Read Digital Edition Foreword, William SealeThe Willard Hotel, Elizabeth Smith BrownsteinNotable Prominent Neighbors: Personalities of Saint John's Church, Richard F. GrimmettThe Association's Decatur House on Lafayette Square: A Center for the Study of History, Neil W. HorstmanPlatform Star: Robert G. Ingersoll in Washington, Steven C. LoweUnraveling the Dolley Myths, Merry Ellen ScofieldRemembering My Mother in the White House on the

Read Digital EditionForeword, William SealeEditing the First Lady: Life Magazine Goes to the White House, Hugh SideyRemembering the Glorious Kennedy Times, Letitia BaldrigeThe Rescue and Renaissance of Lafayette Square, John Carl WarneckeThe Correspondence of David E. Finley and Jacqueline Kennedy, William B. BushongBuy NowSubscribe to White House History

The son of an enslaved woman and an unknown white man, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born into slavery in 1818 on Maryland's eastern shore. He was enslaved for twenty years in city households in Baltimore and on Maryland farms. In 1838, he fled north and changed his name to Frederick Douglass.Douglass was highly active in the abolitionist movement and became

Many people know the sensational story of Congressman Daniel Sickles who shot his wife's lover in broad daylight in 1859 on Madison Place, the street on the east side of Lafayette Square. What fewer people know is that another killing—one that captivated the city because of its racial undertones—happened in 1918 on the opposite side of the Square, in the buil

Before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Building was built during 1922-25, a simple three-and-a-half story brick home stood in its place at the corner of H Street and Connecticut Avenue. The home's original owner was Daniel Webster, a Congressman from both New Hampshire and Massachusetts and a Senator from Massachusetts who also served as Secretary of State for three

In 1810 an enslaved woman named Alethia “Lethe” Tanner purchased her freedom with $275 dollars she had earned selling vegetables in the area we know today as Lafayette Square. Enslaved people used the open air markets to their advantage, by growing fruits and vegetables on small plots of land and selling them to raise money. Before being landscaped and named for the Marq

The Rodgers HouseThe Rodgers House, formerly at 717 Madison Place, was constructed in 1831 by Commodore John Rodgers, a high-ranking naval officer. Rodgers is known to have owned slaves because one of them, a man named Henry Butler, was identified as Rodgers' slave in an 1827 entry in the Marriage Register of St. John's Church, also located on Lafayette Square. In the image

Every president since James Madison has attended services at St. John's Church. This distinctive yellow church was the second building to be constructed on Lafayette Square and has always been a symbolic and important house of worship in Washington, D.C. Visitors to Lafayette Square can enter St. John's Church from the 16th Street entrance to see the sanctuary and

Five hundred and forty-seven dollars and fifty cents. According to the records of the District of Columbia that is the amount that Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, who lived on Lafayette Square, was paid by the federal government for Melinda Lawson, a slave he was forced to free under the District of Columbia Emancipation Act passed by Congress and signed by Abraham