An African Republic by Marie Tyler-McGraw

Author:Marie Tyler-McGraw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2007-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Flanking the entrance to George Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon are two obelisksmarking the burial sites of Bushrod Washington and John Augustine Washington,late owners of Mount Vernon. Both men and their female relatives maintained a connection with the American Colonization Society and with Liberia, based on a Virginia patriotism that needed a plan for ending slavery and on their own need for a more profitable farm labor system. (Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association)

The death of George Washington Custis in 1857 caused William Burke to reflect in a letter to Gurley: “Mr. Custis . . . lived 7 years beyond his allotted time and I have no doubt enjoyed as much of this Lief [life] as any man ever did, so fare as health, food, and raiment is intended to make one comfortable and happy. But my Idea is that it requires more than all these to make a man truly happy in this Lief and if we would be happy in the world to come we must have a foretast of it in this Lief.” Burke obliquely criticizes Custis’s self-indulgent life here—his sympathies were always with Mrs. Custis and Mrs. Lee. He also anticipated that slaves emancipated by Custis’s will would emigrate to Liberia and helpfully pointed out to Gurley that “he [Custis] brought it [his will] home in a small box and gave [it] to Daniel[,] charging him to be very careful to put it in the bank for everything as regard him or us depended on that.”57

Burke worried that his relatives and friends at Arlington and on the other Custis plantations were not prepared for freedom and would be “totally unable to act for themselves.”58 He first offered to return to the United States to prepare the slaves for settlement in Liberia at their emancipation five years after Custis’s death. At the close of the Civil War, Burke hoped that the freedmen might be encouraged to emigrate to Liberia.59 He was to be disappointed. The freedmen and women from the Custis holdings were not interested. The Burkes had apparently found the utopia they desired and all that their life in Virginia had taught them to want, but their fellow ex-bondmen and relatives did not share their views.

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