Harry Washington doesn’t have his face carved into a mountain, or even appear in most George Washington history books. The man who enslaved him and so many others got that honor.
We have raised monuments to the enslaver while letting the people he held disappear beneath his name. Their lives survive, when they survive at all, only where they touched his: as possessions counted in his records, and as the labor that built his accomplishments.
Harry Washington deserves to be remembered on his own terms, beyond the man who once claimed to own him.
Please note that I refer to Harry by the name “Harry Washington” because it is the name he chose to use after escaping slavery. His birth name is unknown.
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The picture is exactly what you think it is, and it’s not our Harry Washington. Although, it is hairy.
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I wish I could tell you that was the end of Harry’s hardship, but Nova Scotia offered frigid temperatures, hunger, poverty, and promises of land that were rarely fulfilled. Harry and his wife, Jenny, eventually sailed with nearly 1,200 other Black Loyalists to Sierra Leone, where they helped establish Freetown.
Harry became one of the settlement’s successful farmers, but there too, white people looked to harm him. When the white-controlled Sierra Leone Company denied the settlers the land and self-government they had been promised, Harry resisted. In 1800, at about 60 years old, he joined a rebellion against British colonial rule. He was arrested and banished across the Sierra Leone River. From there, it is unknown what happened to him.
George Washington rebelled against British rule and America made him its first president. Harry Washington did the same, and history nearly forgot his name.
I would rather live in a country that carved Harry’s face into a mountain.
Sources:
The Human Tradition in the Black Atlantic, 1500–2000 Beatriz G. Mamigonian and Karen Racine
The Enslaved Man Who Escaped George Washington Henry Louis Gates Jr.
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