Archaeology allows us to go deeper. It exposes the minutia, the mundane, the magnificent, the distressing and appalling without design or prejudice. It spreads before us the unearthed evidence of human lives lived in every facet of their glory and their secrets. It reveals a picture that is often conflicted and challenges us to look more deeply.
At this extraordinary site we have uncovered the foundation of the bow window, the ceremonial space chosen by our first president to express his power as chief executive. And we have uncovered the foundation of the kitchen where enslaved Africans toiled, the space where Washington exploited his power as slaveholder.
Washington had firsthand knowledge of the African captives' quest for freedom. Dozens had escaped from Mount Vernon, Va., during the American Revolution. Of the nine captive Africans Washington brought with him from Mount Vernon to the President's House in Philadelphia, four either planned or attempted escaped at some point during or after their captivity in Philadelphia.
Two of Washington's enslaved workers, Oney Judge and Hercules, succeeded in escaping form this site, the nation's first executive mansion. They seized the freedom the Declaration of Independence promised but the nation would not deliver. Each defined liberty and freedom for themselves in the face of gross injustices and, to quote Frederick Douglass, in the face of "the sacrilegious irony" of being enslaved by the leader of the new democratic republic and his wife.
Frederick Douglass did not celebrate the Fourth of July. As an escapee from slavery and a black man in America in 1852, he thought it a mockery to expect him to do so. Sixty years after George Washington signed the first Fugitive Slave Act and two years after the last and infamous Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was written into the Constitution, Douglass wrote one of his most important speeches, "The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro."
