A Response to Imbalances in the Archive
Recovering Traces of Human Movement
My research is interested in retrieving the memories of people and the day-to-day existence of the communities that lived in the Civil War era, war-torn region of Mount Vernon. Despite the daily life of minority communities’ omission from greater historical narratives, their traces, that is, proof of human existence and movement, can still be found in the archive.
By the time the country began reckoning with slavery's national fate in 1861, the Mount Vernon region housed four minority communities: people enslaved on John Augustine Washington’s Mount Vernon Plantation, women of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association - most notably secretary Sarah Tracy, a free Black community - including the Fords of Gum Spring, and abolitionist Quaker families from Accotink to Woodlawn.
How and when did individuals intersect? Who was seen and by whom? Who was recorded as being seen? Did physical relocation reflect moments of newfound freedom? What do silences despite contact or proximity signify?
Memory Traces
“Everything is so beautiful and peaceful one cannot realize that at so short a distance from us men’s passions are driving them to do all that is wicked and horrible.”
“Please excuse me from writing any more. Our feelings are better imagined than described.”
“Do not think hard of us not writing to you. We are afraid to even think aloud.”
“There was mighty heavy timber on that Mount Vernon farm, and we slave folks was pulled and hauled.... life is a burden to a slave person; indeed it is—left without education and the mind terrified all the time.”
“History is everybody talking at once, multiple rhythms being played simultaneously. The events and people we write about did not occur in isolation but in dialogue with a myriad of people and events.”
Elsa Barkley (1992, p. 296)
“Most of the negroes on the Mount Vernon estate have returned, but they are generally idle, and consider themselves free.”
The existence of people in the past has the power to enrich our present in an experiential act of remembrance and memory.
Visualizing the theoretical construct of ephemeral traces presumes, reconstructs, and imagines movement in response to archival silences and draws on how movement and social interaction can offer an inclusive interpretation of history.
Prototype: Visualization of Traces, design by Sai Karlen
Objects in the archive hold both the potential to restore lost knowledge and to distort, simply, or obscure the complexities of reality. If traces can demonstrate how “the spatial and the social are inextricably intertwined” (Tamboukou, 2014, p.11), then maps are an important tool to triangulate people’s places of residence, their proximity to each other, and the routes they took to travel.
Civil War-era maps often prioritized landmarks based on military value. By overshadowing, neglecting, and even erasing the landscape seen as in-between, they construct a “mummified version of the past that is imagined and unreal” (Duncan, 2012, p. 11).
Videos generated with and hosted on Map Warper.
When William Claytor visited Mount Vernon in 1861, “by the most rugged road... We rambled through the woods and on the shore,” he would have passed by and through John Augustine Washington’s estate where, “ten adult men and a fourteen-year-old boy, just three adult women, eight children” were enslaved (Casper, 2008, p. 77). Whereas William Howard Rustle and his group of thirty to forty visitors, who came by steamer a month prior, would have seen a team of free laborers, hired by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, at work on the wharf (Rustle, 1861, Wharf at Mount Vernon, 1861).
What does it signify that those coming by water passed by free laborers while those coming by road passed by people who were enslaved?
By turning traces like sequins in a kaleidoscope, these bits of observation can tumble into a new pattern and form Trouillot’s comparative perspective on the truth, an approach that liberates authority from the individual and can place it into the hands of many (Trouillot, 1995).
Thought to be freedman West Ford photographed on the piazza in 1858, previously owned by Bushrod Washington, landowner in Gum Spring, and employee to the Mount Vernon Ladies Association (MVLA)
“The archive of slavery rests upon a founding violence. This violence determines, regulates and organizes the kinds of statements that can be made about slavery and as well it creates subjects and objects of power.””
Black and Enslaved Reunion at Mount Vernon, 1862
Enslaved and free black lives often appear through intersection, in passing moments of existence in white narratives, a dot rather than a line in accounts of the past. Frequently, the records that reflect and catalogue enslaved people chronicle loss, human lives sold and destroyed, families broken and splintered.
The trace of a large reunion of enslaved and free people at Mount Vernon in 1862, which Scott Casper (2008) pieced together in Sarah Johnson’s Mount Vernon from military and courthouse records, offers a counterbalance to prevailing archival silences (p. 94). The convergence of people formerly enslaved by the Washington family and their free kin marked a brief moment of visibility, of physical and social being.
For visitors, the historic home at Mount Vernon is a space of physical interaction with the idea of the past.
A prevalent oversimplification circulates cultural memory across the country: the narrative that George Washington “freed his slaves.” This reductionist account acknowledges the 123 people set free in 1801, but neglects the narrative of 193 people who remained enslaved to the Washington family and their descendants. The “blissful clarity” (Barthes) of such nationalistic myths prioritizes the idea of the first President’s commitment to freedom over the structural realities of slavery and the marginalized history of those enslaved at Mount Vernon between 1801 and 1863.
My approach visualizing traces from the archive aims to liberate elements of history, “often weak in face of the mythic power of memory and its many oracles” (Barthes) from its purely narrative form by foregrounding movement and physical presence as vital modes of historical engagement.
Laberge, 1987, p. 45