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

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.(5) The story of David Isaacs and Nancy West adds valuable details to this evolving historical portrait of multiracial families and their peculiar positions in early national and antebellum southern communities. In particular, it reveals how intricately and inextricably connected the couple's domestic and financial arrangements were, and how their economic position influenced precisely when members of the white community in Charlottesville chose to revoke the toleration they usually demonstrated for West and Isaacs's relationship. Additionally, West and Isaacs's story shows their ingenious ability to turn laws of race, gender, marriage, and property designed primarily for legally married white couples to their distinct pecuniary advantage. What stands out most about Isaacs and West's sexual association is that, relative to the law, it was less directly oppositional than it was startlingly ambiguous. For example, when the couple altered their domestic arrangements around 1820, they threatened both the moral sensibilities and the economic interests of some whites. When they were subsequently accused of violating Virginia's laws against illicit sex, however, not even the highest court in the state would find them susceptible to criminal prosecution. Cautiously, at some risk, but with a consistent strategy, David Isaacs and Nancy West exploited their unique status by sneaking through legal loopholes, thus ensuring both their own economic stability and the financial futures of their children.

Still, no matter how financially successful they became, nearly being branded as criminals reminded them that they were perpetually vulnerable to legal harassment by whites. Although West and Isaacs never faced the possibility of criminal charges again, the same kinds of jealousy and resentment toward the couple's economic stature that provoked their original legal troubles seethed well into the 1840s. They learned that there would always be some whites who would try to take advantage of the idiosyncrasies of the couple's relationship in pursuit of their own economic gain. Rather than indicating the strength of interracial families in Virginia before the Civil War and the protections afforded to them, the experience of Nancy West and David Isaacs actually highlights the ultimate fragility and tenuousness of their status. That the couple managed to evade each obstacle placed before them is a testament not only to their shrewdness, intelligence, and foresight, but also to their enormous luck. Property and wealth can bring power, stability, and security. They can also provoke envy, greed, and hostility. For Nancy West and David Isaacs, they brought both.

On October 11, 1822, the grand jury sitting at the Albemarle County Court, on evidence provided by two witnesses, presented David Isaacs and Nancy West for "umbraging the decency of society and violating the laws of the land by cohabitating together in a state of illicit commerce as mall and wife."(6) There are no extant descriptions of the testimony that brought about the presentment, but presumably the most germane facts were simply that the couple lived in the same house and acted as a married couple. Nineteen months later, on May 13, 1824, the court found the facts of the evidence against Isaacs and West to be true and asked the couple to show cause why Jonathan Boucher Carr, the local commonwealth's prosecuting attorney, should not bring an indictment against them for the crime of fornication. West and Isaacs's lawyer argued that, even conceding the facts in the presentment, the language used by the Grand Jury failed to accuse the couple of violating any particular statute, and he questioned whether the state could prosecute them on a fornication charge at common law. This legal strategy baffled the county court. Uncertain "whether, admitting the facts presented by the Grand Jury to be true, an Information will lie for the said offence at the suit of the Commonwealth," the court determined the case had to be sent to the General Court in Richmond for decision. West and Isaacs objected, probably because they hoped the County Court would dismiss the case on the spot, but were overruled.(7) In November 1826 their case finally worked its way onto the docket of the General Court in Richmond, where the justices ruled that the state of Virginia could not prosecute David Isaacs and Nancy West on any charge as presented by the grand jury.(8) On May 8, 1827, nearly five years after the original presentment, the Albemarle County Court dismissed all cases against Isaacs and West.(9)

The two witnesses who appeared before the grand jury in 1822 would have had to have been white, because David Isaacs was not black and Virginia law only allowed the testimony of people of color against other people of color. A fire in 1865 burned nearly all the original case papers of the General Court, precluding any precise knowledge of the witnesses' identities, but even without such specific information it seems extraordinarily curious that anyone would air a sexual grievance against Isaacs and Nancy West in 1822. Charlottesville was a small town with just 260 residents in 1810, and it had grown little by the early 1820s. Much of the town's population lived within a few blocks of the couple.(10) By 1822 a significant percentage of Charlottesville's residents must have known that David Isaacs and Nancy West were carrying on a long-term sexual relationship. The couple had already had all seven of their children, the oldest of whom (their daughter Jane) was twenty-six years old. Clearly Isaacs and West were in long-standing violation of anti-fornication laws that prohibited sexual intercourse between unmarried persons, yet for more than twenty-five years no one had chosen to do anything about it.

David Isaacs's own economic clout, along with that of his network of business colleagues (many of whom were also prominent in local social and legal circles), might have prompted hesitation among people tempted to complain publicly about his relationship with West. Isaacs was a successful merchant and an esteemed member of the local business community. Among his associates were merchants John Kelly, John Winn, Twyman Wayt, James and Samuel Leitch, and John R. Jones, all of whom had been appointed by the county court during the 1810s to assist him in his capacity as executor of the will of his brother Isaiah, who had died in 1806.(11) Kelly, "a man of sterling integrity and a decided christian gentleman," was a founder of the town Presbyterian church in the 1820s. Winn owned the enormous Belmont estate, traded in real estate, and served for a time as town postmaster, a position in which he was succeeded by Twyman Wayt. John Jones, who was later noted for his exceptionally "energetic and industrious life," served as a county magistrate beginning in 1819, acted as the financial agent for numerous local planters, and eventually became the first president of the Albemarle branch of the Farmers' Bank of Virginia.(12)

David Isaacs also counted Opic Norris and Alexander Garrett among his close friends in town, naming both as co-executors of his own will.(13) Norris drew especial respect from Charlottesville residents, one of whom wrote after his death that he was "a man of mark ... as useful and beneficial to this community as any man that ever lived here." A merchant who also served as a county magistrate, Norris was a town trustee for many years, secretary-treasurer of a local turnpike company, and at one point in his life the owner of a blacksmith shop as well as a popular tavern. Garrett, meanwhile, dealt in real estate and spent most of his life in public office, serving as deputy sheriff and then as clerk for both the county and circuit courts. He also became the first bursar of the University of Virginia, married the daughter of one of Thomas Jefferson's nephews, and was named an executor of Jefferson's estate in 1826.(14) In addition to having influential friends in town, Isaacs had prominent customers throughout Albemarle County, not the least of whom was Jefferson himself, who bought all sorts of items from Isaacs ranging from meat, butter, and cheese to books and a horse. Jefferson's nephew, Dabney Carr Jr., had been friends with Isaiah Isaacs, serving as a witness to a codicil of his will. Thomas Jefferson also made purchases from many other local merchants, but the long-standing patronage of prominent planters like him helped establish David Isaacs as a worthy, reputable, and respectable businessman.(15)

As a Jewish immigrant, however, David Isaacs would always be somewhat of an oddity in Charlottesville. Around 2,700 Jews lived in the United States in 1820 out of a total population nearing ten million, and only 300 or so lived in Virginia. A few Jews other than David Isaacs lived in Charlottesville in the early nineteenth century, including merchant Isaac Raphael and lawyer Nathaniel Wolfe, but two-thirds of Virginia's Jewish population lived in Richmond.(16) Being a Jew in antebellum America meant numerical near-insignificance but also often entailed cultural marginality and social prejudice. The anti-Semitism that Jews faced in the antebellum United States paled in comparison to that confronted by Jews in Europe and was tempered by political, economic, and religious tolerance. Nevertheless, bigotry was widespread in America. Throughout the country the word "Jew" was used both as a generic pejorative and specifically as a synonym for a cheat. Overt hostility and violence toward Jews was rare, but white Christian churches consistently preached that Judaism was an inferior religion. Jews were unusual and therefore exotic and interesting, but most gentiles also viewed Jews suspiciously and stereotypically as untrustworthy and avaricious. As historian Jacob Marcus writes, early-nineteenth-century Americans were ambivalent toward Jews, and tolerance and acceptance frequently coexisted with rejection and a strong sense of Jewish difference. No matter the precise position of Jews, though, they "resigned themselves to the inevitable; there would always be a dividing line between Jews and Christians."(17)

David Isaacs's position as an outsider among white Christian society may have made his relationship with Nancy West--who, as a free woman of color, was also an outsider--less offensive to other whites than had her partner been a white gentile. In the 1820s most Americans believed Jews were probably racially white, and they were treated as white under Virginia law, but the racial position of Jews was never entirely fixed due to centuries-old European folklore and stereotypes about distinct Jewish physiognomy.(18) In addition, Isaacs's religion certainly distanced him from many of his white Christian neighbors. They might not have expected him to adhere to as high a moral standard as that to which they believed they held themselves. If a distinction of faith helped at all in keeping David Isaacs and Nancy West out of a courtroom, however, such a distinction also meant that regardless of his economic standing, Isaacs could never fully integrate himself into Charlottesville's business and legal communities, which were held together as much by familial as by financial links. Samuel and James Leitch were brothers. John R. Jones's brother-in-law and his first business partner was Nimrod Bramham, another merchant and a man who later became legally entangled with David Isaacs. After parting ways with Jones, Bramham joined fortunes with his son-in-law, William Bibb. John Kelly's son-in-law was none other than Opie Norris, while John Winn and Twyman Wayt were not only partners but had also married two sisters from the same family. John Winn's oldest son Benjamin would grow up to marry the daughter of Ira Garrett, Alexander Garrett's brother.(19) Without access to these sorts of connections, David Isaacs could be deeply immersed in Charlottesville's mercantile world, yet he would never be entirely of it.

It seems most likely, in fact, that one or more of Isaacs's fellow merchants instigated court proceedings against him and Nancy West in 1822. While changes that the couple made to their relationship in 1819 and 1820 may have prompted some complaints to be made on the basis of moral concerns, a closer look at the accusations brought against them suggests that economic interests probably played a significant role as well. Nancy West's economic position suddenly and dramatically improved beginning in 1819. Members of the merchant class frequently shared the same economic concerns, but they were also in competition with one another, which could breed jealousy and vindictiveness, especially when finances got tight. In the wake of the Panic of 1819, merchants who found it very difficult to collect debts owed them even as they tried to pay off debts of their own would have felt particularly vulnerable. Certainly it is not hard to imagine their antagonism toward the economic success of a free woman of color at such a time, especially when they perceived her as having procured that success in large part through an illegal sexual relationship with a white man. Perhaps the local mercantile elite felt that it was time to remind the couple that they lived free of social and legal harassment mostly at the behest of the white community, and that there were limits to what they could and could not do.(20)

During most of the first two decades of the nineteenth century, Isaacs and West carried on their relationship and continued to have children while living in separate homes and owning their own independent businesses. In 1799 Nancy West turned seventeen. Able to convince Thomas Bell to forward the forty pounds left to her by her father, she purchased a half-acre of land--lot number 46 near Charlottesville's southern boundary--from her brother, James Henry West (see map). She probably took up regular residence there around the time she turned twenty-one in 1803 and began raising her family and establishing herself professionally as a baker.(21) Isaacs himself lived just one block north and one block west on his own land on Main Street, lot 36, which he had purchased in 1802. A two-story wooden building on the property served both as his home and his mercantile store.(22) On the 1810 census, Nancy West and David Isaacs are listed as heads of different households. Isaacs lived alone, and West lived with five other free people of color, four of whom were probably the children she and Isaacs had at the time--Jane, Thomas, Hays, and Tucker.(23)

This arrangement began to change beginning late in 1819. In December Nancy West put the land she lived on up for sale.(24) Six months later she purchased the bulk of lot 33, which was on Main Street just a few lots east of where David Isaacs lived, and she began renting out the property to assorted businesses.(25) In addition, the 1820 census reveals that Nancy West was no longer the head of a household, but that David Isaacs suddenly had ten free people of color living in his home. As many as eight of these individuals were Nancy West and the couple's children, who now totaled seven after the births of Frederick, Julia Ann, and Agness between 1812 and 1817. West began running her bakery out of this building as well, next to David Isaacs's store-front.(26) Less than two years later, the grand jury brought its presentment against the couple. For more than twenty years after they had their first child together, then, David Isaacs and Nancy West had maintained separate households; technically, they even lived in separate parishes of Albemarle County.(27) It seems that so long as the couple kept their relationship a strictly illicit one and pretended that it did not exist, Charlottesville's white community was willing to let it go unchallenged. Only when the couple started living together as a single family unit did some members of the community find their arrangement unacceptable. Throughout the early national and antebellum periods, interracial sexual activity, especially between a slaveowner and his female property but also between free people, could generally be tolerated so long as certain proprieties were observed, one of which was never to flaunt such relationships as if they were legitimate. West and Isaacs's sudden public pretense to being a family thus probably played a role in provoking the charges against them. When the grand jury presented Isaacs and West, it also presented two other couples (at least one of which was also interracial and cohabitating) for fornication charges, which suggests that their case may have been part of a small crusade by whites intent on rooting out sexual relationships that represented, in the words of Albemarle County judge Archibald Stuart, offenses "against good morals."(28)

