A little dry but well researched and worth the work to read. Seems Taylor is doing the best she can with limited sources. Slavery was complicated. The relationship of founding fathers to slavery was difficult.
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This is a biography of Jennings but we also learn much about the life and times of President James Madison and his famous and popular wife Dolly. Jennings was born a slave on the Madison plantation, Montpelier, in 1799. His role in the Madison family developed over time to be the coachman, doorman and main servant to Madison. His access to Madison meant he heard many discussions about politics and economics that led him to want freedom for himself and his loved ones.

His desire for freedom led him to risk his future safety by assisting other slaves' escape to freedom in the North. Because he was literate and wrote a brief pamphlet about his years in the White House with the Madisons, we have the first description of what life was like in the White House when the nation was young as well as descriptions of Washington as it was being designed and built. Apparently those with money, fled the city in summer to get away from the heat and bugs.

Jennings was there the day the British burnt the White House during the War of 1812 and the family legend is that he helped rescue the huge George Washington painting that still hangs in the White House today from being destroyed in the fire.

This volume gives us more than biographical information on these individuals. So much of the book is about how these people lived. What it was like to be a slave in 19th Century Washington and how that was different from being a slave in the South.

Famous men such as General Lafayette traveled to Washington from Europe and were openly critical of the USA, a country that purported to be based on democracy and freedom for the individual but that also condoned the use of slaves. It seems men such as Washington, Jefferson and Madison recognized their hypocrisy but could not see how they could change things without bloodshed. ( )

I will admit that I wanted to read this book almost exclusively because of a borderline throwaway line in a National Geographic documentary from the early 90s. And this book wasn't as terrible as the review might make it seem, but it wasn't super great either, to be honest. There were parts where Taylor's writing about enslaved people struck me as like... gross and weird? Which made this book a little difficult, given that it's about an enslaved man. She at one point said that being polite and tactful was "second nature" to Paul Jennings and that really strikes me as terrifyingly close to like undermining the situation in which he lived that made it so he had to learn to do that?

And I guess I'm just confused how a book about an enslaved person like this can exist with writing like that in a post-Orlando Patterson/Saidiya Hartman/so many other people world? I get that it's meant for a popular audience, but I don't think that excuses a lack of really digging into what it meant to be an enslaved person. Taylor does it at times, noting the differences in experiences between those working in the house versus those working in the fields, but there's a lot more that could and honestly should have been done in grappling with that.

That being said, there was some decent information in there about enslavement in Washington, DC, and I do think bringing Jennings's life to the fore is an important project; I just wish it had been done with a little more care and reference to the larger historiography and theorization that's out there. ( )

I'm grateful to have received a free copy of this book, and am a little embarrassed that it took me nearly four years to finish it.

The book does two things, both well. First, it tells the story of Paul Jennings, born an enslaved person on James Madison's Virginia plantation. He served Madison as a personal attendant, then Madison's widow Dolley, and then bought his freedom with the help of Daniel Webster. I found the first few chapters solid but slow (and got stuck there), but from Madison's time in the White House on, the story picks up. Along the way, the story provides a particularly poignant (or, perhaps, searing) view of the gap between Madison's high ideals of liberty, and the reality of slavery, demeaning at best and often casually brutal. Many of the sources that survive from the period focus on what James and Dolley and their white friends and visitors said and did - not so different from what a biography of them might include. But, this book uses the documented presence of Jennings to ask what those conversations - about justice, about social order, about the capacities of black people - sounded like from the perspective of a highly competent enslaved person who had to stand in the room silently and attentively. Evidence suggests Jennings long dreamed of freedom, and after he won it for himself, put himself on the line to help other enslaved people buy their freedom or attempt to escape.

The second goal of the book is to make Jennings' history come alive by sketching his line down to the present day, to a gathering of a couple dozen of his descendants at the White House in 2009 to honor his memory. While this aspect of the book moved me less, it's not a lot of pages, and I can see how it could be really powerful for readers who often find themselves and their families excluded or simply left out of histories of the early 1800s; it's celebration of a continuity between Jennings' experiences and our increasingly diverse American identity today. ( )

Thank you Goodreads for the copy of this wonderful book. Paul Jennings story is something that appealed to the history lover in me and the author's ability to parlay her research into an enjoyable telling of his life and the lives of his ancestors made it a pleasure to read. Paul Jennings was born into slavery on the plantation of President James Madison. When his was young, he moved with the Madison's to the Executive Mansion and even played a major role in saving the famous painting of George Washington when the British attacked in 1812. His duties as a "body servant" to President Madison made him closer to the man than anyone other than his wife Dolley. After the death of the President, Mr. Jennings remained a slave serving Dolley Madison until, with the help of Daniel Webster, he was able to buy his freedom.
It was great to learn about the past from a different point of view. ( )