Sponsored by Blue Grass Motorsport, Dinsmore, and PNC
Institutional Asset Management.
Award-winning historian Amrita Chakrabarti Myers has
recovered the riveting, troubling, and complicated story of Julia Ann Chinn
(ca. 1796–1833), the enslaved mixed-race wife of Richard Mentor Johnson, owner
of Blue Spring Farm, veteran of the War of 1812, and US vice president under
Martin Van Buren. Johnson never freed Chinn, but during his frequent absences
from his estate, he delegated to her management of his property, including
Choctaw Academy, a boarding school for Indigenous men and boys. This meant that
Chinn, while enslaved, had substantial control over economic, social,
financial, and personal affairs within the couple's world, including overseeing
Blue Spring's enslaved labor force. Chinn's relationship with Johnson was
unlikely a consensual one since she was never manumitted.
What makes Chinn's life exceptional is the power that
Johnson invested in her, the opportunities the couple's relationship afforded
her and her daughters, and their community's tacit acceptance of the family—up
to a point. When the family left their farm, they faced steep limits: pews at
the rear of church, burial in separate graveyards, exclusion from town dances,
and more. Outliving Chinn, Johnson was ruined politically by his relationship
with her, and Myers compellingly demonstrates that it wasn't interracial sex
that led to his downfall but his refusal to keep it—and Julia Chinn—behind
closed doors.
Amrita Chakrabarti Myers is the Ruth N. Halls Associate
Professor of History and gender studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She
is the author of Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of
Liberty in Antebellum Charleston.