Probably not coincidentally, the other interracial couple, Joshua Grady and Betsy Ann Farly, lived on lot 26, property owned by David Isaacs just two blocks west of where he lived with Nancy West. Grady was a white blacksmith and Betsy Ann Farly was a free woman of color whose father was Daniel Farly, a free man of color. Daniel Farly resided at the east end of Main Street and was himself the oldest son of Mary Hemings, Sally Hemings's older sister. Mary Hemings lived across the street and half a block west of West and Isaacs in a house on lot 23 she had shared with Thomas Bell (formerly Nancy West's legal guardian) from the late 1780s until Bell's death in 1800. Bell had purchased Mary Hemings and her two children by him (Daniel Farly not among them) from Thomas Jefferson at her request in 1792 and informally freed her. By 1822 Mary Hemings also lived with her and Bell's daughter Sally Jefferson Bell and Sally's husband Jesse Scott, a man descended from whites and Native Americans. A number of Isaacs and West's children would later marry into the Hemings family as well. When Isaacs and West began living together, then, they not only presented themselves to Charlottesville as a legitimate family, but they also bolstered an interracial community on Main Street that had been growing since the eighteenth century. Their presence may have brought the size of that community to a critical mass that finally provoked one or more Charlottesville whites to take action against it by striking at its newest and therefore most vulnerable members.(29)

It is impossible, however, to discount the significance of Nancy West's improved economic position, which was coterminous with her new living arrangements. Before 1819 she had been marginalized within the Charlottesville community spatially, socially, and economically. West was a free woman of color who owned property and a business, and who carried on a sexual relationship with a white man, but at least she was peripheral to the public gaze. She may have lived just a few blocks from David Isaacs, but her land sat at the edge of town. As late as 1820 her original property, including the structures on it, was valued at only $400, at a time when most lots nearer the courthouse, even those just a block closer, were worth at least three times that amount. Before 1820 Nancy West posed no serious or visible threat, literally or figuratively, to the economic standing of other members of the white community. After that year, however, she not only lived openly as the wife of a white man, but she was accumulating capital and occupying valuable, centrally located real estate alongside other whites. The lot Nancy West purchased on Main Street in 1820 was practically across the street from her original location, but it was worth nearly $1,900, which represented economic strength on a completely different scale than that she had previously enjoyed.(30)

For some Charlottesville residents, then, Nancy West and David Isaacs had crossed the boundaries of acceptability in numerous ways--not least of which was economic--and it was time to call them to account for it. The Albemarle County grand jury, however, seemed confused as to how to proceed against West and Isaacs, a confusion that was especially apparent in their failure to specify the precise nature of the charges they wanted the court to bring against the couple. The language of the presentment alleged that the couple violated "the laws of the land," but it contained what appeared to be contradictory accusations. On the one hand, Isaacs and West supposedly had committed the crime of engaging in the "illicit commerce" of a sexual relationship outside of marriage, with the legal implication that they were in violation of anti-fornication statutes. Yet simultaneously, according to the presentment, the offensiveness of their relationship lay in their "cohabitation as man and wife"; that is, acting as if they were married. Given their respective races, this phrasing could be interpreted as an accusation of another crime altogether, namely that of racial intermarriage.

In its opinion on West and Isaacs's case delivered in November 1826, the General Court refused to entertain such vagaries of the presentment. In a case it had only recently decided, the court held that a single act of fornication could not be prosecuted at common law without other circumstances which in and of themselves would qualify as misdemeanors.(31) If, for example, a couple had sexual intercourse in public, the court argued that it "would be indeed an enormous indecency, and so grossly offensive and shocking to the feelings of society, as to entitle it to severe legal animadversion." Such circumstances, though, did not attend to West and Isaacs's case, and the Albemarle County grand jury never claimed that they had. The General Court suspected that the grand jury had included language about the couple living together to intimate that by sharing a household, the couple made their offense against society particularly outrageous. The grand jury presumably meant to imply that, insofar as the nature of their relationship had become so obvious, West and Isaacs had "aggravate[d] its malignity." For their part, however, the justices of the General Court felt that the facts that the couple "occupied the same chamber, ate the same board, and discharged towards each other the numerous common offices of husband and wife" were "in themselves harmless and inoffensive." In short, the court determined that a couple living together as husband and wife could not be said to be acting contrary to public morals. At least at common law, anti-fornication statutes could be used to punish flagrant and public acts of sexual indiscretion, but not (regardless of a lack of formal validation from the state) a marriage-style relationship. If the Albemarle County grand jury wanted to try and charge Nancy West and David Isaacs with violating the state law against fornication, which technically had nothing to do with the egregiousness of the circumstances surrounding the sexual behavior, it could try. Under the presentment before the court, however, the justices ruled that the couple had committed no recognizable crime.(32)

In part, the leniency shown to West and Isaacs can be explained by the specifics of their case as it related to the judicial interpretation of the common law, the principles of which easily gave the General Court a defensible rationale for not punishing an interracial couple guiltless of either flagrantly fornicating or of being legally married. The Albemarle County grand jury badly bungled its presentment against the couple, partially because the white community as a whole had failed to do anything about West and Isaacs for so long. Whites in Charlottesville had allowed the couple to carry on their relationship unchallenged so long as the couple did not pretend it was legitimate. Once Isaacs and West did suggest legitimacy by their new living arrangement, however, it was too late to find a court that would do anything about it. Also, while the presentment ostensibly attacked violations of both racial and sexual mores, it effectively attacked neither. To claim there had been a criminal violation of the racial order meant acknowledging the semblance of marriage in which West and Isaacs lived, but to attack the violation of the sexual order required challenging that very acknowledgment. In other words, Nancy West and David Isaacs either could be married or could be fornicators, but they could not be both. The General Court, presented with this legal and social conundrum, chose to leave the relationship as it was.

Still, even though the General Court rejected the validity of the charge against West and Isaacs on reasonable grounds, the couple had escaped mostly on a technicality. In other cases involving interracial sex, high courts across the South did sometimes demonstrate a willingness to override common law traditions to express their own or the community's disgust. Had sex across the color line truly appalled the justices of the General Court, surely they could have broadened the interpretation of common law to envelop the Charlottesville case and thereby closed the loophole that enabled even the most thinly veiled interracial sexual relationships to go unchecked. That they refused to do so in part suggests a judicial lack of motivation to take action against sexual activity between white men and black women in Virginia, especially when conducted entirely in private. More specifically, there were relationships like that of Isaacs and West all across Virginia, some of which surely involved more prominent individuals than a Jewish merchant from a small hinterland town. Had the justices deemed interracial sex behind closed doors susceptible to prosecution in this instance, no one could predict how many other white men might be exposed to similar charges.(33)

The decision of the General Court still begs the question of why the grand jury did not present the couple as being in violation of some specific statute. Surely a statutory case, either for fornication or for interracial marriage, might have had a better chance of success. Prosecuting the couple for violating the statute against interracial marriage would have done the most severe damage to West, Isaacs, and their family together. In 1822 the white party to an interracial marriage faced six months in jail and a $30 fine, and any member of the clergy performing a marriage ceremony between people of different races had to pay a fine of $250.(34) But proving a charge of interracial marriage here probably would have proved exceedingly difficult. There is no evidence West and Isaacs ever married, and given the potentially severe legal repercussions of such an act it would have been foolish for them to have done so. Additionally, their marriage would have been a violation not only of state law but of Jewish law as well, since Nancy West was not Jewish.

It is worth observing that, even if the couple had been married, ambiguities surrounding Nancy West's status might have made it difficult to bring a case of a racial nature against her and Isaacs. To be defined as mulatto under Virginia law in 1822, a person had to have at least "one-quarter" African ancestry.(35) Nancy West's father, Thomas West, was white. To use the fractional language of the time, his daughter therefore would have been, at most, "half-black." But perhaps she was even less than that. Whites in her community certainly appear to have known her ancestry, and in numerous documents she is described as a "free mulatto woman." Yet when she registered as a free person of color with the county court in 1837, she was described as being of "light complexion."(36) Her brother James legally married a white woman, Susannah Harlow, in Albemarle County in 1794, suggesting that his (and Nancy's) mother's racial ancestry may have been mixed enough for her children with a white man to become legally white.(37) Had a case of interracial marriage been brought against West and Isaacs, then, proving conclusively that West fell within the guidelines of the racial definition statute making her a mulatto, while possible, might have been complicated. Once the "blood" aspect of her racial identity became an admissible legal question, then how the white community treated her would have played a role in further determining her status. At least two of her children were educated with white children in local schools, and one local man testified in a separate lawsuit that her nieces and nephews were "esteemed, received and accepted as white men, were educated with white children and required to perform and did perform Militia and other duties, required only of white men, and allowed to intermarry without objection on the score of blood, with white women."(38) Perhaps a case could be made that Nancy West, too, was effectively a white woman. In antebellum Virginia, race may have been fixed according to law, but it was far more malleable in practice. It has become a standard trope of historical treatments of race that the category itself is a fiction, constructed and reconstructed socially, legally, culturally, economically, and in a multitude of other ways. While the limitations of the public record make it difficult to speculate about how Nancy West and her family envisioned their own racial identities, West's color, ancestry, and local standing all would have complicated the possibility of using race against her in a prosecution for racial intermarriage.(39)

Proving a statutory case of fornication, on the other hand, should have been relatively easy and straightforward. That the couple had had sexual intercourse was evident, and even the General Court conceded that, given the evidence presented by the grand jury, "the existence of a statutory offence may be inferred."(40) It is not entirely clear why the Albemarle County grand jury chose not to pursue a charge based on the infraction of the anti-fornication statute. Possibly it was just a tactical legal mistake, but perhaps the grand jury wanted to use its presentment to express a broader sense of moral outrage than was suggested by the language of the fornication statute, which included nothing specifically about race. From this perspective, trying to bring West and Isaacs up on charges was less about punishing them than about publicly rebuking and humiliating them with a reminder that although they might consider their family legitimate, the white community did not.

Ultimately, even if West and Isaacs had been found guilty of violating anti-fornication laws, their punishment would have been mild, just a ten-dollar fine.(41) Despite the revulsion that white Virginians expressed publicly toward sex across the color line, there was very little the law could do to stop it. Since West and Isaacs were not married and there were no laws specifying penalties for interracial sexual acts of any sort, no one really could prevent the couple from living together and building a family--unless the community was literally willing to run them out of town. When confronted with interracial sexual relationships, however, whites in Charlottesville, like whites in general across the state before the Civil War, seem to have had no inclination to take such extreme action.(42) Even if some people were so inclined, West and Isaacs probably had enough support from other members of the white community to prevent it. More than anything else, the charges against Nancy West and David Isaacs demonstrate that their family was always vulnerable to legal harassment and that its legitimacy could always at least be called into question. The case brought against them was mostly a psychological ploy, intended to anger and instill insecurity precisely at a time when West, Isaacs, and their children were trying to build a new sense of familial intimacy by sharing a household. Ironically, with its decision the General Court effectively, if not legally, recognized the relationship of David Isaacs and Nancy West as what we might call a common-law marriage. No statutory case of fornication was ever made against them, but living under the duress of pending criminal charges for nearly five years may well have wrought psychological damage against the couple and their family nonetheless.

Surely David Isaacs and Nancy West knew that attempting to live together and establish adjacent businesses openly as husband and wife might arouse the hostility of some of their neighbors and possibly even invite criminal prosecution. The question remains why they made such a move despite this awareness. Certainly Isaacs and West wanted to live together with their children because they were a family. Moreover, immediate practical concerns may have played a role, since David Isaacs's house was much bigger than Nancy West's, which may have been very cramped with so many children--at least two of whom, Jane and Thomas, were themselves actually adults--trying to live in it along with their mother. In fact, between 1802 and 1833, David Isaacs added one-story wings onto either side of his home, no doubt in part to make room for the increasing number of residents.(43) Yet it is clear that the couple also had long-term concerns about their family's economic stability and security, concerns that could be alleviated considerably through their new arrangement. Solidifying their relationship as domestic partners was part of a conscious effort to strengthen the security of their respective--and subsequently, their collective--finances. That they did so successfully solely because of the illegality of their relationship could only have antagonized their white accusers even more.

By 1820, if David Isaacs's economic position was established, it was not necessarily stable. As a merchant, if he were smart and careful he could prosper, but the assumption of debt and extensions of credit that accompanied his enterprise also entailed a great deal of risk. Misfortune or carelessness could produce financial ruin. David Isaacs was very familiar with the vagaries of the market, having sued at least seven different people for debt between 1810 and 1822 alone.(44) However, in addition to the uncertainties inherent to his business, David Isaacs faced other potential threats to his financial stability. When his brother Isaiah died in 1806, he had left behind not only his estate of real and personal property but also four young children, for whom David Isaacs took primary responsibility. Although two of Isaiah's children had died by the early 1820s, David Isaacs's entanglement of his own financial affairs with those of his deceased brother and his surviving niece and nephew made his economic situation even more precarious than that of other merchants.(45) With no bankruptcy laws in Virginia in the 1820s, what a man in David Isaacs's position needed perhaps more than anything else was a form of insurance--some sort of knowledge that he had somewhere to turn for support and assistance should catastrophe befall him.

