Sarah Johnson

Sarah Johnson (September 29, 1844 – January 25, 1920) was an African American woman who was born into slavery at Mount Vernon, George Washington's estate in Fairfax, Virginia. She worked as a domestic, cleaning and caring for the residence. During the process, she became an informal historian of all of the mansion's furnishings. After the end of the Civil War, she was hired by the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, ultimately becoming a council member of the organization. She bought four acres of Mount Vernon land to establish a small farm. The book Sarah Johnson's Mount Vernon tells the story of her life within the complex community of people who inhabited Mount Vernon.

Background

Mount Vernon, engraving and etching, by the American artist S. Seymour, after the English artist William Russell Birch. Yale University Art Gallery 1830 engraving of a map of Mount Vernon, General Washington's estate and mansion, that was originally drawn by Washington. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division Washington, D.C.

There were 316 enslaved people living on Mount Vernon when George Washington died in 1799. About half were owned by the late President but most were inherited by Martha Washington's then-underage children after the death of their father (her first husband, Daniel Parke Custis). Of Martha's children by her first husband, two died before reaching adulthood, and two died as young adults, leaving a total of four grandchildren to inherit Daniel Parke Custis' estate when they came of age. Although Washington intended to free the people he enslaved upon his death, Thus, both enslaved and freed Blacks and mulattoes lived on the estate. Insubordination ensued after Bushrod told all the slaves that he had no intention of freeing them. In 1821 he sold fifty-four enslaved people (mostly from the "Union Farm" part of the estate) to Horatio S. Sprigg (1783–1847) and Archibald P. Williams (1788–1846) for $10,000, (~$ in ) supposedly to work on their Louisiana plantations on Bayou Robert on the Red River. However, the large coffle (of about 100 slaves taken from the Alexandria slave jail) was spotted walking westward through in Leesburg, Virginia on August 21. This caused considerable controversy when Hezekiah Niles repeated the story from the local Leesburg newspaper in his Niles Weekly Register, perhaps the country's most-read periodical. Bushrod Washington replied by publishing an article defending his right to sell his property in another Baltimore newspaper, and criticized Niles for visiting Mount Vernon and talking with its residents in his absence. Of his remaining slaves, some escaped. Ned and George, sons of Oliver Smith, Bushrod's lifelong personal manservant, escaped in early October, then were recaptured but not sold, following their father's pleas. On December 3, another of George Washington's executors, Lawrence Lewis, who was also a local justice of the peace, ordered their sister Hannah arrested and held in jail for trial. On January 21, 1822, she was convicted of trying to poison his Union Farm overseer on August 27. Her husband, Hezekiah Scott, some of whose relatives had been in the coffle, had initially been arrested, but was released when the white overseer and his wife (who had prepared the coffee Hannah served, which proved arsenic tainted) failed to appear for the trial. She was sentenced to death, although that sentence was postponed a year by one governor, then reduced to transportation out of Virginia (after the state compensated Bushrod). While jailed in Fairfax, Hannah Smith Scott conceived and gave birth to a boy. She died of disease while incarcerated in Richmond on December 10, 1823. Virginia legislators debated what to do with the infant boy, deciding against the proposal of Fairfax delegate Robert Townshend Thompson to free him. The legislators ultimately decided he was Bushrod Washington's property, although his fate remains unknown (and given the high rate of infant mortality in that era, he probably died).

In 1829, Bushrod Washington and his wife (who were childless) died. Pursuant to Bushrod Washington's will, his nephew, John Augustine Washington II, inherited Mount Vernon (having previously inherited from his father a plantation he developed and called "Blakeley" in what became West Virginia in Sarah's lifetime). However, J.A. Washington II died within three years. He left the administration of both his estates to his widow, Jane Charlotte Blackburn Washington. Sarah's mother Hannah Parker was born around 1826 at Blakeley, and raised there, although Jane Charlotte Washington frequently transferred slaves between the plantations, as well as herself undertook the two-day carriage ride between them. In 1841, Jane Charlotte Washington decided to make Blakeley her residence and leased Mount Vernon and slaves to her eldest son, John Augustine Washington III (usually called by his middle name, Augustine). He had graduated from the University of Virginia that year and became the first Washington to personally manage Mount Vernon since the late President. Augustine Washington brought Hannah Parker and number of other farmhands or potential workers to Mount Vernon, and increased cultivated acreage (which had dwindled to only 145 acres), doubling it within five years and trebling it in 10 years. He also leased out slaves, including Hannah Parker. Augustine Washington became Mount Vernon's owner in full in 1855, when his mother died. Like his mother, he unsuccessfully tried to sell it to the Commonwealth of Virginia as well as to the federal government. By this time, Mount Vernon showed considerable wear and tear caused by a constant stream of sightseers, as well as unfavorable plantation economics. Eventually Augustine Washington moved his family and some slaves to another plantation, Waveland, west in Fauquier County.

The Mount Vernon Ladies' Association purchased part of Mount Vernon in 1859 to preserve the plantation, particularly in the events leading up to and during the Civil War. Black people who tended and cared for Mount Vernon also sought to preserve the estate, but foremost focused on self-preservation, where they would attain the freedom to buy their own property, make their own livings as they chose, and plan for their futures. About two years before Sarah's birth in 1842 (and before that lease), Hannah had given birth to a son, Isaac, and about two years after Sarah's birth, her mother married Warner May, whom Augustine purchased from a Jefferson County estate. The couple would have five more children together. Thus, although Sarah's father's name is unrecorded, she had several half-siblings.

Johnson was first married to Nathan Johnson, who was enslaved at Mount Vernon. They had a son, Smith, who was born in 1861. On October 25, 1888, Johnson was married a second time, to widower William Robinson, who was among the district's most substantial black landowners (having purchased a total of about fifty acres of Mason family land) and who would later also work part-time as a day laborer for the Mount Vernon Ladies Association. Their marriage license included the names of each of their mothers, but blank spaces for their fathers, an indication that both had been white. The pastor of Alexandria's Alfred Street Baptist Church officiated at the simple ceremony at Johnson's house at Mount Vernon, and a reception followed. The Vice Regent of Illinois, Mary Carver Leiter (1885–1913), purchased Sarah's simple yellow dress (and the wedding was postponed several times before it arrived). (Mount Vernon Magazine states that in 1889 she "purchased four acres of her own land just north of Mount Vernon, a plot formerly owned by John Augustine Washington III." Mount Vernon flew its flag at half-mast in her memory.) as influenced by Secession, the Civil War, Emancipation, the Reconstruction era, and Jim Crow laws. Thus it addresses the dichotomy between the founding of the country, with George Washington as its first president, with its noble intentions, and the enslavement and marginalization of black people. Erin Aubry Kaplan of the Los Angeles Times states in her review of the book: "Mount Vernon was a far more complicated place for black residents than for whites, because it represented three fundamentals that blacks were constantly trying to establish: work, home and a sense of national pride."