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This is a list of vice presidents of the United States who owned slaves. Slavery was legal in the United States from its beginning as a nation, having been practiced in North America since early colonial days. The Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution formally abolished slavery in 1865, after the end of the American Civil War.
At least nine vice presidents owned slaves at some point in their lives. Thomas Jefferson was the first while Andrew Johnson was the last.
| No. | Vice president | Approximate number of slaves held | While in office? | Notes | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | Thomas Jefferson | 600+ | Yes (1801–1809) | Most historians believe Jefferson fathered multiple slave children with the enslaved woman Sally Hemings, the likely half-sister of his late wife Martha Wayles Skelton. Despite being a lifelong slave owner, Jefferson routinely condemned the institution of slavery, attempted to restrict its expansion, and advocated gradual emancipation. As president, he oversaw the abolition of the international slave trade. See Thomas Jefferson and slavery for more details. | [1] [2] [3] |
| 3 | Aaron Burr | 10+ | Yes (1801-1805) | Burr was born into a slaveholding family. He became a slaveholder himself upon his marriage to Theodosia Bartow Prevost, who held slaves from her prior marriage to Jacques Marcus Prevost, and bought a servant named Carlos. Burr personally opposed to slavery, proposing a 1785 bill for immediate emancipation which failed in the New York State Assembly in favor of another bill which required gradual emancipation and was never passed; a later bill for immediate emancipation was passed after Burr returned to the State Assembly in 1799. His son John Pierre Burr became an abolitionist and civil rights activist. | [4] [5] |
| 7 | John C. Calhoun | 70–80 | unknown | Calhoun led the pro-slavery faction in the Senate, opposing both total abolitionism and attempts such as the Wilmot Proviso to limit the expansion of slavery into the western territories. He also owned 70–80 enslaved African-Americans at his Fort Hill Plantation, comprising the area where Clemson University currently sits. | [6] |
| 8 | Martin Van Buren | 1 | No | Van Buren's father owned six slaves. The only slave Van Buren personally owned, Tom, escaped in 1814, and Van Buren made no effort to find him. Otherwise, Van Buren hired out free and enslaved African Americans to work at the Decatur House, a pattern he continued during his time in the White House. Later in life, Van Buren belonged to the Free Soil Party, which opposed the expansion of slavery into the Western territories, but not immediate abolition. | [7] [8] [9] [10] |
| 9 | Richard M. Johnson | unknown | unknown | Johnson inherited Julia Chinn, an octoroon mixed-race woman (seven-eighths European and one-eighth African in ancestry), who was born into slavery around 1790. He was later criticized for his interracial relationship with Chinn. Unlike other upper-class planters and leaders who had African-American mistresses or concubines, but never acknowledged them, Johnson treated Chinn as his common-law wife. He acknowledged their two daughters as his children, giving them his surname, much to the consternation of some of his constituents. When Lewis Tappan requested presentation of an abolitionist petition to the Senate, Johnson, still a slaveowner, declined the request. | [11] [12] [13] |
| 10 | John Tyler | 29 | Yes (1841) | Evidence suggests that at least four enslaved and free enslaved African Americans worked in the White House when Tyler was president. He also never freed any of his slaves and consistently supported the slaveholder's rights and the expansion of slavery during his time in political office. | [14] [15] |
| 13 | William R. King | unknown | unknown | He developed a large cotton plantation based on slave labor, calling the property "Chestnut Hill". King and his relatives formed one of the state's largest slaveholding families, collectively owning as many as 500 people. During the conflicts leading up to the Compromise of 1850, King supported the Senate's gag rule against debate on antislavery petitions and opposed proposals to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, which Congress administered. | [16] [17] [18] |
| 14 | John C. Breckinridge | unknown | unknown | 1850, he was nominated for a position in the Kentucky state legislature by a meeting trying to protect the interest of slaveowners. He joined Buchanan in supporting the proslavery Lecompton Constitution for Kansas. In 1860, he ran for president and campaigned on a platform calling for federal intervention to protect slaveowners in U.S. territories. He resigned as a U.S. Senator in 1861, becoming a brigadier general for the Confederacy and later a Secretary of War. | [19] [20] [21] [22] |
| 16 | Andrew Johnson | 9 | No | Johnson acquired up to at least ten slaves from 1843 until their manumission on August 8, 1863, after which they remained as paid servants. A year later, on October 24, 1864, Johnson, as military governor of Tennessee, proclaimed the freedom of Tennessee's slaves. | [23] [24] [25] |
Martin Van Buren was the eighth president of the United States, serving from 1837 to 1841. A primary founder of the Democratic Party, he served as New York's attorney general and U.S. senator, then briefly as the ninth governor of New York before joining Andrew Jackson's administration as the tenth United States secretary of state, minister to Great Britain, and ultimately the eighth vice president from 1833 to 1837, after being elected on Jackson's ticket in 1832. Van Buren won the presidency in 1836 against divided Whig opponents. Van Buren lost re-election in 1840, and failed to win the Democratic nomination in 1844. Later in his life, Van Buren emerged as an elder statesman and an anti-slavery leader who led the Free Soil Party ticket in the 1848 presidential election.
