George Washington is connected to this particular family of mixed race
Bahamian heritage (read the story of the Fairfaxes and
George Washington). Suspicions are that Anne Fairfax, Mount Vernon's first
mistress and the wife of Lawrence Washington, the President's brother, was a
woman of colour whose mother was born in the Bahamas. A number of George
Washington's historians have pointed out that when Anne's brother, George
William, visited his Fairfax aunts in England, he had been utterly humiliated
by their curiosity over whether he would turn black at puberty. Since the
Fairfaxes were a wealthy, titled English family whose members corresponded
regularly with each other, there must have been some foundation for this
assumption regarding George William's race. Indeed, from one of his father's
letters I came across, I discovered that his Fairfax relatives, in point of
fact, actually knew his mother, Sarah Walker, the daughter of the Chief Justice
of the Bahamas, since she had resided with them in England while on a visit
from the West Indies. It is all too obvious then that there must have been a
substantial proportion of her ethnic heritage evident, if her in laws expected
George William to inherit these African traits as well.
Besides their relationship to Mount Vernon, another historical point about this
family is that because of their enormous wealth and their social position in
the British Colonial government of the time, William, Sarah's husband, was the
first person for whom George Washington ever worked. George William, their
son, would, for the rest of his life, be counted as the president's closest
friend.
Laurence Washington, like his brother George, did not father any children.
However, Ann Fairfax's second marriage was to one of the Lees. With George Lee,
Anne finally succeeded in leaving a line even if not a political or culturally
dynamic one. From her sister, Sarah's marriage to Major John Carlyle, however, are descended some of the most politically influential families of the South.
Researched and Written by Mario de Valdes y Cocom
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