Unidentified Martin Van Buren Worker 2
Cite this Page
"Unidentified Martin Van Buren Worker 2," White House Workers History Project, White House Historical Association, 2026, https://whha.whirlihost.com/Detail/workers/234.
- Position
- Unclear from context Unclear from Context
- Years in President's House
- circa 1840
- Legal Status
- Enslaved Person
- Gender
- Male
- Race/Ethnicity
- Black or African American
- Presidency
- Martin Van Buren
- Biography
- According to the 1840 Census, there were four enslaved African Americans working for President Martin Van Buren at the White House: two men and two women. The census does not specify their names or what jobs they performed, though it does note their sex and age ranges; one of them was a man between ten and twenty-four years old. There is no documentary evidence suggesting President Van Buren owned these four enslaved people, which suggests he may have “hired” them from local slave-owners - a common practice in pre-Civil War Washington, D.C., in which someone would pay for the services of an enslaved person with the wages going to their legal owner. Another possibility is that some or all of these four enslaved people were brought to the White House by Angelica Singleton Van Buren, the president’s daughter-in-law whose family enslaved several hundred people across their plantations in South Carolina. It is possible that Angelica’s father gifted or loaned some or all of these individuals to her and her new husband, Abraham Van Buren (the president’s son) to serve them while they lived at the White House.1 Unfortunately, little is known about these four individuals, including their names, at this time.
- “Martin Van Buren” in the 1840 United States Federal Census, accessed via Ancestry.com, https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/8057/records/1619909?tid=&pid=&queryId=d31b2a20-a3b6-438f-94e5-6d14472cea2b&_phsrc=KCT2523&_phstart=successSource; Matthew Costello, “The Enslaved Households of President Martin Van Buren,” White House History.org, https://www.whitehousehistory.org/the-enslaved-households-of-martin-van-buren.
- Birthplace
- Unclear from context
- Unclear from context
- Related Workers
- Unidentified Martin Van Buren Worker 1circa 1840
- Unidentified Martin Van Buren Worker 3circa 1840
- Unidentified Martin Van Buren Worker 4circa 1840
- Related Association Content
- https://www.whitehousehistory.org/the-enslaved-households-of-martin-van-buren