August 19, 2009--James Madison's Slave

With Barack Obama’s election, many of us for the first time learned about the role slaves played in the construction of the Capital building and the White House itself. To my new understanding, it appears that they did much of the work. This is yet another chapter of that sorry history and how wonderful that things have come full circle—Obama himself is not descended from slaves but his wife and children are. What must they feel like living there?

Now it has come to light that the first in a long series of White House memoirs was written by a slave. One belonging to President James Madison. Paul Jennings who was owned by Madison and came with him to the Executive Mansion from Virginia when he was elected president. Paul Jennings was only 10 years old at the time and served initially as a footman to his owner and then later as a valet. He wrote that he often shaved the president and that he was kind to his slaves. Jennings was also among the few who stood at his owner’s bedside on the day he died.

Most historically noteworthy, during the War of 1812, when the British threatened the capital and in 1814 burned the White House almost to the ground, it apparently was 15-year-old Paul who played a significant role in rescuing the famous Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington from the flames. It is now the only object from that era that remains in the White House.

Until recently it was believed that Dolly Madison, that legendary hostess, saved it for posterity, but the recently rediscovered memoir of Paul Jennings--A Colored Man’s Recollections of James Madison-- suggests otherwise.

Additional research about Mr. Jennings tells more about his life, including how he won his freedom some years after Madison died. Though slaves were barred from learned to read and write, Jennings somehow managed to; and though their stories were thought by their owners not to be worth recording, at some point in his life Jennings did so.

We also learn from his Recollections and other sources that though President Madison had made plans to release him from bondage at his death, his wife Dolly refused to carry out his wishes and kept Jennings among her own slaves, and that unlike her husband she was a harsh owner. He was forced to live separately from his wife and children and when things turned difficult for Dolly she hired him out to others and, to quote him kept “the last red cent” of what he earned and left him “to get his clothes by presents, night work, or as he might.” (See linked New York Times story for more details.)

She later sold him to an insurance agent who in turn sold him for $120 dollars to Senator Daniel Webster who quickly set him free, allowing him to work as a servant in his household to return the cost of what Webster had paid for him. Paul Jennings was 48 at the time.

As a free man, Jennings worked in the government’s pension office, was able to buy property, and most remarkably, when Dolly Madison later in life fell on hard economic times, in spite of how she had treated him—refusing to release him as her husband had desired—he helped support her in her old age by giving her “small sums from my own pocket.”

Later this month, descendents of the Jennings family will gather for a reunion at the same house in which their great-great-great relative worked faithfully and heroically as a slave.