People enslaved at Mount Vernon practiced a variety of religious traditions and experiences, including influences from both African and European traditions. While aspects of their religious lives were likely private, church records and naming practices, indicate public representations of the religious communities among those enslaved at Mount Vernon. Scholars have argued religious practices among enslaved communities as evidence of enslaved agency, or resistance, to slavery.
Those enslaved at Mount Vernon engaged in Christian religious practices. Some people enslaved at Mount Vernon participated with organized Christian groups to some degree. At Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg, for example, at least eleven enslaved people "belonging to Coll. George Washington," both adults and children, were christened in the 1760s.1 A description left by a notable eighteenth-century visitor to Mount Vernon suggests that the enslaved people at Mount Vernon had contact with at least three other Christian denominations: Baptists, Methodists, and Quakers. By 1790 about one in twenty-three African Americans in Virginia had joined a church. Of this number, 80% were Baptists and Methodists.2
In addition to worshipping with local congregations, there are indications that Mount Vernon's enslaved community developed at least one spiritual leader within their own community. According to a runaway slave advertisement from the spring of 1798, Caesar—a man enslaved by the Custis family from Washington's Union Farm, who was thought to be forty-five to fifty years old—was a well-known preacher among the local enslaved population in the later years of the eighteenth century. As a community and spiritual leader, Caesar may have played an important role developing an independent, religious community at Mount Vernon.3
There were also several remnants of religious traditions from Africa at Mount Vernon, including both Vodoun and Islam. The names of at least two enslaved women at Mount Vernon indicate a Muslim influence on the estate, if not the actual practice of Islam. Two women, presumably a mother and daughter, called "Fatimer" and "Little Fatimer" were included on George Washington's 1774 tithables list.4 The names appear to be a corruption of the popular Muslim woman's name Fatima, meaning "Shining One" in Arabic. Even if enslaved people were not actually practicing Islam, this child's name provides evidence that some knowledge of Islamic traditions or a familiarity with the Arabic language could still be found in the larger African American community at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Mary V. Thompson Research Historian, updated by Zoie Horecny, Ph.D., 12 May 2025
Notes:
1. Information transcribed from the Register of Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg, Virginia, by Linda H. Rowe, Historian at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, in a letter to Susan Fincke in the Education Department at Mount Vernon, dated 29 May 1997.
2. Louis-Philippe, Diary of My Travels in America, ed. Stephen Becker (New York: Delacorte Press, 1977), 32; Thad W. Tate, The Negro in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1965), 157.
3. The Papers of George Washington, Retirement Series, Vol. 2, ed. W.W. Abbott (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 615n.
4. "[Diary entry: 18 February 1786], Founders Online, National Archives.
Bibliography:
Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. Vintage Books, 1976.
Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978
Thornton, John. “Central African Names and African-American Naming Patterns,” William and Mary Quarterly 3d. ser., 50, no. 4 (Oct. 1993): 727–42.
Thompson, Mary V. “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret”: George Washington, Slavery, and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2019.
Schoelwer, Susan P., ed. Lives Bound Together: Slavery at George Washington's Mount Vernon. Mount Vernon, VA: Mount Vernon Ladies Association, 2016.
