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APPENDIX A " .. being in Company with her revives my former Passion for your Low Land Beauty. ... " During his lifetime Thomas Posey made no claim of, or reference to, descent from George Washington or kinship to the Washington family, nor did Posey's children publicly entertain any such pretensions after his death in 1818.1 It was more than half a century thereafter that the first allegation of a filial relationship between Posey and Washington appeared in public print. In 1871 the Cincinnati Daily Commercial, a leading Ohio journal with some seemingly muckraking proclivities, published a feature article written by an unnamed Indianapolis correspondent, headlined: "Was Geo. Washington a Father?" In commenting upon an oil portrait of territorial Governor Thomas Posey recently unveiled in Indiana's Statehouse, the correspondent stated, "none who are acquainted with the evidence . , . doubts the assertion that Posey was the son of George Washington."2 Without ever providing the nature or sources of the supposed "evidence," the writer related the story of a couple named Posey who were tenants on Washington's Mount Vernon estate. Sometime after the husband's death in 1754, the widow bore a son, allegedly fathered by the then-unmarried Washington. By this account, the support and maintenance of the child, named Thomas Posey, was provided by the squire of Mount Vernon. After growing to manhood, the article related, Thomas served on his putative father's military staff in the Revolution, and thereafter received many political favors from President 263 General Thomas Posey: Son of the American Re

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