A Slave in the White House by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor

James Madison helped draft the Constitution, collaborated on the Federalist Papers and became Americ'as Fourth President. Abolitionism was the movement, centered in the North, that abolition of slavery even in those states that had practiced it since the founding of the country. Daniel Webster of New Hampshire was a force in the United States Senate for the preservation of the Union above all else. She is best remembered for saving important items from the White House before the British burned it. Dolley Madison was a young widow when she married James Madison. It also introduces readers to slaves, abolitionists, and civil right activists hitherto forgotten.Īmerican slaves were almost entirely African and formed the basis of the cotton economy of the South until the Civil War. Based on 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 appalled by this idea Dolley Madison, who ruthlessly sold Paul after her husband's death and many more. He died a free man in northwest Washington at 75.

He would later 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 in the Civil War. Longing for freedom, he was finally emancipated by Senator Daniel Webster and became an abolitionist. Madison's personal attendant during his retirement and got married to a slave in a plantation further off. Toward the end of the Madisons' time there, he helped rescue the portrait of George Washington before the British burned down the White House. As a young boy, he was part of the Madison household staff at the White House. Paul Jennings was born into slavery on the plantation of James and Dolley Madison in Virginia.

A Slave in the White House by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor