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

Amazon.com Price:  $13.29 (as of 12/04/2019 10:11 PST- Details)

Description

Paul Jennings was once born into slavery on the plantation of James and Dolley Madison in Virginia, later becoming a part of the Madison household team of workers on the White House. Once in any case emancipated by Senator Daniel Webster later in life, he would give an aged and impoverished Dolley Madison, his former owner, money from his own pocket, write the first White House memoir, and see his sons fight with the Union Army within the Civil War. He died a free man in northwest Washington at 75. In response to correspondence, legal documents, and journal entries rarely seen before, this amazing portrait of the times reveals the mores and attitudes toward slavery of the nineteenth century, and sheds new light on famous characters such as James Madison, who believed the white and black populations could not coexist as equals; French General Lafayette who was once appalled by this concept; Dolley Madison, who ruthlessly sold Paul after her husband’s death; and lots of other since forgotten slaves, abolitionists, and civil right activists.

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