Slavery at the Gendered Crossroads of the Revolutionary Era: First Ladies and Their Bondspeople

As I walk attentively through the mansion houses at Mount Vernon, Montpelier, and Monticello as part of a series of plantation research outings during annual sojourns to my home in Virginia, my questions hover everywhere, but two in particular push to the forefront. What was it really like to work and live—young and old, male and female—within these beautifully conceived and adorned spaces, among the most powerful and privileged of one's age, with so limited an opportunity to insist on one's own humanity? How can historical narratives constructed today ever truly contain the truths of those captives' lives?

Erica Armstrong Dunbar's Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge and Marie Jenkins Schwartz's Ties That Bound: Founding First Ladies and Slaves have powerful, even moving, stories to tell about some of these men, women and children. These engrossing monographs concern the institution of slavery in the eras of the American Revolution and the early Republic and how elites as well as those whom they enslaved shaped the margins of the nation's founding ideals of liberty and democracy.

The stories told in Ties That Bound and Never Caught indeed are not new ones, but Marie Jenkins Schwartz and Erica Dunbar have profoundly enhanced our knowledge of these people and events and, as a result, deepened our understanding of slavery, particularly the gendered relations within the domestic worlds of elite slaveholding households.

There is much to appreciate in Marie Schwartz's Ties That Bound. Its most significant contributions are found both in its content and analysis. It is certain, for example, that enslaved women routinely described slaveholding women as "devils" and "hellcats," particularly when they spoke of their own physical abuse by these women and the sale and abuse of their children. From this perspective, slaveholding women were no better than their husbands not only because of the ways that they treated their slaves directly, but also because they willfully hid, excused, enabled, and took part in the physical and psychological terrors visited upon black bondspeople and their families. This phenomenon is a nuanced lesson in Marie Jenkins Schwartz's Ties that Bound.

Schwartz's well-researched monograph is a discourse on the relationships of four of the most elite women in the early United States—Martha Washington, Martha Wayles Jefferson and her daughter Patsy, and Dolly Madison—with their slaves. The stories of these women take us through their transition from girlhood to matron status in the nation's largest slave society at the time, Virginia. This point is important because Schwartz quickly establishes for at least Martha Washington and the Jefferson women that they were socialized from birth to accept the privileges of slaveholding as a financial anchor and social marker for their households and their descendants. As girls, they learned that black people were meant to serve them without question and had no right—inherent or otherwise—to freedom, personal wellbeing, or happiness.

Their childhood socialization also included learning that the men in their families routinely demanded the sexual services of enslaved girls and women; how to discount biracial kin; that slave domesticity could be tolerated as long as it did not undermine the operative racial hierarchy; that masters and mistresses must compel their slaves to work hard and be obedient; and that slaves, regardless of their age, gender, or importance within their own social worlds, were the most useful form of portable property that whites could possess. A slaveholding woman's right to barter, sell, use as collateral, loan, give, or rent a bondsperson for the most petty of economic concerns, such as to buy an article of clothing—even more than their command of slave domestic labor as...