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  • Ties That Bound: Founding First Ladies and Slaves by Marie Jenkins Schwartz
  • Christina Bieber Lake (bio)
Ties That Bound: Founding First Ladies and Slaves marie jenkins schwartz Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017 416 pp.

Marie Jenkins Schwartz does a great service by making a weighty and difficult topic accessible to general readers. She endeavors to fill a gap both in the public consciousness and the historical record of some of the most famous early leaders in American history we think we know so well: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. We know they held slaves, but what did their wives think about that?

The answer is in the title of the study itself. While the ties that bound slaves may have been more overt, the ties that bound the wives of early slaveholders were a lot less obvious. Without letting anyone off the hook, Schwartz reveals why these women were able to disregard their own consciences and look the other way—even when the slaves held in bondage were their own blood relatives. Not surprisingly, it comes down to money and a set of cultural conventions that were hard to break. To read this book closely is to remember that privilege for some has always come at a cost to others.

Schwartz begins each part by outlining just how much wealth was required to maintain the grand lifestyle of our earliest presidents. While most Americans think of George Washington as a down-to-earth Patriot, he [End Page 542] was actually a fabulously wealthy Virginia elite—especially after marrying Martha Dandridge, whose earlier marriage had been to a tobacco planter, Daniel Custis. Before the Revolutionary War, the Washingtons created and maintained a genteel lifestyle at Mount Vernon, importing European luxury goods and entertaining hundreds of guests each year. There is clear evidence that George increased their slaveholdings through purchase, at least initially, and that he sold off slaves who persisted in their attempts to escape (63). Their son, Jacky, was likely the father of one of these slaves. Martha apparently had no qualms about bringing slaves from Mount Vernon with them to Philadelphia during the Revolutionary War, and then to New York when George was elected president, establishing a precedent that seven other presidents would follow. Schwartz details how the Washingtons clearly conspired to avoid a Pennsylvania law that required freeing resident blacks by periodically returning their slaves to Mount Vernon. Although George became increasingly uneasy about owning slaves and planned to free them through his will, his death left his wife with difficult financial decisions to make, and the promised freedom came to very few.

Dolley Madison's story is even more disturbing. Coming from a Quaker background that disdained slaveholding, Dolley still found it possible to turn away from those aspects of her faith when she married into James Madison's Montpelier estate that contained more than a hundred slaves. The Madisons openly brought slaves to Washington to help maintain their lifestyle. Dolley became extremely popular, spending lavish sums on clothing from Paris, and deliberately effecting the look of a queen (273). Dolley cultivated and protected her reputation, and it worked. While most Americans think of the first lady as personally braving fire to save a portrait of George Washington during the War of 1812, the truth is probably that the slaves were the ones who saved the treasures from destruction. The story of Dolley's life after James's death is especially inauspicious. She closed her eyes to the misery of her long-held slaves while her own fortunes declined.

Schwartz's richest explorations come when she takes a look at the home life of Thomas Jefferson, whose reputation as founding father took a hit when DNA testing definitively proved his liaisons with his slave mistress, Sally Hemings. While it is easy to judge the situation from our vantage point, Schwartz reveals how complicated it was, especially for the women, black and white, who had little to no agency in the matter. Jefferson's future wife, Martha Wayles, had lost her mother and stepmother early in [End Page 543] life and was cared for by her father's enslaved concubine, Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings...

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