Many Virginia slaveholders fathered mixed-race children with enslaved women. Those offspring were born into slavery and thus increased the owners’ wealth. Thanks to studies by Annette Gordon-Reed, formal tours at Monticello now announce that Thomas Jefferson had four mixed-race children with the enslaved Sally Hemings. Martha Washington’s first husband had a mixed-race half-brother. In the nineteenth century, mixed-race Virginians claimed descent from Martha Washington’s grandson, George Washington Parke Custis.[8]
No records survive of Ann Dandridge, in part because the Dandridge family’s home was in New Kent County, a “burned-record county” east of Richmond. The term, familiar to Virginia historians, reflects Union Army soldiers’ tendency to burn Southern courthouses during the Civil War. New Kent County stands out in this community of archival destruction. Its courthouse was first incinerated nearly eight decades before the Civil War, then again in 1865.[9]
Consequently, no public records or family records survive of the persons enslaved by John Dandridge, Martha Washington’s father. The notion that Ann’s enslaved mother was half-Cherokee is equally impervious to research, though it invites skepticism. The Cherokee lived in Virginia’s southwestern tip, far from New Kent County. More plausible is another recounting of the Costin family tale that described Ann Dandridge’s mother as “an Indian squaw of the Pamunkey tribe,” since Pamunkey lands were closer to the Dandridge home. That version, however, is equally unsupported.[10]
Some facts focus the tale of Ann Dandridge. Martha was born in 1731. For a mixed-race half-sister to be her “playmate,” Ann must have been born by at least 1736; otherwise, the age gap between the girls would have been too great. A woman born in 1736 would have been forty-four when she gave birth to Will in 1780, a late age for a birth mother, but not impossible. But the woman who likely was Will Costin’s mother had at least six children after Will was born; the last in 1801. By 1801, the hypothetical Ann Dandridge would have been well past sixty. That would take credulity into the basement and beat it with a rubber hose. Mary V. Thompson, Mount Vernon’s research historian, plausibly speculates that the Costin family tale omits a generation: that Ann Dandridge gave birth to a daughter, and her daughter gave birth to Will Costin and his many siblings.[11]
This “Thompson correction” raises the question of the relationship among Martha, her hypothetical half-sister, and the half-sister’s daughter (Martha’s niece). If John Dandridge enslaved his daughter Ann, did he convey Ann to Martha? Did Martha then bring half-sister Ann and Ann’s offspring into her marriages with Daniel Parke Custis and then with George Washington? Were Ann and her daughter enslaved or free? Mount Vernon’s records describe no enslaved person by Ann’s name of the age that Ann had to be.