The First White House Memoir

This is a reprint in its entirety of the 1865 memoir of Paul Jennings, a former slave, and the preface that originally accompanied it. This is a fascinating firsthand account of life in the White House during the Presidency of James Madison. The rare document was reprinted in the Journal of White House History (1983), Volume One, Number One, with a "Commentary: The Washington of Paul Jennings–White House Slave, Free Man, and Conspirator for Freedom," by G. Franklin Edwards and Michael R. Winston. This memoir and detailed scholarly commentary from the Journal is also available from the online Museum Shop.

Preface

Among the laborers at the Department of the Interior is an intelligent colored man, Paul Jennings, who was born a slave on President Madison’s estate in Montpelier, Va., in 1799. His reputed father was Benj. Jennings, an English trader there; his mother, a slave of Mr. Madison, and the granddaughter of an Indian. Paul was "body servant" of Mr. Madison, till his death, and afterwards of Daniel Webster, having purchased his freedom of Mrs. Madison. His character for sobriety, truth, and fidelity, is unquestioned; and he was a daily witness of interesting events, I have thought his recollections were worth writing down in almost his own language.

On the 10^th of January, 1865, at a curious sale of books, coins and autographs belonging to Edward M. Thomas, a colored man, for many years Messenger of the House of Representatives, was sold, among other curious lots, an autograph of Daniel Webster, containing these words: "I have paid $120 for the freedom of Paul Jennings; he agrees to work out the same at $8 per month, to be furnished with board, clothes, washing," &c.

J.B.R.


About ten years before Mr. Madison was President, he and Monroe were rival candidates for the Legislature. Mr. Madison was anxious to be elected, and sent his chariot to bring up a Scotchman to the polls, who lived in the neighborhood. But when brought up, he cried out: "Put me down for Colonel Monroe, for he was the first man that took me by the hand in this country." Colonel Monroe was elected, and his friends joked Mr. Madison pretty hard about his Scotch friend, and I have heard Mr. Madison and Colonel Monroe have many a hearty laugh over the subject, for years after.

When Mr. Madison was chosen President, we came on and moved into the White House; the east room was not finished, and Pennsylvania Avenue was not paved, but was always in an awful condition from either mud or dust. The city was a dreary place.

Mr. Robert Smith was then Secretary of State, but as he and Mr. Madison could not agree, he was removed, and Colonel Monroe appointed to his place. Dr. Eustis was Secretary of War–rather a rough, blustering man; Mr. Gallatin, a tip-top man, was Secretary of the Treasury; and Mr. Hamilton of South Carolina, a pleasant gentleman, who thought Mr. Madison could do nothing wrong, and who always concurred in every thing he said, was Secretary of the Navy.

Before the war of 1812 was declared, there were frequent consultations at the White House as to the expediency of doing it. Colonel Monroe was always fierce for it, so were Messrs. Lowndes, Giles, Poydrass, and Pope–all Southerners; all his Secretaries were likewise in favor of it.

Soon after war was declared, Mr. Madison made his regular summer visit to his farm in Virginia. We had not been there long before an express reached us one evening, informing Mr. M. of Gen. Hull’s surrender. He was astounded at the news, and started back to Washington the next morning.

After the war had been going on for a couple of years, the people of Washington began to be alarmed for the safety of the city, as the British held Chesapeake Bay with a powerful fleet and army. Everything seemed to be left to General Armstrong, then Secretary of war, who ridiculed the idea that there was any danger. But, in August, 1814, the enemy had got so near, there could be no doubt of their intentions. Great alarm existed, and some feeble preparations for defense were made. Com. Barney’s flotilla was stripped of men, who were placed in battery, at Bladensburg, where they fought splendidly. A large part of his men were tall, strapping negroes, mixed with white sailors and marines. Mr. Madison reviewed them just before the fight, and asked Com. Barney if his "negroes would not run on the approach of the British?" "No sir," said Barney, "they don’t know how to run; they will die by their guns first." They fought till a large part of them were killed or wounded and taken prisoner. One or two of these negroes are still living there.

Well, on the 24^th of August, sure enough, the British reached Bladensburg, and the fight began between 11 and 12. Even that very morning General Armstrong assured Mrs. Madison there was no danger. The President, with General Armstrong, General Winder, Colonel Monroe, Richard Rush, Mr. Graham, Tench Ringgold, and Mr. Duvall, rode out on horseback to Bladensburg to see how things looked. Mrs. Madison ordered dinner to be ready at 3, as usual; I set the table myself, and brought up the ale, cider, and wine and placed them in coolers, as all the Cabinet and several military gentlemen and strangers were expected. While waiting, at just about 3, as Sukey, the house-servant, was lolling out of a chamber window, James Smith, a free colored man who had accompanied Mr. Madison to Bladensburg, gallopped up to the house, waving his hat, and cried out, "Clear out, clear out! General Armstrong has ordered a retreat!" All then was confusion. Mrs. Madison ordered her carriage, and passing through the dining-room, caught up what silver she could crowd into her old-fashioned reticule, and then jumped into the chariot with her servant girl Sukey, and Daniel Carroll, who took charge of them; Jo. Bolin drove them over to Georgetown Heights; the British were expected in a few minutes. Mr. Cutts, her brother-in-law, sent me to a stable on 14^th street, for his carriage. People were running in every direction. John Freeman (the colored butler) drove off in the coachee with his wife, child, and servant; also a feather bed lashed on behind the coachee, which was all the furniture saved, except part of the silver and the portrait of Washington (of which I will tell you by-and-by).

I will here mention that although the British were expected every minute, they did not arrive for some hours; in the mean time, a rabble, taking advantage of the confusion, ran all over the White House, and stole lots of silver and whatever they could lay their hands on.

About sundown I walked over to the Georgetown ferry, and found the President and all hands (the gentlemen named before, who acted as a sort of body-guard for him) waiting for the boat. It soon returned, and we all crossed over, and passed up the road about a mile; then they left us servants to wander about. In a short time several wagons from Bladensburg, drawn by Barney’s artillery horses, passed up the road, having crossed Long Bridge before it was set on fire. As we were cutting up some planks a white wagoner ordered us away, and told his boy Tommy to reach out his gun, and he would shoot us. I told him "he had better have used it at Bladensburg." Just then we came up with Mr. Madison and his friends who had been wandering about for some hours, consulting what to do. I walked on to a Methodist minister’s, and in the evening while he was at prayer, I heard a tremendous explosion, and rushing out, saw the public buildings, navy yard and, ropewalks, &c., were on fire.

