The Vice President’s Black Wife

Vulgar History Podcast

The Vice President’s Black Wife 

August 6, 2025

Hi everyone, it’s Ann Foster here, host of the Vulgar History podcast. Before we get into today’s episode, I just wanted to mention that this is a podcast about the olden days, but we’re all very much living in the here and now. And here and now, Gaza is facing an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. People are struggling to survive amid destruction, severe shortages of medical care, food, and clean water, and a collapsed healthcare system. The best way that many of us can help is by donating money to organizations who are on the ground there helping. Because donating can get complicated depending on what country you’re in, and I know people are listening to this from all kinds of places all around the world, here are some options based on where you live that may be the most useful. 

So, a Canada-based organization is the International Development and Relief Foundation, IDRF, is providing clean water distribution, installing toilets and latrines, and distributing essential hygiene kits in Gaza. So, for Canadians, you can donate at IDRF.ca. For Americans, the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, PCRF’s, Gaza Relief and Recovery Campaign provides urgent medical aid, treatment, food, water, and necessities for affected families. So, Americans, you can donate to them at PCRF.net. A UK-based organization is Medical Aid for Palestinians, MAP, who are supporting the health system, providing food and clean water, supporting people with disabilities, and more work on the ground in Gaza. So, if you’re in the UK or Ireland, you can donate to them at MAP.org.uk. And wherever you are in the world, an international organization that anyone can donate to is World Central Kitchen, whose team members are on the ground in Gaza doing their best to provide hot meals. You can donate to them at WCK.org. 

And now, here is this week’s episode.

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Hello and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster, and this season, we’ve been looking at various revolutions. We’ve been looking at the French Revolution, the American Revolution, Haitian Revolution. In many of those discussions, we’ve talked about, especially the discussions about the Haitian Revolution, kind of how that was connected to things that happened later in American history, for instance, like the American Civil War. We’ve talked in several episodes about the chattel slave trade, slavery in the United States, especially in some episodes we did like about Ona Judge and Sally Hemings. Today, this episode, I think, really connects to those as well in the context of just broadening the scope of my personal, and hopefully your also, understanding of what it was like to live in America during the period where Black people were enslaved. 

This is actually an episode I want to shout out a person who, I don’t have your name handy, but thank you so much. It was somebody who’s in the Vulgar History Discord group, which you can join if you join our Patreon, who had read this book and said, “This is really good.” And I was like, oh man! This does sound really good. So, I contacted the author, and the timing is really good because this book just came out in paperback, there’s an eBook, there’s an audiobook. It’s such an important and good book, and I had such a good time talking to the author who is Amrita Chakrabarti Myers. 

So, this is a book that’s called The Vice President’s Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn. And the very first thing I think I asked her in this interview you’re about to hear is like, which vice president was this? And why do we use the word ‘wife’ when we’re talking about the relationship between a white enslaver and the Black woman or girl who he enslaved? And we explain the title, it’s a provocative title, and I think it really gets your attention. We’re just going to jump into it because Amrita was such a delight to talk to, and she explains this all so well. She’s so passionate about this story and I’m so happy that she joined me on the podcast. So, talking about The Vice President’s Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn with Amrita Chakrabarti Myers. 

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Ann: So, I’m joined today by Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, author of The Vice President’s Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn. Welcome, Amrita. 

Amrita: Thank you so much for having me, Ann. I’m super excited to be talking about this book with a fellow Canadian!

Ann: Yay! Two Canadians talking about American history. You know, we bring an objectivity to it that I think some Americans find startling. This is what I’ve learned from the episodes I’ve done about American history. I’ve heard this from listeners who were like, “Wow, I’ve never…” because when you just grow up being taught a certain thing, you don’t question it necessarily. But when someone from the outside looks at it, and I’m like, “This doesn’t make sense.” And then, when I learn it, and I explain it to them, they’re like, “Oh, I never thought about it that way.” 

So, actually, first, I just want to say, so before I read your book, I was just like, “Wow. Which vice president’s Black wife?” And then I read about the vice president, and I’m like, well I’ve never heard of him, but I assume Americans have. And then in your book, I realized like, no, even Americans haven’t heard of him. Who is the vice president in question? Just so people know. 

Amrita: So, the vice president in question is Richard Mentor Johnson. He was born and raised in Kentucky, and he grew up in a pretty privileged family, right? Landholders, enslavers. He started out as a state congressman, and then he became a federal congressman, senator, and one-term Vice President of the United States under Martin Van Buren. So, his career spanned almost five decades, 44, 45 years, mostly at the federal level, including that one term as VP. And the VP term ran from 1837 to 1841. 

Ann: When I’m looking at American history, I want to learn, you know, like, is this someone that people know about? Am I going to be breaking people’s understanding of something? But this guy, it seems like no one’s heard of him. Even in your book, towards the end, you talk to some descendants, and even they were like, “Wow, I’m a descendant of a vice president!” And these are people who are interested in history, and they’re like, “We’ve never heard of him.” But I understand why your book is just called The Vice President’s Black Wife, not “Richard Mentor Johnson’s…” because nobody would know. 

But the book is about his wife. And actually, we’ll talk about that, I think, why you use that word to describe the relationship. So, we’re talking about Julia Chinn. I think before we get into her biography, can you explain how you came across her story? 

Amrita: I actually call myself an accidental biographer, I talk about that in the introduction to the book, because this really was the most happy of accidents. I was doing research to teach one of my undergraduate classes. I regularly teach a big lecture class on, you know, US History, Part One, basically; from the era of contact down to the Civil War, in one semester; 500 years in 15 weeks. And I was reading a textbook, and I came across, like, a really small paragraph about this guy named Richard Johnson, and how abolitionists hated him, and they used him in his life as an example of why we should abolish slavery, because they said that here was this man who had all this power, he was an enslaver, a politician, and he regularly sexually assaulted and had sexual relationships with the enslaved women that he owned. So, you know, he became kind of like an example for the abolitionists of why we should abolish slavery, because we need to protect Black women from their rapist enslavers. 

But then, there was, like, this follow up sentence, “Johnson had at least three relationships with three different enslaved women, one of whom was named Julia Chinn, who he was with for almost 25 years and had two daughters with.” And I thought to myself, “Hang on, hang on, hang on. What?” [laughs] Because in the US, people talk a lot about Thomas Jefferson and his long, long-term relationship with Sally Hemings, even though he never acknowledged Hemings, never acknowledged their children, it was sort of widely understood that they were together for decades until her death, they had many children together. This is the story that everyone talks about. But I was like, hang on. I’m a US historian, I’ve been studying US history for decades, I’d already by that point written one book, I teach US history all the time. How have I never heard not just of Richard Johnson, but why have I never heard of Julia Chinn? Why have I never heard of this relationship? I mean, if it was quarter century, two kids, you know, this sounds very Hemings-esque, right? Why have I never heard of this? 

So, I kind of thought I should, you know… I was finishing that first book, I was putting it through the production process, and I thought, well, let me come back to this when I have more time to think about it. But it was really that small paragraph in that US history survey textbook, that sort of led me to go, “Oh! There might be a there there.” I thought, well, maybe, maybe it’ll be an article, maybe it’ll be nothing at all. I certainly didn’t anticipate that it was going to be my second book project. 

And then, about a year later, I was having a conversation with one of my colleagues, Christina Snyder, who is a specialist in Native American history, and she was starting a new project at that point on an Indigenous boarding school called Choctaw Academy, and she was really looking at Native boarding schools as a whole, but particularly focusing on that one. And in the course of our conversation, she mentioned that the boarding school was on the property of this Kentuckian who was a politician and a vice president. And I said, “Hang on, hang on, hang on. Is this the same guy?” Because I was remembering, is this the same guy who also had all of these sexual relationships with Black women on his plantation? She’s like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah! But it was way more complicated than that.” And I thought to myself, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on a second. Indigenous boarding school and enslaved people and a Black— What’s going on here?” 

And so, I just started doing some preliminary internet research and sort of was really surprised, but not surprised, to find out that there had been very little work done, like really nothing done on Julia Chinn at all. But even on Johnson, there hadn’t been a biography written on Johnson since 1932. So, I thought to myself, wow, this is totally, like, you know, unexplored territory in a sense, right? For a historian. There’s so many biographies of Abraham Lincoln. [laughs]

Ann: There’s one coming out, like, every month. Yeah.

