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  • The Secret Life of Bacon Tait, a White Slave Trader Married to a Free Woman of Color by Hank Trent
  • Antwain K. Hunter
The Secret Life of Bacon Tait, a White Slave Trader Married to a Free Woman of Color. By Hank Trent. ( Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. [x], 220. $38.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6521-8.)

In The Secret Life of Bacon Tait, a White Slave Trader Married to a Free Woman of Color, Hank Trent tells the story of a Virginia slave trader's social, intimate, and work experiences from his ambitious youth to his lonely death. Throughout his life, Bacon Tait had few close friends and a dismal romantic record. Neither of these was exceptional for men in Tait's business, but Trent was drawn to Tait's complicated "second life" (p. 3). Tait became a common-law husband and father in a racially mixed family, which he relocated from Virginia to Massachusetts. He spent a great deal of time there but maintained his trade in human beings. This convergence of Tait's business and family makes him a worthy subject, and Trent delivers with a thoughtful and well-researched book.

Tait is a tough biographical study, and his onetime housekeeper and common-law wife, free woman of color Courtney Fountain, is an even more challenging subject. The author impressively has gleaned enough information from archival records to craft an accessible account of Tait's life. Aside from family matters, Tait's relationships with business associates and his sometimes questionable strategies offer insight into the world of young white men on the make in the South's alluring boom-and-bust economy. Fountain is absent at times, due to the slim sources, but Trent was able to find many of her relatives, some of whom were antislavery radicals, and to offer some contextual information about them.

How should we understand this slave trader who relocated, albeit temporarily, to the North with his racially mixed family? Trent highlights different episodes during Tait's life to show how he, like most white southerners, held contradictory beliefs about people of color in his community and treated them accordingly. These "complex ways that whites and blacks interacted" are not new historiographical ground, but they were an important part of Tait's era(p. 5). Tait relocated Fountain and their four children to Salem, Massachusetts, where they lived near Fountain's relatives in an antislavery community. Tait grew wealthy in Richmond, Virginia, but was plagued by loneliness. Salem offered opportunities for his family, but Tait did not dare to admit how he earned his income. Trent explains that by splitting time between Salem and Richmond, Tait "could have the influence of a businessman and the respect of a husband [End Page 454] and father, but not at the same time or in the same place" (p. 138). This was indeed a fascinating "second life" (p. 3).

Tait and Fountain's relationship was complicated; Trent notes that they may have been in love, but it is not clear that was the case. Fountain was a free woman, but we do not know what initially brought her and Tait together or what sustained their relationship. Trent shows that Tait was devoted to his children. Most of them were able to transition from "illegitimate mulattoes to refined white young men and women," though they spent more time with their mother, and Tait died alone (p. 149). Perhaps the children held Fountain and Tait together for so long.

Despite these minor criticisms, Hank Trent has written an engaging book about a lonely slave trader with a racially mixed family who struggled to balance his economic and personal lives. Like other good biographers, Trent offers readers a contextual understanding of Tait's world. One reads how a white man amassed a fortune through the interstate slave trade and how his money ironically went "to educate and elevate women and children of color" (p. 149). The Secret Life of Bacon Tait will be a worthwhile book for those generally interested in southern history and for readers specifically interested in antebellum interracial relationships, families, slavery, slave traders, free communities of color, and white...

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