The Vice President's Black Wife
The Untold Life of Julia Chinn
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
Award-winning historian Amrita Chakrabarti Myers has recovered the riveting, troubling, and complicated story of Julia Ann Chinn (ca. 1796–1833), the enslaved wife of Richard Mentor Johnson, owner of Blue Spring Farm, veteran of the War of 1812, and US vice president under Martin Van Buren. Johnson never freed Chinn, but during his frequent absences from his estate, he delegated to her the management of his property, including Choctaw Academy, a boarding school for Indigenous men and boys on the grounds of the estate. This meant that Chinn, although enslaved herself, oversaw Blue Spring's slave labor force and had substantial control over economic, social, financial, and personal affairs within the couple's world. Chinn's relationship with Johnson was unlikely to have been consensual since she was never manumitted.
What makes Chinn's life exceptional is the power that Johnson invested in her, the opportunities the couple's relationship afforded her and her daughters, and their community's tacit acceptance of the family—up to a point. When the family left their farm, they faced steep limits: pews at the rear of the church, burial in separate graveyards, exclusion from town dances, and more. Johnson's relationship with Chinn ruined his political career and Myers compellingly demonstrates that it wasn't interracial sex that led to his downfall but his refusal to keep it—and Julia Chinn—behind closed doors.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Myers (Forging Freedom) delivers an illuminating account of the life of Julia Chinn, the Black wife of Martin Van Buren's vice president Richard Mentor Johnson. Born sometime between 1790 and 1797, Chinn was originally enslaved by Johnson's parents in Virginia; at 14 she was moved into Johnson's plantation home in Kentucky as a housekeeper. Although Julia remained enslaved until her death, she and Richard reportedly were married by a preacher. Richard referred to Julia as his wife and acknowledged the paternity of their two daughters, Imogene and Adaline; he paid for the girls' education and introduced them to colleagues. His attempts to move his relationship with Julia into the open, including gifts of property to their daughters, eventually cost him friendships, social status, and his presidential ambitions. However, as Myers writes, this "isn't a romance novel." Johnson enslaved more than 100 people, routinely had them beaten and sold South, and engaged in coercive sex with other women he viewed as his property. During his long absences, Chinn administered the estate, Myers notes, making her "complicit" in exchange for "upward social mobility" for her descendants, who by the 1850s were living as white people. Through interviews with descendants and archival research, Myers painstakingly pieces together this long-hidden history. The result is a revealing exploration of the intersection of race, gender, power, and property in 18th-century America.
