Buried lives

When he was eleven years old George Washington inherited ten human beings. The life of the first president has been well chronicled but the lives of the people of color he owned--the people who sustained his plantation and were buried in unmarked graves there--have not. Using fascinating primary source material and photographs of historical artifacts author Carla Killough McClafferty sheds light on the lives of several of the men and women enslaved by the Washington family: talented people like Caroline an expert seamstress and Peter Hardiman a gifted horseman who married and raised a family on the plantation. Determined people like Ona Maria Judge who tended to Martha Washington's needs day and night but who still managed one fateful day to slip away and sail to freedom. McClafferty also explains in clear terms the property laws of the day that complicated George Washington's eventual decision to free the people he owned and the modern-day archaeological survey at Mount Vernon's Slave Cemetery that is uncovering new information about a burial ground that was nearly forgotten to time.