Mrs. Madison slept that night at Mrs. Love’s, two or three miles over the river. After leaving that place she called in at a house, and went up stairs. The lady of the house learning who she was, became furious, and went to the stairs and screamed out, "Miss Madison! If that’s you, come down and go out! Your husband has got mine out fighting, and d___ you, you shan’t stay in my house; so get out! Mrs. Madison complied, and went to Mrs. Minor’s, a few mile further, where she stayed a day or two, and then returned to Washington, where she found Mr. Madison at her brother-in-law’s, Richard Cutts, on F Street. All the facts about Mrs. M. I learned from her servant Sukey. We moved into the house of Colonel B. Taylor [Tayloe], corner of 18^th and New York Avenue, where we lived until news of the peace arrived.

In two or three weeks after we returned, Congress met in extra session, at Blodgett’s old shell of a house on 7^th street (where the General Post-office now stands). It was three stories high, and had been used for a theatre, a tavern, an Irish boarding house, &c; but both Houses of Congress managed to get along in it very well, notwith standing it had to accommodate the Patent-office, City and General Post-office, committee-rooms, and what was left of the Congressional Library, at the same time. Things are very different now.

The next summer, Mr. John Law, a large property-holder about the Capitol, fearing it would not be rebuilt, got up a subscription and built a large brick building (now called the Old Capitol, where secesh prisoners are confined), and offered it to Congress for their use until the Capitol could be rebuilt. This coaxed them back, though strong efforts were made to remove the seat of government north; but the southern members kept it here.

It has often been stated in print, that when Mrs. Madison escaped from the White House, she cut out from the frame the large portrait of Washington (now in one of the parlors there), and carried it off. This is totally false. She had no time for doing it. It would have required a ladder to get it down. All she carried off was the silver in her reticule, as the British were thought to be but a few squares off, and were expected every moment. John Susè [Jean-Pierre Sioussat] (a Frenchman, then door-keeper, and still living) and Magraw, the President’s gardener, took it down and sent it off on a wagon, with some large silver urns and such other valuables as could be hastily got hold of. When the British did arrive, they ate up the very dinner, and drank the wines &c., that I had prepared for the President’s party.

When the news of the peace arrived, we were crazy with joy. Miss Sally Coles, a cousin of Mrs. Madison, and afterwards wife of Andrew Stevenson, since minister to England, came to the head of the stairs, crying out, "Peace! peace!" and told John Freeman (the butler) to serve out wine liberally to the servants and others. I played the President’s March on the violin, John Susè and some others were drunk for two days, and such another joyful time was never seen in Washington. Mr. Madison and all his Cabinet were as pleased as any, but did not show their joy in this manner.

Mrs. Madison was a remarkably fine woman. She was beloved by every body in Washington, white and colored. Whenever soldiers marched by, during the war, she always sent out and invited them in to wine and refreshments, giving them liberally of the best in the house. Madeira wine was better in those days than now, and more freely drank. In the last days of her life, before Congress purchased her husband’s papers, she was in a state of absolute poverty, and I think sometimes suffered for the necessaries of life. While I was a servant for Mr. Webster, he often sent me to her with a market-basket full of provisions, and told me whenever I saw anything in the house I thought she was in need of, to take it to her. I often did this, and occasionally gave her small sums from my own pocket, though I had years before bought my freedom of her.

Mr. Madison, I think, was one of the best men that ever lived. I never saw him in a passion, and never knew him to strike a slave, although he had over one hundred; neither would he allow an overseer to do it. Whenever any slaves were reported to him as stealing or "cutting up" badly, he would send for then and admonish them privately, and never mortify them by doing it before others. They generally served him very faithfully. He was temperate in his habits. I don’t think he drank a quart of brandy in his whole life. He ate light breakfasts and no suppers, but rather a hearty dinner, with which he took invariably but one glass of wine. When he had hard drinkers at his table, who had put away his choice Madeira pretty freely, in response to their numerous toasts, he would just touch the glass to his lips, or dilute it with water, as they pushed about for the decanters. For the last fifteen years of his life he drank no wine at all.

After he retired from the presidency, he amused himself chiefly on his farm. At the election for members of the Virginia Legislature, in 1829 or ’30, just after General Jackson’s accession, he voted for James Barbour, who had been a strong Adams man. He also presided, I think, over the Convention for amending the Constitution, in 1832.

After the news of peace, and of General Jackson’s victory at New Orleans, which reached here about the same time, there were great illuminations. We moved into the Seven Buildings, corner of 19^th street and Pennsylvania Avenue, and while there, General Jackson came on with his wife, to whom numerous dinner-parties and levees were given.

Mr. Madison also held levees every Wednesday evening, at which wine, punch, coffee, ice-cream, &c., were liberally served, unlike the present custom.

While Mr. Jefferson was President, he and Mr. Madison (then his Secretary of State) were extremely intimate; in fact, two brothers could not have been more so. Mr. Jefferson always stopped over night at Mr. Madison’s, in going and returning from Washington.

I have heard Mr. Madison say, that when he went to school, he cut his own wood for exercise. He often did it also when at his farm in Virginia. He was very neat, but never extravagant, in his clothes. He always dressed wholly in black–coat, breeches, and silk stockings, with buckles in his shoes and breeches. He never had but one suit at a time. He had some poor relatives that he had to help, and wished to set them an example of economy in the matter of dress. He was very fond of horses, and often an excellent judge of them, and no jockey ever cheated him. He never had less than seven horses in his Washington stables while President.

He often told the story, that one day riding home from court with old Tom Barbour (father of Governor Barbour), they met a colored man, who took off his hat. Mr. M. raised his, to the surprise of old Tom; to whom Mr. M replied, "I never allow a negro to excel me in politeness." Though a similar story is told of General Washington, I have often heard that, as above, from Mr. Madison’s own lips.

After Mr. Madison retired from the presidency, in 1817, he invariably made a visit twice a year to Mr. Jefferson–sometimes stopping two or three weeks–till Mr. Jefferson’s death in 1826.

