The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

by Thomas Fleming

  Captain Posey had a steady income from a ferry that he ran across the Potomac to Maryland, but he had no head for keeping track of his money. He began by borrowing small sums from Washington and soon owed him 750 pounds—the equivalent of perhaps $75,000 today. Worse, he could not even pay the interest on the debt. He owed more money to people in Virginia and in Maryland. Washington wrote him strenuous letters, but kept loaning him money even when it became obvious that he was never going to get it back. Meanwhile, Posey and his wife and children were always welcome at Mount Vernon. Their oldest daughter, Milly, became Patsy Custis’s favorite companion.

  In 1769, as creditors closed in on Posey, Washington advised him to sell his Potomac lands and the ferry contract, pay his debts, and move west. Land was cheap there, and a man could make a fresh start with very little money. Washington frequently rode to Rover’s Delight to repeat this advice, but found it was “no easy matter to find the Captn at home and still more difficult to take him in a trim capable of business.” Drunk most of the time, the distraught Posey ignored Washington’s advice.7

  Posey’s tall nineteen-year-old son, Thomas, grimly aware that his father was bankrupt, took Washington’s advice. After a consultation at Mount Vernon, Thomas headed west to Augusta County in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, a region where Colonel Washington’s name still meant a great deal to many people. Washington may have loaned him enough money to make the journey. Thomas also probably obtained letters from his father, introducing him to friends in Staunton, the principal town in the county. The captain had soldiered there during an expedition against the Cherokees in the early 1760s. In 1772, Thomas married the adopted daughter of Staunton’s wealthiest merchant and opened a thriving saddlery shop in a nearby town.8

  By that time, John Posey was a ruined man. He showed up at Mount Vernon to borrow small sums, which Washington noted in his account book as “Charity to Capt. Posey.” The ex-colonel remained deeply sympathetic to the plight of Posey’s other sons and paid for the education of two of them. In 1774, with Posey’s wife dead and his family scattered, the captain wrote a last pathetic letter to his Mount Vernon neighbor, describing himself as “advanc’d in years” and “really not able to work.” He thanked Washington for his “many favors” and apologized for being reduced so “very low.” Washington invited him to dinner and gave him twelve pounds. That was the last time Washington had any contact with Captain John Posey. Nothing in this account reveals or even suggests that Washington was a former lover of Posey’s wife.

  VI

  The Daily Commercial’s story remained dormant for the next fifteen years. In 1886, the St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat suddenly reported that in Shawneetown, in southern Illlinois, where Thomas Posey was buried, virtually every man, woman, and child was convinced that George Washington was Posey’s father. The story was based on statements made by some of Posey’s descendants and also by a strong resemblance to Washington noted in one of Posey’s sons. The reporter dredged up a physical description of Posey, published in 1824, that stressed his six-foot-two-inch height and muscular appearance—supposed proof of Washington’s paternity.

  The paper followed this story with an interview with a great-grandson of Thomas Posey, a Missouri banker named George Wilson. He dismissed any and all blood connection to Washington. He analyzed portraits of Posey and Washington, pointing out numerous dissimilarities. Wilson added that Colonel John A. Washington, a grandnephew of the general, had told him there were at least a dozen other people who claimed descent from a Washington-fathered son or daughter. Not one had withstood investigation. Finally, Wilson pointed to a brief autobiographical statement by Posey, in which he wrote that he was born of “respectable parentage.” Would he have written this if he were illegitimate?

  The story refused to die. It surfaced in other papers in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Missouri. The St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat returned to the fray in 1898 with a four-part story that drew on seemingly reliable research. The source seems to have been an unpublished article by a director of the Smithsonian Institution that propounded the theory that Thomas Posey had been placed in the Posey family by his real father, George Washington. His mother was from “one of the most distinguished families in Virginia.” She was the reason Thomas Posey’s real identity was never revealed. Backing the argument was another analysis of the supposedly strong physical resemblance between the two men.

  Out of nowhere at this point reemerged George Wilson, the chief repudiator of the story, to announce that he was now a believer. He had discovered the name of the woman who had been the partner in Washington’s teenage passion—Elisabeth Lloyd. She died giving birth to Thomas, and Washington had arranged for him to be raised by a widow named Posey, a “woman of culture.” In this version, the name Posey was a coincidence—he had nothing to do with John Posey and his family. Wilson’s story ran in the Indianapolis News. Adding to the confusion, Wilson died not long after the story was published, and no one ever found his research. Nor did he tell anyone where he had heard about Elisabeth Lloyd, who remains a mystery woman to this day. All Wilson left were two paintings, one of Posey, the other of Washington, which purported to prove the strong resemblance between father and illegitimate son.

  The story nonetheless convinced editors of encyclopedias and historical compendiums such as Revolutionary Soldiers Buried in Illinois to refer to Posey as “reputedly the natural son of George Washington.” By the 1920s, John C. Fitzpatrick, director of the Library of Congress and soon to be editor of George Washington’s papers, felt compelled to attack the story in Scribner’s Magazine, dismissing it as fiction. In his biography of Washington, Fitzpatrick returned to the attack, noting Washington had befriended and supported several of Posey’s sons. Did this mean he was also their father? he asked mockingly. He also noted that Washington financed the education of many other young men. “If every child whose education was assisted by Washington were to be stigmatized,” Fitzpatrick wrote wryly, “the distinction of being The Father of His Country might take on a new meaning.”

  Fitzpatrick was particularly hard on those whose arguments were based on “alleged physical resemblance.” He called it “the quintessence of inexcusable credulity.” He also took aim at a letter Washington wrote to Posey during the Revolution, which according to some people began with “My Dear Son.” The letter did not contain another personal reference. It was all military business, ending with the usual “Your most obdt. & humble Servant.” When Fitzpatrick examined the original letter, he saw that the claimants were unfamiliar with “one of Washington’s pen characteristics.” It was sometimes hard to distinguish his “word-ending letters”—understandable because he was often writing in haste. A close look at the letter reveals it began with “My Dear Sir.”9

  This is not the end of the story. A recent biographer of Thomas Posey points out that if he was born, as most people agree, in 1750, it is unlikely that John Posey was his father. Posey did not marry Martha Harrison, Thomas’s putative mother, until 1752. This suggests that Thomas may have been born of another woman and taken into the Posey family. How eighteen-year-old George Washington, with very little money and not an iota of fame, could have managed this arrangement remains unexplored. But the secret might explain Washington’s “extraordinary liberality” to Captain Posey and his family. The writer stubbornly ignores Fitzpatrick’s observation that Washington was frequently a generous supporter of the sons of cash-short friends.

  Nevertheless, the biographer, a descendant of Thomas Posey, presses on. He cites Washington’s early love letters, in which he moaned about his passion for a “lowland beauty” and for another “agreeable young woman” who added “fuel to the fire.” The author recounts Thomas Posey’s similar physical appearance, his courage under fire, and his undoubted gift for leadership. “Both [Washington and Posey] died at the same age, of similar causes,” he writes. But he is forced to conclude that there is no hard evidence to prove Washington’s paternity. The best he can say is that “those who
choose to do so may perhaps be forgiven if they continue to believe that Thomas Posey was really the son of George Washington.”10

  VII

  After he returned to Mount Vernon in the final days of 1783, Washington devoted most of the next two years to reviving the plantation’s commercial vitality. Almost as absorbing was the stream of visitors who took advantage of his hospitality to have a meal with the man who was now considered the greatest living American. Yet in these same years some people maintain that Washington fathered a boy named West Ford by a slave named Venus, who lived at Bushfield, his brother Jack’s plantation, ninety-five miles away. The child was born sometime in the year 1784 or 1785.

  No mention of the boy as George Washington’s son has been found in any letter, diary, memoir, or newspaper before Washington’s death in 1799. West Ford never visited Mount Vernon until 1802, when Martha Washington died and the plantation was inherited by Bushrod Washington, Jack’s son.

  Bushrod brought West Ford and a number of slaves from Bushfield. By that time, Ford was a free man. Bushrod’s mother, Hannah, freed him in her will in 1801. From that time until his death in 1863, Ford was a fixture at Mount Vernon, a sort of combination servant and caretaker. In 1850, historian Benson Lossing, who “discovered” the forged letter George supposedly wrote to Martha in 1758, interviewed him. He drew a sketch of Ford, in which some people later found a strong resemblance to George Washington. But Lossing made no claim of paternity in his written account of the interview.

  Not until the closing decade of the twentieth century did many people take seriously the claim that West Ford was George Washington’s son. Linda Allen Bryant and Janet Allen, descendants of Ford, launched a media campaign that won widespread attention in newspapers and on television. Stories ran in USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the New York Times, quoting them and discussing the validity of their claim. The sisters created a website, and in 2001 Bryant published a book, I Cannot Tell A Lie, The True Story of George Washington’s African American Descendants. In her preface, she explained why the book is a historical novel rather than a nonfiction work backed by documents and footnotes: “This format allowed me to relay my heritage in the way it was passed down through the generations by the Ford chroniclers.”11

  In the narrative’s first chapter, seventeen-year-old Venus recalls the night at Bushfield that “Master John”—Washington’s brother—told her that Master George “needs comforting and has asked for you.”

  Venus replied that she would “go and light the fire and warm some bricks for his bed.”

  “Ah, Master George needs warming of another kind,” Jack replied.12

  After that first fateful night, Venus supposedly became Master George’s preferred bedmate whenever he visited Bushfield. When she accompanied Hannah Washington, Jack’s wife, to Mount Vernon, Master George enjoyed her there, too, until she became pregnant. Thereafter he “left her alone.” When the child was born, Venus decided not to christen him George. “Master George Washington was too politically important to have scandal attached to his name,” she thought. Also, in her mother’s words, “the responsibilities of commanding an army had made him sterner, almost unapproachable.” So Venus called the baby “West.”13

  Later in the book, Mrs. Bryant describes how Washington took a special interest in West. At the age of four, he became Washington’s “personal attendant” when he visited Bushfield. He “would fetch and carry and do all kinds of small errands” for him. He sat beside the general on “wagon rides” around the countryside and even accompanied him to church.

  One day, after spending some time with Master George, West asked his mother, “Mamma, is the old General my papa?”

  At first Venus was panicky. She wanted to know “who done told you that?” West said Bushfield’s cook and her helpers talked about it all the time. They said he looked like the General. Venus realized “the [whole] slave population at Bushfield and Mount Vernon knew. No news could escape the slave telegraph.”

  Venus studied her son’s chestnut-colored hair, put her arms around him, and said, “The Old General be your papa.” But she warned him to tell no one, for the time being. “One day you can tell your children but for now it be our secret.”14

  It is a touching story, but facts show it to be fatally flawed. The assumption that Washington paid many visits to Bushfield in the years after he returned from the war is refuted by the detailed information we have for his whereabouts almost every day, thanks to his diary and account books. In fact, there is no documented evidence that he visited Bushfield even once in the years between his return from the war in 1783 and Jack Washington’s death in 1787. Hannah Washington visited Mount Vernon once during this period, and Venus may have accompanied her. But the notion that George would ask for Venus at Mount Vernon, where Martha shared his bedroom and the house was filled with visitors eager to ogle the most famous man in the country, is difficult to accept. Also, the Ford family oral tradition clearly identifies Bushfield as the site of the supposed tryst.15

