Mary Lee Brady, Ph.D.

Examples of Tobias Lear's slave breeding-trading accounting:

1.     William was an "old body servant" at the time Washington wrote his will several months before the great man's death in 1799.  Mind you, William was not more than 45 years of age, a hardened hard-riding veteran like GW, and though lame would not have been considered old.  It is very much speculation that he was ever physically absent from surroundings of the Mansion House, brother Frank, and George Washington.       

2.    Washington's body servant after William Lee was injured may indeed have been Christopher Shields but, it is not likely that it was he portrayed in the Washington family portrait but that of William Lee.  Our reasoning is that if Washington had included his body servant, Martha would have had her body servant as would the Nanny of the children been so included.  It is our considered opinion that Washington wanted William Lee in the portrait he commissioned because William was a loyal servant with him in days of his triumph over adversities. 

The life and heritage of William Lee and his brother Frank Lee are excellent examples as to how and why scholars of the past and present so often deliberately denigrate or distort the generation of goodness by people of African heritage,

... often in the name of scholarship.  So, we rebel again!

Slave lists compiled by George Washington in 1786 listed William Lee as lame and working as a shoemaker at Mount Vernon, following injuries suffered to his knees during the war and afterwards.  His wife Margaret Thomas, a free colored woman in the Philadelphia area  during the war, ... had apparently divorced him. The second and final list compiled in 1799, six months before Washington's death validates that William Lee had obtained Aggy (Agnes) as a wife (likely around 1786-1787 after Washington left him at Mount Vernon to recuperate)

Proofs are to be found in the free colored registrations in Alexandria, Fairfax and various counties during approximately 30 years following the deaths of George Washington and Martha Washington, in addition to the documented histories of various offspring generations of Frank Lee and William Lee.

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