I was always with Mr. Madison till he died, and shaved him very other day for sixteen years. For six months before his death, he was unable to walk, and spent most of his time reclined on a couch; but his mind was bright, and with his numerous visitors he talked with as much animation and strength of voice as I ever heard him in his best days. I was present when he died. That morning Sukey brought him his breakfast, as usual. He could not swallow. His niece, Mrs. Willis, said, "What is the matter, Uncle Jeames?" "Nothing more than a change of mind, my dear." His head instantly dropped, and he ceased breathing as quietly as the snuff of a candle goes out. He was about eighty-four years old, and was followed to the grave by an immense procession of white and colored people. The pall-bearers were Governor Barbour, Philip P. Barbour, Charles P. Howard, and Rueben Conway; the two last were neighboring farmers.

Commentary: The Washington of Paul Jennings–White House Slave, Free Man, and Conspirator for Freedom

By G. Franklin Edwards and Michael R. Winston

In the last hundred years, memoirs of life in the White House have become an almost routine aspect of American political culture. Fascination with life "behind the scenes" (the actual title of the memoir of Elizabeth Keckley, Mrs. Lincoln’s dressmaker, published in 1868) seems to have increased with the growing power of the Presidency and a gradually evolving national consciousness. This was not always true, however.

In the fledgling years of the republic, there was apparently no market for "inside stories" of the presidential household. Even allowing for the almost primitive conditions of the federal city in the early decades of the 19^th century, firsthand accounts of life in the White House are surprisingly rare.

This fact alone would make any memoir of the presidency of James Madison interesting to antiquarians and historians. But when we learn that the earliest account of this period focused on the British attack on Washington in 1814, that this is the testimony of a slave serving in the White House, that this slave later entered into an agreement with Daniel Webster to purchase his freedom, and from other sources find that this individual had a "secret life" that made an impact on United States history, then we have ample reason to believe that the memoir in question is of more than passing historical significance.


The First White House Memoir

A Colored Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison by Paul Jennings had remained obscure, partly because it was published (by George Beadle, Brooklyn, New York) in a limited edition. It is also little more than a pamphlet. Yet its interesting details help to re-create some of the atmosphere of one of the most critical periods in the history of the City of Washington, that of the War of 1812.

Jennings had a strong interest in relating the facts and correcting errors in the historical record. He tells his readers candidly that Secretary of War John Armstrong doubted the British would attack the city and that at the Battle of Bladensburg on August 24, 1814, many of Commodore Joshua Barney’s men "were tall, strapping negroes" who "fought splendidly." He tells also of the panic that struck a completely unprepared and helpless White House after the British troops broke through the American lines and began advancing on the capital.

Early accounts of the "rout of Bladensburg" had alleged that the Americans had not fought well. Jennings’s account blames the Secretary of War for the lack of preparedness and is at pains to declare that in the emergency black men fought side by side with white sailors and marines. As the hour of battle approached, President Madison asked Commodore Barney if his black sailors would run when confronted by the British. "No sir," declared Barney. "They don’t know how to run; they will die by their guns first." Military history confirms this outcome: General William H. Winder’s hastily organized militia were routed at Bladensburg, but Barney’s men stood firm until overwhelmed by the British.

Jennings’s best known passages are about the fabled flight from the White House that fateful day in August 1814. "It has been stated in print," Jennings relates, "that when Mrs. Madison escaped from the White House, she cut out from the frame the large portrait of Washington . . . and carried it off." This story, of course, is still repeated and had become part of the lore that surrounds Dolley Madison’s last moments in the White House.

Jennings is unequivocal in stating that the story "is totally false," maintaining that "she had no time for doing it. It would have required a ladder to get it down. All she carried off was the silver in her reticule, as the British were thought to be but a few squares off, and were expected every moment." Jennings identifies the White House doorkeeper and the gardener as the ones who rescued the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington.

Because he was intimately associated with the Madisons, Jennings’s comments on their personal characteristics are interesting. Praising Dolley Madison’s generosity to soldiers and the common people of the city, Jennings declared her "a remarkably fine woman" who "was beloved by every body in Washington, white and colored." President Madison in his opinion "was one of the best men that ever lived."

His reasons for this judgment tell us something about Jennings’s own sentiments. Jennings wrote that he never saw Madison "in a passion, and never knew him to strike a slave, although he had over one hundred; neither would he allow an overseer to do it. Whenever any slaves were reported to him as stealing or ‘cutting up’ badly, he would send for them and admonish them privately, and never mortify them by doing it before others. They generally served him very faithfully."

The remainder of the memoir provides additional details about the Madisons after the war, when they lived first at the Octagon, then at 19^th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue until 1817, and during retirement at the President’s old family home, Montpelier, in Orange County, Virginia, where he died on June 28, 1836. Through the years that followed, Jennings was always close to Dolley Madison, first as a slave to her residence at Lafayette Square, then as a free man interested in her well-being, easing where he could the burdens of old age and poverty.

In the last days of her life, before Congress purchased her husband’s papers, she was in a state of absolute poverty, and I think sometimes suffered for the necessaries of life. While I was a servant for Mr. Webster, he often sent me to her with a market-basket full of provisions, and told me whenever I saw anything in the house I thought she was in need of, to take it to her. I often did this, and occasionally gave her small sums from my own pocket. . . .

The reminiscences of Paul Jennings raise a number of questions about Washington in the era of slavery, as well as about Jennings himself. Though Madison’s slave from his birth at Montpelier in 1799 until he was purchased from the widow Madison in 1846, Jennings conveys in his brief memoir a sense of emotional poise and intellectual distance from the slavery issue that are strikingly different from the stereotypes that appear most often in the secondary accounts of the period.

However, were there other aspects of Jennings’s outlook and character that were obscured by the measured civility of his memoir? The question is all the more provocative if one considers the tense political and social atmosphere of the national capital in the decades between the administrations of Jackson and Lincoln, when sectionalism intensified over the issue of slavery and its expansion into the territories.

What kind of city was Washington for slaves and free Negroes? Was Jennings likely to be a part of a relatively privileged group because of his bondage to the President of the United States or later as a free servant of a United States senator? Jennings is a sort of Everyman in this history, but he assumes for a moment a leading role in a mass escape of slaves from their masters in the District of Columbia aboard the sailing ship Pearl. What were his relations with ordinary white people or Negroes?

Although answers to these questions are not easily found, there are important clues in the early history of the black community in Washington.


