Elizabeth Dowling Taylor

This book tells the story of upwardly mobile African Americans who prospered and formed their own upper class in Washington, DC during Reconstruction and then how it declined as Jim Crow laws became the rule in the United States.

The book uses one family, that of Daniel Murray (1851 - 1925) to illustrate how the success of this group of African-Americans became regarded as a threat to the larger white society and how laws (as well as institutional norms) were erected to hold them back and to assure the superiority of white Americans.

They more I read books about black history in this country, the more I wonder why white people in this country are so insecure and afraid.… (plus d'informations)

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.… (plus d'informations)

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.… (plus d'informations)