The location of her grave has disappeared

March 5, 2019 8:56 AM

The Erasure and Resurrection of Julia Chinn, U.S. Vice President Richard M. Johnson’s Black Wife.

While doing my research, I was struck by how Julia had been erased from the history books. Nobody knew who she was. The truth is that Julia (and Richard) are both victims of legacies of enslavement, interracial sex, and silence around black women’s histories. The reality of this was driven home to me when I met some of Julia’s and Richard’s relatives, none of whom knew, until they were older, that they were descended from a vice president. And this was no accident.

posted by Etrigan (16 comments total)

What an astonishing and sad story! How horrible that they burned her and her daughters' letters!
posted by Frowner at 9:08 AM on March 5, 2019 [3 favorites]

I once read a biographical book about all the U.S. vice presidents, written in the 1970's. It did not mention Julia Chinn. I would have remembered that.

I think it's most likely that the author didn't even know about her.
posted by kyrademon at 9:21 AM on March 5, 2019 [3 favorites]

Yeah...but he also was the guy mentioned in the campaign slogan, "Rumpsey Dumpsey, Rumpsey Dumpsey, Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh." So he might not be the paragon of equal race relations he's made out to be here.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 9:21 AM on March 5, 2019 [4 favorites]

Indeed, as his wikipedia entry makes clear.

After Chinn's death, Johnson began an intimate relationship with another family slave.When she left him for another man, Johnson had her picked up and sold at auction. Afterward he began a similar relationship with her sister, also a slave.
posted by mwhybark at 9:24 AM on March 5, 2019 [15 favorites]

I'm not sure I can buy into calling someone who sold a slave he was infatuated with downriver for the crime being already married to someone else a "victim of the legacies of enslavement." (This is after Chinn's death, and before he went after the woman's sister. It gets two sentences in wikipedia.)

Telling Chinn's story is great, though.
posted by eotvos at 9:24 AM on March 5, 2019 [7 favorites]

Just for a little context, Johnson was Martin Van Buren's VP, and was selected by the Senate in the 1836 election because there wasn't an electoral vote majority for VP (there was for President).

And South Carolina didn't even hold a public vote, the state legislature chose its electors. And the Whig party had 4 different candidates in different areas, probably in an attempt to deny Van Buren an electoral vote majority, but that didn't work.

I only know this because electoral anomalies have been a bit of a minor hobby of mine in the last couple years.
posted by tclark at 9:26 AM on March 5, 2019 [9 favorites]

Also from Wikipedia:

> "When Lewis Tappan requested presentation of an abolitionist petition to the Senate, Johnson, who was still a slaveholder, declined the request."

Johnson was a monster who slept with women he considered himself to own. Was he slightly less of a monster than the ones who did the same thing but kept it secret and neither referred to nor treated their slaves as wives and daughters? Maybe. But he was still a monster.
posted by kyrademon at 9:33 AM on March 5, 2019 [19 favorites]

It's subtle, in some ways, but I think that Prof. Myers is fairly careful to highlight that Johnson was also a perpetrator of oppression:

While I wasn’t interested in writing a book about Richard, I knew I’d have to use his records to write about Julia; I would have to go through him to get to her. This is one of the realities of the work I do: in order to reconstruct the lives of black women who lived in the Old South, I have to use records created by white men, the very people who not only oppressed black women but who never intended for their materials to highlight black women’s voices.

And note the use of parentheses to denote Johnson's oppression. I feel like it might suggest an appropriately (or at least defensibly) nuanced approach to the history of oppression. Her bio and description of the longer work suggest something similar:

...my research interests revolve around issues of race, gender, freedom, and power and the ways in which these constructs intersect with one another in the lives of black women in the Old South...This project examines the decades-long relationship of Julia Chinn, a woman of color, and U.S. congressman, senator, and one-term Vice President Richard Mentor Johnson, a white man. The couple openly lived together in rural Kentucky during the 1810s, 20s and 30s, despite public disapproval of interracial sex, and Julia and her daughters acquired a fair amount of social and financial power due to their connection to Richard, who never married a white woman and who referred to Julia as his wife. The limits of Julia's power was clearly marked, however, and the privileges of white kinship declined for black women the further they moved from the source of their power, which radiated out from their homes and local communities. Black women also discovered that any attempt to acquire many of the social niceties and respect extended to white women would often bring swift and unpleasant retribution.