As a free person of color, Nancy West also needed security above anything else. In some ways, by 1819 she was fortunate. Both capital and land were typically beyond the reach of free blacks in Virginia, most of whom lived in dire poverty at the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Free women of color in particular confronted severely restricted employment opportunities, but throughout her life, Nancy West had been able to rely on white male patrons--her father, Thomas Bell, David Isaacs--to help shield her from trying economic circumstances. Still, her relationship with Isaacs was tenuous to the extent that it was not recognized by law, meaning that she could be assured of Isaacs's protection only so long as he lived. Despite having some of her own resources, had David Isaacs died anytime before 1819, Nancy West would have been left very heavily dependent on his estate for survival. The debts inevitably accrued by Isaacs as a merchant and as an executor would have to be paid in the event of his death. There was therefore no guarantee that West could rely on inheritance for financial stability.(46)

Nancy West's financial interests, in turn, were inextricable from those of her children, for if she could not survive economically, neither could they. Free women of color frequently had to rear their families alone, since they generally outnumbered free black men and were usually too poor to purchase enslaved spouses. Again, West was in a privileged position in this regard so long as David Isaacs lived, but in 1819 he was nearly sixty years old and had five children with West who were still under age thirteen. Jane Isaacs, the couple's oldest daughter, was twenty-three and a milliner, enabling her to assist her mother both financially and as a secondary caregiver if necessary, but without Isaacs's support the entire family would have to struggle like so many other free families of color.(47) In addition to their individual interests, then, David Isaacs and Nancy West shared collective concerns regarding their children. Together they faced the anxieties of continuing to support their offspring until they all reached maturity, as well as of guaranteeing the security of their children's futures as they came of age.(48)

The structure of Isaacs and West's relationship after 1819 nicely served their mutual financial interests and concerns. For David Isaacs, having Nancy West by his side both domestically and economically meant that he had some financial security should disaster strike. He could rely on her as an outside source of capital to vouch for him, provide security in case of debt, and even support him if he went completely bankrupt. Living, working, and owning land alongside David Isaacs, meanwhile, operated to Nancy West's distinct advantage as well. She not only gained access to greater wealth and potential income, but, more significantly, to some degree of independence. If anything were to happen to David Isaacs after these maneuvers, Nancy West was now assured of having sufficient means to support herself. This improved financial relationship also served the interests of the couple's children. If Isaacs lost his money or died or both, West was in a better position to support the couple's children as they grew, and by helping her to increase her wealth and landholdings over time, it allowed West to pass some or all of that property on to her children as they got older and needed financial footholds of their own.

Throughout her life Nancy West always acquired land from members of her own family or that of David Isaacs, and Isaacs himself repeatedly facilitated West's economic mobility by actively helping to ensure that she had significant resources independent of his own wealth. The lot West bought in downtown Charlottesville in 1820 was, like the property she procured in 1803, land that had originally belonged to her father. Thomas West had rented the lot to Isaiah Isaacs during his lifetime and bequeathed it in his will to James Henry West's four children, each of whom held one-quarter interest. Between 1817 and 1819 David Isaacs purchased three-quarters of the lot from Nancy West's nieces and nephews. Just over a year later, Isaacs sold his entire share to Nancy West for $600, who herself purchased the final quarter from her niece Susannah in 1823.(49) By the time West bought Isaacs's portion of the property in 1820, she had sold her land on the outskirts of town to a free man of color named William Spinner for exactly $600, but there had been legal complications in the exchange. Consequently, she had not yet received any payment for that land, and would not until 1829.(50) She was earning her own money as a baker, but it still seems unlikely that West would have had $600 saved from her own income alone to pay Isaacs for the land. Instead, it appears that David Isaacs purchased most of the land in pieces, specifically for the purpose of then transferring it to Nancy West, with her purchase money then either given or loaned by him. At the very least, it was an unusual exchange, one made much easier for West by Isaacs's intervention. In his will, despite the fact that he had already sold the land legally to West, Isaacs made a specific point of relinquishing "all the right, title, interest, claim or demand" he had in the plot. Presumably this was to be certain that no one would question the land transfer or suggest that Nancy West's land was in reality still owned in any way by Isaacs or paid for with his funds. It was important that anyone who asked know that this property belonged exclusively and entirely to Nancy West.(51)

In 1824 West paid $400 for the northern half of another lot, number 19, directly across the street from the land she had bought in 1820. By this time it is certainly possible that she had enough money saved both from her business and from rents and profits collected on her property to conduct the transaction entirely on her own accord.(52) Still, David Isaacs mediated this exchange as well, since the seller was his nephew Hays Isaacs, for whom David continued to be partially responsible as executor of his brother's will.(53) David Isaacs no longer needed to be a financial backer for West, but this familial connection gave her privileged access to a land purchase she might not have had otherwise. Finally, in 1827 West purchased another Charlottesville property, lot 25, directly from Isaacs, who had bought it from a member of the Taliaferro family, who had purchased it from the estate of Thomas West.(54) David Isaacs did not have to sell land to Nancy West at all. But the couple astutely realized that dividing accumulated wealth between them ultimately was more stable and secure than simply aggrandizing Isaacs's estate. The only other time Nancy West ever came into land ownership was when David Isaacs bequeathed her in his will partial interest in his property, some of which she eventually purchased outright from his estate.(55)

Obviously, every free family, white or black, worried about the state of its finances, and many of both races kept property ownership within their extended families. In this respect there was nothing especially unusual about David Isaacs and Nancy West.(56) The couple was unusual, however, because even as antebellum Virginia law deprived them of an official marriage, they were not only effectively married but the law gave them an ability to stabilize their finances and hedge against economic peril that few white couples could ever have. In most Virginia families, married women had practically no authority to hold or dispose of property until 1877. Instead, by law every wife became a feme covert, meaning that upon marriage a woman surrendered ownership of all her personal and real property to her husband. A husband could not sell his wife's real estate entirely at will, but he was entitled to use it as he chose and keep all profits derived from it. That same property, though, could then be lost by both parties to a marriage in the event that creditors came calling. One of the few ways for a married woman to retain any property rights was to have a trust established for her in equity by someone else (usually by her father)--but almost invariably a trust came with conditions that precluded the full range of its use. The legalities of trusts were so complicated that, over time, the equity system yielded increased litigation.(57)

Yet because of the unusual nature of their relationship, Nancy West and David Isaacs effectively circumvented and subverted the restrictions of the Virginia property laws. West could never claim a dower right in Isaacs's estate as a legally married woman might, but since she and Isaacs were not married she eluded the restrictions of coverture. Even more valuable than a dowry, perhaps, she could own her own property outright without interference or conditions on its use and thus did not need the protection for women that a dowry provided. Race and gender barriers in antebellum Virginia may have limited Nancy West's ability to accumulate real estate and other forms of wealth, but, with regard to property rights, Virginia law actually made Nancy West's position stronger precisely by the means it attempted to restrict her. She was a free woman of color who, specifically because she was "married" (in fact but not in law) to a white man, had more economic independence, strength, and mobility than nearly any married white woman. Furthermore, while white families could protect a married woman's property from creditors through equity, the delimited conditions of its use restricted the free flow of capital both for families and the larger society, and almost always precluded strategies of cooperation that might otherwise maximize a couple's and their family's economic potential through more flexible and collective uses of capital. Nancy West and David Isaacs were not bound by any such fetters. Many white couples, in fact, may have wished they could have enjoyed the economic dynamics of this relationship. In fact, it may have been especially galling to them that West and Isaacs could structure their financial lives so advantageously even as (and, ironically, because) they lived and worked together but stayed unmarried.(58)

West and Isaacs's financial arrangements would be put to the test even before the General Court handed down its opinion in the state's case against the couple. In the spring of 1826 a number of Charlottesville merchants sued Isaacs for debts they believed he owed them in his capacity as executor of his brother's will. By the mid-1830s over half a dozen Charlottesville business owners sued Isaacs in three different lawsuits that dragged on through the courts for twenty years, past the time of Isaacs's death. As the suits progressed, the various plaintiffs demonstrated their willingness to use West and Isaacs's relationship against them in order to head off their defense. That they tried at all demonstrates again how white men in conflict might use evidence of an interracial sexual relationship instrumentally, as a means of attack in pursuit of a larger goal. That they failed reinforces the notion that while whites might have some success in harassing an interracial couple by using the law, they had greater difficulty in using it to produce more tangible consequences.

When David Isaacs's nephew Hays Isaacs turned twenty-one in February 1824, he came into his full inheritance from his father Isaiah. It seems he celebrated by going on a spending spree, mostly in Charlottesville. Local merchants and tradesmen familiar with both the young man and his financial situation willingly extended him credit, and Hays accumulated debts at numerous establishments totaling well over $1,000. Unfortunately, Hays was a financially inexperienced and irresponsible young man, more comfortable with buying and spending than with saving and accounting. By the end of 1824 some of the Charlottesville merchants tried to collect, only to have Hays refuse to pay, claiming he had no money. Nimrod Bramham and William Bibb consequently sued him for debt in Richmond, where he had also purchased some items from that branch of Bramham and Bibb's mercantile firm. In March 1826 a court in Henrico County ruled in favor of the plaintiff, at which point Hays Isaacs promptly left Virginia and never returned.(59)

Just a month later Joel Yancey, another Charlottesville merchant, filed suit in chancery in Albemarle County against David Isaacs. Yancey believed that David Isaacs, as the executor of Isaiah Isaacs's estate, still held a large sum of money for Hays Isaacs. Since Hays owed Yancey more than $400 but was unable or unwilling to pay his debts (and for that matter, could not even be located), Yancey's suit maintained that David Isaacs ought to be held responsible for paying his nephew's creditors. In June 1826 the merchant John R. Jones, who owned a store directly across the street from Isaacs and Nancy West, filed a lawsuit similar to Yancey's, and their cases were eventually joined together. In 1830 Bramham and Bibb, along with five other men to whom Hays owed money, sued David Isaacs as well.(60)

John R. Jones filed a statement that detailed his individual claims but also spoke to the complaints all the creditors had about how Isaacs had administered his nephew's inheritance. Hays Isaacs had signed away to David Isaacs all claims to his inheritance very soon after he came of age. Jones argued, however, that Isaacs had hurried his nephew--who in any event was "totally without experience" in analyzing financial accounts--through the release process, even paying an attorney $100 just to get Hays's signature quickly. David Isaacs, Jones alleged, had mishandled the accounting for his brother's estate and wanted to procure his nephew's release "for the purpose of closing the door to any investigation" into the accounts. Furthermore, Jones claimed that David Isaacs knew that Hays had amassed substantial debts. By getting Hays to relinquish his rights the elder Isaacs hoped to avoid having to fulfill his nephew's obligations and instead keep what remained of Hays's inheritance himself. Jones demanded that Hays's debts to him be paid from David Isaacs's accounts.(61)

Isaacs responded in March 1827. First, he argued that he had never wanted to be his brother's executor at all. The other men named as executors had "declined incurring the trouble and responsibility." As Isaiah's only brother and closest relative David Isaacs felt a "sacred duty" to take the job on himself, but he claimed he "indulged no hope or expectation" that it would be "either safe or profitable to him." Isaacs further claimed that he had never cheated his nephew out of what rightfully belonged to him. He explained that Hays "was and had been unsettled and itenerant [sic]" and was considering leaving Virginia when he turned twenty-one. In addition, the accounts of Hays's inheritance suggested to both uncle and nephew that when Hays came of age, the amount being held for him would be roughly equivalent to bills that still had to be paid and to money owed David Isaacs in his capacity as executor. Consequently, they had mutually agreed that Hays would release his claims and let his uncle work out the details. David Isaacs insisted that the $100 paid to his attorney was for services accumulated over time and not merely to obtain Hays's signature, as Jones's suit alleged. Furthermore, he had wanted to make a final settlement of Hays' s accounts because he feared he might become responsible for the young man's future entanglements and possibly suffer "loss and, probably, great injustice." Rather than using any "undue means" to procure Hays's release, trying to swindle his nephew, or avoid investigation, David Isaacs contended that he had tried to end his financial connection to Hays precisely so he would never have to face the kind of lawsuit he now confronted. So far as he was concerned, his dealings with Hays Isaacs and his inheritance were complete, and he maintained that he could not be held responsible for any additional debts Hays had incurred.(62)

