But as the class aspect of household slavery is often underanalyzed in favor of the more obviously distressed field slave community, this research is sorely needed. So Schwartz sketches for us the contours of what Martha Washington’s or Dolly Madison’s female slaves might have felt, thought, heard, or saw based on their interactions with whites. Since most slaves did not leave written records, sometimes the very nature of slave scholarship is mysterious conjecture. But this is the bane of the slave historian. Indeed, virtually all of what Schwartz gives us comes from correspondence written about them by their white owners. As Schwartz documents, they also spent a tragic amount of energy trying to keep their families together, but the author can provide little insight into the impressions these events made on these women. Female slaves were subject to both white male and black male corridors of power, not to mention their daily labor subjection by white females. Schwartz’s expertise clearly shines when she is analyzing the various ways that both black female slaves and white female aristocrats negotiated the man’s world of early nineteenth-century America. She succeeds a little better than might be expected given her sources, and has produced a very insightful yet readable, compelling, and fairly unbiased contribution to North American slave and women’s studies scholarship. She analyzes the lives of three out of the first four First Ladies in compartmentalized sections, interspersing her analyses of these colonial matrons with periodic Downton Abbey–style peeks into what might have been happening in the slave quarters at the time the events upstairs were going on. With this book, Schwartz attempts to “ the relationships that developed between First Ladies and their slaves” (p. Marie Jenkins Schwartz’s Ties That Bound: Founding First Ladies and Slaves provides an interesting look into lives that crossed lines of class, race, and gender.
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