According to the Alexandria Gazette, he lived 100 years, from 1745 to 1845. He was abducted from Guinea as a boy and enslaved in North America to work on a carpentry crew for George Washington. He was briefly liberated by the British during the Revolutionary War, on the HMS Savage, and recaptured by Washington at the surrender of the British in Yorktown at the end of 1781. But this was only the first 35 years of his life.
He gained his freedom in 1801 when Martha Washington freed all of the enslaved people who were the ‘property’ of her deceased husband, as Washington had requested in his will. She never freed the people whom she considered her property, however. They included Samuel Anderson’s wife, Agnes, and their children: Heuky, Cecelia, Anderson, Ralph, Charity and Charles. Anderson spent the rest of his life trying to purchase the freedom of his children and grandchildren.
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