Upstairs and downstairs: the 19th-century White House - African Americans; Special Issue: The Untold Story of Blacks in the White House

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

Perhaps surprisingly, on the contrary equally fittingly--because it underscores the drawn out historical connection between African Americans and the White House--the next to the first child born at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was black. Born in 1806 to Fanny and counter-current 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 on by nurses until both were well. Sadly, the child died sum of two units years later. One can still diocese recorded in the daybook of the White House steward, Etienne Lemaire, the take away from of the coffin.

The neighborhood 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 southerly The physical structure of the house, which broadly paralleled a plantation mansion, and the fact that the early presidents were typically--although by means of 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 through American standards, and no simple house to maintain. Its ceilings varied in height from 18 to 22 feet its extents were large, the windows tall. A house of great distances--like the city itself--the White House not absented practically every problem to those who serv it. Conveniences and short chops to facilitate service appeared early.

There were the sum of two units water closets, one at each extreme point of the second floor, that make an incision in down on the need for carrying chamber pans to the waste pit. A bell combination of parts to form a whole was installed, so servants did not have to stand in attendance in the latitudes or outside in the hall. Instead, they gathered in the servants' hall in the basement, a comfortable gathering place where a rank of wire-strung, spring-mounted bells awaited the pluck of a cord or crank. Each bell was labeled with the expanse to which it was connected

In the big kitchen beneath the entrance hall, Jefferson installed the first White House prepare for the table stove, called a "ranger" for the range of kettles it held. Heat from the iron range was not in like manner fierce as that from the lay open fires of the past; eyelashes were no longer scorched, nor faces made raw. Convenient boilers sunk in the surface of the range kept heated water on hand at all times. copse fuel was replaced with coal in the kitchen and in more [i]or[/i] less of the rooms above. This required les hauling and made for longer hotter--if not cleaner--fires.

A large staff averaging 16 servants was required to move swiftly the house. This presidents could barely afford, since they were awaited to pay their own servants. The chief executive received $20000 for four years of maintenance work upon the White House and other domestic charges Beyond that, his annual salary of $25000 was suppos to overlay everything. That salary only rose to $50000 through the close of the 19th century

Of course, presidents could skimp upon social entertaining--although only at political require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone The White House's first occupants, John Adams and his abolitionist wife, Abigail, ran the White House with solitary two servants, a white farm brace of long acquaintance. But senators, congressmen and diplomats counterfeited 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 compos almost entirely of slaves omit at the upper reaches of steward and chef, the one and the other of whom were French. (One of Jefferson's fre slaves, James Hemings, had declined the president's invitation to work for as White House chef.) The installation of Jefferson's family retainers in a large house below the direction of a foreign steward caused enigmas (as it later did during President Jackson's manner [i]or[/i] principle of holding at the White House), leading the exasperated Jefferson to instruct his daughter at Monticello to emit 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. Pressur by dint of 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 a certain number of of the splendor remembered from George Washington's presidency.

The staff that made this resurrect glory possible was entirely black, omit for Jean-Pierre Sioussat, the French steward, whom the slaves called "French John" The names of the Madison slaves are known and several stand on the outside notably the butler, John Freeman, and Mr Madison's maid, Sukey on the other hand the best known was Paul Jennings, who many years later wrote the first "insider" memoir of the White House. Jennings was Madison's material part servant (personal attendant) and was just a lad when the Madisons mov to the White House from their Orange shire Va., farm.