A Community Forged by the Dominion of Slavery

When President Washington selected a site for the future capital in 1791, Negroes were already residents of the territory to be ceded to the federal government by the two slave states of Maryland and Virginia.¹ A free black man, Benjamin Banneker, was to assist the French engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant and his successors in surveying the city. The image he created of an intellectual, independent black man is contrary to the usual stereotype. The pervading spirit of the capital was, nevertheless, southern and slaveholding, which is not surprising. In the first census, in 1790, more than half of the Negroes of the United States lived in Maryland and Virginia. The national capital, embracing at that time the City of Washington, Georgetown, and Alexandria in Virginia, was literally born in the center of enslaved America.

From the beginning of the city’s history, slavery was an integral part of the economy. Slaves formed the core of the early labor force, working on the construction of public and private buildings almost as frequently as they served as household servants. When the government embarked on public works, it also hired slave labor; the Treasury Department paid the absentee masters for the use of their human chattel. To protect slaveholders in the city, a special tax was levied on nonresident slave labor.

Early attempts to curtail slavery in the national capital failed. In 1805 Congress defeated a resolution to achieve gradual emancipation in the District; it would have designated the territory’s slave children free when they reached maturity. This would have major consequences for the future of the city. For instance, in 1808, when the external slave trade became illegal as allowed by Article I Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution, the domestic slave trade assumed new economic importance.

Wedged between two slave states, the District of Columbia was ideally located to become the hub of the domestic slave trade. With the increased demand for slaves caused by the expansion of cotton cultivation in the lower South and the slow but steady reduction of tobacco cultivation in Maryland and Virginia, a growing "surplus" of slaves developed in the vicinity of the capital.²

The City of Washington welcomed both coastal slave ships and increasingly numerous overland coffles. Slave pens were established in what is now Potomac Park, and one thrived in the shadows of the White House, behind Decatur House on Lafayette Square. When the pens were full, the city jails were pressed into service as holding centers for slaves awaiting passage to Georgia and the new cotton and sugar plantations of the lower South.

In Alexandria, a part of the District until 1846, the firm of Franklin & Armfield became one of the largest slave dealers in the country, selling by the 1830s as many as one thousand slaves a year.³ Northern visitors to Washington, even those unopposed to slavery per se or who believe it securely protected by its recognition in the Constitution, were particularly offended by the pervasive of the slave trade. Ethan Allen Andrews, concerned for the welfare of the Negro, wrote in 1835:

A number of slave-dealers reside in the District within view of the Capitol, and their advertisements constantly appear in the various newspapers of the city. In fact, the "ten miles square" are the very seat and center of the domestic slave-trade. This is an outrage upon our national government. The privilege of opening a slave-market, with as much publicity as was ever enjoyed by a slave-factory upon the coast of Africa, is wholly distinct from the right to own slaves; and even if the latter were continued, the former ought not to be tolerated.⁴

Despite the rapid extension of the slave trade in Washington after 1808, when increasing numbers of foreign visitors and New Englanders were startled by the auction blocks and coffles of slaves in sight of the still unfinished Capitol, Washington was relatively a better city for Negroes that other slave-holding cities. A source of this may lie in the white reaction to the "great fear" of 1814.

Washington’s white community had been gripped by fear when 4,500 British troops fanned out toward Washington from their disembarkation point on the Chesapeake Bay, in the belief that the capital would erupt in a Negro uprising. Lurid stories about the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) were still vivid in memory. The white leadership of the city was able to express its relief and gratitude when the National Intelligencer printed on August 24, 1814, its account of the black population’s action in the crisis:

The free people of color of this city, acted as became patriots; there is scarcely an exception of any failing to be on the spot . . . manifesting by their exertions all the zeal of freemen. At the same time highly to their credit, conducting themselves with the utmost order and propriety.⁵

Probably the influence of northern congressmen also had a mitigating effect on the pattern of racial dominance in Washington in the early years of the capital’s development. Although free Negroes were not offered opportunities equal to those available to native whites or the growing number of Irish immigrants, measures adopted initially to protect slavery as an institution were less severe.

While Congress had declined, under pressure from Southerners, to abolish the slave trade or slavery in the capital, it had also declined, under pressure from Northerners, to impose on free Negroes the harsh black codes that were common in the slave states. The resulting door of opportunity in Washington, though narrow, was still wide enough to attract increasing numbers of free Negroes from farther south.

The free Negro population of Washington in 1800 had been only 123; by 1820 it had increased to 1,176.⁶ This growth was probably stimulated by the fact that many slave states required free Negroes to leave their boundaries upon manumission. Those states also had strict laws prohibiting the education of Negroes, slave or free.

Washington’s first black code was enacted in 1808. Under the law no Negro could be on the street after 10:00 p.m. Four years later, the penalty for free Negroes apprehended at "nightly and disorderly meetings" was six months in jail; for slaves it was 40 lashes. In 1812 the city council also imposed the requirement that every free Negro register and carry a certificate of freedom, without which an otherwise free man could be jailed as a runaway slave.⁷

In 1827 a stricter curfew was added to the black code, and an oppressive regulation required every free Negro family to post a $500 bond guaranteed by two white men. A year later, Congress barred all Negroes from the Capitol and its grounds except when there "on business."⁸

Despite the new barriers, the free Negro population of Washington continued to grow, reaching 3, 129 in 1830; 4,808 in 1840; 8, 158 in 1850; and 9,029 in 1860.⁹ By 1830 the number of free Negroes exceeded the number of slaves for the first time. By 1840 this number was almost three times as large as that of the slave population; by 1850, almost four times; and by 1860, more than five times. In 1850 only Baltimore, Maryland, among the southern cities, had so great a proportion of its Negro population made up of free Negroes.¹⁰


The Formation of an Enterprising Free Negro Community

Paul Jennings joined the free Negro population of Washington in the early spring of 1847, during the war with Mexico, continued to be a part of the community for 27 years, until his death in 1874. He was well connected with the world of white society and politics. He was a servant and lifelong friend to Dolley Madison. While a servant to Senator Webster, he was to an extent under that powerful man’s protection.

Available directories of Washington show that Jennings lived at various addresses, all located in the northwest quadrant and just outside the urban core, as defined by James Borchert, respected commentator on the city’s population distribution. Among the separate addresses listed for Jennings are three on L Street, located variously between 2^nd and 19^th Streets, N.W.; two residences on 11^th Street N.W.; two on 14^th Street N.W.; and one at 1209 New York Avenue N.W.

