Why This Vice President Refused To Hide His Black Family

Subscribe to my channel    / @loveandsuccession   Richard Mentor Johnson rises to speak at a Kentucky barbecue, and the white guests won't seat his daughter. So he sends her to his carriage, cuts his speech short, and drives off with her. A Lexington paper reported it. These girls carried his name, and he would not pretend otherwise. Her mother, Julia Chinn, was a woman Johnson legally owned. And here is the contradiction. He never signed her free. In Kentucky, children followed their mother. His daughters were born enslaved, and the county saw them as Black. He gave them his last name anyway. He schooled them, saw them married to white men, and gave them farms. He put his name on them, in public, for decades. One of his own allies complained to Andrew Jackson, in writing, that Johnson "had endeavored often to force his daughters into society." And after he died, a single piece of paper decided who his family had been. It had no daughters in it at all. One of them was still alive, with children of her own. So what did his name actually buy those two girls? And why didn't it hold? To answer that, you have to start with the woman he never gave it to.