  There would seem to be little doubt that West Ford had Washington blood in his veins. But it was probably inherited from Jack Washington or one of his three sons, Bushrod, Corbin, or William Augustine. The latter died around the time West was conceived. Ford’s emancipation and the consideration with which he was treated by Bushrod Washington, who left him over a hundred acres of land in his will, is not untypical of how many southern planters attempted to provide for their own or their family’s mulatto slave children. Equally familiar is the tendency of a slave mother to tell her mulatto son or daughter that their real father was “old master” or someone even more distinguished, rather than the overseer or a temporary white workman, or some nameless white guest to whom the master had given access to his slaves, in what some considered the great tradition of southern hospitality.16

  VIII

  The same faux historian who described Congressman Benjamin Harrison as Washington’s procurer claims that the sixty-eight-year-old ex-president caught the cold that led to his death while jumping out a back window with his trousers in his hand after an assignation with an overseer’s wife. This is a story that John C. Fitzpatrick labeled “the most nebulous of all the slanders,” but over the years it “gathered its strength from mere repetition.” It is an extreme example of the things people have believed—and some continue to believe—about George Washington’s imaginary love life.

  Ultimately, the George Washington pseudo-scandals are a cautionary tale about the way fame attracts this sort of defamation from those who want to believe the worst about a great man. Their reasons run the gamut from envy to political partisanship to revenge for perceived or imagined wrongs.17

  BOOK TWO

  Benjamin Franklin

  THE SINS OF THE FATHER

  A young man named Daniel Fisher, who worked as a clerk for Benjamin Franklin and lived in his house on lower Market Street in Philadelphia, later told a revealing story about his employer’s marriage. Fisher was relaxing in a downstairs room, perhaps reading a copy of Ben’s newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette. Ben’s wife, Deborah, was sitting a few feet away. William Franklin, Ben’s illegitimate son, walked through the room. He did not even glance at his stepmother or say a word to her. As Fisher put it, he did not make “the least compliment to Mrs. Franklin.”

  As William left the room, Deborah Franklin exclaimed, “Mr. Fisher, there goes the greatest villain on earth.” Fisher could only stare at her in amazement. He thought of William as a relatively harmless young man. Deborah proceeded to denounce William in “the foulest terms I ever heard from a gentlewoman,” Fisher said. In a few months, the clerk quit his job and went elsewhere. There were too many times when Deborah’s “turbulent temper” hurled volleys of abuse at him as well as at William.1

  Deborah was also violently jealous of the long hours Franklin devoted to the politics of Pennsylvania. She once bitterly complained to Fisher, “All the world claimed a privilege of troubling her Pa
ppy.” She grew even more unhappy when Franklin plunged into the worldwide fad for studying electricity and made a host of original discoveries, climaxed by proving lightning was a form of electricity and could be tamed by the judicious use of lightning rods. Franklin proved his case by reporting that he had flown a kite in a thunderstorm and was able to measure the electricity that flowed from a metal key attached to the string. The discovery won him worldwide celebrity. Few people knew that the person who had risked his life to fly the kite was William Franklin. The triumph cemented the already strong bond between father and son and further inflamed Deborah Franklin’s anger. The discovery accelerated the Franklins’ pursuit of fame in a sphere that both Benjamin and William found fascinating and Deborah acrimoniously continued to dislike: politics.2

  II

  The oldest of the founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin was born in 1706 in Boston. His father, Josiah Franklin, had emigrated from the mother county in 1683 after becoming disillusioned with the flaccid Christianity of the Church of England. He was fifty years old when Ben was born. Josiah earned his living with his hands, making soap and candles. Between Josiah and Benjamin stood fifteen older children by two wives. Two more children followed Benjamin. As a boy, Franklin recalled thirteen people at the supper table.

  Benjamin’s mother, Abiah Folger Franklin, seems to have managed this large ménage with skill and warmth. His later letters to her, addressed to “Honoured Mother,” glow with affection. In his autobiography, he remarked that she had an excellent constitution and suckled all ten of her children. Benjamin was extremely proud of her Folger ancestors, who had settled Nantucket—especially Peter Folger, who wrote a long verse essay defending liberty of conscience in religious matters. Benjamin seems to have inherited his sunny disposition from his mother. More important, she inspired his lifelong fondness for women.