Although the free Negro communities in some northern and southern cities, notably Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and New Orleans, were older and had more settled traditions, the free Negro community of Washington known to Paul Jennings exhibited characteristics that eventually made it distinctive in several critical fields, especially in education and in the delivery of social services. In an official report to Congress published in 1871, covering "Schools of the Colored Population," the Commissioner of U.S. Department of Education made the following observation about the origins of the free Negro population:

. . . Another fact important to be considered is that the colored people, who first settled in Washington, constituted a very superior class of their race. Many of them were favorite family servants, who came here with congressman from the south, and with the families of other public officers, and who by long and faithful services had secured, by gift, purchase, or otherwise, their freedom. Others were superior mechanics, house servants, and enterprising in various callings, who obtained their freedom by their own persevering industry. Some, also, received their freedom before coming to this city. . . .¹¹

As early as 1800, more than a third of the population of the District was Negro, and up until the 1860s, Negroes represented approximately one-fourth to one-third of the total inhabitants. Free Negroes, as already noted, made up the largest proportion of the Negro population. Their residences and institutions were scattered over different portions of the "ten miles square" community, with greater concentrations in some portions that in others.

Free Negro homeowners were much in evidence as early as 1806 in Washington and Georgetown. Brown and Lewis have observed that:

By the outbreak of the Civil War, black homeowners were scattered throughout the southeast of the city. The greatest concentration was along 4^th Street between the Navy Yard and East Capitol Street, with the blocks between 3^rd and 5^th Streets, S.E. (east of the present Folger Library and the Library of Congress Annex), having the largest number of black homeowners. Black property owners were scattered elsewhere on Capitol Hill and along 9^th and 10^th Streets in the southwest section. The majority of blacks in the District lived in the northwest section of ‘P’ Street and west of New Jersey Avenue.¹²

Borchert notes that, "Whites tended to live in the urban core, while black residences ringed that core. To the north, K Street . . ." became a dividing line between the races, with whites, with few exceptions, occupying residences to the south of the street and blacks inhabiting the dwellings to the north. He notes further that:

South and west of the white core, blacks dominated part of the low-lying lands of Tiber Island (Southwest, between the Mall and the Potomac), and Foggy Bottom (west of the Mall). In spite of this core-periphery tendency, many free blacks owned or rented homes throughout the city, although these may well have been in clusters, with several black families surrounded by whites.¹³

The major institutions of the free Negro community–schools and churches–were most often located in the areas of heaviest Negro residence. This pattern was not always by design or planning, for quite often, available structures were found only after some effort and, in the case of schools, buildings were used that had been originally designed for housing. Business institutions catering to a broader community clientele–often only to whites–were located nearer the center of the city. This was true of eating places, barber, blacksmith, and tailor shops, and livery stables.¹⁴

It should be pointed out that although the original City of Washington, as laid out by its planners, covered approximately ten square miles, its population in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, was only about 60,000. Vast portions of the area were sparsely settled, especially sections of the southeast and southwest bordering on the waterfront and of the northwest toward Boundary Street (now Florida Avenue), which formed the northern extremity.

The settlement pattern was altered during the decade of the 1860s. Following the emancipation of the slave population and other consequences of the Civil War, the population increased to more than 100,000–the white sector by approximately one-half and the Negro population threefold. This substantial growth resulted increasing density in the already concentrated settlements and a filling of the interstices between these areas and the outlying peripheral boundaries. The Washington of the immediate post-Civil War years became a substantially larger and more highly differentiated community than it had been during the first 60 years of its existence.


Economic Status of the Free Negroes ¹⁵

The free Negro inhabitants of the District of Columbia were represented in a wide variety of skilled trades and service occupations. To a significantly lesser extent, they were proprietors of small businesses. By and large, due to peculiar features of the community, the vast majority of this group was relegated to the status of laborers and servants. In the various building trades, Negroes were bricklayers, carpenters, plasterers, stone masons, tinners, caulkers, painters, roofers, and carriage-makers; in service occupations, they were barbers and hairdressers, blacksmiths, tailors, caterers, shoemakers, draymen, waiters, cooks, gardeners, hackmen, restauranteurs, messengers, and domestic servants, among other occupations. At the upper reaches, Negroes performed as teachers, ministers, and nurses; and surprising as it might seem, as early as 1846, three were physicians.

The number of skilled workers among this group and those in other employment, such as the small number serving as messengers in government, were seriously restricted by local conditions which limited their influence as an economic force. There were few factories in which craftsmen might work, for the major employers of skilled labor were military–the Navy Yard, in the southeast section, and the Army Arsenal, on the Anacostia River.

Unlike their counterparts in most southern cities in which slave and free Negroes had a virtual monopoly on work in the skilled trades, Negroes in Washington experienced competition from Irish and German immigrant workers. Even when employed in these trades, Negro workers were paid a lesser wage than immigrants for the same work. In the rebuilding of the Capitol, slave laborers were imported under contract and performed much of the work. Later, in the construction of the Washington Canal and the waterway above Georgetown, most of the work was performed by Irish and other European immigrants under contract.¹⁶

While free Negro craftsmen did work for individual white citizens, they were not employed in any substantial manner on most public works projects. Free Negroes were affected economically by the fear and apprehension of whites that followed racial conflicts occurring in the 1830s, all of which strengthened and extended the oppressive black codes. The 1831 Nat Turner rebellion, in Virginia, resulted in greater restriction of the movement of Negroes within the community and severely limited opportunities for assemblage.

In 1835 a slave reputedly attempted to murder Mrs. William Thornton, the widow of the architect of the Capitol, and passions were inflamed because it was thought that this abortive action was inspired by abolitionist sentiments. The resulting mob behavior was intended to intimidate free Negroes in the city. A Negro school and some tenements were destroyed, churches were attacked, and the furnishings were smashed in the fashionable Beverly Snow restaurant owned by a free Negro of that name.

The upheaval became known as the "Snow Riot" and was followed by restrictive legislation in 1836 designed to limit the right of the free Negroes to perform work other than "drive carts, drays, hackney carriages or wagons." There were no longer to operate restaurants, for example, a major outlet of work for the more enterprising blacks. The intent of the legislation was to reduce free Negroes to servile status.

The prohibition of Negro-operated businesses and other provisions of the black codes collapsed as tensions abated. Two or three years after the Snow Riot, for example, another free Negro, Absolom Shadd, reopened Beverly Snow’s former restaurant, which he operated for 20 years before selling it for $25,000 and moving his family to Canada.

Although the lot of the free Negro was not, in general, an enviable one, there were instances, as the one cited previously, in which free Negroes accumulated cash and real property as reflected in the substantial taxes they paid.

As mentioned earlier, three free Negroes are known to have been educated as physicians, having studied with white physicians for a period of three years and, in addition, having taken a number of special apprentice-type courses. Their training expenses were underwritten by the American Colonization Society that the promoted the program to send free Negroes to the West African colony of Liberia.

Besides owning real estate of all kinds, free Negroes sometimes operated profitable businesses. Alfred Jones, for example, operated a feed store valued at $16, 000. James Wormley, considered a man of means, operated a hotel that many persons, both local residents and visitors, considered "the most agreeable" in the city.¹⁷

Although most free Negro women who worked were servants, a few received training as nurses. It was as teachers and religious workers, including clergymen, that most free Negroes worked in white-collar occupations.

Some well-educated Negroes, in rare instances, might look forward to a salaried government job, as that enjoyed by Paul Jennings in his later years. A free Negro held the post of chief messenger in the Patent Office, for example; a few others received appointments of this kind, doubtless following recommendations by white sponsors.

Nor had the situation changed much by 1858, when the city directory listed Paul Jennings as a laborer in the Pension Office; subsequent directories of 1860, 1862, 1863, 1866, 1867, and 1869 carried the same entry, except that the 1862 edition took occasion to list him as "colored." The directories of 1871 and 1872 gave Jennings’s occupation as "book binder."

While government employment provided Jennings with a measure of distinction, the economic consequences did not set him apart from the vast majority of other free Negroes. In the will Jennings executed in 1870, he left the house he owned at 1806 L Street, N.W. and his personal effects to his sons. The document, now in the records of the District, suggests that Jennings, like the great majority of free Negroes, had at best only modest real or personal property.


Educational and Religious Experiences

The aspirations and collective objectives of free Negroes in the early Washington community are exhibited most clearly in their persistent struggle to secure formal educational experiences for themselves and their children and to develop a medium for religious expression and mutual aid. In this connection they devoted a considerable amount of their energies and material resources to the building of institutions for those purposes.

They were assisted in these endeavors by whites of goodwill having the same orientations, so that in many respects the institution-building process often assumed the character of a racially collective enterprise. Despite the pernicious climate created by the black codes and limitations imposed upon the opportunities for free Negroes’ economic advancement, the occasions for educational and religious participation contributed to the crystallization of an identifiable, self-conscious community life for members of the free Negro group.

The investment in education for free Negroes began early with the building in 1807 of a school for colored children by George Bell (or Beall), Nicholas Franklin, and Moses Liverpool, who had been reared as slaves in Maryland and Virginia and knew not a "letter of the alphabet."¹⁸ As soon as the one-room schoolhouse was completed on land purchased the year before by Liverpool, a white teacher was employed to offer instruction.

The significance of this effort is seen in the fact that according to the 1807 local census, there were potentially only 494 free Negroes to be served by the school. At that time, there were two public schools to serve a white population of 4,000, although the white population was served also by three or four private schools.¹⁹ Commenting on the effort of Bell, Franklin, and Liverpool, Chancellor Williams notes that "though poor, proscribed and unlettered, they found[ed] . . . an institution for the education of their children within ten years after the first schoolhouse for whites was built in the city."²⁰

The school’s early date was its singular distinction, for in rapid order three more schools appeared under the tutelage of blacks and whites in the next four years. One was started by an Englishman, one by an English-born woman in Georgetown, and a third by a free woman of color on Capitol Hill.

In addition to initiative on the part of individuals in the area of education, some contributions were made by mutual-aid organizations and churches. The Resolute Beneficial Society, founded in 1818 by a group of free Negros to provide health and burial benefits for its members, devoted most of its funds to the development of a school for colored children. In announcing the school’s opening, the Society proclaimed that it was ". . . now open for the reception of children of free people of color and others, that ladies or gentlemen may think proper to send to be instructed in reading, writing, arithmetic, English grammar or other branches of education apposite to their capacities, by a steady, active and experienced teacher, whose attention is wholly devoted to the purposes described."²¹

Most churches contributed to the instruction of Negro children and at time adults. Green reports that every denomination in the city enrolled colored children in Sunday school classes, initially with white children and later, as the colored population multiplied, in separate units.²² It should be noted that a major distinction existed between Sunday school classes operated for Negroes and those for whites: The former, unlike the latter, contained adults as well as children.

The black adults in such Sunday school classes were learning to read and write. Green notes, "In 1827 the priest of Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown founded the first seminary for colored girls and himself taught classes of Negro boys. And contrary to assumptions of later generations, during the 1820’s colored children in Washington and Georgetown sometimes attended white private schools."²³

The results of this boost to education were significant, but the symbolic effects were even more meaningful. The entire enterprise was conducted at great cost and challenge to the free Negro inhabitants and their associates.

One small school succeeded another for a variety of reasons: difficulties in securing proper physical facilities for instruction; death and disability of the founders; presence of hostile environments that produced unfavorable climates for learning; and financial difficulties, among others. The schools that were continued over a period of several years did not always have an uninterrupted character.

In general, these schools offered instruction on the most elementary level–reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, and in the case of Sunday schools, moral instruction as well. Some euphemistically carried the title "seminary," but few, in reality, approached that level. When John Cook returned to the District of Columbia in 1836 from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, after having been forced to take refuge following the Snow Riot, he envisioned the development of his former school, the "Union Seminary," into a high school for 30 to 35 students.

So great was the demand for instruction at the most elementary level, however, that he was forced to abandon his plan. One important exception to these one- and two-teacher schools, which offered instruction to pupils ranging in number from a "handful" to 100 to 150, was the seminary established by Myrtilla Miner, a frail, educated Yankee woman from New York. While operating a school in Mississippi for the daughters of plantation owners, she was repulsed to see the effects of bondage on human beings and decided to open a school for "colored females" in the District of Columbia.

She selected the District "because it was the common property of the nation and because the laws of the District gave her the right to educate free colored children, and she attempted to teach none others."²⁴ Miss Miner’s school was opened in 1851. Although it experienced interruptions and changes in leadership due to Miss Miner’s ill health and her long absences for fund-raising, the school continued to provide instruction until 1861.