Witness testimony in the case centered on two issues. The first was Hays Isaacs's alleged incompetence concerning financial matters. V. W. Southall, David Isaacs's lawyer, testified that Hays had seemed satisfied with his uncle's handling of his accounts. Although he did not know Hays very well, Southall believed Hays seemed capable of making his own financial decisions, but he conceded that Hays did not "take time to examine the items composing the account." The merchant Isaac Raphael testified that Hays would not do blindly whatever David Isaacs told him to, but that Hays was also not "capable of investigating complicated accounts and of making judicious contracts about his property." Daniel Keith, Charlottesville's constable, lived one block from David Isaacs and was asked whether he thought Hays capable of handling money or property. Keith answered, "I knew him well. And think him incapable of managing either." Keith also found him generally to be "foolishly extravagant."(63)

As the plaintiffs' lawyer probed these white community members for their assessments of Hays Isaacs, he also hammered away at David Isaacs's relationship with Nancy West and their daughter Jane. Opie Norris was asked if Nancy West and Jane Isaacs were "both members of the family" of David Isaacs, "the first in the character of wife, and the second as daughter." Norris, giving an honest but disingenuous answer, probably in an effort to protect his friends, replied that Nancy and Jane lived in Isaacs's house but that he did not know for certain "that Nancy West is the wife of the defendant Isaacs or Jane Isaacs the daughter--only from public rumor." Daniel Keith, meanwhile, said that he knew Nancy and Jane and that "Nancy lives with [David Isaacs] as wife and Jane is called the daughter." Keith, Norris, and Isaac Raphael all also testified that they believed that around the time Hays turned twenty-one Nancy West had purchased his house and land in Charlottesville and that both she and Jane might have received some slaves from him.(64)

David Isaacs and Nancy West had had their fornication charge dismissed just six months prior to the witness testimony in the Yancey and Jones lawsuit, only to find themselves confronted with an antebellum catch-22. Their original legal troubles had them trying to answer the accusation that they were not a legitimate family. Now Yancey and Jones argued that lsaacs's financial transactions were of questionable legality because he and Nancy West were in fact a family. The point of clarifying that David Isaacs's relationship with Nancy West was one of husband and wife was never overtly made in the case papers, but the implication was obvious: David Isaacs had taken advantage of his unusual relationship with Nancy West to acquire real and personal property from his nephew for himself. By making West the purchaser, the argument went, Isaacs was trying to avoid the obvious charge of a conflict of interest that might arise had he purchased the property directly, but since West was effectively if not legally Isaacs's wife he could still enjoy the benefits from its use. Similarly, while Jane Isaacs nominally owned some of the slaves once belonging to Hays Isaacs, in reality David Isaacs had merely boosted his own holdings through his daughter's ownership. These transparent ruses, Yancey and Jones suggested, were clear abuses of David Isaacs's power as executor of Isaiah Isaacs's estate. He had exploited his inexperienced nephew's finances for his own personal aggrandizement.

It is impossible to know how well or how poorly Hays Isaacs understood his financial affairs or, for that matter, how much of an effort David Isaacs made to keep his nephew informed. At the very least, numerous aspects of the situation looked suspicious. David Isaacs's own lawyer admitted that Hays hardly looked over his uncle's accounts before relinquishing his claims. That Nancy West and Jane Isaacs purchased land and may have procured slaves from Hays in December 1824, just as Bramham and Bibb were filing a suit against the young man in Richmond, suggests perhaps that David Isaacs and Nancy West indeed colluded to protect Hays's assets from being lost to pay off his debts. These transactions were certainly a conflict of interest for David Isaacs, since even if they were undertaken at some level to protect Hays, any economic improvements in the lives of Nancy West and Jane Isaacs represented improvements in David Isaacs's life as well. Jones and Yancey had a point when they drew attention to the peculiarities of the Isaacs-West family finances.(65)

David Isaacs's own defense offered only weak responses to the accusations made against him. Undoubtedly, he was being honest when he said he wanted to be rid of any financial responsibility for his nephew. Hays's reckless spending placed David Isaacs at enormous risk, and we have already seen how greatly the elder Isaacs valued security. Ultimately, though, David Isaacs's only substantive response to the charges of Hays's creditors was a demand that the letter of the law be upheld. Regardless of what others might think of Hays's fiscal capacities, David Isaacs argued, he had never coerced Hays into signing anything. He and Hays Isaacs had a legally binding agreement between them, and no third party ought to have the authority to challenge its legitimacy. As David Isaacs pointed out in his response to Bramham and Bibb's lawsuit against him, elaborating on an argument made in his response to Yancey and Jones, Hays had never attempted to retract his agreement to the arrangement between them, nor had Hays ever intimated that he believed he might have made a mistake. Consequently, David Isaacs claimed he could not "see the principle of equity which authorizes other and third persons to impugn or question the right and authority of a legatee or distributee ... after their arrival to age, upon considerations sufficient to themselves, to release and acquit an executor or guardian of any claim."(66)

The Albemarle County Circuit Superior Court of Law and Chancery ruled against David Isaacs on May 16, 1834. Based on its own readings of Isaacs's accounts, the court found that he still owed Hays over $2,500 of his inheritance from Isaiah Isaacs. It ordered that the young man's debts be paid from this sum and that David Isaacs turn over to Hays directly what remained. Essentially, the court accepted the claims of Yancey, Jones, Bramham and Bibb, and Hays's other creditors, all of whose cases the court ruled on together. Hays Isaacs's release to his uncle was technically legal, but the court ruled it could not be construed to have a negative impact on any parties aside from David and Hays. David Isaacs, the court agreed, had procured his nephew's release "as a protection against the claims of the creditors." Additionally, the court took David Isaacs to task for his handling of his nephew's estate, suggesting he had done an injustice to his nephew for his own convenience and probably his own gain. David was not guilty of any criminal activity, but the court asserted that Hays's release was "not founded on an actual settlement, in which every thing is explained; but obtained, as it would seem, with the view of preventing the necessity of such a settlement." The court mentioned nothing about David Isaacs's relationship with Nancy West or the financial transactions between her and Hays Isaacs.(67)

David Isaacs immediately looked to appeal the court's verdict. In order to do so, however, he had to have someone post security equivalent to at least double the amount of the judgment issued against him. If Isaacs lost his appeal and then had insufficient funds to fulfill the court's decision, whoever posted security for him would be obliged to pay. Nancy West was available to assist, as was Jane, who now went by Jane West after having married her cousin Nathaniel H. West in 1832. On June 27, 1834, Nancy, Jane, and Nathaniel West all entered into a bond with David Isaacs, Hays Isaacs, and his creditors. The Wests collectively pledged over $7,000 as security, the entirety of their estates. Once again, David Isaacs and Nancy West proved their relationship provided them with financial strength and a degree of mutual reliance unavailable to others. Yet because they derived their strength only from being inextricably connected to one another, their fortunes still rose and fell together. Here, the Wests' gesture entailed enormous risk.(68)

The same day that Isaacs filed his appeal, Hays Isaacs's creditors jointly filed a bill of exceptions with the Albemarle court claiming that the security posted by the Wests was invalid. First, they argued that Nancy West, though a "woman of colour," was "the wife de facto of David Isaacs ... now living, and for many years having lived with the said David Isaacs as his wife, and which connection is notorious in the neighborhood in which they reside." Second, they claimed that any property West claimed to own in reality belonged to Isaacs. She may have purchased the land herself, but they alleged she did so entirely "with the funds of the said David Isaacs." The creditors further tacked on the assertions that Jane West could not enter into a valid contract because she was a feme covert as a result of her marriage to Nathaniel West, and that Nathaniel West, in turn, was himself "notoriously insolvent" and owned no property at all. Taken as a whole, the intent of these objections was to head off David Isaacs's appeal of the judgment against him altogether by accusing him of trying to post security for himself, since all the pledged money really belonged to him. Being from Charlottesville, Hays's creditors knew that David Isaacs's most realistic sources of sufficient security lay in his own family. If they could demonstrate a reason for the court to reject the legitimacy of the Wests' security, David might well be unable to find another person to put up any money in their place. He would have to start paying off his nephew's debts immediately.(69)

Nathaniel and Jane West paid no land taxes in Charlottesville in 1834 and could have only contributed little to David lsaacs's security. The crux of the matter, then, was whether Nancy West actually had any estate legally distinct from that of David Isaacs. The objections specifically addressing her shared the claim that she did not. In the first, the creditors claimed that Isaacs and West lived as husband and wife, and while their relationship could not be recognized in law as a marriage because it crossed the color line, in this instance it ought to be treated as if it were a legitimate union. If Nancy West was therefore a married woman, she could not possibly post security for David Isaacs because her estate was legally his estate. Realizing that these grounds for objection might carry little weight with any court, since the fact remained that the couple could not be and was not legally married, the creditors filed their second objection. Here, they claimed that any property Nancy West appeared to own was merely an illusion designed to conceal David Isaacs's holdings.(70)

Hays Isaacs's creditors had good reason for wanting their money quickly. Whether or not Nancy West actually owned her own property, they had seen how David Isaacs relied on her whenever he got into financial trouble or looked for some economic advantage. What would happen if Isaacs got into additional legal difficulties while he appealed the judgment against him in this case? By the time a court ruled on the creditors' lawsuit, Isaacs and West could lose both their fortunes, leaving the men to whom Hays Isaacs owed money no possibility of collection, at least not without additional legal proceedings. Each of the objections to Nancy West's posting of security was logically sound, and they reflected the effort by Hays's creditors to object on every possible ground. When placed together in a single document, however, the objections were logically inconsistent. In the first objection the creditors asked the court to acknowledge the legitimacy of West and Isaacs's domestic partnership on equal footing with a legal marriage, thereby invalidating Nancy West's property ownership. In the second objection, meanwhile, it was taken for granted that the relationship could not be legally recognized. The point here was not that Nancy West could not own property, but that in fact she did not. In the same document, then, Nancy West was both married to a white man and not married to a white man. She both owned property and yet could not own property. Having all these claims be true was impossible, but the creditors cannot be blamed for trying. The failure of state law to define the relationship of West and Isaacs effectively meant that any attempt to confront the couple legally would be absurdly slippery. Nancy West and David Isaacs fell through the cracks between the laws and exploited them. Without explanation, the Albemarle court rejected the bill of exception, the Wests' posted security was accepted, and the appeal proceeded. Just as the General Court had determined seven years earlier, little could be done about David Isaacs and Nancy West without addressing a host of other difficult legal issues.

David Isaacs died in 1837. In his will, he provided that Nancy West could continue to reside in the house in which his family lived and worked for as long as she lived, and he directed that it be sold upon her death and the proceeds divided into seven portions for the couple's children. He allowed Nancy to select any items of personal property from the estate she wished to keep and ordered that most of the remainder then be sold at public auction, with the proceeds to be given to a charity selected by his executors. She chose some cooking utensils, a few tables and a dozen chairs, a bureau, a bed and bedstead, an expensive metal clock, and David Isaacs's sleeve buttons and watch chain. At public auction in April 1837, Isaacs's son Tucker purchased some mugs, bowls, and other kitchen accessories, and his daughter Julia Ann's husband Eston Hemings--a son of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings--bought some similar items. Numerous members of the Scott family, who were neighbors, family friends, and distant relatives by marriage, also made some purchases, including Isaacs's copy of the writings of Thomas Jefferson.(71) Little if any of the proceeds from the estate sale went to charity. David Isaacs's estate had a fair number of debts, no doubt compounded by the Panic of 1837. Isaacs's administrator, Egbert R. Watson (Isaacs's chosen executors had failed to qualify), spent more than a decade slowly paying off his liabilities, mostly by collecting debts still owed Isaacs and through rents, profits, and sales of property owned by his estate.(72)

In some ways, the late 1830s and early 1840s were years of great success for Nancy West. David Isaacs's death undoubtedly was painful and there were financial difficulties attendant to settling his estate. West, though, was also able to sell and transfer property to the couple's children and their families, bringing to fruition what had likely been her and Isaacs's long-term goal of insuring self-sufficiency in adulthood for their offspring. As David Isaacs neared the end of his life and then passed away, and as West entered her later years--she was fifty-five by the time of Isaacs's death--this goal became increasingly imperative. In 1836 Nancy West gave a portion of lot 33 to Jane "in consideration of the natural love and affection which she bears to the said Jane West."(73) Nancy probably lived with her daughter for a number of years on this spot as well, since in September 1837 she arranged for a five-year rental of the house she and David Isaacs had lived in, most likely to help pay off Isaacs's debts. Although Isaacs had "loaned" West the property, rental fees accrued to his estate, which technically continued to own the property.(74) Back in her own house in 1842, Nancy West sold the property next door (lot 35) to Eston Hemings, and the following year Tucker Isaacs purchased a small piece of land on lot 33 from his mother next to his sister Jane.(75) By the end of 1843, Nancy West still lived in the house she had shared with David Isaacs and paid taxes on the land, but because Isaacs's estate still retained control over the property she no longer owned anything outright.(76)

Whatever pride came from being able to foster her children's independence, Nancy West still had her own lingering fiscal responsibilities. In early 1846 the Richmond Court of Appeals rejected David Isaacs's appeal from the Albemarle chancery court, but by this point the assets held by Isaacs's estate were not nearly enough to cover the sums owed to Hays and to the numerous merchants of Charlottesville. With accumulated interest and inflation over more than a decade, the debts now totaled around $5,000. It was only a matter of time until Egbert Watson let Nancy West know he had no other option but to ask her to auction off her house. In June 1846 she consented to the sale, but given her own pledge to pay Hays's debts if David Isaacs could not, she really had very little choice. Reluctant to relinquish her family home, however, she bought most of the property back herself for $2,300, while Tucker, who was also acting by this year as his mother's financial agent, bought a small piece of the property for himself.(77) As the time drew near for her to make her first payment for this purchase, however, Nancy West found herself low on funds. If she could not pay for the property, it would be resold, and if the purchase price failed to cover the debts owed by Isaacs, West could still be held accountable to pay what remained.

