The Maddens of Culpeper County were exceptional not only for their scrupulous record-keeping. As the title suggests, they weren’t slaves but “free persons of color.” The family’s founder was an indigent Irish immigrant, Mary Madden, who gave birth in 1758 to a daughter by an unknown black man-possibly a slave. Under Colonial law, the legal status of the mother was conferred upon her children. The daughter, Sarah, was free. But like her destitute mother, fined for bearing a mulatto child, she became an indentured servant.
Sarah’s term of service lasted until she was 31 years old. Most of her indenture was spent at Montpelier, the home of future president James Madison. When her term was over, she set herself up as a seamstress and laundress. The book offers a vivid picture of hauling water and washing outdoors in all seasons and stitching clothes by hand: in one year, for just one family, Sarah scrubbed 430 items and sewed dozens of shirts, breeches, coats and sheets. Sarah had 11 children to support; if she had not been able to, they would have been placed as indentured servants.
T. O. Madden’s great-grandfather, Willis, seems to have inherited Sarah’s fortitude. Working as a blacksmith, teamster and sometime whisky distiller, Willis saved enough to buy a farm and establish a popular tavern and general store. He lost all but the land to predatory troops–mainly Union-in the Civil War.
Later generations became teachers, ministers and storekeepers. Like other free blacks, the Maddens endured a subtle psychological hardship. They lived between two worlds, black and white. Blacks who had been slaves envied and mistrusted the Maddens for their education and their ownership of land. Although the book describes instances of sympathetic whites helping the family through legal problems, to most whites free blacks were an irritant. Madden quotes petitions to the Virginia Legislature demanding that free blacks be excluded from trades–carpentry, blacksmithing, masonry-where they competed with whites, or that free blacks be expelled from the state entirely. Now a sizable landowner, he writes of being refused service at a lunch counter until desegregation was enforced by law.
As Madden tells his own story, the almost courtly prose he uses to narrate the family’s earlier history gives way to a more relaxed, sitting-on-the-front-porch style. He is old-fashioned in some ways, using the word “negro” rather than “black,” a term he says his ancestors would have considered a slur. Madden’s agenda isn’t political. Instead it is a deeply personal account of an extraordinary American family.
