Landmark Lecture: A Digital Gateway – Researching the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon & Beyond

At his death in 1799, George Washington recorded 318 enslaved people at Mount Vernon. This number does not reflect the numbers of individuals who worked the property during the entire tenure of the Washington family from 1735 – 1858, and it does not begin to address individuals enslaved on the numerous properties owned by Washington or the vast acreage he administered on behalf of the Custis family. In 2014, to better understand the lives of those enslaved individuals, Mount Vernon’s digital humanities program designed a unique database to capture the events of their daily lives. This database compiled, deduped and organized references from ledgers, diaries, work reports, etc., to provide a means to quantitatively analyze these textual references. This presentation explores the Slavery Database with a focus on issues of data entry, data manipulation and the complexity of working with text as data in order to recreate the community enslaved by the Washington and Custis families.