Thomas Jefferson was an American statesman, planter, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. He was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence. Following the American Revolutionary War and before becoming president in 1801, Jefferson was the nation's first U.S. secretary of state under George Washington and then the nation's second vice president under John Adams. Jefferson was a leading proponent of democracy, republicanism, and natural rights, and he produced formative documents and decisions at the state, national, and international levels.
The 1836 United States presidential election was the 13th quadrennial presidential election, held from Thursday, November 3 to Wednesday, December 7, 1836. In the third consecutive election victory for the Democratic Party, incumbent Vice President Martin Van Buren defeated four candidates fielded by the nascent Whig Party.
The 1860 United States presidential election was the 19th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 6, 1860. In a four-way contest, the Republican Party ticket of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin won a national popular plurality, a popular majority in the North where states had already abolished slavery, and a national electoral majority comprising only Northern electoral votes. Lincoln's election thus served as the main catalyst of the states that would become the Confederacy seceding from the Union. This marked the first time that a Republican was elected president. It was also the first presidential election in which both major party candidates were registered in the same home state; the others have been in 1904, 1920, 1940, 1944, and 2016.
Monticello was the primary plantation of Thomas Jefferson, a Founding Father, author of the Declaration of Independence, and the third president of the United States, who began designing Monticello after inheriting land from his father at the age of 14. Located just outside Charlottesville, Virginia, in the Piedmont region, the plantation was originally 5,000 acres (20 km2), with Jefferson using the forced labor of black slaves for extensive cultivation of tobacco and mixed crops, later shifting from tobacco cultivation to wheat in response to changing markets. Due to its architectural and historic significance, the property has been designated a National Historic Landmark. In 1987, Monticello and the nearby University of Virginia, also designed by Jefferson, were together designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The United States nickel has featured a depiction of Monticello on its reverse since 1938.
Richard Mentor Johnson was an American lawyer, military officer and politician who served as the ninth vice president of the United States from 1837 to 1841 under President Martin Van Buren. He is the only vice president elected by the United States Senate under the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment. Johnson also represented Kentucky in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. He began and ended his political career in the Kentucky House of Representatives.
John Cabell Breckinridge was an American lawyer, politician, and soldier. He represented Kentucky in both houses of Congress and became the 14th and youngest-ever vice president of the United States. Serving from 1857 to 1861, he took office at the age of 36. He was a member of the Democratic Party, and ran for president in 1860 as a Southern Democrat. He served in the U.S. Senate during the outbreak of the American Civil War, but was expelled after joining the Confederate Army. He was appointed Confederate Secretary of War in 1865.
John Breckinridge was an American lawyer, slave-owning planter, soldier, and politician in Virginia and Kentucky. He served several terms each in both state's legislatures before legislators elected him to the U.S. Senate. He also served as United States Attorney General during the second term of President Thomas Jefferson. He is the progenitor of Kentucky's Breckinridge political family and the namesake of Breckinridge County, Kentucky.
Poplar Forest is a plantation and retreat home in Forest, Virginia, United States, that belonged to Thomas Jefferson, Founding Father and third U.S. president. Jefferson inherited the property in 1773 and began designing and working on his retreat home in 1806. While Jefferson is the most famous individual associated with the property, it had several owners before being purchased for restoration, preservation, and exhibition in 1984.