Amrita: Right. Like, oh, another Lincoln biography. I mean, no offence to Lincoln biographers, but I was like, this is really kind of unexplored territory. Johnson hasn’t been written about in almost 100 years. Nobody’s actually done a sustained examination of Chinn, or their daughters, their family. And I was like, well, maybe there just isn’t enough information, maybe there’s not enough sources. 

So, I’m talking to that same colleague, and I was like, “Someone really needs to do some research on this. Someone needs to write about this family, about her, about their daughters. What was it like to live as a Black woman in a relationship with this powerful white man in the middle of rural Kentucky?” And I was kind of going on and on, on my soapbox, and she finally paused and looked at me and said, “Isn’t that kind of what you do?” [laughs] Right? Because in my first book, I had talked a lot about interracial sexual relationships, but in Charleston, South Carolina. So, she literally was just like, “Isn’t this kind of what you do?” Like, I kept saying, “Someone should do this.” And she’s like, “Dude, you need to do it.” Right? [laughs] 

Ann: Who is that someone? Yeah. 

Amrita: And I was like, “Oh, okay!” So, it really was this weird series of events and, you know, coincidences, whatever you want to call it, that eventually led me to start doing this work on Chinn. So, it was a series of happy accidents and coincidences. 

Ann: What I do want to sort of establish as well, because this is just something that’s been on my mind recently since, like, a month or two ago when I saw the movie Sinners, for instance, Hailee Steinfeld’s character, and Hailee Steinfeld herself, who is one-eighth Black, and she has Filipino heritage as well. I think she’s one-eighth Filipino as well, but she’s always presented as white. And then in that movie, I was like, this is such a good talking point for me on an audio podcast when we’re talking about mixed-race people and what did they look like? We don’t know what Julie Chinn looked like, obviously, there’s no portraits, there’s no photography. But the fact that her children were able to live as white people, basically, indicates how light-skinned she must’ve been. 

So, can you explain just from your research about, like, when we’re talking about a Black woman, and she was a Black woman, but she might have looked to us, today, like a white person. It’s just whatever the status was of your mother, like you become enslaved if your mother was enslaved. If your mother was Black, then you’re Black also. So, just to visualize this, can you explain that? 

Amrita: Well, you’re actually asking about two different things. One is appearance, the other is legal status, right? So, the legal status thing is in some ways a little bit easier to nail down because the way the law worked in the US was that it’s partus sequitur ventrem, is the Latin phraseology for this particular law. It dates back to the mid to late 1600s after Bacon’s Rebellion, which happens in Virginia. Essentially, at that point, colony by colony, what will become the United States essentially passes legislation saying that “As the womb or the mother goes, so does the child follow,” right? So, paternity becomes irrelevant in terms of the status of free or slave. Enslavement or freedom depends upon the legal status of the mother. If your mother is enslaved, you are born enslaved; if your mother is free at the time of your birth, you are therefore born free. 

But at that point, of course, it doesn’t say anything about race, but what begins to happen, of course, is that white women who had never been enslaved for life, but there were white women who had been indentured servants, right? That sort of thing. But we begin to see partus sequitur ventrem basically creates a very definitive clear schism about who gets to be enslaved, who gets to be free. 

So, it doesn’t matter if you have a white father, or if you have a free Black father, right? It depends on who your mother is. White women are not going to be enslaved. Black people will be increasingly… Race is going to be created, right? Prior to this, there is no sort of conscious understanding of race, right? Whiteness is created as a result of and in opposition to blackness, right? And vice versa, right? Prior to this, it’s everyone is, they’re German, they’re French, they’re Irish, they’re Dutch, they’re English, they’re Scottish, they’re not white. There is no understanding of whiteness. It’s ethnic and national cultural differentiations. But in order to create the system here, where slavery follows the condition of the mother, you have to therefore create— Racial difference has to come into being. 

So, certain groups of women will never be enslaved. Well, who are those women? It’s not about religion. It’s not about ethnicity. It’s about this idea of whiteness. So, I just gave you a really quick history lesson. [laughs] 

Ann: No, it’s so good. Thank you. 

Amrita: But if you go, this is where it starts, right? This idea of whiteness and Blackness, of otherness, of right? Who gets to be free, who gets to be enslaved? And so, freedom, if a Black woman is free, then her children are going to be free as well, right? Again, irrelevant in terms of paternity. Because we don’t know who—at that point, there’s no DNA testing—we don’t know who contributes the right sperm, but we know whose body the child comes out of. And therefore, that idea of the status of the womb, the freedom or enslavement of the womb, and the passage of that onto the child is really critical. 

So, for Julia Chinn, we know she was enslaved because her mother was enslaved. Her mother was owned by Richard Johnson’s parents, Robert and Jemima Suggett Johnson. Because Henrietta was owned by the senior Johnsons, that means any children that Henrietta had were also going to be enslaved. So, Julia is born enslaved, her brother Daniel is born enslaved. There may be other siblings that we’re unaware of, but in the records, the only ones that I’m able to discover, at least up until this point, has been Julia and her brother Daniel. 

So, they are both born enslaved, they’re born enslaved on the senior Johnson’s plantation. They’re owned by the same people who own their mother because she’s enslaved, they’re enslaved; whoever owns her, owns them. Unless they decide to free them, right? If they decided one day to free them, or to sell them to someone else, or bequeath them to somebody else, this is how it’s going to go. And that’s what happens. 

At some point, when Julia is around 13, give or take a year, she and her brother Daniel are bequeathed, passed on to Richard, who is one of the Johnson’s 10, 11, 12… they have a lot of kids. So, he, by this point, is you know, 30 years old. He’s setting up his own farm, his own home, his own independence, just a couple of miles away from his parents. And in order to help their son get his plantation up off the ground running, he needs labourers. So, not only do his parents give him 2,000 acres of land, they also give him almost 100 enslaved labourers to help him, because he needs carpenters and wheelwrights and masons and field hands and domestic staff, right? Plantations are businesses. So, Julia and Daniel are transferred to Richard’s legal ownership at that point, leaving their mother behind. 

Ann: Well, I just wanted to also ask you about this because she was trained in domestic work from age 6 or something like that. To me, so much of this is just, like, trying to imagine a world that I’m like… It’s challenging to try and imagine what it’s like. But to be like, “Okay, we’re setting up this new homestead. We need a housekeeper; we need someone who’s experienced. This 14-year-old,” like is bananas to me. But she was trained and clearly, she was thought to be capable of this job at this young age. 

Amrita: Mm-hm. And I mean, this kind of goes back to the question that you had about what she may or may not have looked like. We understand that she was definitely of African descent, how much is unclear. We don’t have portraits, this is pre-photographic technology, but we do know from newspaper articles about her and about her daughters that they were definitely lighter-skinned. And her daughters in particular, people actually said that if you didn’t know who they were, you would mistake them for white women. 

So, it’s very possible that the racial mixing in that family, like Sally Hemings’s family had probably been going on for generations, right? Julia and Daniel had the last name Chinn; there were white Chinn families in the area. In fact, Henry Clay, who was a very prominent Kentucky politician at that time, lived down the road, one of his law partners was a Chinn. So, it’s very possible, if not plausible, that a Chinn man had a relationship with Henrietta, a sexual relationship of some kind. At least two children were produced because Julia and Daniel both carry that last name Chinn. It doesn’t mean that that man acknowledged them, but they definitely wanted to make it clear… They were making a public pronouncement by using that name. They didn’t carry the last name of Johnson, or no last name at all, it was Chinn. Julia’s last name… So, Julia is Chinn, Daniel is Chinn, but Julia’s daughters with Richard will carry the last name Johnson, which is really interesting, right? 

But we understand that Henrietta most likely had an interracial sexual relationship of some kind. Julia then goes on to also have an interracial sexual relationship with Richard Johnson. So, now, we’re looking at women two or three generations down the line who are, to strangers, appear phenotypically, appear to be white, in terms of skin colour, facial features, but they’re still legally enslaved. Because again, it’s not what you look like, it’s again lineage. As the mother goes, and the freedom of the mother, so too follows the status of the child. So, Imogene and Adaline (Richard and Julia’s two daughters), legally, on paper are enslaved, regardless of what they look like, or how they may be treated. That’s, on paper, that’s the legal status. 

