![]() ![]() She never questioned the utility or morality of slavery. Martha Washington, born in 1731, grew up toward the end of the roughest era of master-slave relations, when African captives were being brutalized into servitude. The lives of these women span the mid-eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. And the women Schwartz studies, she makes clear, could have made other choices. Her portraits reveal their matter-of-fact acceptance of people as capital, as collateral, and as wombs for producing more capital. Her stories testify to slave-owners’ daily temptations to be guided by greed, laziness, and injustice. The sum of these tales conveys, with even greater power than the individual distasteful details, the ugliness and personal corruption that almost inevitably infected people who owned other people. In Ties That Bound, Marie Jenkins Schwartz, who has written about children in slavery, turns to the relationships Martha Washington, Martha (Patsy) Jefferson Randolph, and Dolley Madison had with the slaves in their families. ![]() Ties That Bound: Founding First Ladies and Slaves By Marie Jenkins SchwartzĬhicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017, 420 pp., $35.00, hardcover ![]()
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