What is known
In April 1781 the British sloop of war Savage, Captain Richard Graves, came up the Potomac and anchored off Mount Vernon. Lund Washington, the general’s cousin and farm manager, went aboard with provisions to spare the house. Seventeen enslaved people went aboard too and did not come back: fourteen men and three women, by the list Lund kept, among them Deborah, 16 (the list). Washington wrote to Lund on April 30 that it would have been “a less painful circumstance to me, to have heard…they had burnt my House, & laid the Plantation in Ruins.” Seven of the seventeen were recovered after Yorktown. Deborah was not.
She survived smallpox, which marked her face, and reached New York, where she married Harry Squash, a man who had also come in from slavery and been bought by a Mr. Lynch from an officer of the Royal Artillery. When the inspections began in April 1783 the clerks wrote the couple down together on the Polly, bound for Port Roseway: he as “Property of Mr. Lynch,” she as formerly Washington’s, “came away about 4 years ago.” Her own account of the year differs from Lund’s list; the register records what each person told the clerks. She was free under Birch’s certificate. He was not.
The Polly was among the first vessels in the book, and the inspection took place within days of Washington’s letter of April 28 asking Daniel Parker at New York to secure any of his people he could find, “so that I may obtain them again.” No one stopped her.
In Nova Scotia the muster of the free Black settlement at Birchtown, taken in 1784, lists a Deborah Lynch in the household of Neil Robinson. Historians at the Museum of the American Revolution and elsewhere take her to be Deborah, carrying the surname of the man who had owned her husband. Harry Squash does not appear in the muster; whether he died in the first winter, as has been suggested, or was carried elsewhere as Lynch’s property, the record does not say. Nothing more of her is known.
Sources
The register entries, Nova Scotia Archives dataset and the Black Loyalist Heritage Society transcription. Washington to Lund Washington, April 30, 1781, and Washington to Daniel Parker, April 28, 1783, Founders Online. Mount Vernon, “H.M.S. Savage,” Digital Encyclopedia, citing Lund Washington’s list and Mary V. Thompson, “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret” (2019). Museum of the American Revolution, Finding Freedom, “Deborah,” with the Birchtown muster (Library and Archives Canada, MG 9 B9-14, item 1292). Harvey Amani Whitfield, North to Bondage (2016), on enslaved people carried to Nova Scotia.