Hercules Posey

Hercules Posey was born about 1748 at the Mount Vernon, Virginia plantation, the son of an enslaved Black woman of the Mount Vernon plantation enslaved community of the principal mid-eighteenth-century Virginia. He was inherited by George Washington at his marriage to Martha Dandridge Custis in 1759 — under the Custis dower-and-inheritance arrangement of the Custis estate.

He was instructed in the principal Mount Vernon plantation kitchen across the principal 1750s and 1760s — and was named the principal chef de cuisine of the Mount Vernon plantation household about 1770.

He was married in the principal mid-1770s to Lame Alice — an enslaved seamstress of the Mount Vernon plantation — and they had three children at the Mount Vernon plantation: Richmond, Evey, and Delia.

He was selected by Washington in November 1790 — at the principal post-1789 transition of the United States presidential household from New York to Philadelphia — and held the principal chef de cuisine position of the principal United States presidential household at the principal Robert Morris house at 190 Market Street at Philadelphia from November 1790 to March 1797.

He was a principal post-1791 Pennsylvania-Gradual-Abolition-Act circumvention subject at Washington's six-month-rotation of the principal Philadelphia presidential household enslaved community — at the principal post-1788 Pennsylvania law providing that any enslaved person resident at Pennsylvania for six months would be automatically emancipated. Washington rotated Hercules and the other enslaved members of the presidential household between Philadelphia and Mount Vernon every six months to circumvent the principal Pennsylvania gradual-abolition law.

He was returned to Mount Vernon in March 1797 at the close of the Washington presidency — and was sent to the principal Dogue Run farm at Mount Vernon as a junior agricultural worker.

He self-emancipated from the Mount Vernon plantation on the night of the twenty-second of February 1797 — and reached Philadelphia in the principal post-Mount-Vernon escape period. He lived across the principal post-1797 period at New York under the name Hercules Posey.

He died at New York on the fifteenth of May 1812 of natural causes, at approximately sixty-four.

He is honored here as the principal chef de cuisine of the first United States presidential household.