The Vice President's Black Wife

August 28, 2023
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.