In Kentucky, Johnson was a plantation owner, slaveholder, and political force, serving in state politics before going to D.C. as a congressman, senator, and then Vice President. He also had complicated social relationships with Native Americans and African Americans. Rising to fame as an “Indian Killer,” Johnson also maintained a boarding school for Choctaw boys on his plantation. And while he never married a white woman, over the course of his life he engaged in open relationships with three different black women and had children with two of these women.
Publicly known as his wife, Julia Chinn, the second of these women, lived with Johnson and the couple’s two daughters for over twenty years and oversaw his business affairs while he was away in Frankfort and in D.C. This included handling all plantation issues and openly interacting with the students and officials of the Choctaw boarding school.
Utilizing private papers and state records, this paper examines an interracial family which existed in a time and place where white persons publicly maligned such unions and claimed such relationships did not happen, or that when they did, they occurred between people of the lowest orders who lived in secrecy and shame, shunned from polite society. These parameters clearly do not reflect the lives of Chinn and Johnson, and it is this chasm between public rhetoric and private reality that this paper interrogates.
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