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Paul Jennings

Title Page for Paul Jennings' 1865 memoir “A Colored Man's Reminisences of James Madison“

Credit: University of North Carolina, Documenting the American South

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Paul Jennings was enslaved in the White House during the term of President James Madison. When President Madison's term ended, Jennings returned with the Madisons to their residence in Virginia called Montpelier. After Madison died, his wife Dolley moved back to Lafayette Square in 1837, bringing Jennings and a few other enslaved people with her to live in the home of her cousin, Congressman Richard Cutts of Maine.

In 1846, Dolley Madison sold Paul Jennings to a man named Pollard Webb for $200.Webb only owned Jennings for a short time until 1847, when Daniel Webster purchased Jennings' freedom from him for $120. Webster, a former Secretary of State and Congressman from both New Hampshire and Massachusetts, made an arrangement with Jennings to work off the purchase price as a servant in Webster's Lafayette Square home at the rate of $8 per month.

While working for Webster, Jennings remained in contact with Dolley Madison, who still resided on Lafayette Square despite serious financial difficulties, and he would later describe in his memoir that Webster instructed him "whenever I saw anything in the house I thought she was in need of, to take it to her."  "I often did this," Jennings wrote, "and occasionally gave her small sums from my own pocket, though I had years before bought my freedom of her."

While working in Webster's household, Jennings is said to have participated in a daring plot to free more than 70 enslaved African Americans in the capital. According to a book published in 1930 called Fugitives of the Pearl, Paul Jennings was one of the chief organizers of the escape attempt. The author of this book, John Paynter, was related to three of the escapees and utilized family recollections to write about the incident.  According to Paynter, Jennings planned to leave the city on the Pearl and left a letter for his employer, Daniel Webster, explaining that a "deep desire to be of help to my poor people" motivated his participation in the escape.  However, according to Paynter, Jennings decided that it would be dishonorable to leave before his debt to Webster was repaid, so he returned to Webster's residence and retrieved the un-read letter.

In 1865 Jennings, by then a free man, wrote a memoir A Colored Man's Reminiscences of James Madison. This book was the first memoir of life in the White House written by someone who had lived there.

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