But getting back to your question about, like, a 14-year-old running a 2,000-acre household, the reason I’m talking about this is it’s really connected, right? Women who were brought into the house, who were brought out of the fields and into the domestic service positions, particularly who rise to become housekeepers, heads of the household. They’re often lighter-skinned, they’re often more conventionally Eurocentric in terms of their appearance. They’re considered by white people to be more attractive, more intelligent, more appealing. I’m not saying that any of that is true, I’m saying that Europeans looked at mixed-race women and said, “Oh, they’re smarter, they’re more attractive, they’ll look good around the house, they’ll be able to manage things.” And that’s exactly what Richard’s mother says. 

When he sets up his household, she’s already been training Julia from the age of 6, she being Richard’s mother. This is very common in large plantation households is that the woman of the household—the mistress, the white woman in charge—will go down to the quarters and from young ages, 4, 5, 6 children will be put to work even part-time, enslaved children, whether they’re put to work in the gardens or running errands. But often, what will happen is women will go down to the quarters, and they’ll say, “Hmm, these children, they look a certain way, they have a certain appearance, a certain bearing. I think that’s someone who I want to train to be a domestic servant,” right? Again, it’s all of those prejudices and stereotypes that walk into this. They go down to the quarters and they’re like, they don’t want young children who are phenotypically much darker-skinned, who have particular kinds of features, particular kind of hair, right? They look for a certain kind of enslaved child who they then, in their heads, think will not only be smarter, but will look good in their homes, and that’s what happens to Julia. 

At the age of 6, she’s taken out of her mother’s house on the plantation, out of the slave quarters. Her brother remains in the quarters with his mother, but Julia’s taken into the main house, and she’s trained alongside the older enslaved women on the plantation, cooking, cleaning, sewing, washing, you name it, she learns how to do it. This is an era with, like, no washing machines, no dishwashers. I mean, cleaning means you’re on your hands and knees scrubbing, right? Washing means you’re boiling large pots of water and you’re, like, scrubbing clothes, nursing children. It’s all of that. So, she will be on call from sunup until sundown, and she’ll sleep right in the attic of the house, which is where most of the domestic staff would be living. 

So, by the time she’s transferred to Richard’s ownership, she’s been training as a domestic servant for eight, nine years. Again, it’s Richard’s mother who says, she comes to kind of help her son set up his house. He’s got almost 100 enslaved labourers, but she says to him, “You need someone to manage your household because you don’t have a wife.” But even if he did have a wife, the wife would still need a manager. Like, you have a manager for the fields, right, an overseer; you need a manager for the house staff, your housekeeper. Because you can’t run a 2,000-acre plantation business by yourself, you need managerial staff. And so, you have to pick enslaved people who are trained enough and who you trust enough to put into these positions. She said, “I’ve already picked out a housekeeper for you.” She goes, “You’re going to have to find someone to run your fields, your barns, your grist mills, your saw mills, all of that. But in terms of your house staff, I got you. I’ve already picked out Henrietta’s daughter. She looks good. She only weighs 90 pounds. She’ll look good around the house. She’s already well-trained.” 

So, you can see all those stereotypes coming into play in that conversation because his mother says to him, not only is Julia well-trained, and she ought to know because she’s trained her, but she’s 90 pounds is, will not grow up bulky and awkward and will look good around the house. So, I mean, all of that sort of history around this stereotyping of what, you know, an enslaved domestic servant should look like comes into play right there in that one conversation. 

And so, it doesn’t matter that she’s 14. We think of 14-year-olds as children, but when you dial back to the 17 and 1800s, first of all, people lived much shorter lives, right? I mean, the death rate was pretty high. We didn’t have vaccinations. We didn’t have good maternity care, right? Mortality rates were super high because of things like malaria, dysentery, whooping cough, you name it; people didn’t live that long. Women died all the time because of childbirth, right? But the mortality rate amongst enslaved labourers was even higher because of overwork, malnutrition, all of those kinds of things. And because, I mean, they were seen as labourers from the time they were born, until they began working, they were a drain on the finances of the plantation because the plantation again was a business. So, that’s why enslaved children are put to work as young as 5 or 6, because they have to earn their keep. They’re being fed, and housed, and so they have to earn their keep. So, they start working part-time at a young age. They’re labour, they’re considered half hands as early as age 6. And by the time they’re 13, 14, they’re considered full hands or full-time workers. 

So, Julia wouldn’t have been considered a child according to their standards. According to white people’s standards, plantation owner standards, she was a 14-year-old enslaved Black girl. She was not a child; she was a full working hand. Was she going to work in the fields or was she going to work in the house? Well, she had been trained to work in the house. But she’s being brought in not just to be a member of the domestic staff, but to run the domestic staff. That’s the key here. She’s going to be the housekeeper. 

This is a huge job, especially because there’s no white wife, right? She’s going to be in charge of everything: buying, selling, overseeing, disciplining, you name it, signing contracts. I mean, she’s going to do it all. She’s going to basically take on the role of a white mistress in terms of what gets purchased, what gets cooked, how do you take care of guests, taking care of the gardens, the farm animals, the orchards, all of that. Even before she becomes sexually involved with Richard and has two children, this is going to be her life, organizing the huge parties that he throws, everything. Again, we’re like, she’s 14. This is a 2,000-acre plantation. They would have said to you, they being Europeans, white people would have said, “She’s enslaved, and this is what she was trained for. At 14, she’s not a child, she’s a full hand.” 

Ann: It’s just… I don’t know, we talked about this just a bit before we started recording, but there’s part of Julia’s character and what she was like and what she was capable of. It’s like, this is a 14-year-old in this situation who was capable of this job. She was specifically chosen partially for her looks, but partially because Richard’s mother knew that this person was up to the job. It’s like, who she is and what were her capabilities? And then there’s also what is this life that she was born into that she had to live? 

The precarious balance of those two, I think you outline really well in your book, just trying to see who was she? What was she like? But then also, how else could she have been if this wasn’t the life that she was born into? There is something about her, and we see this as we go on and talk about her life, that she was… Not everybody in my current job would be capable of managing—I work for the public library—not everybody could manage a small public library. Not everybody could manage a huge plantation. She could. Part of that is, like, yes, her training. But part of that would be just her innate capabilities, I think. That comes through what she’s able to accomplish later in her life, I think. 

Amrita: She’s really amazing, but it shows you what happens when… I think that most children, if you took them and started giving them a particular kind of education, whatever that education is, at the age of 5 or 6, they’re going to develop a whole lot of different skills and talents. She is, she’s obviously very skilled. It’s hard to explain how important a housekeeper is in this day and age because they really are managers. 

So, she’s literate; she knows how to read and write, which is pretty important because most enslaved people at this time and point don’t know how to read and write because they’re forbidden from learning how. Frederick Douglass once famously said that “An educated slave is a bad slave,” because if you’re educated, you’re going to ask questions, you’re going to want more, you’re going to be challenging things that aren’t right. So, she knows how to read and write. She’s also financially literate; she knows how to do math. So, she’s not just directing the other enslaved staff. Yes, she knows how to weave, sew and knit. She knows how to engage in contract negotiations. She can buy and sell because she knows math. She can read and write. 

This is a woman who is able to actually do all of the work that upper level management would be expected to do because she’s been given the opportunity to obtain a certain kind of education, not just how to wash clothes, or wash floors, or sew clothing, or cook, or any of these other things (all of which she can do), but she can read, she can write, she can do math. 

She’s also given medical training. Most frontier women— And Kentucky at that point was the frontier, it was still a territory when the Johnsons came out from Virginia to help settle it. Most frontier women had a certain modicum of medical knowledge because you don’t have doctors and hospitals on the frontier, and so you have to know how to do a lot of this stuff yourself, for yourself and for your kids and your family. But she develops enough medical skill that her husband, Richard, will later say that she’s actually as good as one half of the trained physicians in the area. Richard doesn’t hire a doctor to look after the people at Blue Spring Farm (which is the name of their plantation), or Choctaw Academy, the Native American boarding school I mentioned earlier, he doesn’t hire a white physician to look after the school or the farm until after Julia dies because she’s that good. 

In decades of that Indigenous boarding school being open, she only lost, like, one student until there was a massive cholera outbreak. And a cholera outbreak was beyond anyone’s capabilities. It didn’t matter if they were white, Black, enslaved, or free, it was killing everybody, and nobody knew how to stop it because people didn’t understand how cholera worked back in the day. But she was that good. She was able to minister to the healthcare needs of the enslaved people, white family members, teachers of the Academy, and the Academy’s students. So yeah, she’s pretty amazing. 

