Paul Jennings: The Enslaved Man Who Saved the Washington Portrait

The story of the White House portrait is usually told with Dolley Madison at the center of it. On the afternoon of August twenty-fourth, eighteen fourteen, as British troops advanced on Washington and the President's household was evacuating, Dolley Madison directed that the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington be removed before the building was abandoned. She gets the credit in most accounts, and her role was real. But there was a man next to her in that house who was also making decisions that afternoon, and he wrote about it fifty years later.

Paul Jennings had been enslaved at Montpelier, James Madison's Virginia plantation, since birth. He became Madison's personal attendant and traveled with the family to Washington when Madison was elected president. He was fifteen years old on the day the British marched on the capital. His account of the portrait's removal, published in eighteen sixty-five under the title A Colored Man's Reminiscences of James Madison, is one of the earliest memoirs by a Black American. He puts himself in the frame.

James Madison freed no one in his will. When Madison died in eighteen thirty-six, his estate was debt-laden, and Dolley Madison, needing money, sold Paul Jennings to pay her bills. He was sold at least twice over the following years. Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster eventually purchased his freedom in eighteen forty-seven, in exchange for Jennings's domestic labor for a period of years, a transaction that replaced one form of bondage with another and was described by Webster as an act of generosity.

Jennings died in Washington DC in eighteen seventy-four. He is buried there, nine years after publishing the memoir that put him back in the story he had lived. Montpelier, where his life as a piece of property began, has spent the past decade documenting the enslaved community he came from. In twenty twenty-one, descendants of that community won seats on Montpelier's board of directors, an institutional act of accountability that is still unusual enough to be remarkable.