All the U.S. Presidents Who Owned Slaves While in Office

Twelve of the first eighteen American presidents owned enslaved people at some point in their lives. Eight of them owned enslaved people while actively serving as president. They presided over a nation founded on principles of liberty while personally holding human beings in bondage – and the specific details of how they did it reveal a far more calculated, hands-on system than most history books acknowledge.

Here are all eight, in the order they served.

George Washington

George Washington owned more than 300 enslaved people at Mount Vernon when he became the first president in 1789. The seat of government was Philadelphia – a city in Pennsylvania, a state that had passed the Gradual Abolition Act of 1780. Under that law, any enslaved person brought into Pennsylvania and kept there for more than six months automatically became free.

Washington’s response was methodical and deliberate: he rotated his enslaved household workers in and out of Philadelphia every six months, ensuring none of them ever crossed the legal threshold for freedom. He did this as president. He coordinated it from the executive residence. He was explicit about it in correspondence – he didn’t want any enslaved person to know about the legal provision, worried they might use it to claim freedom.

Nine enslaved people cycled through the Philadelphia President’s House during his two terms: Oney Judge, Hercules (his chef), Christopher Sheels, Moll, Austin, Richmond, Giles, Paris, and Joe Richardson. Oney Judge escaped anyway in 1796, slipping away to New Hampshire while the Washingtons attended a dinner. Washington spent years attempting to recapture her through federal agents. She died free in 1848.

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson owned between 130 and 200 enslaved people at Monticello during his presidency. He wrote that “all men are created equal.” He also had a decades-long relationship with Sally Hemings – an enslaved woman who was the half-sister of his late wife Martha – with whom he fathered at least four children.

Jefferson never freed Sally Hemings. He freed only two enslaved people in his lifetime and five more in his will – all of them members of the Hemings family. The rest were sold after his death to pay his debts. Monticello’s records show that Jefferson tracked the productivity of enslaved workers meticulously, logging births, deaths, and the value of their labor in the same ledgers where he recorded his own expenses.

DNA testing in 1998 confirmed the Jefferson-Hemings paternal connection beyond reasonable doubt. Jefferson had initially brought the story to light by granting Sally Hemings’s children preferential treatment – lighter workloads, educational opportunities, and eventual freedom – which made the relationship an open secret at Monticello while remaining publicly deniable in Washington.

He died deeply in debt on July 4, 1826 – exactly 50 years after the Declaration of Independence, and the same day as John Adams.

James Madison

James Madison owned approximately 100 enslaved people at Montpelier during his presidency. He co-authored a Constitution that counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for representation purposes and included an explicit clause preventing the abolition of the slave trade before 1808. He was one of the principal architects of a government that embedded slavery into its founding document.

Among the enslaved people Madison brought to Washington was a man named Paul Jennings. Born at Montpelier in 1799, Jennings served as Madison’s personal valet for years. He was present at the White House on August 24, 1814, when British forces burned Washington – he later wrote that it was he, not Dolley Madison, who saved the famous portrait of George Washington by rolling it up and handing it to two gentlemen before the British arrived.

In 1865, Jennings published *A Colored Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison* – the first memoir about White House life ever written by anyone who had lived there. It is 15 pages long and matter-of-fact in its account of slavery within the executive mansion. Jennings was eventually purchased from Madison’s heirs by Senator Daniel Webster, who allowed him to purchase his own freedom through installment payments. He became an abolitionist and helped enslaved people escape via the Underground Railroad.

Madison freed no one in his will.

James Monroe

James Monroe owned between 49 and 75 enslaved people at Highland plantation during his presidency. As Governor of Virginia in 1800, before he reached the White House, he oversaw the response to Gabriel’s Rebellion – a planned slave uprising organized by an enslaved blacksmith named Gabriel who intended to march on Richmond and demand liberty.

The rebellion was betrayed before it began. Monroe ordered the execution of 26 men, including Gabriel, who was hanged on October 10, 1800. Monroe then wrote to Thomas Jefferson arguing that something had to be done about the problem of enslaved people seeking freedom – specifically, that freed Black Americans posed a threat to white Virginia and should be removed to a separate territory.

That idea became Liberia.

Monroe was the driving political force behind the American Colonization Society’s founding of Liberia in 1822 – a colony in West Africa intended as a destination for freed American slaves. The Liberian capital, Monrovia, is named after him. The project was simultaneously a humanitarian gesture and a tool for removing free Black people from American soil. Many Black Americans, including Frederick Douglass, vigorously opposed it.

Monroe freed no enslaved people upon his death. His plantation was sold to pay his debts.

Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson owned 95 enslaved people at the Hermitage plantation at the time of his inauguration and kept approximately 14 enslaved household workers at the White House during his presidency. He was one of the most active slaveholders among American presidents – buying, selling, and managing enslaved people with a calculating precision that historians have documented in extraordinary detail.

In 1804, before his presidency, Jackson ran a newspaper advertisement offering a reward for the return of an escaped enslaved man. The ad offered $50 for the man’s return – and an additional $10 for every 100 lashes administered to him before delivery, up to 300 lashes. Of the more than 1,200 runaway slave advertisements reviewed by historians, Jackson’s is the only one that explicitly offered a financial bonus for physical punishment.

Jackson’s slaveholding philosophy was consistent and unapologetic. He believed slavery was a matter of property rights and states’ authority, and his presidency was marked by a fierce defense of Southern interests. His Indian Removal Act of 1830, which forced the relocation of Native American tribes to territories west of the Mississippi, also served the practical purpose of opening millions of acres of fertile land in the Deep South to cotton production – and to the enslaved labor that produced it.

He died in 1845 with approximately 150 enslaved people at the Hermitage.

John Tyler

John Tyler owned approximately 50 enslaved people across his Virginia plantations during his presidency, including at least two who worked in the White House. Among them was his personal valet, a man whose name has been recorded in some sources as Armistead.

On February 28, 1844, President Tyler attended a naval demonstration aboard the USS Princeton on the Potomac River. The ship’s centerpiece was the “Peacemaker,” a massive wrought-iron cannon – at the time the largest naval gun in the world. During a ceremonial firing for dignitaries, the Peacemaker exploded. The blast killed eight people, including Secretary of State Abel P. Upshur and Secretary of the Navy Thomas W. Gilmer.

Tyler’s valet, standing near the president, was also killed in the explosion. Tyler himself survived only because he had gone below deck moments before the fatal firing.

The Princeton disaster is one of the most dramatic incidents in the history of the American presidency, but the death of Tyler’s enslaved valet – a man who had no choice but to accompany his enslaver aboard the ship – rarely appears in accounts of the event. Tyler was engaged to be married the following month; his fiancée Julia Gardiner’s father was also killed in the explosion.

Tyler freed no one upon his death.

James K. Polk

James K. Polk owned 56 enslaved people when he entered the White House in 1845. He left with more.

Polk is the only president in American history documented to have actively directed the purchase of new enslaved people during his presidency – via correspondence written from the White House itself. Historian William Dusinberre’s research found that Polk managed his Mississippi plantation remotely throughout his presidency, authorizing purchases, overseeing discipline, and directing the labor of enslaved people while simultaneously running the country.

His agents carried out the purchases on his behalf, acquiring enslaved workers for his plantation in Mississippi while Polk was in Washington signing legislation. He kept these transactions secret during his lifetime, projecting a more moderate public image than his private correspondence warranted. The full extent of his slaveholding activities during the presidency was not widely documented until the early 21st century.

Polk also served as Speaker of the House of Representatives and had a strict policy of working his enslaved people hard: his plantation records show high mortality rates and brutal working conditions. His wife Sarah Polk managed the plantation after his death and continued to hold enslaved people until the end of the Civil War.

Polk died just 103 days after leaving the White House – the shortest post-presidential life in American history.

Zachary Taylor

Zachary Taylor owned between 100 and 300 enslaved people spread across multiple plantations in Louisiana and Mississippi when he became president in 1849. He was a career military officer who had never held political office before – nominated precisely because his lack of political record made him palatable to both Northern and Southern voters.

Taylor brought enslaved workers to the White House, making him the last president documented to have done so. He died on July 9, 1850 – just 16 months into his term – from gastroenteritis, likely contracted from contaminated food at a Fourth of July ceremony.

He is also the last president whose enslaved people’s records were largely destroyed by the very conflict his death helped precipitate. Taylor’s sudden death elevated Millard Fillmore, who supported the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act. Historians have speculated that Taylor, who had begun to oppose the extension of slavery into new territories, might have taken a harder line – but he was gone before the decade-long slide toward civil war truly accelerated.

The records of many of the people Taylor enslaved, their names, their families, their fates after the Civil War, were lost in the chaos of a conflict that his presidency might – or might not – have shaped differently.

Eight presidents. Three hundred years of the republic’s history as a slaveholding nation. And a single, inescapable fact: the men who ran the government that called itself the land of the free were, while doing so, the legal owners of human beings.