George Poindexter was an American politician, lawyer, and judge from Mississippi. Born in Virginia, he moved to the Mississippi Territory in 1802. He served as United States Representative from the newly admitted state, was elected as Governor (1820–1822), and served as a United States senator.
The 1860 Democratic National Conventions were a series of presidential nominating conventions held to nominate the Democratic Party's candidates for president and vice president in the 1860 election.
Partus sequitur ventrem was a legal doctrine passed in colonial Virginia in 1662 and other English crown colonies in the Americas which defined the legal status of children born there; the doctrine mandated that children of enslaved mothers would inherit the legal status of their mothers. As such, children of enslaved women would be born into slavery. The legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem was derived from Roman civil law, specifically the portions concerning slavery and personal property (chattels), as well as the common law of personal property; analogous legislation existed in other civilizations including Medieval Egypt in Africa and Korea in Asia.
Madison Hemings was the son of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. He was the third of Sally Hemings’ four children to survive to adulthood. Born into slavery, according to partus sequitur ventrem, Hemings grew up on Jefferson's Monticello plantation, where his mother was also enslaved. After some light duties as a young boy, Hemings became a carpenter and fine woodwork apprentice at around age 14 and worked in the joiner's shop until he was about 21. He learned to play the violin and was able to earn money by growing cabbages. Jefferson died in 1826, after which Sally Hemings was "given her time" by Jefferson's surviving daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph.
Thomas Jefferson Randolph of Albemarle County was a Virginia planter, soldier and politician who served multiple terms in the Virginia House of Delegates, as rector of the University of Virginia, and as a colonel in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. The favorite grandson of President Thomas Jefferson, he helped manage Monticello near the end of his grandfather's life and was executor of his estate, and later also served in the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1850 and at the Virginia Secession Convention of 1861.
Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, owned more than 600 slaves during his adult life. Jefferson freed two slaves while he lived, and five others were freed after his death, including two of his children from his relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. His other two children with Hemings were allowed to escape without pursuit. After his death, the rest of the slaves were sold to pay off his estate's debts.
The political career of John C. Breckinridge included service in the state government of Kentucky, the Federal government of the United States, as well as the government of the Confederate States of America. In 1857, 36 years old, he was inaugurated as Vice President of the United States under James Buchanan. He remains the youngest person to ever hold the office. Four years later, he ran as the presidential candidate of a dissident group of Southern Democrats, but lost the election to the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln.
Ursula Granger was a woman enslaved by president of the United States Thomas Jefferson for over 27 years, who described her as a person who "unites trust & skill." She worked as a cook, dairymaid, laundress, and wet nurse, and has been referred to as the "Queen of Monticello" and as a pioneer of Black cidermaking in America.
...Jefferson owned over 600 enslaved people during his lifetime, the most of any U.S. president
Calhoun...owned...some 70–80 enslaved African-Americans
The 1830 census lists four enslaved women in his household while in residence at the Decatur House
Martin Van Buren owned at least one enslaved person during his lifetime...He also hired out enslaved and free African Americans to work at Decatur House...This pattern continued during his time at the White House, where five free African Americans and four enslaved people labored to maintain the Executive Mansion.
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)These efforts, together with a sizeable bequest of land and slaves from his father, eventually made Johnson a wealthy man, although he never identified with the privileged classes.
These four identified individuals, a mix of free and enslaved African Americans, worked in the Tyler White House...Newspaper accounts from the time also suggest that there were other enslaved individuals working at the White House...by 1850, there were forty-six enslaved individuals working at the Tyler property; ten years later, that number decreased slightly to forty-four
He believed that abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia would be unfair to the slaveholders in adjacent states, but he supported abolition of the slave trade there.
...William R. King was a slaveowner and earned income and maintained his lifestyle by using slaves....Reportedly, in Alabama, King and his relatives formed one of the largest slave-holding families in Alabama, collectively owning as many as 500.
In 2005, lawmakers and the governor of Washington State approved naming King County after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. instead of William Rufus King, the 13th vice president, who owned slaves and supported the Fugitive Slave Act.
In 1864 and 1865, he claimed pay toward wages, rations, and clothing for three servants: Henry, Florence, and Elizabeth (Liz)...Though Johnson's actual relation to his enslaved servants can only be corroborated by DNA evidence, he certainly had a unique relationship with Dolly, Florence, Liz, William, and Sam
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