Caroline Branham

Caroline Branham was born into slavery in 1764 at Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate. Caroline’s mother was enslaved by Martha Washington and considered property of the estate of Martha’s first husband, Daniel Parke Custis (1711-1757). Caroline Branham was one of four enslaved people present at the death of General Washington on December 14, 1799, as recorded for posterity by George Washington’s private secretary, Tobias Lear.

Due to her condition as part of the Custis estate, Caroline and her children remained enslaved upon Washington’s death. Under the terms of his last will and testament, the 123 people he enslaved were emancipated. When Martha died in 1802, her will stated that Caroline and her children became the property of the youngest of her four grandchildren, George Washington Parke Custis. Soon after, Mr. Custis directed the construction of his home, Arlington House. Enslaved brick makers, carpenters, and laborers, many of them people he inherited from his grandmother, built the grand home.

Caroline Branham lived with her extended family in a cottage on the Arlington House plantation. In the mid-to-late 1820s, Mr. Custis introduced her to Jared Sparks (1789-1866), an early American historian who would later become the president of Harvard College. Sparks was conducting research for a biography of George Washington and wanted to interview Caroline Branham for her account of the passing of the first President. Caroline agreed to do this, but on one important condition. She asked, or was granted in exchange for her lengthy recollections, that Mr. Custis manumit (i.e., free) her toddler grandson Robert (Robert H. Robinson, 1824-1909).

 

Robert H. Robinson

Alexandria Black History Museum

The manumission records of Alexandria County (then encompassing Arlington County) indicate that Custis sold three-year-old Robert, the son of Caroline’s daughter Lucy Branham, to an area Quaker family by the name of Miller in 1827. Young Robert may have remained with his family at Arlington Plantation through his childhood, but in 1834 the Millers apprenticed him for an eleven-year term to a prominent Alexandria baker and businessman, Robert Jamieson. Finally, in January 1846, at age twenty-one, Robert H. Robinson became a free man.

On his path to freedom, Robert Robinson learned to read and “cipher” (do arithmetic). Eventually, he opened a night school and organized a debate club for black freedmen. Most important, he became a prominent black minister in Alexandria City as the pastor of Roberts Chapel on South Washington Street, organized in the early 1830s by black Methodist Episcopal congregants. The church, now called Roberts Memorial United Methodist Church welcomes a diverse congregation. Along with two of his sons and other members of the community, Reverend Robinson organized the earliest African Americans’ Emancipation Day observances in Alexandria City. Over a fifty-year period beginning in 1864, the celebration attracted such prominent dignitaries as Frederick Douglass, John M. Langston and Booker T. Washington. Today, the library of the Alexandria Black History Museum is named in honor of Robert H. Robinson.

Mr. Custis, believed by Branham descendants to be the father of one or more of Caroline’s children, officially recorded the last chapter of her life. The records of Christ’s Church of Alexandria note the following entry under the heading “burials of blacks” in the city’s Episcopal Cemetery,

March 13, 1843. Caroline Branham, an old servant of General Washington. See account of the death of Washington in Sparks’ Life of Washington.

Being a Christ’s Church member, Mr. Custis arranged to have Caroline Branham laid to rest in the still prominent Alexandria City cemetery. Unfortunately, there is no surviving marker for her grave or for the graves of the other free and enslaved African Americans buried there.