In a very real sense, the instruction offered by this institution was superior to that available to local white girls. Several of the students later attended and were graduated from Oberlin College. "The quality of the teaching, the range of subjects, and the pervasive atmosphere of mutual affection and mannerliness between white staff and Negro pupils combined to make Miss Miner’s such a model institution that envious white people objected."²⁵ Over the course of the school’s existence, Miss Miner was assisted in one way or another by a woman identified as a sister of Horace Mann, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and by many persons involved with the Society of Friends.

One concrete outcome of this "thrust for education" was that by the end of the 1850s, 42 percent of the free colored population was literate and some 1,100 Negro children were attending private schools.²⁶ This result, the product of uncertainties, perplexities, and sacrifices, is a tribute to the will of a group that was barred from educational opportunities at the public expense until 1862.

White private Negro schools disappeared for all practical purposes after 1860, the separate Negro churches that developed during the first half of the 19^th century became a central aspect of black community life. They exercised leadership roles because their ministers were among the most highly educated members of the Negro community. The churches, themselves sanctuaries from the physical and emotional pressures of outside work, provided religious, social, and educational experiences.

It was within the protective walls of the churches that major community issues of concern to Negroes were discussed and proposed actions planned. By 1860 the Washington community had eight such congregations. With the formation of the independent Negro churches of various denominations, there soon developed an association of pastors of these independent churches.

In Washington’s very early days, Negroes worshiped alongside whites in Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, Catholic, and other churches. But segregation in the treatment of the Negro and white communicants increasingly appeared; for example, Negroes were often relegated to the galleries as segregation in seating patterns emerged. In one Methodist church, blacks objected to the refusal of the white pastors to hold Negro babies in their arms while performing baptismal rites.²⁷

As a result of these and other discriminatory acts, Negroes began to separate themselves from the white churches, often meeting in homes until such time that they were able to purchase structures of their own. In many instances following the movement for separate worship, the Negro congregations were led by white pastors. Later, however, especially after the Snow Riot and the restrictive codes of the 1830s, Negro preachers assumed the leadership of Negro congregations in increasing numbers. Evolution of this process if complete separation of worship and religious matters was aided substantially by the growth of the Negro population.

In one respect, the Catholic church differed from the others. Throughout the entire six decades (1800-1860) during which the separatist church movement was in process, only one catholic church, St. Martin’s, was organized as an exclusively Negro congregation. Even during the most restrictive period of the 1830s, Catholic churches continued to have integrated worship, and their schools taught Negro children on an equal footing with white children. The church paid little attention to the legal limitations on the assemblage of Negroes.²⁸

Among these early churches are some that have continued in the community as powerful and prestigious congregations. The 19^th Street Baptist, the Asbury Methodist, the Metropolitan A.M.E., and the 15^th Street Presbyterian are examples of this distinguished continuity. During their early history, these churches gave considerable attention to the well being of their congregations.

The 15^th Street Presbyterian Church was organized as a result of the Sunday school established in connection with the smaller instructional school. Its pastor, the Reverend John W. Prout, played a major role in assembling a group to oppose the efforts of the American Colonization Society to recruit Negroes for settlement in Liberia.²⁹

By and large, the Negro church emerged as the center of Negro life. As an independent institution in Washington, it apparently did not receive the same opposition similar congregations experienced elsewhere.³⁰


Paul Jennings and the "Pearl" Affair

The preface to A Colored Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison, presumably written by a white man, provides few details about Paul Jenning’s life. In 1865 at the time of publication, Jennings was identified as an "intelligent colored man" who worked as a laborer in the Department of the Interior. He was born into slavery on James Madison’s estate in 1799. His "reputed father" was Benjamin Jennings, an English trader, and his mother, an unidentified slave owned by Madison. Jennings was Madison’s valet, serving him until his death in 1836 and Mrs. Madison for another ten years.

It is not know how he came to know Daniel Webster. We know that Webster as a young "War Hawk," made a celebrated visit to the "President’s Palace" in June 1813. Madison was ill, and the two men were in a protracted disagreement about the conduct of the War of 1812.³¹ During this and later visits to the White House and to the Madison residence at 19^th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, Webster certainly came to know Jennings well as a servant intimate to the Madison circle.

Many years passed, and we know from the reminiscences of Jennings that Mrs. Madison had fallen into such financial distress after her return to Washington from Montpelier in 1837 that retaining Paul Jennings seems to have been economically impossible. Jennings was purchased on September 28, 1846, by an insurance agent, Pollard Webb, for $200.³²

In March of the following year, title to the slave Jennings passed to Daniel Webster, with a consideration of $120, which was for some unknown reason $80 less than the original purchaser had paid Mrs. Madison. Jennings was manumitted on the condition that he "work out" the sale price at the rate of eight dollars per month.³³ Webster was an antislavery man (though not like the passionate abolitionists in the later years of the sectional struggle). It is not surprising that the senator from New Hampshire would refuse to own a slave.

Jennings thus became a free man at the age of 48; he had spent his life in personal service to his kindly masters, the Madisons. It might be assumed that he would have accommodated himself to the slave system and that after 1847, he would avoid association with slaves or those free Negroes in circumstances different from his relatively privileged situation. This was not the case, however.

An important aspect of the Negro community in Washington was its sense of solidarity. There was not in Washington, for example, a counterpart to the gens de couleur, the so-called colored creoles of New Orleans, virtually a separate caste between whites and slaves, and who were sometimes themselves slaveowners (and later supporters of the Confederacy).

In Washington, free Negroes not only established a network of schools and churches, but also worked actively to abolish slavery. They also provided assistance to slaves, frequently collecting money in churches and fraternal lodges to "buy out" slaves in difficulty with their masters. The action of Paul Jennings a year after he obtained his freedom illustrates this fact.

In March 1848 Paul Jennings secretly participated in a celebrated plot to liberate a large number of slaves in Washington. While traveling to Baltimore that month with Senator Webster, he met by chance Daniel Drayton of Philadelphia. A qualified sea captain, Drayton was interested in the flight of slaves to free states. He had aided one family in an escape, taking them to Philadelphia, where they were sheltered by the well-established free Negro community.