Ann: I love that in your book you really explain… You know, the book is talking about her life and her story and how it came about, but you’re also explaining how you came to these conclusions, what are the documents you’re looking at? So, you’re finding things people are saying about her where it’s like, they have no reason to misrepresent— Well, they do in some of the things they say about her. But that, Richard, in his letter saying, “I didn’t need to hire a doctor.” It’s like, yeah, that is true, for sure. 

So, we’ve got her, she’s 14 years old, she’s the housekeeper of this house, and then quite quickly, she becomes pregnant with his child as a teenager. 

Amrita: And that’s not surprising either. One of the things that I try to explain very clearly is that being promoted to housekeeper of a large plantation for an enslaved woman, although it comes with certain privileges… Carrying the keys to the plantation on your belt, being able to oversee the house staff, dictate punishments, buy and sell goods for the property, engage in contract negotiations, you have access to better food, better clothing. You can bring your relatives into the house and give them better jobs, which she did. So, you have all these privileges, but it’s a double-edged sword. Because when, as an enslaved woman, you’re brought into the house like that, whether it’s as a day maid or as a housekeeper or anything in between, you’re also more susceptible to sexual assault. 

Enslaved women would regularly talk about how they didn’t want to have children because they understood how partus sequitur ventrem worked. But if they had children, they hoped they were boys, and if they had girls, they hoped they were ugly because they understood that having children for the slave machine was bad enough, but having daughters was even worse because daughters not only would transmit slavery to future generations through the womb, daughters would actually be susceptible to sexual assault by overseers, by enslavers, by enslavers’ sons, by lots of different white men in all different directions, guests to the plantation, right? 

So, there’s always this concern about having daughters and about having good-looking daughters. And what you really didn’t want is for those daughters to be sent to the house. Because if they were in the slave quarters, you at least had a modicum of oversight over your kids; you could keep an eye on them in the fields, they slept in your house during the evening. Yes, people could still come in and just yank them out any time, but there was that psychological feeling of you could give more protection if you were in front of them. 

But when she’s taken away at the age of 6, Henrietta is only going to see her daughter once a week on Sundays, day off. But then, after the age of 14, Julia’s moved to a whole different plantation, two miles away. For us, two miles is nothing. But back then, when you’re on foot and you have to get permission to leave your plantation if you’re enslaved, that means Henrietta can’t keep an eye on her kid in any way, shape, or form at all anymore, right? She’s really on her own. And the fact that she’s placed in the house and made a housekeeper, it immediately is suspect. You know that this is problematic. 

He doesn’t have a wife, but even if he did, this could still happen. But he doesn’t have a wife. She’s young, we’ve heard that she’s attractive, she’s small, she’s slender, she’s all of these things. And historically, if you look at the literature, enslaved housekeepers are often sexual mistresses, and sexual mistresses are often enslaved housekeepers in white households. Like, the line between the two is real blurry. And so, it’s a dangerous position to be in because if you are a woman in the house, you are susceptible to assault and attack by every white man in that house, from the patriarch down to his white sons. And it’s really hard. You’re sleeping right in that house, they have 24/7 access to you. 

And within a year, she is pregnant, right? So, here’s a man who’s 30 years old, 30, 31. Here’s a girl who’s 13 or 14. You know, they grew up on the same plantation, but they probably didn’t really know each other growing up because the age difference was so vast that by the time Julia is old enough to be taken into the main house and trained as a servant from the age of 6, Richard is already, like, out of the house, right? He’s gone to college, then he becomes a state senator, state congressman, and then he moves to DC because he becomes a federal representative. So, they don’t really know each other until she’s given to him. And then, she ends up in his house and he’s like, “Oh!” We don’t know how the interaction begins, right? We know that she’s placed in the house and within a year, she’s pregnant and gives birth to their first daughter. He claims, you know, he’s very open about the fact that this is his child. 

Ann: Right. Like the surname you said. Both daughters have the surname Johnson. 

Amrita: Yeah. Adaline and Imogene both carry the last name Johnson. Julia does not. Julia always carries Chinn. Her brother Daniel always carries Chinn. Daniel’s wife, Parthine, is a Chinn. Their children are Chinns. So, you’ve got all of these Chinns on the plantation who are related to Julia, but her daughters are Adaline Johnson and Imogene Johnson, and they carry that name until they get married. And then Adaline takes her husband’s last name, Scott, and Imogene takes her husband’s last name, Pence. 

But I mean, how did this interaction start, right? Was it straight-up sexual assault? Was it more psychological coercion? But it lasted until Julia died almost 25 years later. And so, this becomes a relationship always of unequals, right? Always, there’s an unequal power dynamic. He owns her; he never frees her. But she’s able to use the situation to the best of her advantage, even though she never acquires freedom for herself, her daughters do. Even though she never gets a formal education, her daughters do. Even though she never owns property, her daughters will grow up to get land, money, enslaved labourers of their own. 

So, all of the power and privileges that she never had for herself, she’s able to… You know, she was never legally married. Her daughters will have legal marriages, right? All of these kinds of things that she’s unable to acquire for herself, she’s able to use the minimum of privileges that she has as the housekeeper and mistress and pseudo-wife of this powerful, wealthy, white, male plantation owner and politician to navigate a better socioeconomic status for her brother, sister-in-law, nieces, nephews, and her daughters. 

Ann: Well, that reminds me of, in the story of Sally Hemings, where she… I think you mentioned this in your book as well, but when she is with Thomas Jefferson, pregnant in Paris, and she’s considering maybe staying in Paris, or is she going to go back with him? Like, she and he come to an agreement where he says, “Any children we have together, I will free when they turn 21.” So, like, again, Sally Hemings is like, “Okay, this is happening, and I’m going to use the situation for the betterment of my children.” So, Julia Chinn, it’s a similar sort of situation, but potentially not the identical conversation, because can we talk about the “wife” situation? Why the book is The Vice President’s Wife? Their marriage, or lack thereof? 

Amrita: Well, this is something that everybody asks me, and I’m really glad they do and it’s something that I also talk about in the book right up front. I’ve had people really be upset with the fact that I use that word. Like, “Why are you calling her his wife?” Right? And I said, well, I think that we have to sort of step back and think to ourselves, what does ‘wife’ mean? Does one only get to be called a wife if one has a piece of paper? Is ‘wife’ about a legal status? Or is ‘wife’ about social responsibility? What I mean by that is Richard Johnson never legally marries a white woman, he never legally marries anybody. The only woman in his life until her death, that functions as a wife, is Julia Chinn. 

What I mean by functioning as a wife is she runs his household, like a wife; she runs his businesses, like a wife; she has access to his lines of credit and bank accounts, like a wife; she buys and sells, engages in contracts, like a wife; she disciplines the enslaved labourers on the plantation, like a wife; she has sex with him, like a wife; and she gives birth to and raises his two children, like a wife. Right? Wifehood, up until very recently, and some people would say still today, is very much about labour. It’s about the kinds of labour that you perform inside a particular relationship, with or without the legal status. That whole idea of legal status, wedding paper, like, you know, marriage certificate, et cetera, that’s actually a pretty recent phenomenon when we think broadly across human history. And so, she’s doing all the work of a wife, number one. 

Number two, Richard actually calls her his wife, refers to her as his wife in his private letters and correspondence. Number three, his friends refer to her as his wife, even if they are not happy about it. The newspapers refer to her as his wife, again, not always in the most complimentary way, but they all acknowledge that she functions, in every aspect, as his wife. She oversees the soirées and parties. She sits at his table, as do his daughters with the most famous of his guests and visitors, former presidents, the Marquis de Lafayette. So, in every way, shape, or form, she functions as a wife. 

I give her that title because I think that she should be credited as such because what else do we call her? I refuse to use the word ‘concubine.’ I think it’s offensive. And I don’t think ‘mistress’ actually qualifies either because he doesn’t have a wife; she’s not the second woman, she’s not simply a sexual mistress who he sees occasionally. She is running his whole life. He lives in Washington, DC for six months out of every year because of his job as a full-time politician. So, who’s running his house, his businesses, taking care of his home, taking care of his finances, the Indigenous boarding school? Who’s running everything when he’s gone? It’s her. She’s not the headmaster of the academy, but she works with the headmaster of the academy to make sure that all the children, all the boys who come to this school have food, clothing, medicine. She does all of that. So, in addition to running the plantation and the house and the finances, she’s also helping to run and oversee Choctaw Academy. 

