NONFICTION: PORTRAIT
A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons
by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor
For eight years, beginning with the inauguration of James Madison in March 1809, an African-American slave named Paul Jennings lived and worked in the White House. When his service as footman there began he was about 10 years old — the exact date of his birth is unknown — and his responsibilities included “messenger, dining room servant, assistant to the coachman, and other duties” assigned by the doorkeeper. Jennings was described by one of Dolley Madison’s nieces as “a handsome mulatto boy, and a favorite page of Mrs. Madison’s.”
He came to the White House with the Madisons from Montpelier, the plantation in Virginia where he had been born sometime in 1799. His mother “was a Madison slave, the granddaughter of an Indian; his father was a white merchant named Benjamin or William Jennings,” though beyond that nothing seems to be known about his father’s role, if any, in his life apart from passing along his surname. The harsh rules of the slave-holding states being such as they were, Paul became the Madisons’ slave because his mother was their slave, one of approximately 100 at Montpelier. The only known image of Paul, a daguerreotype taken sometime after he obtained his freedom in 1847, shows “a handsome man with a certain Frederick Douglass-like fierceness.”
By any measure, the Paul Jennings who went to the White House was an exceptional boy. He had “managed to learn to read and write, rare for a slave during a period when it was common for free poor people to substitute a mark for a signature because they were unable to write their own names.” Elizabeth Dowling Taylor speculates that the “likely picture that emerges is of a young Paul absorbing language skills by ‘standing in’ on lessons offered to one or more boys of the Madison extended family. Listening in, secondhand learning: this is perhaps the first instance of Jennings taking advantage of his circumstances.”
Those circumstances were, of course, the household of one of the most prominent and influential Americans of the day, who in 1787 had played a central, indeed essential, role in the shaping of the U.S. Constitution. The Madisons were wealthy landowners and cultured people as well, and Jennings — whose mother was a house servant — seems to have been frequently in James Madison’s presence from a very early age. Taylor writes:
“His exposure to the visual and auditory ‘feast’ at Montpelier was a daily education. The light, the knowledge was shared with him, even if inadvertently. Thus enlightened and informed, he pondered on ways to secure his birthright, the gift Nature had bestowed. Yes, he sighed for freedom, but he did not choose life as a fugitive. … Instead, for the time being, Jennings fashioned a life of meaning while still enslaved. He learned to balance his divided loyalties carefully. He knew how to succeed within the system in which he was trapped. He was good at what he did, always the unobtrusive figure in the background, there to attend to his master’s needs, to anticipate his needs. Madison saw Jennings as trustworthy and capable, and he, in turn, had reason to take pride in his skills and usefulness. But Jennings was also good at gaming the system, judging when to stretch or risk his ‘place,’ and not lacking for courage to follow through.”
During their eight White House years, the Madisons, and thus Jennings, moved back and forth between the president’s house and the family plantation. Washington in the summer was unbearable, while Montpelier was comparatively comfortable. There Jennings, “besides serving as the master’s valet, was the butler or houseman and held the responsibility of head servant.” He greeted visitors at the front door — one of them described him as “courteous, well-bred and well dressed” — and presided over the dining-room table and sideboard. He “set the standards for management of the household, and it was his responsibility to ensure that its enslaved members were fit for skilled service.”
As slaveholders the Madisons were fairly typical of their time and place. Life for slaves in northern Virginia was less onerous than for those in the Deep South — though it was still slavery — and Madison, who as a young man had briefly wished “to depend as little as possible … on the labour of slaves,” was “a garden-variety slaveholder” who “followed the basic patterns and norms for slaves’ living conditions and treatment that had long been established on Virginia plantations.” Like his great friend Thomas Jefferson, he knew that slavery was wrong and wished that it could be extirpated from the young republic, but he did nothing about it.