Even as the decree of the Court of Appeals placed Nancy West in a vulnerable position yet again, it simultaneously provided her with the means to overcome it. The court ordered David Isaacs's estate to pay all of Hays Isaacs's debts, and in keeping with Hays's apparent tendency to borrow money from nearly everyone he knew and not pay it back, he had still had an unpaid loan from Nancy West. In November 1846 Nancy West sued Hays Isaacs in chancery. The story she told in her deposition to the court went back to her land purchase from Hays in the 1820s. As discussed earlier, Hays had sold West half of lot 19 in Charlottesville in 1824. The other half of the lot belonged to Isaiah Isaacs's living daughter, Fanny. In 1825 or 1826, West recalled, Hays offered to buy out his sister's interest and sell the rest of the property to West, but he needed to borrow some money to make the purchase. West loaned him $200, but he never made the purchase, never returned her money, and left the state. West believed at the time of her statement that he lived in Arkansas, leaving her no prospect of collecting directly from him.(78)

With more than twenty years of accumulated interest added to the $200 Hays owed Nancy West, his debt would go a long way toward helping her cover the price of her home, and she practically begged the court to grant her lawsuit. It was her only chance to recover her money. The Albemarle chancery court granted the case, and West and Egbert Watson (who, as administrator of David Isaacs's estate, also administered Hays's accounts) settled out of court in 1850. Finally, David lsaacs's debts were paid, and Nancy West kept her home--barely.(79)

Undoubtedly, Nancy West felt somewhat desperate when she filed her plea to the court in 1846. She herself very nearly crashed financially right along with her deceased husband, and her personal holdings were always at least partially conditional on his financial circumstances. But while she would have had to move from her home had she been unable to scrape together the money to pay for it, it is unlikely that Nancy West would have been relegated to the poorhouse. David Isaacs assisted her in procuring assets independent of his own both so that she could survive financially without him and so that he might depend on her if he needed to. Nancy West implemented precisely the same strategy in the next generation. Because she had already transferred so much of her own wealth to her children, by the 1840s West had established a safety net both for them and for herself. A blend of insecurity and stability thus inhered to Nancy West's position throughout her life in Charlottesville, both domestically and financially. She was effectively married and raised a large family, but the legality of that marriage and consequently the legitimacy of that family was never certain. She managed to attain wealth and pass significant amounts of that wealth on to her children, but her personal fortunes were dependent upon the financial strength of David Isaacs, which in the end was unsure. The dynamics that obtained in the domestic and the financial always overlapped and were integrally related.

In 1850 Nancy West sold almost all the land she still owned in Charlottesville and shortly thereafter moved to Chillicothe, a town in Ross County, Ohio, and the home of numerous communities of free people of color emigrating from Virginia. She died there late in 1856.(80) For much of her life, her economic stature and domestic relationship with David Isaacs seem to have meant that the legal and social hostility facing free people of color in Virginia did not greatly affect her desire to remain where she had been born. In 1832, for example, even as the Virginia legislature passed a series of restrictive laws against free blacks and slaves, she and her son Frederick started and ran a newspaper known as the Charlottesville Chronicle from a building she owned. If Nancy West ever thought about leaving Virginia before David Isaacs died, her actions do not indicate that she had any intention of doing so, and at least for some years after his death her transfer of property to her children implies that she assumed they would stay in Charlottesville as well.(81)

Surely the changing political, legal, and social environments for free people of color in Virginia in the late 1840s influenced her departure. Amidst growing sectional tensions, the General Assembly passed new legislation further constraining the activities and movements of free people of color. These new restrictions included a tax on free blacks to pay for their own colonization to Liberia (which both Frederick and Tucker Isaacs paid in 1850), and a renewed effort to uphold the 1806 removal law, which forced slaves freed after that year to leave the state unless they received explicit permission to remain. Despite her long tenure in her community and having been born a free woman, in 1850 Nancy West found herself before the Albemarle County court along with dozens of other free people of color and asked to prove she was born free and a legal resident of Virginia. Having to make this appearance must have been humiliating, and Nancy West may have chosen to heed Virginia's clear invitation to leave the state.(82)

More than the generally hostile legal environment, the migration of Nancy West's children probably played the greatest role in her decision to move. Eston and Julia Ann Hemings had lived in Ohio at least part of the time since the late 1830s, joining Eston's brother Madison, who had moved there after Sally Hemings died in 1835. By the late 1840s Virginia law stripped free people of color of the right to return to the state if they left, clinching Eston and Julia Ann's decision to remove to Ohio permanently, which they had done in any event by 1845. Since the early 1840s Tucker Isaacs and his wife Betsy-Ann had also sometimes lived in southern Ohio with her parents, former Monticello slaves Joe Fossett (who was also a son of Mary Hemings) and his wife Edy. While Nancy West successfully demonstrated her right to remain in Virginia in 1850, Betsy-Ann Isaacs was not so fortunate. Born a slave, manumitted in 1837, but never having received permission from the legislature to remain, she was required to leave the state; she and Tucker departed Virginia permanently shortly thereafter. Agness Isaacs, Nancy West's youngest daughter, moved to Ohio in the early 1850s along with her husband Jerman Evans, a free man of color from Charlottesville whom she had married in 1836. Agness received her mother's home and property in Chillicothe as an inheritance. By the end of 1850 Nancy West was nearly seventy years old. Her husband had long since died and his accounts were finally settled. Three of her children had departed a Virginia that obviously no longer wanted their presence, and she too decided to live out her days elsewhere.(83)

In the end Nancy West and David Isaacs had achieved much. They had maneuvered through the labyrinths of their local community and of Virginia law to build and maintain successfully a forty-year relationship that should have been impossible. They established themselves as landowners, businesspeople, and parents, and utilized their own success to place their children, whose lifetimes would traverse the Civil War and Reconstruction, in positions where they too might succeed. But each in turn would have to do so on different terms and in different circumstances and social environments than their parents, and they each chose to follow different paths. Among David Isaacs's and Nancy West's children, only Jane West remained in Charlottesville by the onset of the Civil War, where she died a wealthy woman in 1869. Thomas Isaacs's whereabouts for much of his life are unknown. Hays Isaacs, the couple's second son (not Isaiah Isaacs's heir), died a young man in 1839. Frederick Isaacs removed to Wythe County in southwestern Virginia, where he had such difficulties with debts in the late 1830s that he ended up in jail before finally filing in 1837 for bankruptcy under recently passed Virginia laws. Agness Isaacs lived out her life in Ohio, as did Tucker Isaacs, whose house, according to family oral history, served as a station on the Underground Railroad. Tucker Isaacs would also bring suit against an Ohio hotel after the Civil War for refusing to rent him a room. Julia Ann Isaacs moved to Wisconsin with Eston Hemings in the early 1850s. The couple changed their last name to Jefferson and became white persons.(84)

(1) Albemarle County Will Book 3, pp. 302-3; Albemarle County Will Book 4, pp. 18-19. Unless otherwise stated, all Albemarle County records are held at the Albemarle County Courthouse, Charlottesville. James Henry West, "the son [of] Perscilla," was born into slavery, but Thomas West had sold him his freedom for five shillings in 1785; see Albemarle County Deed Book 9, p. 177. Nancy West was born a free person in 1782, which suggests that her mother must have been freed sometime after James's birth. Priscilla, with or without Thomas West, may also have had a third child named Penelope. David Isaacs left some money in his will to Penelope, a free woman of color and the "daughter of old Ciller." Albemarle County Will Book 12, p. 367. Thomas West's land in Amherst County, to which James Henry West moved sometime shortly before 1800, currently lies within the borders of Nelson County along the Rockfish River.

The author would like to acknowledge Peter S. Onuf, Cinder Stanton, Edward L. Ayers, Annette Gordon-Reed, Robert Vernon, and the anonymous readers for the Journal of Southern History for their assistance, comments, and useful criticisms.

(2) Jacob Rader Marcus, United States Jewry, 1776-1985 (4 vols.; Detroit, 1989-1993), I, 149-50; Myron Berman, Richmond's Jewry, 1769-1976: Shabbat in Shockoe (Charlottesville, 1979), 2-3 and 7-9; Herbert T. Ezekiel and Gaston Lichtenstein, The History of the Jews of Richmond from 1796 to 1917 (Richmond, 1917), 13-16, 240; Carol Ely, Jeffrey Hantman, and Phyllis Leffler, To Seek the Peace of the City: Jewish Life in Charlottesville (Charlottesville, 1994), 2; Nancy E. Willner, "A Brief History of the Jewish Community in Charlottesville and Albemarle," Magazine of Albemarle County History, XL (1982), 2; Albemarle County Deed Book 20, p. 436; and Albemarle County Will Book 4, pp. 18-19. Cohen and Isaacs dissolved their partnership in 1792. Isaiah Isaacs first appears on the personal property tax lists in Albemarle County in 1792, and David Isaacs appears first in 1793; Albemarle County Personal Property Tax Books, 1792, 1793, MSS 5145-d, microfilm supplement reel A-1, Special Collections, Alderman Library, University of Virginia [hereinafter cited as ACPPTB].

(3) Manuscript Census Returns, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Albemarle County, Virginia (hereinafter cited as Manuscript Census, [year], Albemarle County), National Archives Microfilm Series (hereinafter cited as NAMS) M-432, reel 932, frame 203. In fact, this made her one of the richest free women of color in the entire upper South. According to Loren Schweninger, in 1850 just four free black women in the upper South owned $5,000 or more in real estate. Loren Schweninger, "Property-Owning Free African-American Women in the South, 1800-1870," Journal of Women's History, I (Winter 1990), 34.

(4) Virginia's colonial legislature explicitly forbade interracial marriage for the first time in 1691. In 1662 the body had addressed the question of interracial sex specifically, imposing a double fine on extramarital relations involving black and white partners. The anti-fornication laws in place by the end of the eighteenth century, however, levied no such additional penalty for interracial sex. W. W. Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia from the First Session of the Legislature in 1619 (13 vols., Richmond, New York, and Philadelphia, 1809-1823), II, 170 (1662, Act 12), and III, 86-88 (1691, Act 16); A Collection of All Such Acts of the General Assembly of Virginia, of a Public and Permanent Nature, As Are Now in Force (Richmond, 1794), Chap. 138, sec. 6; and The Revised Code of the Laws of Virginia (2 vols.; Richmond, 1819), I, Chap. 141, sec. 6, pp. 555-56. See also A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., and Barbara K. Kopytoff, "Interracial Sex and Racial Purity in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia," Georgetown Law Journal, LXXVII (1989), 1967-2029; and Peter W. Bardaglio, "`Shamefull Matches': The Regulation of Interracial Sex and Marriage in the South before 1900," in Martha Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York and London, 1999), 112-38, esp. 113-21.

(5) Important studies of these subjects include but are not limited to Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven and London, 1997); Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (New York and London, 1984); Melton A. McLaurin, Celia, A Slave (Athens, Ga., and London, 1991); Thelma Jennings, "`Us Colored Women Had to Go Through A Plenty': Sexual Exploitation of African-American Slave Women," Journal of Women's History, I (Winter 1990), 45-74; Kent Anderson Leslie, Woman of Color, Daughter c4f Privilege: Amanda America Dickson, 1849-1893 (Athens, Ga., and London, 1995); Cynthia Kennedy-Haflett, "`Moral Marriage': A Mixed-Race Relationship in Nineteenth-Century Charleston, South Carolina," South Carolina Historical Magazine, XCVII (July 1996), 206-26; Henry Wiencek, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White (New York, 1999); Carolyn J. Powell, "In Remembrance of Mira: Reflections on the Death of a Slave Woman," in Patricia Morton, ed., Discovering the Women in Slavery: Emancipating Perspectives on the American Past (Athens, Ga., and London, 1996), 47-60; Adele Logan Alexander, Ambiguous Lives: Free Women of Color in Rural Georgia, 1789-1879 (Fayetteville, Ark., 1991); T. O. Madden Jr. with Ann L. Miller, We Were Always Free: The Maddens of Culpeper County, Virginia, A 200-Year Family History (New York and London, 1992); and Diane Miller Sommerville, "The Rape Myth in the Old South Reconsidered," Journal of Southern History, LXI (August 1995), 481-518. Other works on these topics are cited where appropriate throughout the notes below.

