Story of U.S. vice president from Ky., his enslaved wife shows how history surprises us.

Recently on a beautiful fall afternoon, my wife Liz and I visited Great Crossing in Scott County, looking (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) for the farm of one of Kentucky’s more amazing, and largely forgotten, figures.

Richard Mentor Johnson (1781-1850) led a stranger-than-fiction life. The product of a prominent Central Kentucky family, he rose to greater heights than any of his kin: hero of the War of 1812, U.S. representative, U.S. senator and, ultimately, vice president of the United States under President Martin Van Buren.

Along the way, he defied all conventions. His story demonstrates how complex and hard-to-pigeonhole our forebears actually could be.

In the 1813 Battle of the Thames, fought in Canada, Johnson led a regiment of Kentuckians against British regulars and their Native American allies. Although wounded multiple times, Johnson not only prevailed in the attack, but was alleged to have personally slain the famous Shawnee chief Tecumseh. He became a national hero.

But he was far from a one-dimensional warrior. A devout Baptist and a proponent of education, Johnson in the 1820s set up the Choctaw Academy on his Blue Spring farm near Great Crossing, according to the Kentucky Encyclopedia.

Not only the Choctaw but many other tribes sent boys there to study “reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar, geography, practical surveying, astronomy, and vocal music.”

By 1835, enrollment approached and may have exceeded 200. A Choctaw chief described Johnson as a man with a noble impulse and a big heart.

Still, the school closed in the 1840s. The Choctaw had been removed to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), and the Kentucky academy had been supplanted by mission schools there.

Some students who attended the Choctaw Academy became successful in business and tribal politics. Others found it difficult to return to their tribes, because they’d lost touch with their relatives and Native American customs.

“Unable to cope with the changes, many of these young men would go on to commit suicide,” says the website Kentucky Historic Institutions.

More remarkable, though, and scandalous to his contemporaries, was Johnson’s unique relationship with Julia Chinn, an enslaved woman who had been given to Johnson as part of his father’s estate.

Many white men had sexual relationships with enslaved women—think of Thomas Jefferson, for example. Most such relationships amounted to rape.

Johnson, however, instead of hiding and denying his actions as other white men did, openly lived with Chinn, declared her his “bride” and even wed her in a private ceremony, although antebellum laws against mixed-race marriages prohibited their union from being legally sanctioned. Their common-law marriage lasted two decades.

Chinn wore the finest fashions, befitting the wife of a wealthy man, and co-hosted Johnson’s parties at Blue Spring plantation. In 1825, the couple hosted the Marquis de Lafayette, the Washington Post said in a February 7 article about Johnson and Chinn.

During Johnson’s long absences to serve in Washington, D.C., Chinn ran his 2,000-acre plantation, and Johnson told his white employees to respect and obey her as they would him. She also ran the Choctaw Academy’s medical ward.

The couple had two daughters, Imogene and Adaline. Johnson gave them his last name. He insisted they be fully accepted by white society as his children.

“But when he spoke at local July 4 celebration, the Lexington Observer reported, prominent White citizens wouldn’t let Adaline sit with them in the pavilion,” the Washington post said. “Johnson sent his daughter to his carriage, rushed through his speech and then angrily drove away.”

Chinn died of cholera in 1833. For reasons I haven’t seen explained, Johnson never emancipated her. He may have loved her and obviously considered her his wife, but legally she remained enslaved until her death.

Meanwhile, Johnson’s political opponents pilloried him for his interracial relationship and children.

After Johnson’s own death 17 years after Chinn, his brothers destroyed his papers in an attempt to keep his surviving daughter, Imogene, from inheriting his estate. It may also be that they wanted to shield the record of Johnson and Chinn’s union from history.

Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, a professor at Indiana University, has written a book about Chinn, “The Vice President’s Black Wife,” that’s scheduled to be published by the University of North Carolina Press.

Myers has contrasted the attention lavished on Henry Clay, another Kentuckian of the same period, with the comparative obscurity of Johnson.

“The whole thing is depressing,” she wrote in an online essay. “The main house at Johnson’s Blue Spring Farm is gone, the cemeteries on the land are overgrown and have disappeared to the naked eye, and the only remaining school building is about to crumble into the ground.”

Meanwhile, in nearby Lexington, “thousands of visitors annually stream through the impeccably maintained gardens and halls of Ashland, the home of Henry Clay, Kentucky’s other great antebellum statesman. The contrast between the two sites couldn’t be any starker. And the difference has everything to do with race.”

It’s because of characters like Johnson and Chinn that I love reading and researching history. You find again and again that human beings have always been complicated and self-contradictory and surprising. The times have always been complex.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.