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

The work of both public and academic historians in the past decade has done much to illuminate the lives of enslaved people in the households of the nation's first presidents. Since 2016 alone, Erica Armstrong Dunbar has published her account of the Washingtons' runaway slave Ona Judge, Mount Vernon has opened the exhibition "Living Bound Together: Slavery at George Washington's Mount Vernon," and James Madison's Montpelier has debuted its own exhibition on slavery, "The Mere Distinction of Colour."¹ Marie Jenkins Schwartz's Ties That Bound enters this field with the story of First Ladies of the founding era and their slaves, arguing that we cannot tell the stories of these white women without examining their enslaved workers.

Ties That Bound brings together the stories of First Ladies and their enslaved people in three sections that each address one presidential household: Washington's, Thomas Jefferson's, and Madison's. The short chapters in each section follow the lives of Martha Washington, Martha Wayles Jefferson and Martha (Patsy) Jefferson Randolph, and Dolley Madison, focusing on how they were intertwined with slavery. Though Schwartz's goal is laudable and imperative, some of the weaknesses of her text indicate the challenges inherent in restoring these stories.

The first section traces Martha Washington's transition from her middling-status childhood to her role as slave mistress of a large estate and then as First Lady. Martha's first marriage to Daniel Parke Custis advanced her socially and required her to learn how to run a large slave-powered estate. She brought this experience to her marriage to George Washington and her move to Mount Vernon, along with a large number of Custis slaves. Schwartz accurately paints Martha as a demanding master but is on less firm ground arguing that Martha was harsher than George; though she illustrates Martha's severe treatment of slaves, she omits the many available examples of George's. She also tells the more familiar stories of Judge's escape and the emancipation of her husband's slaves through his will; as Schwartz discusses, Martha, who owned the majority of the slaves at Mount Vernon, never freed her slaves.

Schwartz's analyses, however, are often problematic when going beyond these well-trodden stories. Her characterization of three African American figures from the Washington household—Ann Dandridge, William Custis Costin, and West Ford—relies on Henry Wiencek's An Imperfect God, which has been criticized for factual and interpretive problems that could equally be applied to her work.² Schwartz states, despite a lack of definitive evidence, that "Ann Dandridge was Martha's half sister" (44). She is more careful in addressing Costin and Ford. Schwartz claims that there is "circumstantial, but persuasive, evidence" (64) that Costin was the son of Martha's son John (Jacky) Parke Custis and Ann Dandridge, and that it is "possible—if not probable—that George [Washington] was West's father" (108). But she describes Costin as "the only enslaved person Martha ever freed" while noting that "even in his case she could not bring herself to execute a formal deed of manumission. His name was simply omitted from any list of Mount Vernon slaves" (65)—which could also mean that he was always treated as a free person. Schwartz should have engaged, even in the footnotes, with other scholars who have read the evidence differently and disagree.³ In correcting years of willful ignorance of these relationships, historians need to be particularly careful in untangling possible family relationships to ensure accuracy and fully qualify any conjectural claims. Instead, Schwartz later takes these blood ties between the Washingtons and enslaved people as a certainty, noting that "Martha and George both had blood relations of mixed race" (107).

Similar conjectures shape Schwartz's ensuing treatments of Martha Wayles Jefferson, her daughter Martha (Patsy) Jefferson Randolph, and the Hemings slaves. While a particularly poignant chapter on Martha Jefferson's death with slaves at her bedside...