In September 1784, a young enslaved woman named Nance gave birth to twins in what is now Fayette County, Pennsylvania. According to the state’s new gradual abolition law, Tom and Charity could not be held as slaves for life, but only as slaves for a term—an unfree status that carried a twenty-eight-year sentence. When Nance’s enslaver registered the twins as his property, he noted that their mother had previously been “the property of General Washington.”
The future first president had separated Nance from her family at Mount Vernon ten years earlier, sending her north to help develop a plot of land that he had purchased in the Monongahela River Valley. Nance, who was “fit for any business,” labored alongside others who Washington held in bondage to establish a grist mill on his property.
Shortly after Nance gave birth to Tom and Charity, Washington ordered the family back to Mount Vernon. The young mother refused to leave Pennsylvania, prompting the general to sell her and her children to separate buyers rather than force them back to Virginia in chains. Finding herself bound in a different township than her eldest children, Nance gave birth to a second set of twins whom she named George and Jane. Although she lived in a ‘free state,’ enslavers had separated Nance from her family once more.
Cory James Young's Website 