Upstairs and downstairs: the 19th-century White House

American Visions, Feb-March, 1995 by William Seale

Thomas Jefferson Randolph, the grandson of Thomas Jefferson and the first child ever born in the White House, fittingly bore the family names of two of Virginia's leading Revolutionary figures.

Perhaps surprisingly, but equally fittingly--because it underscores the long historical connection between African Americans and the White House--the second child born at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was black. Born in 1806 to Fanny and Eddy, two of President Jefferson's slaves, the child was, of course, also a slave.

Fanny had a difficult time in childbirth, and she and the baby were waited upon by nurses until both were well. Sadly, the child died two years later. One can still see recorded in the daybook of the White House steward, Etienne Lemaire, the cost of the coffin.

The presence of slaves in the early White House was more than simply a function of Virginia's dominance of the presidency and of slavery's centrality in the South. The physical structure of the house, which broadly paralleled a plantation mansion, and the fact that the early presidents were typically--although by no means always--wealthy, conspired to bring the nation's stain within the walls of the President's House.

The White House was a vast barn by American standards, and no simple house to maintain. Its ceilings varied in height from 18 to 22 feet. its rooms were large, the windows tall. A house of great distances--like the city itself--the White House presented practically every problem to those who served it. Conveniences and short cuts to facilitate service appeared early.

There were the two water closets, one at each end of the second floor, that cut down on the need for carrying chamber pots to the waste pit. A bell system was installed, so servants did not have to stand in attendance in the rooms, or outside in the hall. Instead, they gathered in the servants' hall in the basement, a comfortable gathering place where a row of wire-strung, spring-mounted bells awaited the pull of a cord or crank. Each bell was labeled with the room to which it was connected.

In the big kitchen beneath the entrance hall, Jefferson installed the first White House cook stove, called a "ranger" for the range of pots it held. Heat from the iron range was not so fierce as that from the open fires of the past; eyelashes were no longer scorched, nor faces made raw. Convenient boilers sunk in the surface of the range kept hot water on hand at all times. Wood fuel was replaced with coal in the kitchen and in some of the rooms above. This required less hauling and made for longer, hotter--if not cleaner--fires.

A large staff averaging 16 servants was required to run the house. This presidents could barely afford, since they were expected to pay their own servants. The chief executive received $20,000 for four years of maintenance work on the White House and other domestic expenses. Beyond that, his annual salary of $25,000 was supposed to cover everything. That salary only rose to $50,000 by the close of the 19th century.

Of course, presidents could skimp on social entertaining--although only at political cost. The White House's first occupants, John Adams and his abolitionist wife, Abigail, ran the White House with only two servants, a white farm couple of long acquaintance. But senators, congressmen and diplomats mocked their hospitality. Mrs. Adams fired back that, unlike Washington, they were not rich and could not afford to entertain in splendor.

Jefferson's staff was composed almost entirely of slaves except at the upper reaches of steward and chef, both of whom were French. (One of Jefferson's freed slaves, James Hemings, had declined the president's invitation to serve as White House chef.) The installation of Jefferson's family retainers in a large house under the direction of a foreign steward caused problems (as it later did during President Jackson's tenure at the White House), leading the exasperated Jefferson to instruct his daughter at Monticello to send no more slaves to Washington, for they, unlike white servants, could not be fired.

Jefferson's successor, James Madison, introduced a more brilliant social fare to the White House. Pressured by the approach of war with England, Madison used the White House as a place to bring together politicians with opposing views. Weekly entertainments and, toward the beginning of the war, nightly dinners restored to the Madison administration some of the splendor remembered from George Washington's presidency.

The staff that made this resurrected glory possible was entirely black, except for Jean-Pierre Sioussat, the French steward, whom the slaves called "French John." The names of the Madison slaves are known and several stand out, notably the butler, John Freeman, and Mrs. Madison's maid, Sukey. But the best known was Paul Jennings, who many years later wrote the first "insider" memoir of the White House. Jennings was Madison's body servant (personal attendant) and was just a lad when the Madisons moved to the White House from their Orange County, Va., farm.