(6) Albemarle County Law Order Book, 1822-1831, October 11, 1822, p. 51.

(7) It is unclear whether West and Isaacs even made an effort to deny the charges against them, but it would have been both futile and perjurious to do so. The Albemarle County Court indicted Nancy West's nephew, Nathaniel West, for perjury the same day the court sent his aunt's case to Richmond. Found not guilty many years later, the timing of Nathaniel West's legal trouble suggests that he may have lied in an effort to protect family members from prosecution. Albemarle County Law Order Book, 1822-1831, May 13, 1824, pp. 129 and 131; and Albemarle County Law Order Book 1831-1837, October 11, 1832, p. 87.

(8) Commonwealth v. David Isaacs and Nancy West, 5 Rand. 634 (Va. 1826).

(9) Albemarle County Law Order Book 1822-1831, May 8, 1827, p. 246.

(10) Manuscript Census, 1810, Population Schedule, Albemarle County, NAMS M-252, reel 66, frame 217. Unlike the 1810 census, in subsequent years the population of Charlottesville was not separated from county totals, which makes it extraordinarily difficult to chart the town's growth with specificity. The population of Albemarle County as a whole, however, grew slowly between 1810 and 1850, from just 18,268 in 1810 to 19,750 in 1820, 22,618 in 1830, 22,924 in 1840, and 25,800 in 1850; census figures cited in John Hammond Moore, Albemarle: Jefferson's County, 1727-1976 (Charlottesville, 1976), 115-16. Even allowing for a generous population increase in the town, by 1822 Charlottesville seems unlikely to have comprised more than three to four hundred people. There were 25 free people of color living in Charlottesville in 1810.

(11) Albemarle County Law Order Book, 1809-1821, May 15, 1812 and May 12, 1818, pp. 137 and 328; and Albemarle County Will Book 1, pp. 25-29.

(12) Mary Rawlings, ed., Early Charlottesville: Recollections of James Alexander, 1828-1874 (Charlottesville, 1942), 20-21, 30-31, and 34 (first quotation on p. 34); and Rev. Edgar Woods, Albemarle County in Virginia (Charlottesville, 1901), 239-40 (second quotation on p. 239), 242-43, 341, and 346-47.

(13) Albemarle County Will Book 12, p. 370.

(14) Rawlings, ed., Early Charlottesville, 11, 12, 35 n. 11, 49 n. 5, and 65 (quotation on p. 35); Woods, Albemarle County in Virginia, 201-3, 243-44; and James A. Bear Jr. and Lucia C. Stanton, eds., Jefferson's Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767-1826, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 2d ser. (2 vols.; Princeton, 1997), II, 947 n. 71.

(15) Jefferson was also at least an acquaintance of Nancy West's father, Thomas. David Isaacs sent Jefferson unsolicited books on Judaism and thought enough of the former president to be one of the earliest contributors to the proposed University of Virginia. Ely, Hantman, and Leffler, To Seek the Peace, 3-4; Albemarle County Will Book 1, pp. 25-29; Marcus, United States Jewry, I, 361; and Bear and Stanton, eds., Jefferson's Memorandum Books (see the index for mentions of Thomas West, as well as for numerous notations of payments made to David Isaacs and other Charlottesville merchants).

(16) Ira Rosenswaike, "The Jewish Population of the United States as Estimated from the Census of 1820," in Abraham J. Karp, ed., The Jewish Experience in America (5 vols.; Waltham, Mass., 1969), II, 2, 8-9, and 19C; Ely, Hantman, and Leffler, To Seek the Peace, 3; and Willner, "A Brief History," 2-3.

(17) Marcus, United States Jewry, I, Chaps. 14-15 (quotation on p. 553). See also Frederic Cople Jaher, A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Anti-Semitism in America (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1994), esp. Chap. 4; and Howard N. Rabinowitz, "Nativism, Bigotry and Anti-Semitism in the South," American Jewish History, LXXVII (March 1988), 437-51. That typical contemporary forms of anti-Semitic prejudice also pervaded Charlottesville in this era is suggested by an 1820 editorial reprinted in the Charlottesville Central Gazette that, while not hostile toward Jews, stereotyped British Jews as "great bankers" whose value to the United States as potential immigrants would lie primarily in their talents with money. Charlottesville Central Gazette, February 4, 1820, p. 4.

(18) The racial status of Jews was a matter of some inconclusive debate in the United States as the language of "racial science" became the widespread means by which Americans discussed racial difference by the 1850s. Before midcentury Americans discussed the racial position of Jews very little and generally accepted Jews as whites, albeit a distinct class of whites. Most importantly for David Isaacs's story, "[t]he Jewish racial question was not a social or political issue in the antebellum South: whatever anti-Semitism Southern Jews encountered was primarily economic or religious." Leonard Rogoff, "Is the Jew White?: The Racial Place of the Southern Jew," American Jewish History, LXXXV (September 1997), 195-230 (quotation on p. 201). See also Sander Gilman, The Jew's Body (New York and London, 1991), Chap. 7, and Jaher, Scapegoat in the New Wilderness, Chap. 5. Karen Brodkin discusses the racial position of Jews in the United States after the 1880s in How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, N.J., and London, 1998).

(19) Woods. Albemarle County in Virginia, 143, 147, 239-40, 243, and 346-47.

(20) While there is no direct evidence to implicate him, John R. Jones seems an especially likely candidate to have brought Isaacs and West to the attention of the Albemarle criminal justice system. Not only was his mercantile business located on property directly across the street from David Isaacs's, but (as discussed below) he would act extraordinarily antagonistically toward him in lawsuits beginning in the mid-1820s. Jones also served as a member of the grand jury that presented Isaacs and West in 1822. Albemarle County Law Order Book, 1822-1831, October 7, 1822, p. 31.

(21) Albemarle County Deed Book 1, p. 162. Nancy West paid taxes on this land in 1800, but did not in 1801, 1802, or 1803, which suggests that someone else (someone other than Thomas Bell, who paid James West for the land but who died in 1800) probably took legal responsibility for the land and its taxes. In addition, Nancy West exchanged a small piece of the property in 1803 to have some fences built, further indicating that she probably did not reside regularly on the property before that year. Albemarle County Land Tax Books, 1800-1804, MSS 5145-b, microfilm supplemental reel 2, Special Collections, Alderman Library, University of Virginia (hereinafter cited as ACLTB); and Albemarle County Deed Book 14, pp. 263-64.

(22) Albemarle County Deed Book 1, pp. 158-59; and Declaration 619, April 1802, microfilm 5794, reel 2. vol. 15, Mutual Assurance Society of Virginia Declarations, Alderman Library (hereinafter cited as Mutual Assurance Society).

(23) Manuscript Census, 1810, Population Schedules, Albemarle County, NAMS M-252, reel 66, frame 179; Rawlings, ed., Early Charlottesville, 74, 79; and Albemarle County Will Book 12, p. 368.

(24) Albemarle County Deed Book 22, pp. 46-47.

(25) Ibid., 177-78. In 1828, for example, the land was occupied by one Mr. Schroff, a tinner; see Rawlings, ed., Early Charlottesville, 72.

(26) Manuscript Census, 1820, Population Schedule, Albemarle County, NAMS M-33, reel 130, frame 75.

(27) Until 1832, although most of the town of Charlottesville lay in Fredericksville Parish, the outskirts of town, including the plot on which Nancy West originally lived, were part of neighboring St. Anne's Parish; see ACLTB, 1833, supplemental reel 4.

(28) Albemarle County Law Order Book, 1822-1831, May 13, 1824, p. 131. Two petitions to the General Assembly from Albemarle County in the decade or so before Isaacs and West were charged indicate that Charlottesville residents also had broader concerns beyond interracial sex about immorality and disorder in their midst. In 1815, for example, twenty-five men asked the state legislature to extend the jurisdiction of town trustees one mile beyond Charlottesville's borders, enabling them to suppress "riots" at "some houses of ill fame within a few feet of the town." The legislature refused this entreaty, only to receive another petition in 1818 making a similar request. This time, the thirty-three signatories complained about large Sunday gatherings of blacks at "tipling-shops" just beyond the town's boundaries, activities that were "inimical to sober habits and morals" and "contrary to good policy and our own safety." It is unclear to what extent the changing evangelical culture of early-nineteenth-century Virginia might have played a role in these protests. By 1850 Charlottesville had forty-five churches, but no denomination had a church building in town at all until 1826. In addition, prominent among the signatories to both petitions were many members of the merchant community, including David Isaacs, suggesting that concerns about drinking and prostitution may have been economic as much as, if not more than, moral. Legislative Petitions--Albemarle County, #6459, December 8, 1815, and #7213, December 14, 1818, Library of Virginia, Richmond; and Moore, Albemarle: Jefferson's County, 77-81, 155.

(29) Census records indicate that Joshua Grady and Betsy Ann Farly almost certainly lived together by 1820 and continued to do so until at least the 1830s. The third couple brought before the court in 1822 was Andrew McKee, a white man and a hatter who was later a party to a lawsuit filed against David Isaacs, and Matsy Cannon, whom I have been unable to locate elsewhere in the public record. Andrew McKee had no free people of color sharing his household in either 1820 or 1830, but a white woman between the ages of 26 and 45 did live with him in 1820. Manuscript Census, 1820, Population Schedule, Albemarle County, NAMS M-33, reel 130, frames 71 and 80; Manuscript Census, 1830, Population Schedule, Albemarle County, NAMS M-19, reel 197, frames 254 and 274; Rawlings, ed., Early Charlottesville, 89; Lucia Stanton, "Monticello to Main Street: The Hemings Family and Charlottesville," Magazine of Albemarle County History, LV (1997), 97-100, 109-10; and Ervin L. Jordan Jr., "`A Just and True Account': Two 1833 Parish Censuses of Albemarle County Free Blacks," Magazine of Albemarle County History, LIII (1995), 136.

(30) Nancy West's original property, lot 46, was valued at just $300, with her house adding an additional $100. By contrast, the land she purchased in 1820, lot 33, was worth $1000, while the buildings on it were valued at an additional $880. ACLTB, 1820-1821, supplemental reel 3.

(31) Samuel Anderson v. Commonwealth, 5 Rand. 627 (Va. 1826).

(32) Commonwealth v. Isaacs and West (quotations at 635).

(33) On the judicial handling of cases involving interracial sex and interracial marriages in the antebellum South, see Peter W. Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill and London, 1995), 48-64, and 260 n. 112. On Virginia see also Peter Wallenstein, "Race, Marriage, and the Law of Freedom: Alabama and Virginia, 1860s-1960s," Chicago-Kent Law Review, LXX (1994), 371-437, esp. 389-94.

(34) Revised Code of the Laws of Virginia (Richmond, 1819), Chap. 106, secs. 22-23, p. 401.

(35) Hening, ed., Statutes at Large, XII, 184 (1785, Chap. 78).

(36) Since 1793 free people of color in antebellum Virginia had been required by law to register with their county court. When Nancy West registered as Nancy Isaacs in 1837 (the earliest registration for her that I was able to locate), she was described as "aged 56 years, 5 feet 1 inch high, light complexion, a scar upon the left cheek, a mole upon the left side of the nose no other scars or marks perceivable." Albemarle County Minute Book, 1836-1838, Oct. 2, 1837, p. 263.

(37) Albemarle County Marriage Register, 1780-1868, August 29, 1794.

(38) Rawlings, ed., Early Charlottesville, 73, 79; and testimony of Benjamin Wheeler, Hays v. Hays, [1836?], Albemarle County Ended Chancery Causes (Circuit Superior Court), Case 354 (Library of Virginia, Richmond).

(39) Barbara J. Fields's famous pair of essays are useful places to begin a historical investigation of the concept of race as a constructed category in the United States, though a scholarly understanding of race as a fiction goes back at least to the work of W. E. B. Du Bois; see Barbara Jeanne Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History," in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York, 1982), 143-77; and Fields, "Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America," New Left Review, CLXXXI (May/June 1990), 95-118. In the spirit of "critical race theory," whose foundational premise is the examination of racial categories, works discussing the construction of "whiteness" have become increasingly numerous of late; important recent works include Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York, 1998); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York, 1993); and David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London and New York, 1991). On cases involving people of ambiguous race and the process of making racial determinations about them in the nineteenth century, see Ariela Gross, "Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth Century South," Yale Law Journal, CVIII (October 1998), 109-88; and Hodes, White Women, Black Men, Chap. 5. On the origins of race and racism in colonial America see Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968); Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill and London, 1996); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), esp. Chap. 15; and Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race. Vol. Two: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (London and New York, 1997).

