intertwined, archaeological research helped us uncover the lives of Kate, Doll, Frank Lee, Neptune, and hundreds of other people enslaved at Mount Vernon.

While we can learn many important details about the past from letters, account books, or maps, equally important answers lay just beneath the surface. 

To help us better understand how archeology can help us recover landscapes and the meaning people gave to them, we talked to Dr. Jason Boroughs, who currently works as the research archaeologist at George Washington's Mount Vernon.

Intertwined's co-creator Jeanette Patrick served as the lead interviewer for our conversation with Boroughs, joined by co-creator Jim Ambuske. 

Intertwined is narrated by Brenda Parker and is a production of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and CD Squared. Full transcripts, show notes, and bibliographies for Intertwined are available at www.georgewashingtonpodcast.com.