Jennings and Drayton formed a pact to execute a large-scale escape of slaves from the capital. A month later, in the borrowed schooner Pearl, Drayton made his way down the Delaware to the Chesapeake and arrived at Washington’s 7^th Street Wharf on the evening of April 13, 1848. As it happened, the city was occupied with a huge celebration for the new republic established by the revolution in France, the first of a wave of Europeans revolutions with which Americans sympathized. As Drayton recalled in his memoirs, "Bonfires were blazing in public squares, and a great outdoor meeting was being held in front of the Union newspaper office, at which very enthusiastic and exciting speeches were delivered, principally by southern democratic members of Congress. . . ."³⁴

Drayton was struck by the enthusiasm of these slaveholders for a revolutionary regime in France and by Mississippi Senator Foote’s effusive oratory about "universal establishment of civil and religious liberty" for the "whole family of man." Drayton did not participate in the celebration because he "came to Washington, not to preach, nor to hear preached, emancipation, equality and brotherhood, but to put them into practice."³⁵

By prearranged signal with Jennings, word of the Pearl plot was spread among slaves and some free Negroes related to them. (It was common for families to be half slave, half free as they struggled to buy out spouses, or children, one by one.) Two days later, all preparations had been completed. Jennings was assisted by Daniel Bell, a free Negro who enjoyed a thriving trade as a carpenter, and Samuel Edmonson, also free, a butler.³⁶

Late on Saturday night, April 15, more than 70 men, women, and children made their way furtively through the streets to the Pearl. Before leaving Senator Webster’s house, Paul Jennings wrote a letter to the senator to reconcile his feelings of admiration for Webster (and obligation to him) with the desire to strike a blow for freedom. He wrote:

Honored Friend,


A deep desire to be of help to my poor people has determined me to take a decided step in that direction. My only regret is that I shall appear ungrateful, in thus leaving with so little ceremony, one who has been uniformly kind and considerate and had rendered each moment of service a benefaction as well as pleasure. From the daily contact with your great personality which it has been mine to enjoy, has been imbibed a respect for moral obligations and the claims of duty. Both of these draw me towards the path I have chosen.

Jennings³⁷

Leaving the note for Webster, who was not at home, Jennings told "Aunt Rachel," the cook, that he would be away for a few days and set off to meet Edmonson and Bell. As the schooner began to fill with the fugitives, Jennings’s scruples about his obligations to Webster gnawed at his conscience. He had risked much to enter the conspiracy, which was on the verge of success. The planned escape by so large a number of slaves from the capital would have been a sensational blow to the slavocracy.

On the other hand, it seems Jennings may not have completely repaid Webster for his freedom. Had he wished he could have left with the other Pearl passengers. He decided, finally, that he was morally bound to keep his agreement with Webster. He explained to his friends, then returned to Webster’s house, where he retrieved the letter he had written earlier.

The Pearl set sail at 10:00p.m. with slaves who belonged to no fewer than 41 owners in Washington, Georgetown, and Alexandria. When the schooner was 144 miles from Washington the next day, after suffering much difficulty because of poor sailing conditions, it dropped anchor near Point Lookout, where the Potomac enters Chesapeake Bay, to await fair wind. Meanwhile, awakening Washington was in an uproar; the mass escape had been discovered on Sunday morning.

A hastily gathered posse near City Hall had no idea where to set out in pursuit. Then a Negro drayman, Judson Diggs, apparently bearing a grudge against some the Pearl’s passengers, revealed the escape plan. The vigilante group used a steamer belonging to one of the Georgetown owners whose slaves had fled; within a day they overtook the Pearl, still anchored near Point Lookout.³⁸

The Pearl was overrun, its captain and crew taken prisoner, and the trapped runaway slaves and their free relatives towed back to Washington. Mobs of furious whites jeered at Drayton and the fugitives, bound and paraded through the city streets. All were jailed, but soon many of the fugitives were turned over by their owners to slave traders. Some were sold "down South" to the dreaded Louisiana market, gateway to hard labor in the sugar fields, or, for attractive women, shame in houses of prostitution. Among those sold were people who were legally free.

Families were broken as the sales proceeded. One newspaper dispatch from Washington dated April 22, 1848, and reprinted in northern newspapers reported:

Last evening, as I was passing the railroad depot, I saw a large number of colored people gathered around one of the cars, and from manifestations of grief among some of them, I was induced to draw near and ascertain the cause of it. I found in the car towards which they were so eagerly gazing about fifty colored people, some of whom were nearly as white as myself. A majority of them were of the number who attempted to gain their liberty last week. About half of them were females, a few of whom had but a slight tinge of African blood in their veins, and were finely formed and beautiful. The men were ironed together, and the whole group looked sad and dejected.³⁹

The vigilante actions of the Washington slaveowners, as well as the hasty sale of the fugitives prior to trial, was a galvanizing shock to northern abolitionists. Horace Mann and William Seward became defense counsel for Drayton. A rescue fund was established for one of the Edmonsons, with such wealthy contributors as John Jacob Astor III. Other affluent sympathizers succeeded in purchasing some of the fugitives, though many were lost irretrievably to the slave markets of the lower South. Paul Jennings was one of the principal organizers of fund-raising activities to rescue one family among the Pearl passengers sold into slavery.⁴⁰

The reverberations of the Pearl affair did not end with the heightened tension over slavery in the nation’s capital in 1848. Joshua Giddings and John Parker Hale denounced slavery in the Senate with new force and drove John C. Calhoun and others to defensive positions. Within two years of Pearl tragedy, the slave trade in Washington was abolished, as a major element in the Compromise of 1850. By 1852 Captain Drayton was freed from jail by a presidential pardon.

Perhaps the most potent result of the furor over the Pearl affair was that it so fueled the anger of a northern woman that she wrote a novel that was serialized in the National Era, 1851-1852. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin would change the course of history, molding public opinion as decisively as any book in American history.

A turning point came when many northerners began to sense the implications of Captain Drayton’s convictions. At the conclusion of his memoirs about the ill-fated Pearl venture, Drayton wrote:

. . . by my actions, I protested that I did not believe that there was, or could be, any such thing as a right of property in human beings. Nobody in this country will admit, for a moment, that there can be any such thing as property in a white man. The institution of slavery could not last for a day, if the slaves were all white. But I do not see that because their complexions are different they are any less men on that account. The doctrine I hold to, and which I desired to preach in a practical way, the doctrine of Jefferson and Madison, that there cannot be property in man–no, not even in black men.⁴¹

In a curious way, Drayton’s reference to the antislavery view of James Madison closes the circle of Paul Jennings’s obscure but historic role in the realization of the values implicit in the institution of American democracy. The knowledge we have of Paul Jennings, as limited as it is, also sheds light upon the often-neglected history of the community in which the White House stands. Black Washington has remained for most Americans what the late Constance McLauglin Green called it, "the secret city."