(40) Commonwealth v. Isaacs and West, at 635.

(41) Revised Code of the Laws of Virginia, I, Chap. 141, sec. 6, pp. 555-56 (passed 1792).

(42) Generally, a sort of practical white apathy in Virginia seems to have held even in cases where a white woman became involved with a black man. The Nansemond County census for 1830, for example, listed at least nine free men of color with white wives, while a divorce case from Campbell County in 1816 involved a free man of color and his white wife who were considered married in their community but not in law. They do not seem to have faced any sort of legal persecution. The lack of effort by whites to take action against interracial couples may have pervaded many other parts of the South as well, as suggested by a study of antebellum Alabama indicating the existence of many stable familial relationships between free black men and white women. Other studies of antebellum South Carolina and Louisiana point to similar phenomena, though the instances discussed involved enslaved women, and it could be argued whites in these places had somewhat different understandings of racial hierarchy than Virginians. On toleration for sexual intercourse between white women and black men in the South, see Hodes, White Women, Black Men, Chap. 1. See also James Hugo Johnston, Race Relations in Virginia and Miscegenation in the South, 1776-1860 (Amherst, Mass., 1970), Chap. 10, esp. 265-66; Thomas E. Buckley, S.J., "Unfixing Race: Class, Power, and Identity in an Interracial Family," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, CII (July 1994), 349-80; Joshua D. Rothman, "`to be freed from thate curs and let at liberty': Interracial Adultery and Divorce and Antebellum Virginia," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, CVI (Fall 1998), 443-81; Gary B. Mills, "Miscegenation and the Free Negro in Antebellum `Anglo' Alabama: A Reexamination of Southern Race Relations," Journal of American History, LXVIII (June 1981), 16-34; Kennedy-Haflett, "`Moral Marriage'"; and Judith Kelleher Schafer, Slavery, the Civil Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana (Baton Rouge and London, 1994), Chap. 7.

(43) Isaacs built a one-story wing onto the west side of his home between 1802 and 1806, and tax records suggest he made this addition in 1803. A small boost in the rental value of the property between 1815 and 1816 may indicate the second wing was built in one of those years, but insurance records indicate its existence by 1833. ACLTB, 1803-1804, 1815-1816, supplemental reels 2 and 3; and Declarations 5201 (1806) and 8233 (1833), reel 8, vol. 63, and reel 14, vol. 94, Mutual Assurance Society.

(44) Albemarle County Law Order Books, 1810-1811, pp. 49, 475; 1811-1813, pp. 134-35, 333; 1813-1815, p. 372; and 1821-1822, pp. 163, 363.

(45) At the time of his death, Isaiah Isaacs had four children by his wife Hetty Hays, who had also died by 1806--Fanny, Hays, Patsy, and David. By 1824 only Fanny, who married a man named Abraham Block and moved away from Charlottesville, and Hays, who seems to have moved between Charlottesville and Richmond, were still alive. Albemarle County Will Book 1, pp. 25-29; and Albemarle County Deed Book 24, pp. 316-17.

(46) Although the Virginia legislature had passed a liberal manumission act in 1782, white Virginians expressed increasing discomfort with the growing free black population in its wake. Legally, the 1806 removal act provided that unless they successfully petitioned the legislature, all freed slaves now had to leave the state within one year of being manumitted or be reenslaved. Other restrictive legislation followed over the course of the antebellum period, including a wave of laws in the early 1830s and in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Socially, whites generally disliked the very presence of people who were of African descent but were not enslaved and treated them with disdain. Economically, while there were greater opportunities for work in urban areas, most free men of color worked as rural agricultural laborers or as tenant farmers living in a perpetual cycle of debt that prefigured the postbellum status of many freedmen. Free black women most commonly worked where they were allowed to, especially as washerwomen or seamstresses, and faced astounding poverty. That some free people of color, including a significant number of women, were able to thrive in Virginia and the South as a whole was the result of great struggle, mutual support forged by communities, families, and institutions, and the occasional ability to form patronage relationships with whites, both sexual and otherwise. The classic study of free blacks remains Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, 1974). Other important general studies include Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915 (Urbana and Chicago, 1990), Chaps. 1-4; Johnson and Roark, Black Masters; Leonard P. Curry, The Free Black in Urban America, 1800-1850: The Shadow of the Dream (Chicago, 1981); and Eugene D. Genovese, "The Slave States of North America," in David W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene, eds., Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedman of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World (Baltimore and London, 1972), 258-77. Studies of free blacks in individual states abound, but those on Virginia in particular include Tommy L. Bogger, Free Blacks in Norfolk, Virginia, 1790-1860: The Darker Side of Freedom (Charlottesville and London, 1997); Madden, We Were Always Free; A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. and Greer C. Bosworth, "`Rather Than the Free': Free Blacks in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia," Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, XXVI (Winter 1991), 17-66; Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 (New York and London, 1984), Chap. 4; Luther Porter Jackson, Free Negro Labor and Property Holding in Virginia, 1830-1860 (New York and London, 1942); and John H. Russell, The Free Negro in Virginia, 1619-1865, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, Series XXXI, No. 3 (Baltimore, 1913). For a study of one free black family in Albemarle County see Kirt von Daacke, "Slaves Without Masters? The Butler Family of Albemarle County, 1780-1860," Magazine of Albemarle County History, LV (1997), 38-59.

(47) West and Isaacs's oldest son, Thomas Isaacs, perhaps could have assisted his mother as well. David Isaacs mentioned Thomas in his will and left him an inheritance, meaning Thomas was still alive as late as 1837, but nothing else is known about him, including his whereabouts at that point.

(48) On free women of color and familial concerns see Lebsock, Free Women of Petersburg, Chap. 4; cf. Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, "Strategies of Survival: Free Negro Families and the Problem of Slavery," in Carol Bleser, ed., In Joy and In Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South, 1830-1900 (New York and Oxford, 1991), 88-102. See also Whittington B. Johnson, "Free African-American Women in Savannah, 1800-1860: Affluence and Autonomy Amid Adversity," Georgia Historical Quarterly, LXXVI (Summer 1992), 260-83; Virginia Meacham Gould, ed., Chained to the Rock of Adversity: To Be Free, Black, and Female in the Old South (Athens, Ga., and London, 1998); Alexander, Ambiguous Lives; and Schweninger, "Property-Owning Free African-American Women."

(49) Isaacs began purchasing the land in 1817, the same year West gave birth to the couple's last child, which may suggest that Isaacs and West planned her move closer downtown a number of years before it actually occurred. Albemarle County Deed Books 20, pp. 436-37, 449; No. 21, pp. 380, 408-9; No. 22, pp. 177-78; and No. 23, pp. 255-56.

(50) The original deed of sale to Spinner in 1819 conveyed him a specifically measured piece of lot 46, when in fact West should have conveyed the entirety of her remaining interest, which was slightly more than the 1819 deed provided. The consequent legal haggling meant the deed had to be redone in 1829. Until the land exchange was finally completed in 1832, Nancy West technically continued to own and pay annual land taxes on the property, and she received no payment for the land's sale until after the second deed was signed. Albemarle County Deed Books 22, pp. 46-47; No. 28, pp. 169-70; and ACLTB, 1819-1833, supplemental reels 3 and 4.

(51) Albemarle County Will Book 12, p. 367.

(52) Between 1820 and 1824 the estimated annual rent on lot 33 was $100. ACLTB, 1820-1824, supplemental reel 3.

(53) Albemarle County Deed Book 24, pp. 316-17.

(54) Albemarle County Deed Books 13, pp. 315-17; No. 19, pp. 361-62; and No. 26, p. 379.

(55) Albemarle County Will Book 12, pp. 366-70; Albemarle County Deed Books 39, p. 232; No. 41, pp. 318-19; and No. 47, pp. 12-13. Nancy West's purchases from relatives and intimates may also be suggestive of the role race and gender played in economic exchange in Charlottesville. It may simply have been easier to buy land from those one knew or were related to, but the pattern of people from whom West purchased her property might also indicate an awareness on her part that others were reluctant to sell land to free people of color or to women. West's economic elevation, then, was not only easier to do through her family, but perhaps she could only do it through her family.

(56) As Luther P. Jackson has suggested about free black property accumulation, for example: "Free Negro ownership of property involved a variety of interests and motives.... One of the strongest of these interests was the maintenance and perpetuation of the family. The ownership of property welded the family together and enabled the holder to share his possessions with his family circle." Jackson, Free Negro Labor and Property Holding, 164.

(57) If a trust in equity was established for a married woman, it was often undertaken by a father for his daughter as both a means for her security and/or as insurance against a careless or exploitative husband, or by a husband wishing to protect property from loss. Whatever the motivation, a trust was an option generally available only to relatively wealthy women. On the legal rights of married women in the antebellum era generally, see Elizabeth Bowles Warbasse, The Changing Legal Rights of Married Women 1800-1861 (New York, 1987). On the legal rights of married women in Virginia up to and through the passage of the Married Women's Property Act in 1877, see Joan R. Gundersen and Gwen Victor Gampel, "Married Women's Legal Status in Eighteenth-Century New York and Virginia," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d set., XXXIX (January 1982), 114-34; Suzanne D. Lebsock, "Radical Reconstruction and the Property Rights of Southern Women," Journal of Southern History, XLIII (May 1977), 195-216; Sara Frances Ketchum, "Married Women's Property Law in Nineteenth-Century Virginia," (M.A. thesis, University of Virginia, 1985); and Cynthia Gianakos, "Virginia and the Married Women's Property Acts," (M.A. thesis, University of Virginia, 1982). On equity, the multiple motivations that lay behind an estate's establishment, and the complications and restrictions that accompanied equity, see Lebsock, Free Women of Petersburg, Chap. 3.

(58) In some ways West and Isaacs's relationship prefigured the effects of the Married Women's Property Act of 1877. For women, as one author writes, that law's "main purpose was to protect the wife's property from being lost to her husband's creditors.... A married woman in Virginia could now own, manage, and dispose of her separate property as if a femme sole"; Gianakos, "Virginia and the Married Women's Property Acts," 37. In the same vein, historian Suzanne Lebsock argues that laws protecting married women's property offered protection to men as well, since "a man who was about to lose his own holdings could rest in the knowledge that in the future his wife's property would be secure." Just so with David Isaacs and Nancy West. Lebsock, "Radical Reconstruction and the Property Rights of Southern Women," 203.

(59) Bramham & Bibb v. Isaacs, Albemarle County Ended Chancery Causes (Circuit Superior Court), Case 58; Yancey v. Isaacs, Albemarle County Ended Chancery Causes (Circuit Superior Court), Case 46, both in Library of Virginia, Richmond; and Albemarle County Chancery Order Book, 1831-1842, May 16, 1834, pp. 97-99. The third case was John R. Jones v. Isaacs, Case 55, but the papers for both Yancey's and Jones's lawsuits are archived together in folders under Yancey's name.

(60) Albemarle County Chancery Order Book 1831-1842, pp. 21, 32, 45, 50, 96, and 97. The other plaintiffs were Samuel Leitch, Andrew McKee, James Saunders, Fountain Wells, and George Toole. McKee was a hatter, Saunders a lawyer, and Toole a tailor who lived and worked in a house owned by Wells.

(61) Statement filed by Rice Wood on behalf of John Jones, June 28, 1826, Yancey v. Isaacs.

(62) Reply of David Isaacs, March 20, 1827, Yancey v. Isaacs. Hays Isaacs's release, dated a few months after his twenty-first birthday, relieved David Isaacs of responsibility for "all and every claim and demand of whatever character or description which ... I possibbly [sic] may have against him ... it being doubtful upon a full and fair settlement, which of us may be debtor to the other...." Release of Hays Isaacs, June 22, 1824, Bramham & Bibb v. Isaacs.

(63) Testimony of V. W. Southall, Isaac Raphael, and Daniel Keith, November 1827, Yancey v. Isaacs.

