Potomac Bound: A Spatial and Network Analysis of the People Enslaved by George Mason

George Mason IV, often dubbed the “forgotten founder,” has been recognized in modern times for his political contributions to the early United States. However, despite espousing freedom and human rights in his 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights, Mason enslaved over one hundred Africans and African-Americans in both Maryland and Virginia during the latter half of the eighteenth century. My study expands upon and disrupts previous accounts of the Mason’s enslaved laborers by employing social network analysis and digital GIS maps to investigate the networks they constructed along and across the Potomac River. While historians have often narrated the relationships among enslaved people, my networks empirically describe and visualize these networks, offering greater clarity about the shape, size, layout and location of these networks.

For several generations, the Mason enslaved were Potomac bound—stuck in a system of chattel slavery and forced to remain in the same geographic area. Nevertheless, the people enslaved by the Masons were networkers; they cultivated and participated in webs of strategic associations based on kinship, fictive-kinship, and their occupations operating ferries and fisheries. These connections developed across space and in a specific geographic environment—along the shores of the Potomac River. I argue that this aqueous landscape was a determinative factor in the construction and maintenance of these water-facilitated webs—networks which shaped their social, political, and economic circumstances and occasionally provided motivation and means for escaping the cycle of Potomac enslavement. Enslaved people like Dick, Watt, Clem, and Joe, for example, drew on their experience navigating watercraft, their knowledge of the area’s geography and their connections on both sides of the river to pursue their own paths to freedom.

Due to the visual nature of my argument and evidence, presenting this research in a poster format is a natural fit. As a starting point, the poster will include digitally-created GIS maps which show the Mason’s landholdings in both Maryland and Virginia, helping viewers discover the various locations where the Mason’s laborers were enslaved, and estimate the size of the enslaved population at each site. Photographs taken at these places will immerse viewers in the waterscape that the enslaved people inhabited, moved through and utilized to fashion their networks. Finally, social network graphs—showing the webs of connections constructed by the Mason enslaved networkers—will be featured prominently both on their own, and overlaid on top of the digital maps. Therefore these network visualizations will not only reveal who was connected to whom and who were the central actors in the networks, but also how these connections were situated in the geographic environment—stretching back and forth across the river—and how they changed over time. Combining these three types of illustrations will help viewers visualize the dynamics of enslaved networks along the Potomac River and recognize the specific influence of waterways in their formation.