Why Richard Mentor Johnson Sold The Black Woman Who Replaced His Wife

Subscribe to my channel    / @loveandsuccession   In 1839, the postmaster general of the United States wrote to President Martin Van Buren about the Vice President's household. One word in that letter explains why Richard Mentor Johnson sold a woman at auction. Her name was Parthene. After Julia Chinn died in the cholera summer of 1833, Johnson put Parthene in charge of the house Julia had run for twenty years. Then she walked away from it, heading north toward Ohio with a student from the Choctaw Academy, the school Johnson ran on his own farm. WHAT'S IN IT The schoolmaster's 1833 report on where the cholera struck first What the students of Johnson's school were doing in his yard at night, and what Johnson called it Why Ohio, less than a hundred miles away, was still not safe The two stories a cabinet officer reached for when he described the woman at the Vice President's side The 1840 letter in which Andrew Jackson explained why Johnson had to go The stone dormitory that still stands outside Georgetown, Kentucky, and what happened to it in July 2026 The documents are clean: a cabinet officer's letter, the schoolmaster's reports, Johnson's own letters, and the historians who traced them. Parthene's own words do not survive, and the video says so instead of filling the gap. If you want more of these, the document first and the story second, subscribe. There are more files than you would think, and I keep opening them. Watch next: Why This Vice President Refused To Hide His Black Family    • Why This Vice President Refused To Hide Hi...   Sources: Amos Kendall to Martin Van Buren, 1839, as quoted in Mark O. Hatfield / U.S. Senate Historical Office, Vice Presidents of the United States, 1789-1993 (1997), "Richard Mentor Johnson" Sheryll Cashin, Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy (Beacon Press, 2017): Parthene in charge of the household, her escape and sale Marjorie Hall Young, "Stars in a Dark Night: The Education of Indian Youth at Choctaw Academy," Chronicles of Oklahoma 75 (1997) #AmericanHistory #FamilyHistory #RichardMentorJohnson