I strongly suspect that it is less that Prof. Myers has fanciful ideas about the oppressive nature of the relationship, and more that her work is an attempt to deal with a complex historical reality with a focus on the agency of Black women. For that to work, I think it must be important to recognise the role that Johnson played in Chinn's life, which seems to have been complex and ambiguous. That seems, to me, like the most likely explanation for the ambivalent tone.

It seems like it's worth buying the book to find out, anyway!
posted by howfar at 9:44 AM on March 5, 2019 [29 favorites]

Maybe I'm just contributing to a derail. This is is a post about a Black woman, so I guess we shouldn't spend all our time in the comments talking about a white man.
posted by howfar at 9:46 AM on March 5, 2019 [9 favorites]

The Dollop episode on him is great - Richard Johnson, A Terrible Vice-president.
posted by chainsofreedom at 11:26 AM on March 5, 2019 [3 favorites]

LOC holds a political cartoon about this.
posted by Ideefixe at 11:55 AM on March 5, 2019 [2 favorites]

Of course, when we talk about her, we are talking about the void that time and malice made of her. So, as a result, if we talk about him in just the right way, we can talk about her, although imperfectly and uncertainly. Think of all the women for whom even this much is impossible — faceless and nameless after centuries of anihilating efforts.
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:28 PM on March 5, 2019 [10 favorites]

I mean, this is really an article about the methods of studying the lives of the enslaved in history. It's an enormous challenge, especially as far back as the early 19th century. There are countless people whose entire lives may only be memorialized as a single number on an inventory of property: like, someone could be born, work, marry, go through all the experiences of life as an enslaved person, and die -- and the written record of their life could be no more than the difference between a "2" and a "3" on a government form for declaring how many slaves a person owned in a given year. Some, especially those who died in childhood, may never have been recorded at all.

So it's really a remarkable feat of scholarship that Prof. Myers was able to piece together a biography of Chinn from correspondence written to other people by her husband. It's like working entirely with peripheral vision. It's really impressive, and it's hugely commendable.

I think it's also important to recognize the nuance she's bringing to her view of Chinn's husband, because the nature of their relationship was undoubtedly complex. I seriously doubt that a scholar like Myers is unaware of Johnson's behavior and history.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 12:53 PM on March 5, 2019 [20 favorites]

I mean, this is really an article about the methods of studying the lives of the enslaved in history. It's an enormous challenge, especially as far back as the early 19th century.

The 1870 Census is referred to as the Brick Wall by Black genealogists, because you can trace your whole family back 140 years and then WHAM.
posted by Etrigan at 1:01 PM on March 5, 2019 [14 favorites]

This is a total aside, but thanks for that link! Genealogical research on Black Americans was basically my academic life, and I didn't know Dr. Gates had written articles about it for the Root. There's a lot of resources for African American genealogy, but he actually mentions (in this and other columns) some resources that don't get as much attention, like the 1867 voter registration lists.

Anyway, I'm still just marveling at how impressive it is that Myers was able to do all this without even having access to Johnson's collected papers. This is some real needle-in-a-haystack stuff, except it sounds like it wasn't even clear how many haystacks she would need to look through.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 2:45 PM on March 5, 2019 [3 favorites]

Wow. I had never heard of Julia Chinn (or, to be honest, her husband; the Civil War kinda sucks up all the air around 19th century American history). A white person of stature being openly married to a black person would've thrown a lot of societal expectations into disarray, so it makes sense that people would've been eager to forget her as quickly as possible.

(Also I agree that the focus should stay on Julia Chinn, but I'm glad for the added Richard M Johnson info. I would've might've found myself assuming that he wasn't a complete monster without it, and that would've been wrong of me.)
posted by grandiloquiet at 12:05 PM on March 6, 2019