So, to me, I call her ‘wife’ because I believe that she deserves the respect of that title because of the enormous amount of work and labour that she did 24/7, 365, alongside a hundred enslaved labourers. Without all of those enslaved labourers, including her, Blue Spring Farm would have ceased to function, Choctaw Academy would have ceased to function. Richard is only able to be gone for six months every year because he knows that he has someone in charge running everything for him, and that someone is Julia Chinn. That’s why I call her a wife. 

Ann: And then what also was controversial, scandalous at the time, and part of where the word ‘mistress’ or ‘concubine’ wouldn’t be appropriate is the fact that he openly was in this relationship with her, and that’s what was startling to a lot of people. Can you explain the difference between how he presented Julia with how other people might have had an enslaved Black mistress? 

Amrita: Sure. So, we can talk about Jefferson and Hemings, right? Jefferson, for all the conversations that he may or may not have had with Sally in France, for all the privileges that Hemings may or may not have had at Monticello, the plantation in Virginia, even though the children were set free in different various ways at the age of 21, Jefferson never acknowledged Hemings. He never acknowledged their relationship, he never acknowledged his paternity of their children. Hemings did not run his household; she did not oversee his parties, she was not sitting at the dining table when his famous friends came to visit. It was never an open relationship. It was an open secret in the sense that people talked about it and gossiped about it, but he did not come home to Monticello, and she was not there living in that house, running everything. He had a separate set of apartments created for her with hidden passageways (which they’ve just recently excavated at Monticello). But everything was done behind closed doors. To the world, he was a bachelor, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, but he never admitted, ever. There was nothing to suggest it on paper or in terms of his own behaviour. 

Henry Clay, the politician I mentioned earlier, very famous Kentucky politician, considered to be the author of the Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850, which saved the union twice. At both times, the country almost ends up in civil war, and it’s Henry Clay who drafts the measures that pulls the country back from war, both those times. Clay and Johnson literally grow up next door to each other. Their plantations are not far from each other, they have many friends in common, they serve in Congress together. Clay has a white wife. Clay has white children. Clay also, like many white enslavers, he has enslaved Black mistresses in the quarters. So, he has a white wife and family out front and a Black family in the quarters, and he will go to the quarters, and he will engage in sexual relations with these women, and he will even have children with them. But they are hidden. They are, it’s immoral, it’s illegal, it’s hidden, it’s not open. 

Henry Clay’s wife catches him in the act with this enslaved woman in the quarters. She follows him. She suspects that he’s up to no good, so she follows him to the quarters, and she catches him in the act, basically, and all hell breaks loose on the Clay farm. So, to keep the peace, to make sure that his wife is happy, Clay sells that Black woman and their biracial children together downriver to Louisiana. Out of sight, out of mind, get rid of the evidence, keep his wife happy, because she’s his wife. She’s the mistress of the plantation. Because back then, it was like master and mistress, right? As opposed to sexual mistress. So, his white wife was not just his wife; she was the mistress of the plantation, and to keep her happy, that’s what Clay did. Consider how different— So, there’s Jefferson, who’s a widower, who takes up with Hemings, but never acknowledges her publicly. And then, there’s Clay, who’s a married man, who takes up with a Black woman, but also never acknowledges her publicly, and then sells her and their children, right? 

And then there’s Johnson. Johnson never marries a white woman; he’s with Julia until her death, they have two daughters together, and he’s pretty open about it. They live together, he helps to raise those two daughters, he helps to educate them. When they grow up, he arranges good marriages for them with local white men. After they’re married, he transfers huge amounts of property to both the daughters, especially real estate, right? That’s how you were wealthy back in the day. It’s not about cash. It’s about land and labourers. He transfers acreage; he transfers large amounts of real estate, like large numbers of enslaved labourers, as well as cash and furniture, and all kinds of other things to both of his daughters when they get married, when they come of age. And he’s doing it all out in the open. He’s going down to the county courthouse, and he’s doing notarized deeds of transfers of property, right? His daughters are getting married openly by, like, ministers of the gospel. There’s no… He’s not hiding anything. He’s not hiding anything. 

So, this very openness, again, it’s a double-edged sword, right? I want to be really careful to understand that we talk— Like, there are some people who are like, “Oh! He was in love with her. This is like a Harlequin romance!” I’m like, it is not a Harlequin. This is not a romance. This is not a romance. He was always her enslaver. She was always enslaved. He never freed her. Do I think he loved his daughters? I do think he loved his daughters because love translates into action. You might have emotional attachment to somebody, but love translate into action. So, the fact that he educates his daughters, arranges good marriages for them, transfers property to them, also makes sure to transfer property to his grandchildren, this shows his practical love and affection for his daughters. He writes letters talking about his feelings for his daughters, particularly when one of them, you know, as you’ll read about, one of his daughters passes away relatively young, and he is just grief-stricken. 

We don’t see this, that similar kind of behaviour towards Julia. I think he respects Julia. He respects her abilities. He respects how those abilities translate into him having a certain amount of freedom and a certain kind of life, but he doesn’t free her. He doesn’t give her property. He doesn’t legalize their marriage, right? He doesn’t do any of those things. He could have, and he didn’t. 

At the end of the day, people are like, “Well, why do you think he didn’t?” I’m like, that was the last remaining hold he had over her, right? If he set her free, she could have left him. So, if this is really love, why would you fear setting them free? The only reason you would fear setting them free is because you fear that they’re going to walk out on you, right? Because deep, down inside, you’re like, “I don’t think she really does care about me. I don’t think she’s here because she likes me. She’s here because she’s forced to be here. Because otherwise I’d set her free, and she’d stay.” I think he was worried that she would not stay, that she would leave if she had the opportunity, and that’s why he never did set her free. There was always that last remnant of control. Like, “I can sell you. I can take your children away from you. I could beat you. I could kill you.” I mean, there’s all kinds of things. Did he do any of those things? No. But he’s always maintained that level of oversight and coercion. 

Ann: That’s why it’s such a complex, weird, I’m going to say, fucked up situation [Amrita laughs] because, like, reading the book, I’m just like, how do I feel about this? It’s so complicated because it’s like, he would go with Julia to church, he would host dinner parties, and his daughters were there, and they’re so well educated and they’re so well-dressed, and he proudly would be like, “These are my daughters,” and like everyone’s sitting at a table together. And everyone in Kentucky was just like, “This is fucked up. What is this guy doing?” So, it’s like, he was doing this stuff where it’s kind of like, he’s like, “Well, if I just act like this is normal, it’ll become normal.” But it’s like, this was not normal at the time. Like, Julia and the daughters were not able to get this level of, I’m going to say respect, but just sort of acceptance, I guess, is a better word, anywhere other than on this farm. 

You have some examples in your book where, like, they couldn’t… It’s this weird situation. He is not a hero. He is not a good guy. Like, Julia is in this— Oh, and as the book goes on, you see he has had and does have further sexual relationships with other enslaved women, always young, always lighter-skinned, where it’s just like, “Oh, this guy sucks. This guy is a piece of shit.” 

Amrita: There’s a power dynamic that has just become so clear when you see, like, every woman, 18 years old or younger, every woman, light-skinned. He has a type. And there’s always that element of mastery and dominance, right? Because he’s their owner. He never has parallel relationships. He never has relationships with people who— Because I mean, of course, even white women had less power back in the day, legally, but he never pursues a woman who would be his social equal in any kind of way. 

Ann: Yeah. And the way that you write the book, everybody should read the book because there’s so much nuance, and you have so many examples of things, but at first, you’re sitting with Julia, and what’s her experience and stuff. And then later on, you kind of explain, “And here’s what else I learned about Richard,” and you learned about the previous relationships and the future relationships. And it’s like, no matter how old he gets, he’s always choosing an enslaved light-skinned woman who is about, who’s a teenager. Like, he’s getting older, but he’s always choosing that same…

It reminds me, I mean, again, like the similar story that I kept thinking of is like, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, where it’s Sally Hemings was the young teenage half-sister of his dead wife, who he loved, so there’s this weird incestual thing. And then we find out later with Richard, some of the partners he’s choosing are seemingly also, like, nieces or nephews. It’s kind of like, okay, these are people who kind of all probably look the same because they’re kind of related to each other. It’s all fucked up. It’s all weird. I don’t want anyone to come away from listening to this podcast thinking like, “Wow, he was like, an early civil rights champion.” It’s like, no. 

