Hercules Posey
In November 1790, Hercules was one of eight enslaved Africans brought by President Washington to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, then the temporary national capital, to serve in the household of the third presidential mansion.[2] Louis Philippe's secretary estimated the girl's age as six, but she may have been Hercules's daughter Eve, who was listed in the June 1799 Mount Vernon Slave Census as "a dwarf.The others were his son Richmond (then 13 years old), Oney Judge, Moll, Austin, Christopher Sheels, Giles, Paris, and Joe (Richardson).Custis, Hercules was recalled as "a celebrated artiste ... as highly accomplished a proficient in the culinary art as could be found in the United States."Washington argued (privately) that he was a citizen of Virginia, that his presence in Pennsylvania was solely a consequence of Philadelphia's being the temporary national capital, and that the state law should not apply to him.Decatur, a descendant of Washington's secretary, Tobias Lear, discovered a cache of family papers unavailable to scholars, and presented Hercules's escape from Philadelphia as fact.[11] Historian Anna Coxe Toogood found Hercules and Richmond listed in the Mount Vernon farm records during the winter of 1796–97.[13] Ganeshram, and her colleague Sara Krasne at the Westport Historical Society, found compelling evidence suggesting that Hercules, of whom there was no record after 1801, lived and died in New York City.In January 1798, the former President's house steward, Frederick Kitt, informed Washington that the fugitive was living in Philadelphia: Since your departure I have been making distant enquiries about Herculas but did not till about four weeks ago hear anything of him and that was only that [he] was in town neither do I yet know where he is, and that it will be very difficult to find out in the secret manner necessary to be observed on the occasion.Louis Philippe I, later the last King of France, visited Mount Vernon in 1797, and wrote in his diary of Hercules's escape to freedom and how he had left behind his six-year-old daughter.In the novel's acknowledgements, the author reprised public statements regarding her objections to and attempts to persuade the publisher to alter what she called the "offensive nature" of the picture book's illustrations.
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