Sometimes I think I didn't really start studying history until I had been out of college for twenty years or so. In high school and college, history felt like lists of events and dates with an occasional heroic or tragic story thrown in. I didn't realize it was my history too.

A few weeks ago I finished reading Ties That Bound by Marie Jenkins Schwartz. It was an unsettling book and I didn't write about it right away. It is about three of the four first, first ladies,¹ Martha Washington, Martha Jefferson, and Dolley Madison, and how they related to their “slaves.” ²

I always thought that along with being cruel to the enslaved human beings, slavery must be crazy-making to the so-called owners. As a child a woman may be your wet nurse and caregiver; then, you grow up, and she becomes your property.

Even more insane is how male slave owners often impregnated their female slaves and then ended up being fathers of their slaves. This story from Martha Washington's family is a good example of the madness of it all, and I don't think it was unusual.

Martha's father, John Dandridge, had a relationship with a woman of “mixed ancestry.” This resulted in the birth of Ann Dandridge who lived her life enslaved. Martha took her to Mt. Vernon after her marriage to George Washington. Later, Ann had a son, believed to have been fathered by Martha's son Jacky. This went beyond even the norms of the time where white men fathered enslaved children. This union produced an unseemly problem. The son looked white. People were not comfortable with white slaves. Martha was not comfortable with legal manumission. Therefore, she just omitted his name from the property list and he was free by default.

George Washington freed his slaves in his will. However, most of the Mt. Vernon slaves were owned by Martha. After her death, they were distributed to her heirs.

The Jefferson and Madison stories are equally antithetical to these founding fathers' idea that all men are created equal. Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings, half-sister of his deceased wife, is now widely known. He did free the children of their union.

Schwartz uses a range of sources and adds to our understanding of the early days of this country. It's an interesting and painful read.

¹ The second president, John Adams, and his wife Abigail did not own slaves.

² I notice writers now often use the expression “enslaved people” instead of slaves though this goes back an forth depending on how the term is used in a sentence.