Amrita: [laughs] No. 

Ann: No. Julia was incredible, and she ran this farm. Like, one of the reasons you were saying like, if he freed her, she might leave. And it’s like, yeah, and then your entire everything’s going to fall apart because she’s single-handedly running everything so capably, so well. 

Amrita: Yeah. What happens to your hotel, your taverns, your grist mills, your sawmills, your crops, your home? I mean, everything. The academy that you’re making money off of from all the tuition? I mean, it all goes down the toilet if you don’t have her in charge. 

Ann: Well, and that’s what you see when she dies. Suddenly, he has to hire a bunch of people to do a bunch of different jobs because she was doing everything, unpaid, because she was enslaved. 

Amrita: Exactly. He has to hire a doctor. He has to hire an overseer. He has to be present more often; he keeps having to take leaves of absence from DC to come home and oversee this— Basically, everything is falling apart after she passes away. 

Ann: And this is where I want to highlight, she was such an impressive person. She was in this shitty situation, and how good she was at doing everything!

Amrita: Well, and I know that a lot of people… Like, I actually had somebody who I know really well read the book manuscript before it was published, you know, in order to give me feedback. I circulated amongst some friends who are academics to get feedback. And one of them said to me, like, “I really didn’t like anybody in this book.” And I sort of looked at them and my jaw dropped, and they said, “No, no. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a really good book and we need this book and I’m glad you wrote this book, but I don’t like anybody in this book,” you know, because none of them are likable characters. You know, Richard is an enslaver. His daughters, you know, grow up to be enslavers, and they pass. You know, Julia is, you know, she’s complicit, right? She oversees enslaved people, she disciplines and punishes enslaved people. She’s not running an Underground Railroad station out of her backyard, right? She’s not Harriet Tubman. Like, she’s not a heroine, right? She’s a survivor. And that’s the problem is that survivors engage in behaviours that we don’t like. 

It’s uncomfortable. If someone is a martyr, a victim, we can get like, righteously indignant about what was done to them. If someone is a heroine, we can be super proud of, like, what they’ve engaged in. But what do we do with people who survive? We can understand that they are brought into a situation of victimization, and they have two choices, right? Or they have certain choices, and they choose to survive. So, they stay, they survive. But in staying to survive, they engage in all kinds of actions that we find morally reprehensible. 

So, that’s what my friend meant when they said, you know, “I didn’t like anybody in this book. Julia’s not likable. The daughters aren’t likable. Richard certainly isn’t likable.” And I was like, well, it’s not about whether or not they’re likable, it’s the fact that there are probably… First of all, to understand the situation Julia was placed into from a very small, from birth, but really from age 6 on this path, on this course. So, she could have risen up and resisted, and she probably, she could have been killed, or just sold. 

Ann: Or her children could be taken away from her. 

Amrita: Her children could have been taken away from her. So, she had to look at every single angle of the situation that she was in, as a 14-year-old, taken away from her mother. I mean, Black children were right from the beginning were socialized by their parents to understand the precarity of their situation, to understand how tenuous every day of their life was. That any day, they could wake up and they could be sold, their parents could be sold, their spouses could be sold, their children could be taken away from them, they could be beaten. Like, every step had to be thought, there had to be great calculation in how they chose to live. 

So, Julia’s like, “Okay. Well, I could resist, and I could die, or I could be sold, or my children could be taken away from me. Or I could work within the very narrow confines of the hand I’ve been dealt and see if I can somehow make it better, if not for myself, then for my descendants.” And so, yeah, we don’t like survivors because we like to think that we would never engage in such behaviour. We don’t know what we would have done if we were in her position. That’s ludicrous for us to say that if we were born in 1790s Kentucky, and we were enslaved, that we wouldn’t— We don’t know what we would have done. We simply don’t. 

Ann: Well, and we see later on in your book—we don’t need to get into details, people can read the book to get all this stuff, but we do see later on—an example of, after Julia’s died, another young enslaved woman that Richard takes up with, and she tries to leave and how relentless and ruthless he is in bringing her back. And so, we see like, “Oh, why didn’t Julia try to escape?” It’s like, well, this woman did and look what happened to her! Like, Richard is like not a chill guy. Like this is not… yeah. 

Amrita: Because at the end of the day, he’s very clear that every human being and everything on that plantation is his property and belongs to him, and he can do with it as he wants. And that includes sending, you know, a mob, a paid mob, after his current sexual partner in order to, like, forcibly arrest her and bring her back to the plantation. So, this is the man that Julia’s been with for 25 years; she knows who he is. She knows who he is better than anybody. So, you know, by the time this happens, she’s dead, but it’s like, when you ask, “Well, why didn’t she run away?” Well, we see what he did when someone tried that. She knew that. She knew who the father of her children was. 

It’s like people who say today, like with domestic violence victims, like, “Why didn’t she just leave?” It’s like, really? Because when women finally make the decision to leave, that’s when their likelihood of being murdered, like, quadruples. When they’ve made that decision and they try to leave, that’s when the most harm comes to them and those they love. So, it is a terrible situation to be trapped in. There’s differences with domestic violence, obviously, but in terms of the larger parameters of feeling helpless or powerless, or knowing what kind of violence could be meted out against you and those you love if you try to escape, right? 

So, I mean, I can’t judge the way people behaved, the way someone like Julia behaved 200 years ago, because I mean… I just try to look, I’m a historian, right? The same reason that this is not a Harlequin romance, [laughs] that it’s not that story. I’m a historian. I look at the sources, the ones that are available, and I try to do my very best to, like, paint as clear a picture as we can of the very complicated, very difficult, messy situation that enslaved women found themselves in. 

And Julia would not have been unusual in the sense that there were tens of thousands of women all over this country who had very similar experiences. We don’t know their stories because often the stories have been suppressed, the sources don’t exist or have been destroyed. One of the reasons that we were able to recreate Julia’s story is because, you know, her sexual partner is famous, right? He’s a politician, he’s a Senator, he’s a Vice President. So, there’s more information that exists on him than the regular, average Joe Smith, and because there’s more information on him, we’re able to get more information on her and their daughters. 

So, it’s important that we, I think, you know, understand what her life was like, because slavery was not the same for everybody. It’s slavery, yes. But people’s daily lives look different depending on what state they were living in, whether it was urban slavery or rural slavery, what position they had in the household structure. And so, it’s important to understand the range of experiences that enslaved women would have experienced. So, understanding Julia’s life is helpful because it gives us more, you know, understanding of the kinds of pressures that Black women were under, the kinds of things that they faced and the different ways in which they navigated those obstacles and situations. 

Ann: I find it so interesting. So, just in my American Revolution episodes, we talked about Sally Hemings, we talked about Ona Judge, and even just between those two stories, you see differences in situations. And then looking at Julia Chinn, which is a bit later, but similar, and how different her situation was. And I think looking at these specific stories is so important instead of just thinking, like, you know, this period of— It’s like slavery was a monolith and every plantation was like this, and every woman’s experience was like this. It’s like, no! Because people are different and situations are different. I think the more that we can look at different specific stories, like the work that you’re doing, I think that’s part of why it’s so important, is to be like, it’s not just like, “This is how it was.” It’s not just Gone with the Wind, watch that, there you go. There’s so much nuance and there’s so much fucked-up-ness and like, all these weird, grey areas. 

Amrita: Yeah. I mean, nuance is the great word. That is the best word. Like I said, not everybody is a Celia who rises up, you know, finally after several years of human trafficking and sexual slavery and murders her owner. Not everybody is a Harriet Tubman who runs away. Not everybody is a Sojourner Truth who earns her, who gains her freedom by law and then becomes an abolitionist preacher and a feminist speaker, right? People respond differently, and that’s really the story of the human condition. As historians, that’s what we’re really trying to understand is the narrative. The different events that happen, but how people responded within those events, how events over here shape ones over here, people over here shape things down here. Understanding the totality of those experiences, asking the questions, being critically engaged, and analytically curious. 

It’s important because so much of that history is still being played out in the present moment. If we want to understand why our society looks a certain way today, things didn’t just pop up out of nowhere, right? Whether you’re talking about the education system, the economy, housing markets, financial systems, our electoral college in the United States. We can’t understand the way any of those things look in the present moment without understanding what came before. We just can’t. 

Ann: I think it’s so interesting what your book does, because it’s looking at a specific situation, it’s one woman’s life, where it’s just like, she was in this one place in Kentucky, and she really never left there. Where it’s just like, oh, Harriet Tubman was doing this and Sojourner Truth and whatever, and they were later on. But how would she know anything outside of this one place where she lived? She was not going to be— There’s not the internet, like she can’t watch inspirational documentaries to be like, “Here’s how you should be behaving.” It’s like, she’s doing the best she can. That’s what I try to think, like I try to extend that to everyone I look at when I’m researching. It’s like, we can judge now, but like, when you’re in that situation, everyone’s making the best choices they can. 

For her, and you make this really clear in the book, like it’s all about her children, her daughters. And if she had run away, if she had done anything other than be excellent at running this household, he could have taken that out on the daughters, and she just wanted their lives to be better than hers. And I think that comes through so clearly. 

Amrita: Yeah. I mean, I’m glad that you said that because I think that, to me, you know, it’s her love for her children that basically dictates all of her actions and her behaviours, right? Whether we like them or not is irrelevant, but we can see— And I mean, she succeeds. She succeeds in making a better life for them and her grandchildren, and her descendants than anything she ever required for herself. So, I think that that’s what I really wanted to come across in this story is that, like, how everything for her, it’s about family. It’s about family, it’s about legacy, and legacies of freedom, and upward social mobility, right? There’s very few pathways for Black women in the 19th century. 

This is the pathway that she’s able to carve out, and so we see, like, her ability, her positionality in the household means that she can bring Daniel into the house. She brings Daniel’s wife into the house, she brings their children into the house. So, all of them are taken out of field work, they’re all given training, they’re all able to take different positions in the domestic staff. That also gives them access to education because, as her daughters are being privately tutored and educated by the headmaster of Choctaw Academy, he educates the rest of the house staff as well. They take classes together as a group in the evenings. So, her positionality leads not only to “better” jobs for her friends and her family members on the plantation, it also gives them the ability to learn how to read and write and gives them an education. So, they develop, right? All of these skills that they wouldn’t have necessarily had if it had not been for the sacrifices that she chose to make, right? Because, again, these are things that then they can take out. If they acquire their freedom, they can get different kinds of jobs; there’s all kinds of things that they’ll be able to do that they wouldn’t have otherwise. 

So, it’s really a story of survival. It’s a story, I mean, certainly about privilege, but it also, we really see where the boundary lines of that privilege are drawn. You can see, like, what Julia is able to do at home, on her own property, at church, which is only two miles away, at Choctaw Academy. But you also see how clearly the boundary lines are drawn because she never leaves. It’s not that she doesn’t just not ever leave Kentucky. She literally, probably her whole life is limited to like about a five-mile radius around her house. So, when people talk about how much power and privilege she had, I’m like, do you realize how small that circle of privilege was? Like, it was the plantation, the school, the church. Anything outside of that, the further away she got from the epicentre of her “power” at home, the less power she had, almost immediately. It just dropped, right? This is not a woman who’s like, you know, moving and shaking in Lexington or Louisville or Washington, DC. She and her daughters never go to those spaces. Their privilege is contained to really a very, very small area around their house. And so, I think that we have to understand, like, as much as Julia was able to do, how limited it also was. 

Ann: Well, and I find also what a fascinating part is of your book, and you write about it in the book how this was for you as well, so moving to meet her present day, some of her present-day descendants, like both Black people, and also white people. But I really liked in your book, you talk about sort of the… Especially after Sinners. That movie just really got me reading more about like the colour line and people passing and stuff, and just, like, wanting to know more about that. So, showing how her descendants, some of them had to leave and maybe change their name to be able to, especially when laws were passed, the one-drop rule and stuff. 

So, can you talk about what it was like meeting her descendants and just to see the ripple effect of her life and, like, the sacrifices she made and how that’s manifested in these people who are around today? Like, I find that… I’ve never come across a book that has that element in it. 

Amrita: Yeah, I had never thought when I started working on this project that I would meet, like, descendants of the family; it really hadn’t occurred to me. I know I’m a historian. I’m a historian of slavery and Black women. I research dead people [laughs] and try to understand how the past impacts and shapes the present. But I had never thought about talking to real, live human beings. Like, librarians and archivists, yes. But actual descendants, I was like, [voice shakes] whaaat? 

It was amazing to me when those relationships were brokered and the introductions were made, and I began developing those relationships with members of the family. It was just really kind of heart-wrenching when I did all of these interviews with them after I spent time, built relationships. A handful of people agreed to be interviewed by me and go on the record, which was really wonderful, and I think that that really is one of the richest parts of the book is being able to talk about those connections between the past and the present. 

Some of the descendants have always identified as Black, and they sort of knew the general outlines of their history, if not the specific details. It was still something that people didn’t necessarily want to talk about because it was, like, having to acknowledge not only slavery, but sexual assault, and rape, and all of these things that Black families obviously didn’t want to talk about because they’re painful and uncomfortable. 

But what was also really important and kind of heart-wrenching for me was when I met the descendants of the family who have always identified as white and have been white for multiple generations, who had no idea growing up that their lineage traced back to Richard Mentor Johnson and an enslaved Black woman. They had no idea that they had any Black heritage in their family at all. They just thought that their family was white and had been white, like, for generations. And it wasn’t until they were fully grown people, like, married with children of their own, forties, fifties, sixties, that they’re uncovering the truth about their lineage, that they’re related, that they’re descended from not only a vice president, but from his enslaved Black wife because at some point in the late 19th, early 20th century, we don’t know exactly when, but folks cross the colour line. And they don’t just cross the colour line externally, but in terms of legal documentation, census records, things like that, they actually begin, they stop telling their children and grandchildren the truth about their heritage, and that knowledge is literally lost. 

Some people do it by moving away; some people move to other states, they move to other, like, even just across the river to Ohio. They move just far enough away that they can quietly stop telling their kids and grandkids the truth of who they are. But there are other people who continue to live right in the area, in Lexington, in this area, and they just stop talking about it. They just stop telling their kids, they stop telling their grandkids, and history can be lost very quickly, that’s the thing. It can be erased, twisted, warped, changed, and lost within a generation. That’s what’s so dangerous about not telling the whole truth, because it only takes one generation for the knowledge to be lost, and then it can take centuries for it to be recovered. So, it’s the late 20th century before these folks begin to actually uncover who they are. Like, literally boxes in attics. [laughs] Yeah, boxes and attics, Ancestry.com, all kinds of things that kind of come together. 

So, that’s why I thought it was really important to really get their stories, in order for us to understand the depth of erasure, the depth of anti-Blackness in this country, the depth of violence against Black people. It’s so severe, the anti-Blackness is so all-encompassing that you have members of the family at a certain point who say, “It’s Jim Crow, it’s segregation, there’s so much violence, there’s lynchings, the Klan is running the show, there’s no protection for us anywhere. So, the best thing that we can do is to cross the colour line and change.” Some of them, like you said, change their names, move to other states, and hide who they are for the rest of their lives because the alternative is acknowledging your Blackness, and then potentially losing everything you have, losing your medical license, losing your home, losing the ability to send your kids to certain schools, losing the right to vote if you’re a man. You lose all of these opportunities because of Jim Crow segregation, because of the colour line. And that’s the choice that a lot of people made. 

I mean, again, it’s like, is it a comfortable choice? Is it a choice that we can rejoice about? No. But you have to look at what was it that forced them to make that choice in the first place? If Black people had had equal access to schools, and to the voting booth, and to educational opportunities, to housing, to everything, then there would have been no need for them to lie and to hide and to cross the colour line, and to engage in this act of extreme familial, historical erasure. But if we can understand that Julia felt like these were the few choices she had and none of them were very good, some of these people had, to them, they were like, “Well, we have few choices.” Now, not everybody could engage in this choice. You had to be phenotypically white enough to pass, right? So, some branches of the family are never going to be phenotypically white enough to pass, and they don’t. Others are, and they do. And they do. Because they’re like, “Well, the alternative could be death.” So, it’s really rather heartbreaking. 

Ann: Yeah. Again, you know, I’m just trying to extend grace to people who are making for them what is the best decision for them to survive and to keep on going. This is part of what I find so fascinating about this book, and about the story is we started this conversation talking about the legal status of Black or white, versus what people look like, and then when you get into some of these descendants who, phenotypically, they can cross the colour line because of what they look like, but legally they’re Black. It’s just like, well then, what is race? What are we even doing? Like, if it’s just… It’s so complicated. 

Amrita: It really is a social construction, right? That’s not just, like, academic. When we say race is socially constructed, it literally is. We go back to the very beginning of our conversation when I’m talking about whiteness is constructed in opposition to Blackness, that it really comes about as, you know, post-Bacon’s Rebellion, as the colonies are thinking about committing themselves more exclusively to slavery, and then it becomes racially based, chattel slavery through the womb of the mother. All of these things create Blackness and also create whiteness, right? But then you have to keep those lines separate, you have to keep the boxes really rigid. 

And the thing is, is that they just never really are. People are always having sex, whether consensually or not. Free Black people are being born because they have white mothers. Black women will become free and then give birth to Black children. And even within the confines of slavery, you have mixed-race children being born. How do you treat them? Is it just about skin colour? Is it something else? It’s messy. It’s messy from the beginning. There was no way to not have it be messy. And so, all of these attempts, legally, to segregate, to delineate, to define, to separate, never fully worked, right? 

So, the whole logic of race is illogical because it’s created, it’s about power, it’s about hierarchy, it’s about social structure. So, whatever country you go to, whether it’s based on religion, whether it’s based on, like, ethnicity or language, there’s always hierarchy. But our attempts to do that in terms of creating this system of race based on external physiology just instantly breaks down from the beginning, and people have been trying to still deal with it. From the day they created it, they’ve been trying to navigate the fallout of it, and it’s just never gone very well. 

Ann: It’s just so fascinating to me. Like, I’m so grateful that as a podcaster and a casual history enjoyer, I’m grateful for people like you who spend a decade digging around the most obscure archives to find all this stuff, to make a book so that this information can be disseminated. But I also just appreciate, like, all these issues that the book brings up, but also just learning about Julia Chinn, who was, to me, just a really impressive, interesting person, and I’m glad I know about her. And the way that the specific story can be extended out to talk about all these societal things, but then also just, like, I love learning about a person from history who was buried until you kind of unearthed all this stuff. So, I don’t know. Thank you. Thank you for writing this book and for doing this work. 

Amrita: Thank you! I appreciate that. And thank you for having me on the show. It’s been really a pleasure to chat with you about this. I hope people read the book! 

Ann: Yes, that’s the whole point. 

Amrita: Yeah. I mean, please! The Vice President’s Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn. Get it. Buy it. Tell me what you think. I’d love to hear from you. 

Ann: Now available in paperback. 

Amrita: Yes, it’s coming out next month in paperback! Super excited.

Ann: Yeah, I think I’m timing this episode to be, like, so when you hear this, listeners: Now available in paperback. So, even more accessible for everybody to get it. And if you, you know what, like get your library to buy a copy. That’s another good thing you can do. Just, like, bug your library. 

Amrita: It’s also now an audiobook as well. It dropped as an audiobook in January. So, you can buy the book, you can do an eBook if you prefer to have an eBook, but you can also listen to it as an audiobook. Yeah. 

Ann: Yeah, absolutely. So, thank you so much for talking with me. This is so fun. 

Amrita: You’re very welcome. Thank you. 

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So, I cannot recommend this book enough. It’s just, it’s really so well written. Like, it’s just a good book to read, but also, the history is so interesting, and Amrita has got obviously such a passion for telling this story. The book, it’s mostly about, you know, the life of Julia Chinn, but you also get Amrita in the book explaining kind of how she researched this, what it was like for her to talk to the descendants. It’s such an important and good book, and you can get it in hardcover, paperback, eBook, audiobook. It’s available in all the places. There’s a link here in the show notes so you can buy it using my Bookshop link, but like, wherever you get your books from. Get it from the library. Honestly, just read this book. It’s so, so, so good. 

Next week on the podcast, we’re going to march towards actually talking about Marie Antoinette. It’s closer. Well, we’re getting closer every week, I guess, to talking about actually Marie Antoinette, but every single episode is just going to be about somebody who is intimately connected with her. And then we’re going to talk about her, and it’s like, the culmination of the last, what? Year and a half of podcast episodes. I’m really excited to be getting to that point, but also I feel like I couldn’t have appreciated the story of Marie Antoinette without doing all these episodes that we did leading up to it. So, that’s coming up, and that’s exciting. 

And what else is exciting is I’m happy to announce the first-ever Vulgar History live podcast event. So, I’m going to be doing a live podcast recording in Halifax, Nova Scotia, my hometown. I’m going to be visiting there, and I was able to connect with the owner of the Trident Booksellers & Cafe, which is a place that I actually used to work for a while when I was in my twenties. So, I’m going to be having an event there! We’re going to be recording a podcast. I’m going to be talking about a story from Canadian history. So, this is going to be on Wednesday, September 3rd at 7:00 PM, Halifax, Nova Scotia, at the Trident Cafe. You know, put that in your schedule app or whatever, if you’re in that area. But don’t worry, I’m going to be talking about this a lot, relentlessly, in the next weeks coming up to it. I’m so excited. It’s my first— I’ve had meetups before, but I’ve never done a live podcast recording. So, I had to do it in the city where I know my family, my mom’s going to come. Like, it’ll just be a lot of supportive people, and I hope that you will be, if you’re in that area, you could be among those supportive people who come to that as well. So, more details to come, like including who I’ll be talking about. But anyway, Vulgar History live podcast recording, 7:00 PM, Wednesday, September 3rd, at the Trident Cafe, and it’s free. So, there’s not a link to go to or anything, just show up, basically. 

Also, one of the reasons I wanted to do that podcast recording is, you know, because I’ll be there and it’ll be fun. But also, I want to practice and get ready for when I do my book tour next year, because I have a book coming out, it’s called Rebel of the Regency: The Scandalous Saga of Caroline of Brunswick, Britain’s Queen Without a Crown. And you can pre-order that if you’re in Canada or in the U.S. from your local, independent bookseller, or from any of the online retailers. You can go to your bookstore and order it, or you can go to the website of your local independent bookstore and order it. There’s lots of ways you can order it. If you’re not sure how to order it, let me know, and I can walk you through it. Although if you’re somewhere outside of Canada and the U.S. and you want to know how to order it, stay tuned. We’re working on it, I promise. 

Yeah, so when you pre-order my book, which I hope you will do, or you could also just bug your local public library to be like, “You should get this book because it’s great and everyone’s going to want to read it.” When you buy it yourself, though, and you have a receipt for it, if you share a picture of that receipt with me, then you can get some free stuff from me, including one-year free membership to my Patreon, one-year free membership to my Substack, as well as a beautiful paper doll designed by Siobhan Gallagher, who’s also a person with Halifax, Nova Scotia roots who’s an artist who I love working with. I love commissioning her to do stuff, and she knocked it out of the park with these Caroline of Brunswick paper dolls that you can get as well by sharing your receipt from your pre-order with me. You can do all that, you can find links to buy the book, you can share your pre-order receipt at RebelOfTheRegency.com. All of the links are there. You can also add it to your “To-be-read” list on Goodreads or on Storygraph if you track your reading there. And it’s got a cover now! It’s beautiful. And I’m really excited to be able to share more information with you as we get closer to the book coming up. 

And yeah, next week, Marie Antoinette. I don’t know, if you divide this season, this overwhelmingly long season, into different parts, we had American Revolution part, we had Haitian Revolution part, we had the radical women of the French Revolution mob era, and now we’re getting into, seriously, a bunch of weeks where it’s literally just Marie Antoinette. People who are connected to her are getting closer and closer to her, and then we’re going to talk about Marie Antoinette, and I’m really excited to be reaching this climax of the season. So, thanks for sticking with me through all of these meandering things as we make our way towards talking about Marie Antoinette. And yeah, we’ll talk to you next week. Until then, keep your pants on and your tits out. 

Vulgar History is researched, scripted, and hosted by Ann Foster, that’s me! Editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. Transcripts of this podcast are available at VulgarHistory.com by Aveline Malek. You can get early, ad-free episodes of Vulgar History by becoming a paid member of our Patreon for as low as one dollar a month at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWwriter. Vulgar History merchandise is available at VulgarHistory.com/Store for Americans and for everyone else at VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com. Follow us on social media @VulgarHistoryPod and get in touch with me via email at VulgarHistoryPod@gmail.com. 

References:

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