"Notorious in the Neighborhood": An Interracial Family in Early National and Antebellum Virginia

Abstract

ON SEPTEMBER 6, 1796, THOMAS WEST, AWARE OF THE ILLNESS THAT would kill him just a few months later, wrote his last will and testament. West, a white blacksmith, owned land in both Amherst and Albemarle Counties, including ten half-acre lots in the town of Charlottesville, which amounted roughly to one-fifth of the town at the time of his death. In his will, West named two of his children--James Henry West and Nancy West--as heirs. Both children were free people of color born of a relationship between the elder West and a woman named Priscilla, who at one point in her life had belonged to her children's father. West left all of his land, livestock, and furniture, as well as his eight slaves, to James Henry West and his family. His fourteen-year-old daughter Nancy West was left only the annual interest on forty pounds held by her guardian, local merchant Thomas Bell, until she turned twenty-one, at which time she would receive the principal.(1) Among the witnesses to Thomas West's will was David Isaacs, another local merchant. Isaacs, born in 1760 in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, had immigrated to the United States and moved to Charlottesville sometime in the early 1790s from Richmond, where he and his brother Isaiah had been traders in Cohen and Isaacs, one of the city's largest mercantile firms. Both Jewish, the Isaacses were also among the founders of Beth Shalome, the capital's first synagogue. In Charlottesville, the brothers lived downtown on land rented from Thomas West.(2) While David Isaacs had a direct economic relationship with Thomas West for the few years that he lived in Charlottesville before West's death, he had an even more significant, lasting, and unusual relationship with West's daughter Nancy. Between 1796 and 1817, David Isaacs and Nancy West had seven children together. By the time of David Isaacs's death in 1837 he and Nancy West (who occasionally, though rarely, used Isaacs's last name) had maintained a familial relationship for over forty years and had lived in a single household for seventeen of those years in downtown Charlottesville, where Isaacs owned a mercantile business and West ran a bakery. Between them the couple amassed substantial wealth, and by 1850 Nancy West owned real property valued at $7,000, enough to make her the richest non-white person in Albemarle County.(3) Interracial sex per se was not illegal in early national and antebellum Virginia, but laws prohibiting interracial marriages had been in place since the colonial era and anti-fornication laws punished all offenders having sex outside of marriage whether or not it crossed the color line.(4) In this legal environment, a stable, successful, and familiar couple like David Isaacs and Nancy West--a relationship that, to us, might seem improbable if not impossible for that era--nonetheless thrived. An investigation of their financial dealings, land transactions, and courtroom encounters provides a rare glimpse at how an interracial couple operated and even prospered within the legal and social boundaries of a Virginia that discouraged their sexual activities and frowned upon their family, but which lacked either the motivation or the power to end their relationship. Examining the lives of exceptional couples at the margins like Isaacs and West is essential to understanding the rules of race, sex, gender, and class in the South before the Civil War--and to appreciating that unusual circumstances like theirs came with rules all their own. The example of West and Isaacs also reinforces arguments made in the work of recent historians, who have complicated our understandings of racial and sexual relations in the early national and antebellum South with studies of multiracial families, coerced and consensual interracial sex involving both free people and slaves, and the lives of free people of color. Collectively, these scholars have demonstrated that there were significant gaps between the ideals white southerners often projected about themselves and their world and the experience of life on the ground in their society. …