“Scholars and general readers alike
will not be able
to put this remarkable book down.”
-- Drew McCoy, author of
The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy
A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons
by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor
with Foreword by Annette Gordon-Reed
Published by Palgrave Macmillan, January 2012
The story of . . .
- the first White House memoirist and his unique journey from slavery to freedom played out in the highest circles of ideas and power.
- the complicated relationship between James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, and his enslaved manservant.
- the even more complicated relationship between Jennings and the widowed Dolley Madison who broke her promise to free him; and of the New England senator, Daniel Webster, who stepped in to aid Jennings by lending him his purchase price.
- Jennings’s efforts to help 77 still-enslaved men, women and children reach freedom in the grandest-scale-ever attempted slave escape.
- a vital antebellum African-American community in the nation’s new capital that included ex-slaves of Presidents Washington, Jefferson and Madison.
It is a story . . .
- that has never been told.
- whose time for telling is now.
- based on original research, newly-discovered documents, and telling oral histories from Paul Jennings’s descendants.
Copy from this website may be republished electronically only with acknowledgement of its source and a link to www.pauljennings.info.
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