(64) Testimony of Opie Norris, Isaac Raphael, and Daniel Keith, November 1827, Yancey v. Isaacs. Hays put the slaves he had inherited from his father in trust in December 1824 to be sold in the event he could not pay off debts he had to Jane, Nancy West, and Fountain Wells. It is not clear whether Jane or Nancy ever actually owned any of these slaves outright--although some of their neighbors believed they did--or even if the sale was necessary. In any case, under a provision of his father's will, eventually Hays Isaacs was legally obligated to free all the slaves that he had inherited. On his death, Isaiah Isaacs, "being of the opinion that all men are by Nature equally free," manumitted a number of slaves outright in addition to devising a plan to free others. Deed of Trust between Hays Isaacs, Daniel Keith, Nancy West, Jane Isaacs, and Fountain Wells, in Yancey v. Isaacs (a copy also appears in Albemarle County Deed Book 25, pp. 75-77); and Albemarle County Will Book 1, pp. 25-29. According to property tax records, Nancy West, Jane Isaacs, and David Isaacs (who, like many merchants, probably had customers who sometimes settled their debts with slaves rather than cash) all periodically owned slaves, but never more than a few at once and apparently not for very long at a time. Neither Isaacs nor West owned any upon their deaths in 1837 and 1856, respectively; their eldest child, Jane Isaacs, owned seven slaves at the outbreak of the Civil War. It is unclear if, when, or how either Nancy West or David Isaacs used, sold, or manumitted their slaves when they did own them. Thousands of African Americans purchased slaves throughout the South before the Civil War, sometimes for purposes of economic exploitation and sometimes to keep families together. Since Virginia's removal law of 1806 forced emancipated slaves to leave the state, many slaveowning people of color in Virginia actually possessed relatives who likely would have had to move away if manumitted. Given the intertwined nature of enslaved, free black, Native American, and white ancestries in the extended West-Isaacs-Hemings families, it seems probable that at least some slave ownership by Nancy West and David Isaacs involved protecting family members. We know for certain that some other members of their extended family acted with such a motive. At the estate sale of many of Thomas Jefferson's slaves, for example, Jesse Scott purchased his brother-in-law Joe Fossett's wife and two of the Fossetts' children to keep them from being sold to others. Albemarle County Deed Book 25, pp. 75-77; ACPPTB, 1815-1836, supplemental reels A-3 through A-6; Manuscript Census, 1860, Albemarle County, Slave Population Schedule, NAMS M-653, reel 303, frame 34, p. 4; Stanton, "Monticello to Main Street," esp. 101-2; and Rawlings, ed., Early Charlottesville, 74. On free black slave ownership see Johnson and Roark, "Strategies of Survival"; Philip J. Schwarz, "Emancipators, Protectors, and Anomalies: Free Black Slaveowners in Virginia," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, XCV (July 1987), 317-38; Larry Koger, Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860 (Jefferson, N.C., and London, 1985); Jackson, Free Negro Labor and Property Holding, Chap. 7; Carter G. Woodson, "Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830," Journal of Negro History, IX (July 1924), 41-85; and John H. Russell, "Colored Freemen as Slave Owners in Virginia," Journal of Negro History, I (July 1916), 233-42.

(65) If David Isaacs ever engaged in some creative accounting or exploited his position as his brother's executor, John Jones himself undoubtedly tried to exercise some shady prerogatives of his own. Jones had been a commissioner appointed by the Albemarle County Court in 1823 to help settle David Isaacs's accounts as Isaiah's executor. According to Jones, once Hays Isaacs owed him money, he could no longer act objectively and he excused himself in 1825. He objected to all previous work he had done as a commissioner, which effectively suspended any settlement of accounts. David Isaacs never appealed to the court for new commissioners, which Jones used to accuse him of concealing malfeasance. Jones neglected to mention, however, that after he excused himself he arranged for Hays to sell him all his real estate, which included land in Richmond, two hundred acres in Louisa County, and another seventy-two acres in Henrico County in addition to the land in Charlottesville, if he could not pay a debt of just $254.94. This exchange, of course, was illegal, since Hays had already sold his land in Charlottesville to Nancy West a year earlier, which Jones must have known, having been a commissioner at the time of the sale (Hays had also sold the interest in his inheritance to a man from Lynchburg in exchange for "a valuable consideration" two weeks before he made his deal with Jones. Hays Isaacs thus sold Charlottesville lot 19 three different times, indicating that he was either very stupid, very criminal, or both). As David Isaacs pointed out in his defense, Jones's dealings also pointed directly to his own efforts to cheat Hays Isaacs and to his own abuse of inside knowledge of Hays's affair, since Jones knew the cumulative value of Hays's land far exceeded any debts Hays owed to Jones. In addition, David Isaacs pointed out that it was somewhat illogical and astoundingly duplicitous for Jones to assert that Hays Isaacs was incompetent to make financial decisions while Jones was so obviously willing to take the young man's land at a fraction of its value. Statement filed by Rice Wood on behalf of John Jones, June 28, 1826; Reply of David Isaacs, March 20, 1827; Deed in trust from Hays Isaacs to Rice Wood for John Jones, May 21, 1825; Release of Hays Isaacs to Timothy Fletcher, May 5, 1825, all in Yancey v. Isaacs; and Albemarle County Deed Book 25, pp. 223-24, 231.

(66) Reply of David Isaacs, February 5, 1831, Bramham & Bibb v. Isaacs.

(67) Albemarle County Chancery Order Book, 1831-1842, pp. 97-99; and Opinion of the Court, May 16, 1834, Yancey and others v. Isaacs. The court also found that John Jones had not acted at all improperly in his dealings with Hays Isaacs.

(68) Bond between David Isaacs et al., and John R. Jones et al., June 27, 1834, Yancey v. Isaacs; and Albemarle County Marriage Register, March 27, 1832.

(69) Bill of exceptions filed by Jones and others v. Isaacs et al., June 27, 1834, Yancey v. Isaacs.

(70) Nathaniel West paid personal properly taxes in 1834 on just four slaves and three horses. Jane West paid no taxes of her own and there is no record of a separate estate created for her before her marriage. When Nathaniel West died later in 1834, his estate was valued at just over $1,200. Just over half that sum came from two slaves and a carriage, with the remainder mostly tied up in household goods. In 1835 Jane West paid taxes on one slave, and she paid no land taxes at all until 1838. ACPPTB, 1834, 1835, supplemental reel A-4; ACLTB, 1834-1838, supplemental reels 4 and 5; and Inventory and Appraisement of the Estate of Nathaniel H. West, Albemarle County Will Book 12, pp. 31-32.

(70) Albemarle County Will Book 12, pp. 366-70 and 396-401. Ironically, as county magistrates, Nimrod Bramham and Andrew McKee were among those who appraised David Isaacs's estate in 1837.

(72) A complete settlement of David Isaacs's estate was not made until 1850. See Albemarle County Will Books 13, pp. 172-73; No. 14, pp. 85-86; No. 15, pp. 210-13; No. 17, pp. 67-69; No. 18, pp. 477-82; No. 20, pp. 291-93; and Albemarle County Deed Book 41, p. 238.

(73) Albemarle County Deed Book 35, p. 340. Jane and Nathaniel West and Eston and Julia Ann Hemings probably lived in houses next door to one another on lot 33 from as early as 1832, when both couples married. In 1837 Nancy West sold a portion of the lot on which the Hemings' home sat to Thomas Grady and Anderson Shiflett. Grady and Shiflett agreed also to buy out Julia Ann's dower claim, even though it was not entirely clear that she had one since, as the deed recorded, the property was "given, but never conveyed" to her and Eston by Nancy West. Jane West's home sat on the portion of the land given to her by her mother in 1836, and she held it until 1850, when she moved to a part of lot 36. Albemarle Count Deed Book 35, pp. 264-67; No. 48, pp. 16-17, 429-30; Albemarle County Marriage Register, March 27 and June 14, 1832; and Declaration 8597 (1837), reel 14, vol. 95, Mutual Assurance Society.

(74) Albemarle County Deed Book 35, pp. 205-8. An insurance policy for the property indicates that Nancy West did not live in the house in 1840. Declaration 11186 (1840), reel 16, vol. 103, Mutual Assurance Society.

(75) Albemarle County Deed Books 39, p. 232; and No. 41, pp. 267, 319.

(76) ACLTB, 1844, supplemental reel 5.

(77) Albemarle County Deed Book 47, pp. 12-13. Also in 1846, and also with Nancy West's consent, Watson sold lot 26, the only other piece of property Isaacs's estate still owned, in an effort to raise money to fulfill the Court of Appeals' decree, but this lot was in a swampy and low-lying area and brought in just a few hundred dollars. Albemarle County Deed Book 44, pp. 145-46.

(78) Nancy West also indicated she believed Hays had first been in New Orleans before appearing in Arkansas, and she may have been correct on both counts, given the whereabouts of Hays's sister, Fanny, who lived in Arkansas with her husband Abraham Block in the 1840s and through at least 1855, when Hays formally released any claim he had left in his sister's half of lot 19. Abraham Block was instrumental in founding a synagogue in New Orleans in 1827. In the 1980s, archaeologists excavated a trash pit behind the Block house in Washington, Arkansas. Albemarle County Deed Book 54, p. 37; and Leslie C. Stewart-Abernathy and Barbara L. Ruff, "A Good Man in Israel: Zooarchaeology and Assimilation in Antebellum Washington, [Arkansas]," Historical Archaeology, XXIII (1989), 96-110.

(79) There is no record of the exact terms of the settlement, but presumably Watson agreed to pay Hays Isaacs's debt to Nancy West rather than deal with the hassles of yet another lawsuit involving David Isaacs's estate. West v. Isaacs, Albemarle County Ended Chancery Causes (Circuit Superior Court), Case 370, Library of Virginia, Richmond; and Albemarle County Chancery Order Book, 1849-1854, p. 78.

(80) It is not clear precisely when Nancy West moved to Ohio, though it was probably sometime in 1851 or 1852. She was still in Virginia in December 1850 and bought land from Eston Hemings in Ohio in 1852. By 1854, when she finally sold the last piece of property she held in Virginia, she is referred to in Albemarle County records as Nancy West of Chillicothe, Ohio. Albemarle County Deed Books 48, pp. 428-29; No. 49, pp. 197-98; No. 53, p. 260; Albemarle County Will Book 25, pp. 156-59; Albemarle County Minute Book, 1850-1854, p. 6; and Judith P. Justus, Down From the Mountain: The Oral History of the Hemings Family: Are They the Black Descendants of Thomas Jefferson? (Perry, Ohio, 1990), 111.

(81) Nothing is known about the Charlottesville Chronicle, which was published only in 1832 and 1833 from a site on lot 33, other than James Alexander's recollection that it was a "quasi democratic sheet." Rawlings, ed., Early Charlottesville, 72-73; see also Elizabeth Copeland Norfleet, "Newspapers in Charlottesville and Albemarle County," Magazine of Albemarle County History, L (1992), 75-76.

(82) ACPPTB, 1850, supplemental reel A-8; Albemarle County Minute Book, 1850-1854, p. 6; Acts of the General Assembly of Virginia, 1847-1848, Chap. 10, secs. 34-37, pp. 118-19; Chap. 13, p. 126; Chap. 26, pp. 162-64; Acts of the General Assembly of Virginia, 1849-1850, Chap. 6, pp. 7-8; Revised Code of the Laws of Virginia (Richmond, 1849), Chap. 107, pp. 465-68, Chap. 198, secs. 22-23, pp. 745-48, and Chap. 212, pp. 786-89. Ira Berlin documents the increasingly hostile legislation against free people of color in Virginia and across the South in the 1850s in Slaves Without Masters, Chap. 11. Tommy Bogger documents the hostile social environment for Norfolk's free people of color in the 1850s in Free Blacks in Norfolk, Virginia, Chap. 7.

(83) Stanton, "Monticello to Main Street," esp. 111-20; Albemarle County Deed Books 35, pp. 388-89; No. 42, pp. 282-83; Albemarle County Minute Book, 1850-1854, p. 13; Albemarle County Marriage Register, October 20, 1836; and Albemarle County Will Book 25, pp. 156--59. Before leaving Virginia for good, Tucker Isaacs had earned a reputation in Charlottesville as a painter and builder. He also seems to have picked up the skills of a forger, perhaps from his brother Frederick, who was known for his talent of perfectly replicating the signatures of every signer of the Declaration of Independence. In 1850 Tucker Isaacs went on trial for forging a free pass for his still-enslaved brother-in-law Peter Fossett, who at the time belonged to none other than John R. Jones. Perhaps Jones's underhanded dealings with his parents gave Tucker Isaacs some extra motivation to free his wife's brother. Isaacs successfully pleaded not guilty to the charge. Rawlings, ed., Early Charlottesville, 79-80; and Albemarle County Minute Book, 1848-1850, February 5 and 6, 1850, pp. 308-10.

(84) According to the 1860 census, Jane West was worth over fourteen thousand dollars. Manuscript Census, 1860, Population Schedules, Albemarle County, NAMS Reel M-653, p. 367; Justus, Down From the Mountain, 108, 111; Stanton, "Monticello to Main Street," 119-20; West-Isaacs family Bible records, privately held; Albemarle County Will Book 28, p. 207; Albemarle County Deed Books 34, pp. 510-12; and No. 35, pp. 47-49, 51-52.

MR. ROTHMAN is an assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama.