FOUR
Perceptive as she was, Anne Royall couldn’t overcome the great moral blind spot of her age: slavery. She firmly opposed the institution in print, but she held slaves at various points in her life along with a wary view of abolition.1 Like her, many intellectuals of the era ought to have known better, but they instead chose to rationalize a practice that even casual visitors to America knew caused limitless human suffering and terror. Washington City served as one of the nation’s most prominent depots of slave trading, but the town’s guidebook writers barely mentioned it. In this respect, Anne Royall fell squarely in line with the shameless civic boosters she despised.
Slavery came to the English colonies in 1619 when a Dutch trading ship brought twenty slaves to Jamestown, Virginia. Tobacco planters favored forced human labor to cultivate their cash crop,2 but by the end of the eighteenth century, tobacco cultivation had largely become a dead letter along the Potomac. Farmers had exhausted the soil on many of the old plantations, and the agricultural infrastructure was collapsing. Slavery, however, persisted.
In 1800 African Americans made up 29 percent of the District’s roughly 14,000 people, with 80 percent of their number enslaved. Few free blacks owned property in the capital or held prominent occupations. (Benjamin Banneker, Andrew Ellicott’s surveyor assistant in 1791, had been a rare exception.) The laws of Maryland and Virginia, which held sway in DC until the 1830s, severely limited them with a broad range of codes and restrictions. In Virginia, freed slaves couldn’t even remain in the state, which gave them six months to leave after their manumission or risk being sold back into slavery.3
Forced labor was common enough in Washington City that contractors used slaves to build the Capitol. This fact went unremarked in histories of the District throughout the nineteenth century, but in more recent decades the weight of evidence has made the conclusion unavoidable. Even Congress itself had to recognize the truth when in 2009 it produced a formal resolution that included the following introductory clauses:
Whereas enslaved African-Americans provided labor essential to the construction of the United States Capitol;
Whereas enslaved African-Americans performed the back-breaking work of quarrying the stone which comprised many of the floors, walls, and columns of the Capitol;
Whereas enslaved African-Americans also participated in other facets of the construction of the Capitol, including carpentry, masonry, carting, rafting, roofing, plastering, glazing, painting, and sawing;
Whereas the marble columns in the Old Senate Chamber and the sandstone walls of the East Front corridor remain as the lasting legacies of the enslaved African-Americans who worked the quarries. . .
. . . therefore a plaque would be placed in the visitor center.4
As admissions of guilt go, it wasn’t much. But at least it put an official imprimatur on our understanding of just how fundamental slavery was to the District. Indeed, the very presence of the “peculiar institution” in the capital served as a symbol for all the contradictions of a place where the defenders of human bondage and the champions of personal liberty not only coexisted but bizarrely were often one in the same.
Slavery Calculus
American slavery didn’t belong exclusively to the province of white-suit-wearing, mint-julep-swilling plantation masters in Greek Revival mansions on the banks of the Mississippi. Instead, it was an endemic transnational phenomenon that connected the “slave supply in Virginia, credit availability from New York, cotton prices on the Liverpool market, and the prices and demand for slaves at New Orleans and Natchez.”5
Numerous corporations took part in this complex financial web of buying and selling human beings. Modern descendants of those companies include investment banks such as Lehman Brothers; railroads Norfolk Southern and CSX (which took over the B&O Railroad); publishers Knight Ridder, Gannett, and Tribune Company; and insurance carriers Aetna and AIG6—and that doesn’t take into account the many institutions, including the nation’s oldest and most prestigious universities, that invested in and therefore profited from the companies doing the dirty work.
With the mortality rate for humans used as chattel as high as it was, a range of insurance companies issued policies to slaveholders to protect their “property,” including one in 1856 that cost $2.00 to insure a ten-year-old domestic worker and another that cost $5.50 for a middle-aged adult slave.7 Carrying the calculus of human bondage further, D. B. Warden notes in his 1816 Washington City guide that the daily expense of a slave, which took into account food, drink, clothing, and insurance, totaled “nearly twenty-seven cents.” Washington City taxed the owners of male slaves aged fifteen to forty-five $1.50 each and comparable females a dollar.8
Once established, slavery inevitably required a fully integrated network to support it: Owners had title to fellow humans; traders trafficked in such “commodities”; companies created infrastructure to support that economy; local governments regulated the trade with laws and taxes; and the national government tied domestic slavery to foreign trade, principally with Britain. All these aspects of the slave trade united in one place: the American capital itself.
The Architecture of Confinement
In 1800 slaves were visible on area plantations and at occasional slave auctions, but not to the degree that came after Congress banned the transatlantic slave trade in 1808.9 That ban wasn’t as high-minded as it sounded: It had less to do with abolishing the barbaric practice than with increasing the value of slaves already present in North America and fostering an increasingly lucrative domestic trade.
By the middle of the next decade, a boom in cotton sales and production in the Deep South created a yawning demand for slaves nationwide, with Alexandria and Washington City quickly taking advantage.10 Within two decades the region had transformed itself from a sleepy backwater with a scattering of slaves on shambling farmsteads into a fearsome juggernaut of slave trading, the “great Man-market of the nation,” according to a famous broadside.11
Abolitionist broadsides decried the sale of human beings in “the land of the free.” See next page for detail images.
The port of Alexandria in particular became a hub for the delivery of slaves from Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other American locations. The Virginia port also shipped out men, women, and children born and raised in the capital area as captives to plantations and other sites around the country. Ship manifests from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries provide physical descriptions of their human cargo with elliptical yet revealing notes. Along with age, height, and skin tone—“dark,” “brown,” “light,” “fair”—slaves are identified by the scars on their bodies. In one case, sixteen-year-old Alexandria native Jonathan Horne had a lump on his lower lip, a smallpox mark on his chin, a mark of unknown origin on his left arm, and a “crossmark by the bite of a dog on his left cheek.” Other slaves exhibited telltale burns, cuts, pricks, scars and “red marks” across their bodies.12
One of the largest landowners was Notley Young, his acreage occupying almost all of Southwest Washington City in a sprawling estate worked by sixty bondsmen housed in eleven buildings marked “Negro quarters.” A typical slave quarter might contain “pens” made of rough logs, with walls, fireplace, a roof, and little else. Only fourteen by sixteen feet in size, such a cramped wooden box may have held up to ten people.13 Bondsmen planted and harvested crops of various kinds and brought them to market. They assisted in the operation of the estate houses by cooking, sewing, cleaning, and undertaking other household chores. They built new outbuildings and fixed old ones and generally performed the labors necessary to make the farm profitable.
Even free blacks could be sold into slavery.
The Alexandria prison where slaves were held until being sold to plantations in the Deep South.
More numerous than the planters, though, were common slaveholders, who usually had only a few slaves they used as domestic workers. Some stayed in their masters’ attics, stables, or carriage houses, but in other cases the middle-class house itself served as a sort of prison. Back yards essentially became slave spaces, often with a two-story outbuilding with kitchens, laundries, and other service rooms on the ground floor and sleeping quarters above.14 Confined by high brick walls up to a foot thick, forced laborers found themselves trapped away from public view, in isolated rooms without windows, and corridors without exits. Inside this harsh, inhuman space, “the bondsman could see only a maze of brick and stone, the forbidding reminders of his servile confinement.”15
Newer urban houses for the elite replaced the old plantations with stylish architecture in front and hidden slave quarters in back. One of the most prominent examples, John Tayloe’s Octagon—which had six sides instead of eight—was among the most famous private houses in Washington City. Designed by Capitol architect William Thornton in the Federal style, it hosted ambassadors and treaty signings and served as the residence of the president after the British burned the White House. Its high walls enclosed a two-story structure for slaves and outbuildings, which included a stable, smokehouse, and cowshed.16 It also had a basement with a kitchen and a warren of narrow little rooms and work spaces. While slaves labored in the hot, choking confines belowground, “men in their picturesque costumes [and] ladies in their Empire dresses of soft silk” danced “graceful minuets” on the floors above.17
Rise of the Slavemongers
But slaves who had the misfortune to pass through the District, instead of living there, had it worse. Everyone knew what awaited bondsmen sold to the Deep South, say, to a mosquito-infested Louisiana sugar cane plantation or, more likely, an industrial cotton operation in the wilds of Alabama and Mississippi: isolation on a remote farmstead, the violence of the lash, years of crushing labor, and often an early death. Masters in the capital used their slaves’ knowledge of the terror of being sold to the Deep South as leverage beyond the whip, or shipped them away without a second thought if there wasn’t enough work available.18
Isaac Franklin, one of the District’s upstarts, founded his slaving operation in the capital with his nephew John Armfield (along with partner Rice Ballard outside DC) in 1828. It was the first and most notorious of five successive slave-trading firms to operate from the same headquarters in Alexandria, the last operating until the Civil War.19 The Franklin and Armfield business initially acquired capital from a range of national banks to buy slaves from the decaying plantations of Maryland and Virginia. From there, they sent their human cargo to New Orleans and Natchez, then routed their profits back through banks in New York and Philadelphia. They fiendishly converted human beings into commodities, whether “packed onto slavers’ brigs like cordwood, imprisoned in cholera-infested Natchez pens like cattle, or displayed on the market like wool and ivory.” They used that last phrase, “wool and ivory,” as shorthand for blacks in general and developed a range of euphemisms to describe both their business operations and those whom they shipped into bondage. One such term was “fancy maid,” which, despite its winsome connotations, referred to a woman sold for carnal exploitation, to be kept as a sex slave for planters or otherwise raped by the traders themselves. To this end, the slavers impudently called themselves “one-eyed men,” in crude reference to their genitals.20
The traders didn’t open their prison to the general public, but they weren’t exactly discreet, either. One of their advertisements in an Alexandria newspaper promised CASH FOR 500 NEGROES:
Including both sexes, from 12 to 25 years of age. Persons having likely servants to dispose of, will find it to their interest to give us a call, as we will give higher prices, in cash, than any other purchaser who is now, or may hereafter come into this market.21
Professor E. A. Andrews, a fervent critic of slavery, received a rare private tour of Franklin and Armfield’s slave pen. It was the early American equivalent of a publicity tour for a prison, with inmates lined up for inspection, “the most studied attention paid to cleanliness” of the facility, and the slave traders acting as witty, gracious hosts. But Andrews saw the great lie for what it was, a testament to the “countless evils occasioned in this world of sin and misery.”22
The slavemongers couldn’t fully conceal their horrors from the general public, and more than a few residents found it contradictory at the very least that those operations should spring up in a town that billed itself as a paragon of liberty. One man, Solomon Northup, whose story of being kidnapped into Southern slavery, Twelve Years a Slave, has become quite well known recently, recalls looking out from the windows of a holding cell to see a familiar building: “Strange as it may seem, within plain sight of this same house, looking down from its commanding height upon it, was the Capitol. The voices of patriotic representatives boasting of freedom and equality, and the rattling of the poor slave’s chains, almost commingled. A slave pen within the very shadow of the Capitol!”23
Even more conspicuous was the sight of slave drivers forcing their gangs through the street with “the whip of the slave-driver and the clanking of chains” providing the soundtrack as “the gangs were kept together and driven like sheep under the watchful eyes of their brutal guards.”24 In regular public human auctions, slavers broke up families and parceled them out to different parts of the country, stripped and revealed the naked bodies of their captives before the eyes of eager buyers, and even forced them to dance to showcase their “liveliness.”25 Such inhumanity composed a typical day’s work for the men known as “soul-drivers.”26
Slaves in leg irons being marched off to auction were a common sight in prewar DC.
Private Prisons
The drivers held their captives in notorious slave warrens in cellars and basements of houses, hotels, and taverns, carefully confined away from the public view. The Williams Slave Pen sat across from the Smithsonian grounds, a three-story, “pleasant looking” brick house in which slaves were tightly shackled in a holding room next to the kitchen.27 The pen at Robey’s Tavern was a “wretched hovel” near the Capitol with no air circulation, oppressively hot in summer and frigid in winter, its conditions worse than regular jail cells.28 The St. Charles Hotel contained subterranean rooms with six thirty-foot-long barrel-vaulted cells with iron rings attached to the walls to secure the captives.29 It even advertised its services: “The Proprietor of this hotel has roomy underground cells for confining slaves for safe keeping, and patrons are notified that their slaves will be well cared for. In case of escape, full value of the Negro will be paid for by the Proprietor.”30
“Well cared for” is an audacious euphemism—most accounts of these prisons describe people forced to sleep on cold floors, chained to walls, whipped and beaten by overseers, stuffed into gloomy cells, and unprotected from vermin or disease. During an 1832 cholera epidemic, the number of deaths at one slave pen reached such a number “that both coffins and undertakers were insufficient to fill the demand, and they were obliged to send to other cities for help.”31
The Picture of Cruelty
As the slave trade became more visible, some began calling for change. One event in particular crystallized many opinions against the practice. In 1815 a black woman, name unknown, jumped from the third-story window of a downtown tavern where she was being held and broke her back and both arms in the fall. She was desperately trying to escape the men who had confined her and to keep from being separated from her husband and children—to no avail.32 The story spread widely thanks to Jesse Torrey’s seminal book A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery, in the United States, which not only brought attention to the cruelties meted out to slaves but also to the kidnapping of free black citizens.
Torrey had spoken to two such individuals, Delaware residents, whom the slavers had kidnapped and held in the same tavern from which the woman had leapt. He then went a step further and raised funds for their legal defense, and a few months later a court freed them.33 This episode wasn’t isolated. Critics of slavery claimed the traders’ primary goal was to “kidnap every colored stranger they could lay their hands on,”34 and the burden of proof lay on black citizens to prove they were free. If they didn’t have the right papers, they could be arrested and sold at auction. Even if they did have proof but were arrested mistakenly, they could still be sold as slaves if they couldn’t pay for their room and board while wrongly imprisoned.35
The sight of captives manacled and dragged through the streets, the horrific conditions of the slave pens, the division of families at auction, the kidnapping of free blacks—these atrocities led many to call for the end of slave trafficking in the capital. One of the most vocal was John Randolph, House member from Virginia, an active slaveholder and ardent states’ rights champion, who nevertheless saw slave trading as “a crying shame before God and man, not surpassed in abomination in any part of the earth; for in no part of it, not even excepting the rivers on the coast of Africa, is there so great, so infamous a slave market as in the metropolis, in the seat of government of this nation which prides itself on freedom.”36
Judge James Morsell of the Circuit Court conducted a judicial investigation on the legality of “manacled captives” being driven through the streets, seeing it as “repugnant” to the spirit of the republic and the rights of humanity.37 Jesse Torrey called for Congress, as “guardians of the public liberty,” to ensure that free blacks were not kidnapped or otherwise abused by the traffickers.38 Washington City citizens, including a number of slaveholders, presented a petition to Congress in 1819 demanding an end to the transport of slaves through the city and their shipment from it.39 To these carefully worded calls, petitions, and entreaties, members of the national legislature considered this great moral question, took stock of the weighty issues—and did nothing.
The Colonial Gambit
In the absence of congressional action, it appeared that the nation’s leading politicians might find a different way to end slave trafficking. Just before Torrey’s polemic against the trade appeared, figures such as John Randolph, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster staged the first meeting of the American Colonization Society.40 With Torrey himself claiming credit for the idea behind the group, the society stated its goal as bringing about the demise of slave trading and similar practices by founding an African colony that would take in blacks from America and develop a sort of model society of freedmen.41 In 1820 the first waves of expatriated blacks began arriving on the western coast of Africa, and two years after that they founded the new country of Liberia. They named their capital Monrovia in honor of then-president James Monroe, author of the political doctrine that forbade European colonization of or interference in the Western Hemisphere but helpfully said nothing about American colonization of or interference in the Eastern Hemisphere.
Leading opponents of slavery supported the society, as did leading slaveholders, but the group favored getting rid of the public eyesore of slave trading rather than eradicating the institution itself. It never wanted to free slaves but to ship free blacks to Africa.42Thus the group’s dual purpose, according to critics, was salving the conscience of whites troubled by signs of the slave economy and reducing the number of free blacks in America who might threaten that economy. Which explains why major slaveholders such as Randolph, who owned hundreds of people, supported and belonged to the group.
Fighting the Plague
By contrast, the District’s first real abolition movement took as much of a stance against colonization as it did slavery. Activists in the movement suspected the society of trying to ship the most ardent black opponents of slavery out of the country in order to strengthen the business of human bondage. Educator John Prout denounced moves to remove blacks from the only country most had ever known—the native country of many—and leading black figures from Baltimore, including teacher Jacob Greener and minister William Watkins, attacked the society in print and in public forums.43 They advocated a branch of abolition called “immediatism” to counter the gradualism that wasn’t making much progress against the moral scourge.
Among the most famous abolitionists in the Chesapeake region were Benjamin Lundy and William Lloyd Garrison. Lundy, a white Quaker, published his weekly Genius of Universal Emancipation in the Midwest before moving to Baltimore in 1824. There he worked with Greener and Watkins to print the newspaper and got into all manner of altercations with local slaveholders. He denounced one who brutally beat him in return; in court the judge called the beating a “merited chastisement” and let the slaver off with a dollar fine.44 Lundy left Baltimore soon after, finding Maryland’s “spirit of tyranny . . . too strong and malignant for me.”45
Garrison wrote for Lundy’s paper before he famously began his own antislavery newspaper, The Liberator, on January 1, 1831. In it he denounced both African colonization and gradual abolition as wrong-headed and counterproductive ideas. In that first issue, he didn’t mince words about the capital:
That District is rotten with the plague, and stinks in the nostrils of the world . . . a fouler spot scarcely exists on earth. In it the worst features of slavery are exhibited; and as a mart for slave-traders, it is unequalled. These facts are well known to our two or three hundred representatives, but no remedy is proposed; they are known, if not minutely at least generally, to our whole population,—but who calls for redress?46
The answer of course was Garrison himself. However, while the columnist activist had a huge impact on the nation, he did most of his pioneering work from New England, and many of his opinions—which favored women’s rights and nonviolent protest and condemned American politics and organized religion—lay so far ahead of their time that many abolitionists, both black and white, kept their distance, seeing him as a distraction from their primary goal.47
These abolitionists had more important matters to worry about than Garrison, though. They operated in a place hostile to their goals at best, at worst malicious and violent. Their protests often met with fists, bricks, knives, or guns. One of their prime enemies was slave trader Hope Slatter, notorious for separating black families at the auction block, abusing slaves and their rescuers, and inciting mobs to attack abolitionists and blacks in general. The threat that Slatter and many like him presented had the paradoxical effect of binding black and white activists together, whether “as victors over slaveholders or victims of their wrath.”48
Mob Mentality
By the 1830s racial violence spread beyond those with a direct economic interest in slavery to larger sections of the white public, who took alarm at the competition that black emancipation might introduce to the white working classes. Throughout the North, mobs attacked abolitionists and free blacks in churches and their homes, with conflicts in 1834 in New York City and Philadelphia turning especially fierce.49
The next summer in Washington City, the simmering climate of racial hostility increased as rumors flew of a slave attacking his master after being caught stealing. It worsened when officers arrested Reuben Crandall, a botanist and physician, for possession of abolitionist literature. District Attorney Francis Scott Key—composer of “The Star Spangled Banner,” promoter of African colonization, and enemy of abolitionists—charged him with sedition and threw him in jail. In response, a mob of four hundred mechanics, including many striking laborers from the Navy Yard, converged on the jail to “take the damned rascal and hang him up on one of the trees.”50
Finding him well guarded and inaccessible, the mob moved on to Beverly Snow, a black restaurateur, who allegedly had insulted the wives of white mechanics. Again not finding their intended victim, they settled for ransacking Snow’s restaurant and destroying several black homes, schools, and churches.51 Before the mob could march on the city’s public buildings and destroy them too, soldiers were called out to be “posted at their doors, and their windows barricaded, to defend them against the citizens of Washington.”52When the tumult subsided, the city council took quick action, not by enforcing laws against mob violence but by cracking down on business licenses issued to free blacks and by imposing other sanctions on them.53
Gag Reflex
Amid the chaos, some abolitionists continued to hold out hope that Congress would see the damage wrought by this social crisis and end slavery in the capital for good. In the mid-1830s they sent the government 100,000 petitions arguing for the abolition of slavery in DC, and by the end of the decade another half-million signatures arrived. Again, the gridlocked legislature failed to take action. Southern members vowed to defend slavery at all costs and even threatened the dissolution of the Union if they didn’t get their way.54 One measure that did break the gridlock and pass the House was the infamous gag rule, which prevented any petition related to slavery in the District to be read or discussed.55
Around the same time, William Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society mailed one million pamphlets to Southern editors, businessmen, and others to illuminate them on the topic of slavery. The pamphlets had their intended effect: The Southerners held great public bonfires with the mailers as fuel. The South saw the elimination of slave trading in terms of domino theory: Abolishing that institution would cause other established social traditions to tumble in an unbroken path that would lead invariably to the demise of the plantation system and of white supremacy.
Antislavery politicians of the North countered with a more immediate issue: They wanted to get rid of DC slavery because Northern tax dollars were financing the capital prisons where slave traffickers kept their captives,56 a business of which they obviously wanted no part. But the most powerful Northerner, President Martin Van Buren, had a different view. In 1837 he promised to be “the inflexible and uncompromising opponent of every attempt on the part of Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia against the wishes of the slaveholding states.”57 (This exercise in political cowardice didn’t win him any friends in the North. In his failed reelection attempt, he lost 158 of the region’s 170 electoral votes.)
The federal government was proving to be feckless. No matter the legal violation, the violent event, the moral outrage, Congress and the president chose inertia over action, and when they did act it usually made matters worse for the capital’s black residents. In turn, many abolitionists gave up on legal paths to achieve an end to slavery, seeing the law as an impediment—instead of an avenue—to their goals.
Tales from the Underground
The Underground Railroad—a vast, awe-inspiring institution—had a formidable reach into the South. To white Southerners, it represented a conspiracy to deprive them of their property; for Northerners, it gave proof positive of the nightmarish conditions that slaves endured and their determination to escape it. The District of Columbia had one of the earliest and most well-established lines, which years later Frederick Douglass recalled as stretching from the capital to Philadelphia, New York, Albany, Rochester, and finally Canada, the true land of freedom.58 Before escaped slaves reached any of those destinations, though, they traveled through a shadowy network of safe houses, many of them in destitute areas of Southern cities where they could find shelter and seclusion but police rarely ventured.59
The South fought back by limiting slaves’ knowledge of local geography, levying steep and violent penalties on escapees, and fostering a counternetwork of professional slave catchers. The Washington Auxiliary Guard, which employed eighteen such men in the District, arrested free blacks for curfew violations and hunted down runaway slaves.60 As the official history of the police department explains it: “The ringing of the [signal] bell at 10 p.m. was of special importance to the colored people, as after that hour if out without a pass they were subject to arrest, fine, and flogging. The last was administered sometimes at the guard-house and sometimes at the whipping-post of the jail, on the northeast corner of Judiciary Square.”61
For violating the Black Code, countless blacks faced grim conditions at the city jail.
The Railroad needed daring and clever figures to counteract these measures, and two of the most adept were Thomas Smallwood, a middle-class shoemaker and former slave, and the Reverend Charles Torrey, whom some called “the regular Rob Roy MacGregor of dare-devil philanthropy.”62Together the two worked to free Southern captives, establishing a wide network that included black and white abolitionists, among them a dentist, a minister, a boardinghouse owner, and an Ohio congressman. In 1842 alone they freed between 150 and 400 slaves in groups of ten to fifteen at a time. Individuals escaped singly or in pairs from bondage and converged at prearranged “places of deposit” around the Washington region, from where teamsters in wagons conveyed them northward.63 The journey wasn’t cheap to arrange; Smallwood and Torrey initially paid teamsters between eight and twenty-five dollars per escapee, later deciding to purchase their own wagon and horses instead.64
Slaveholders offered handsome rewards for the return of their “property,” so those running the Underground Railroad took care not to trust people unknown to them.65 Skirting the law and avoiding capture proved hard and dangerous work, yet it didn’t stop Smallwood from taunting slaveholders in the pages of abolitionist newspapers that Torrey edited. Using the pen name Samivel Weller Jr. (after a character in The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens), Smallwood baited his enemies and mocked them as “poor puppies,” among other jabs.66 Taking care not to be identified, he successfully eluded capture over the years. If people did discover his name, authorities had difficulty finding him amid all the other Smallwoods in Washington City.67
Eventually his luck and Torrey’s ran out, though. In November 1843 the police came upon their wagon, horses, and fourteen runaways and took possession of all of them. (Torrey brazenly filed suit to recover the wagon and horses seized from their illegal mission.)68 The police raid ended Smallwood’s activities in the capital, after which he relocated to Canada. Later in a memoir he condemned his former country as “hypocritical, guileful, and arrogant” and worse than any other nation in its treatment of black people.69
In his own writings Torrey offered an open threat to those holding slaves, saying “God judgeth the heart of each man. I do not. I only affirm the guilt of the sin, and its inconsistency with piety, and warn men to leave it off.”70 He continued his clandestine if increasingly daring liberation of slaves until late 1844, when Hope Slatter arranged for his arrest by Baltimore authorities. From a jail cell Torrey wrote: “The question of my prudence, I must adjourn to Judgement Day. I have done, many things in the South, that prudent men dared not do . . . I am bold & decided. God made me so. He did not make me cautious.”71
Torrey may have been a zealot, but his zealotry did more to weaken the bonds of slavery in the Chesapeake than all the well-meaning words of politicians or the impassioned editorials of newspaper writers. It came at a cost, though. The reward for Torrey’s lack of caution was death from tuberculosis in a Maryland prison in 1846.
The Freedmen’s Progress
The Underground Railroad offered the most prominent local means of undermining slavery, but another force had just as great an impact. Its effects were subtle and took many years to accumulate, but in the end they proved unstoppable in undermining human bondage in the District. It was a small but fatal flaw in the mechanism of slavery itself.
From the beginning of the capital’s history, Washington City constantly needed laborers to construct public buildings as well as its mansions and other structures. Contractors routinely ran short of workers, and the easiest, most expedient way of finding them was to hire slaves from their masters.72 In the most visible example, from 1795 to 1801 contractors constructing the Capitol paid slaveholders sixty dollars per month per slave for all manner of manual labor, from carting and carpentry to plastering and painting. Most of the money went to the master of course, but slaves received allowances for working nights, Sundays, and holidays.73 (This was notably the case for black sawyers on the project; for other trades and unskilled labor, the recompense may have been less.) Around the same time, city commissioners developed a plan for building projects that would pay slaves thirteen cents a day beyond what was owed the master. The commissioners offered this small sum not out of any sense of charity, but because they believed the amount would provide an incentive for bondsmen to work even harder at their backbreaking labors.74
From this arrangement, the system broadened beyond the construction trades and increased dramatically in the capital in decades to come, reaching the point at which most waiters, private servants, and many artisans were hired-out slaves.75 Other Southern cities employed this system as well, if to a lesser degree, and Washington was much more open to it than neighboring Baltimore, which had the least slave hiring of any urban area in the South.76
From a purely financial angle, this form of hiring reallocated the labor supply to jobs where demand was highest, and parties to the contracts specified price, length of service, working conditions, and work to be performed.77 Hired-out slaves often lived on the premises of their temporary employer, whether a ropewalk, tavern, mill, or bakery.78 But in some cases, to lessen the financial cost of the employer, they found independent housing of their own, often in neighborhoods with many free black residents.79 It made economic sense to all parties: The slave owner made money hiring out the bondsman, the temporary employer didn’t have to pay for housing, and the slave caught a break from the employer’s constant watch. While out on their own, slaves could sell homegrown vegetables in the market for small amounts of money, and in certain cases could make a bit more money by hiring their own time—namely, finding their own work, paying their master a certain percentage, and keeping the rest.80 Richard Wade, in his pioneering study Slavery in the Cities, explains it this way:
Under this arrangement, masters told their Negroes to locate a job, make their own agreement on wages, and simply bring back a certain sum every week or month. The slave, moreover, could pocket any profit he made. . . . Often the owner did not know where his blacks worked; no contract bound master and employer; and no special public supervision governed the arrangement.81
Frederick Douglass took part in this system, writing in his autobiography that as a slave he learned to caulk, and then “I sought my own employment . . . made my own contracts, and collected my own earnings.”82 If a slave salted away enough earnings, he might purchase his own freedom and, in less common cases, that of family members. Althea Tanner remains one of the most notable examples of this phenomenon. She sold enough of her garden produce to such customers as Thomas Jefferson that she eventually raised $1,400 for her own freedom and that of twenty-two friends and relatives.83
Jonathan Martin, in his key recent study of slave hiring in antebellum America, posits that the will of enslaved peoples was fundamental to this economic system. Specifically, slaves did what they could to control their hiring and used their capacity for work as a means of leverage with their employer.84 Of course, they took a real risk in standing up for their labor, and they were still subject to physical violence and punishment if they came into conflict with their masters. Nonetheless, in Washington City at least, the economic incentive for slave hiring became too great for slaveholders and employers to resist, and a chain reaction began—well beyond anyone’s expectations.
As slaves were hired out, they earned small sums of money above the wages paid to masters; as they gained extra money from that and side jobs like gardening, they could live on their own; as they lived on their own, they developed a sense of autonomy; and when they developed enough autonomy, they bought their freedom. Slave hiring—combined with bondsmen’s escapes from captivity and the ongoing sale of slaves from cities to plantations—dramatically reduced the presence of urban slavery as a percentage of the labor force. The census for Washington City told the story:
|
Year |
1800 |
1820 |
1840 |
1860 |
|
Free blacks |
123 |
1,796 |
4,808 |
9,209 |
|
Slaves |
623 |
1,945 |
1,713 |
1,77485 |
Even as the capital’s population grew, the number of slaves remained static after 1820, while the number of free blacks increased dramatically. To put it another way: In 1800, one of every five residents of Washington City was enslaved, and by 1860 that ratio had dropped to one in thirty-five.86
That said, the long-term effect of slave hiring in reducing the number of bondsmen had nothing to do with the development of a conscience among slaveholders, who still benefited greatly from the arrangement. Masters who freed their slaves had benefited from years of unpaid labor that never was reimbursed. Masters who manumitted slaves in their wills still received the full benefit of slaves’ forced labor and merely prevented their heirs from receiving that same benefit. Masters who hired out their slaves received the benefit of years of (mostly) unpaid labor and received a substantial capital gain when slaves paid for their freedom.
But the experience of slavery gave newly freed blacks a commitment to abolishing the system entirely. Many of them lived among current slaves and heard their stories and struggles. In many cases, slaves and free blacks didn’t exist as separate, distinct classes but instead overlapped in countless ways in their jobs, families, churches, and neighborhoods. Marriage between free and enslaved blacks was common, making up half the black marriages in the District by midcentury, and churches supported and extended community ties by helping to provide assistance to children if a parent was sold at auction or died.87
The Chesapeake had the nation’s largest concentration of free blacks even before the capital was built,88 and as they became a greater percentage of the population they became more active in the abolition movement and the Underground Railroad, which included many important figures who had once been enslaved, such as Jacob Greener, Thomas Smallwood, and of course Frederick Douglass. Slaves hiring out their time not only opened the door to more autonomy, they also helped marshal the forces fighting their oppression nationwide.
Internal Immigrants
Whether formerly enslaved or not, free blacks in the District increased in number as they abandoned the tobacco farmsteads of Maryland and Virginia, where work was hard to find, and came to Washington City in search of jobs.89 Often these rural areas imposed such harsh limitations on free blacks that relocation was their only choice.90 Maryland slaveholders even considered them “a standing incitement to servile disorder” and made it a priority to drive them out of the state.91
The capital, by contrast, even though it had its own stringent racial codes, as we’ll see, became one of the Southern cities most open to black immigration. This distinction alone elevated Washington City above other Southern towns and drew more blacks to the District, which cemented an even stronger community.92 Most of the work they found when they arrived fell into a few occupations: carter, coach driver, cook, domestic servant, manual laborer, seamstress, waiter, or washwoman.93 The income from such jobs didn’t amount to much—less than 2 percent of total income in the District, though they were 16 percent of the population94—but at least it was theirs and not going into the pocket of someone who claimed to own them. Some even became entrepreneurs, selling perfume, baked goods, or seafood, or opening their own oyster houses or restaurants, like Beverly Snow’s.
If an antebellum African American saved up enough money, he or she might purchase property in one of the neighborhoods of the District. Particular concentrations of black homeowners cropped up in the southeast District from Capitol Hill to the Navy Yard, the more down-at-heel “Island” southwest of the Capitol, and the slowly expanding reaches of northwest and northeast DC.95 But poorer blacks lived in alleys with such names as Willow Tree, Goat Alley, and Tin Cup Alley, within tiny rooms in “flimsy frame shacks or converted carriage houses and horse stables behind the more respectable homes of the whites.”96 In this way, the geography of poverty still followed the contours established by the slave quarters behind the old mansions.
The Rock of Abolition
As more blacks gained their freedom and the community expanded, churches played an enormous role in the bonding and cohesion of that community. The first, Mount Zion Negro Church, established in 1814, was integrated, but later churches separated from their white counterparts due to parishioner disgust at segregated seating or at ministers owning slaves. Many of the breakaway institutions and their preachers took overtly antislavery stances, including Daniel Alexander Payne and John F. Cook, both enslaved once and happy to work with Northern and local abolitionists to eradicate the institution for good.97 Cook’s aunt Althea—the same vegetable seller who paid for her freedom and that of nearly two dozen others—freed him as a child, and he became a shoemaker and messenger as well as a minister at Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church.98
Perhaps the most important denomination in the District was Methodism. Wesley Zion Church and African Methodist Episcopal, like the Fifteenth Street church, went well beyond spiritual centers and took part in all aspects of the lives of freedmen as well as slaves. Wesley Zion in particular provided a broad range of help: information on jobs and social services to established free blacks; food, housing, and work for newly freed slaves; Sunday schools and community forums; plus shelter for runaway slaves, training for active abolitionist ministers, and fund-raising for the Underground Railroad.99
Education proved especially critical for blacks in Washington City. Slaveholders had tried to deny their captives any sort of enlightenment and prevented them from joining together to transmit information, communicate with the outside world, find ways to escape, or otherwise rebel. But any sort of education for the lower classes, white or black, was inadequate in the District. Numerous private schools existed in the early capital, as did underfunded “pauper schools” for indigent children, but both excluded black children. It took until nearly the middle of the century for the city to fund a few taxpayer-supported public schools, but only about four hundred students enrolled, and unfortunately, again, black children were mostly kept out.100
Instead, an array of privately funded schools for blacks arose, and they started even before Washington City itself existed. In the 1790s, Quaker abolitionists funded both childhood and adult education, and the undertaking increased in the 1820s and 1830s as abolitionists fostered a range of schools with biracial instructors.101 By the Civil War, African Americans funded fifty-two schools in the District, and some of them, such as the Columbian Institute, were quite well regarded.102 School benefactors put a strong focus on antislavery teaching, and students soon learned from opponents of slavery the importance and methods of eliminating that system.
A frail white New Yorker, Myrtilla Miner ran the most prominent school and received funding from such notable abolitionists as Henry Ward Beecher, Wendell Phillips, and Lucretia Mott. She referred to her institution as “a genteel school for missus of color,” but the lessons proved anything but quiet and conventional. She provided her pupils with a potent mix of abolitionism and feminism, tying together the fate of all women and blacks and charging that women were “left to the same degraded position in regard to liberty as the degraded African.”103 She strove to train a new class of black women to become effective, well-trained opponents of slavery south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and to that end the quality of instruction at her school often exceeded the education offered by schools for white students.104
Her plan was daring, direct, determined, and doomed. As progressive as he was, Frederick Douglass considered her strategy “reckless, almost to the point of madness,” considering the growing hostility from whites in Washington of the 1850s. Sure enough, she and her students soon faced threats and intimidation from racists, legal disputes from landlords, and the deterioration of Miner’s health, which she described as “that stage of nervousness and irritability which ends in insanity.” Hostility from official Washington and an arson attack forced the school to close in 1860.105
The Black Code
The struggles that free blacks faced in education formed a microcosm of their challenges in the District as a whole. Those started with the law itself. In 1808 the capital passed its first “Black Code,” which it updated and tightened periodically in later decades, usually after a race riot or major slave escape or rebellion.106 Many of these criminal regulations derived from archaic Maryland and Virginia laws, while Congress passed additional overlapping laws that only confused the issue. By midcentury the District had such a tangle of racial regulations that it was hard to keep track of them all. Some of the major provisions held as follows:
· • Masters were prohibited from allowing slaves to be hired by contract, and employers from entering into such contracts.
· • Persons undertaking any economic transaction with a slave, but without a license from the slave’s owner, were fined two thousand pounds of tobacco.
· • Slaves found away from their homes could be punished with up to thirty-nine lashes.
· • No black person could testify in court against a white person, but he or she could against a fellow black person.
· • Free blacks had to post a bond with the city with testimony from five white witnesses who could vouch for their good behavior.
· • A white woman bearing a black man’s child became enslaved for seven years.
· • A white man siring a black woman’s child became enslaved for seven years.
· • Slaves, and in some cases all blacks, couldn’t bathe in the river, be drunk in public, beg, break the Sabbath, carry weapons, gamble, go out in public after 10:00 p.m., go to church after 10:00 p.m., hold private meetings after 10:00 p.m., hold dances without a license, join “disorderly or tumultuous assemblages,” keep barnyard animals, kill game, “ramble,” ride horses, run horses in the street, sell “old metals,” sell liquor, set off firecrackers, or travel without a pass.107
Arbitrary, mean-spirited, and draconian, the District’s Black Code represented the accumulated pathology of Washington’s fear and paranoia about what a quarter of its residents might be doing at any given time. At fifty-seven single-spaced pages by the middle of the century, it covered just about every possibility.
In the end, such laws proved futile. The same financial logic that created a fully functioning network to support slavery also crippled it. Despite all the restrictions on it, slave hiring prevailed in the District of Columbia as an economic necessity.108 Even the behavior code for free blacks was only “periodically enforced, usually when whites were anxious over the threat of a slave riot or the protests of abolitionists.”109 Likewise, a prohibition on black-owned and black-run businesses was never effective, put to use only in a climate of fear or retribution.110 Indeed, no matter how many rigid, punitive clauses the city and Congress added after a riot or revolt, the needs of business owners combined with black determination trumped each edition of the code before it took effect.
Interior of the slave prison in Alexandria, one of several throughout the capital area.
Decline of Slave Power
By the mid-1840s slavery was collapsing in Washington City. Virginia planters and others with an economic interest in slavery took the first step, pushing a bill through Congress in 1846 to return to their state its share of the District of Columbia: one-third of the capital’s total square miles. Although disgruntled at the capital’s weak economy, they really wanted to add more pro-slavery members to the Virginia legislature against antislavery adversaries on the western side of the state (a clever strategy for sixteen years, at which point those westerners, tired of being pushed around, created their own state: West Virginia).111 Virginia law mandated forcing out freed slaves after their manumission, which of course only encouraged them to migrate to Washington City, dramatically increasing its free black population, which jumped almost 70 percent from 1840 to 1850.112 The District developed an even stronger black community, while Virginia slithered further into the slavery camp. The Potomac River had become as much a racial and social divide as a geographic one.
Two years later, in 1848, the schooner Pearl ran adrift outside the capital on a Potomac shoal. A ship owned by a Georgetown tobacco merchant intercepted it, and authorities discovered seventy-seven slaves aboard, who were trying to escape. One of the men who had arranged their failed journey, Paul Jennings, was a free black servant of US Senator Daniel Webster. Riots ensued, in which white mobs attacked the Centre Market, where many blacks worked; destroyed the offices of an abolitionist newspaper; and assaulted Congressman Joshua Giddings, who had defended members of the Pearl ’s crew publicly.113 The recaptured slaves were put into slave pens in Alexandria and then sold into the Deep South, and the terrible public spectacle played out in the capital and on the pages of national newspapers. Northerners reacted in horror; Southerners called for increased legislation and vigilance against all blacks. In Washington City, abolitionists may have lost the Pearl fight, but they helped cement antislavery feeling in the North and, through changing public opinion, won “a strategic victory that further weakened slavery in the nation’s capital.”114
In 1850, perhaps sensing the shifting tide of opinion, Congress finally passed a measure to control slavery in the District—or at least that’s what some of its members claimed. Technically the bill prohibited the importation of slaves and their transportation elsewhere. But in practice, those movements could continue in Alexandria, no longer a part of DC, and nothing in the bill stopped people from owning slaves in Washington City, slave pens from operating in its jails and taverns, or chain gangs of slaves from traveling through its streets.115 It was a paper victory, a feel-good attempt to remove some of the ugliness of human trafficking in the capital while doing little to affect the practice itself. More than anything else, the congressional rear-guard action showed how much the debate over slavery had reshaped public opinion.
The policies of the federal and local government clearly inhibited blacks instead of helping them, but despite such baleful efforts, Washington City was becoming more hospitable, or at least less intolerable, to blacks than almost anywhere else in the South. As with so many endeavors the authorities undertook—from selling houses at auction to creating canals, from providing for the poor to building a functional economy—they demonstrated once again their ineptitude in running a capital. But in this case, their heavy-handed attempts at racial and social control positively, mercifully failed.
The rising class of free blacks stood as the rare positive result from official neglect, inertia, and incompetence, and it proved critical in years to come. For when a new administration came to town in 1861, it found not just planters and slave traders as sworn enemies but also abolitionists and free blacks as potential allies, providing a firm if fragile base for the prosecution of the Civil War, the fight to protect the Union, and the ultimate demise of slavery.