On the morning of 24 August 1814, a fifteen-year-old enslaved footman in the President's house named Paul Jennings did what he did every day. "Mrs. Madison ordered dinner to be ready at 3, as usual; I set the table myself, and brought up the ale, cider, and wine." The dinner was eaten, but not by the Madisons: "When the British did arrive, they ate up the very dinner, and drank the wines, &c., that I had prepared for the President's party." Fifty-one years later Jennings published a short book about his years in that household, and in it he corrected the story that had already hardened into legend — that Dolley Madison had cut Gilbert Stuart's portrait of George Washington out of its frame with her own hands before she fled. "It is totally false," he wrote. "She had no time for doing it. It would have required a ladder to get it down." What actually happened, from the only man who left an account from inside the house: "John Susé (a Frenchman, then door-keeper, and still living) and Magraw, the President's gardener, took it down and sent it off on a wagon." None of which takes anything from her. She stayed while the city emptied, refused to leave until the picture was secured, and gave the order that saved it. The correction is narrower and more interesting than that: it is about whose hands were on the canvas, and about the fact that the people who did the lifting were a French doorkeeper and a gardener, and that the person who told us so was owned by the family he was serving dinner to.

The figure is Dolley in the years of her husband's presidency — a high-waisted white gown of the 1810s, a red patterned shawl, and the turban that was her signature and was copied all over Washington. She is credited with turning the President's house into a room where political opponents could meet each other socially without it ending in a brawl, which in that decade was not a small achievement. George Washington is the man in the rescued portrait. Andrew Jackson was fighting the same war four months before New Orleans made the whole thing look like a victory. And Jennings's little memoir belongs to the same body of testimony — the enslaved and formerly enslaved writing down what they saw — that Frederick Douglass made impossible to ignore.

Model: 10125 / W. Britain / 1/30 scale / matte finish / 1 piece set