Ties That Bound: Founding First Ladies and Slaves by Marie Jenkins Schwartz (review)

In this engaging study, Marie Jenkins Schwartz examines the lives of early First Ladies as slaveholders. Slaveholding among the nation's First Ladies has received limited scholarly attention when compared with the scholarship about their husbands. For no era is this truer than for the founding generation. In particular, Schwartz focuses on the slaveholding experiences of Martha Washington, Martha Jefferson, Jefferson's daughter Patsy Jefferson Randolph, and Dolley Madison. Schwartz argues that examining slaveholding among these early First Ladies provides a richer picture of not only the women but also their husbands and slaves. According to the author, these elite women presided over shared domestic spaces that "required ongoing negotiations" among black and white people (p. 2). These negotiations "created a peculiar world of their own—a world that reveals much about class, race, and gender in the early nation" (p. 2).

Drawing on a variety of sources, including letters, memoirs, presidential papers, house plans, historical scholarship, and the First Ladies exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, Schwartz demonstrates that these First Ladies perceived slaves as vital to their family's economic interests, and they acted accordingly. For example, Martha Washington disagreed with her husband's decision to free his slaves at her death. Fearing for her own safety from slaves who might wish to see her dead and recognizing that her plantations did not need all the slaves the family possessed, Martha freed her deceased husband's slaves early. She failed to provide them with anything to begin their new lives, however, and her actions resulted in the painful separation of Washington's slaves from family members still working on the plantation.

Much of the literature about early First Ladies emphasizes their roles as helpmates, hostesses, and heroines in behalf of their country and their husbands' political careers. Schwartz refines our understanding of their roles by illuminating how slaves facilitated their mistresses' success. She reminds us that slaves prepared the elaborate food for Dolley Madison's influential White House receptions. Even the story of Madison's heroism in saving Gilbert Stuart's portrait of George Washington during the War of 1812 is complicated by Schwartz's explanation that Madison's slaves played an important role in saving the piece. Schwartz argues that these details are significant because "[e]rasing enslaved blacks from the story implies that black people played no role in forging America. Focusing wholly on free whites suggests that the American story is theirs alone" (p. 280). One of the strengths of Ties That Bound: Founding First Ladies and Slaves is that first families' slaves emerge as discrete individuals with stories of their own.

Ties That Bound's most important contribution is refocusing our attention on First Ladies as slaveholders and revealing how slaveholding influenced their roles. When pondering Patsy Jefferson Randolph's contribution to the role of First Lady for her father, Thomas Jefferson, Schwartz notes that Randolph did not publicly challenge Jefferson's relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. Randolph, Schwartz argues, became "the first of a number of First Ladies who have stood by a President in the face of public allegations of personal misconduct" (p. 207). Maintaining focus on the First Ladies' slaveholding rather than the better-known and well-documented presidents poses a challenge. Even if Schwartz sometimes leaves her readers with the desire to learn more from the First Ladies themselves, Ties That Bound illuminates a crucial dimension of their lives that merits scholarly attention. This book deserves a wide readership and is informative for both popular and scholarly audiences.