cover image A Slave in the White House: 
Paul Jennings and the Madisons

A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons

Elizabeth Dowling Taylor, foreword by Annette Gordon-Reed. Palgrave Macmillan, $28 (336p) ISBN 978-0-230-10893-6

The complex relationship between a president and his bondman abounds in ironies in this revealing study. Historian Taylor reconstructs the life of Jennings, a slave belonging to President James Madison who became his valet, barber and major-domo, bought his freedom from Madison’s widow Dolly, and published admiring reminiscences of the couple. Taylor fleshes out slender sources into a convincing recreation of Jennings’s relatively privileged but precarious existence, setting it against a vivid portrait of the deeply conflicted Madison, a theorist of liberty who lived off of slave labor and a master who prided himself on his paternalism yet broke his vow never to sell his “charges.” At the heart of the story is the tension between the warm human relationship between Madison and Jennings and the remorseless inhumanity of slavery as an institution and ideology; in one tragicomic vignette, Madison declaims into a guest’s ear trumpet about slaves’ unfitness to live free among whites—while his servants studiously pretend not to hear him. Taylor paints a fascinating portrait of slavery, hypocrisy, and one man’s quiet struggle to overcome its injustices. Photos. (Jan.)