CONTENTS• The Landscape of Urban Enslavement
• Resistance to Slavery in the Nation’s Capital
• Emancipation and Civil War Washington
• Institutions of Reconstruction: The Freedman’s Bureau and the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company
• Frederick Douglass and the Politics of Reconstruction
• Community, Activism, and Desegregation: 1900-1954
Race and Place will
explore the following topics through visits to historic landmarks, lectures
by nationally known scholars, and pedagogical resource sessions, and collaborative
curriculum project development:
The
Landscape of Urban Enslavement
In the 1850 census 400,000 people were enslaved in urban centers such
as the District of Columbia, Charleston, Savannah, Norfolk, Baltimore,New Orleans, and Nashville. (1) Compared to its rural
context, urban enslavement differed in significant ways, including types
of labor and housing, the practice of “hiring out,” mobility,
and methods of punishment by their owners. An examination the landscape
associated with urban slavery in Washington, DC is particularly illuminating
because it not only provides case studies that exemplify the characteristics
of slavery in urban areas, but it also allows for a juxtaposition of the
institution of urban slavery with the governmental debate over that very
institution occurring in the federal city and the nation as a whole. The
interior architecture of Decatur House (a workshop site,
today a National Historic Landmark), designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe
and completed in 1819, illustrates the active desire to hide the enslaved
and free African Americans upon whose labor the household was dependent.
The subsequent slave housing constructed at Decatur House ca. 1839, and
still standing there today, is very similar in design to the structures
that have been lost in cities throughout the south. Beyond the walls of
Decatur House, its Lafayette Square neighborhood (a workshop
site, today a National Historic Landmark) offers a case study of the changing
proportions of free and enslaved African-Americans in the District and
a host of nationally prominent families on both sides of the slavery question.
“Slave pens,” a type of structure where slaves were imprisoned
in urban areas, not only existed in the city of Washington, but also were
located within sight of the White House and the Capitol. Abolitionists
used the existence of these prisons to highlight the inconsistency of
a government whose founding documents guaranteed freedom for all, but
whose laws upheld the practice of one person owning another.
Resistance to Slavery in the Nation’s Capital
Resistance to slavery in the nation’s capital necessitated great
secrecy, which, until recently, has prevented it from being explored in
truly substantive ways. However, studies such as 2003’s Subversives:
Antislavery Community in Washington, DC, 1828-1865 by Stanley Harrold
(a workshop scholar), reveal anti-slavery activities such as the distribution
of abolitionist literature, purchases of freedom to prevent the separation
of families, and daring escape efforts, such as the mass escape by more
than seventy slaves on the schooner Pearl. These “subversives,”
among them many women and interracial collaborations, risked beatings,
imprisonment, and mob violence in their efforts to circumvent and bring
an end to the institution of slavery.
A study of resistance to slavery in Washington, DC is of crucial importance to understanding the larger institution as the city was strategically located on the border between free and slave-holding states and a thriving center of the slave trade. Nowhere did underground activity provoke slaveholders more than in the nation’s capital. In a place of such economic and political significance, active resistance helped harden positions on both sides of the question in the years leading up to the Civil War. For example, defenders of slavery viewed the escape attempt by the passengers on The Pearl as a blatant attack coordinated by the abolitionist campaign. (2) Resistance to slavery in the capital also had national ramifications because it sometimes involved people of national prominence. Among the slaves attempting to escape on The Pearl were a man owned by the Secretary of the Treasury and a fifteen-year old girl owned by former First Lady Dolley Madison.(3) Secretary of State Henry Clay held a number of slaves at his Decatur House residence and, in 1829; an enslaved woman named Charlotte Dupuy sued him for her freedom. The lawsuit, brought in the US Circuit Court of the District of Columbia, fell between Clay’s two attempts to mediate the national controversy over slavery, the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850.
Emancipation and Civil War Washington
“This Proclamation changed everything,” Frederick Douglass
wrote in his memoirs. (4) The issuance of the Emancipation
Proclamation on January 1, 1863, is arguably one of the most important
moments in American history and was the final step in a political and
personal process that played out in the District of Columbia. Nine months
earlier, on April 16, 1862, an Act of the U.S. Congress ended slavery
in the capital. This sanction by Congress represented a hardening of Northern
sentiment against slavery and was the initial legal step toward total
freedom for all African Americans. (5)
Elizabeth Hobbs Keckly moved to Washington, DC in 1860 and lived there throughout the Civil War, owning her own business as a seamstress and functioning as both the dressmaker and trusted confidante of Mary Todd Lincoln. Keckly’s memoir, Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House, published in 1868, provides a vivid description of the Civil War period in the nation’s capital from the viewpoint of an African-American woman. She describes the impact of the war on the city and its occupants and the plight of the newly freed slaves who flocked there and for whom she acted as an advocate. “They came to the Capital looking for liberty, and many of them not knowing it when they found it . . . the bright joyous dreams of freedom to the slave faded—were sadly altered, in the presence of that stern, practical mother, reality. . . “ (7)
Although Keckly’s relationship with Mary Todd Lincoln ended acrimoniously with the publication of her memoir, she maintained a close relationship with the First Lady during the Civil War. Keckly was the First Lady’s traveling companion and one of the few people that Lincoln would see in following the death of her son Willie, so Behind the Scenes offers an intimate view of the Lincoln family, revealing the interrelationship between personal and political events. (8) Keckly’s life and writings are both unique and representative of the African-American experience, and are already a proven classroom resource on slavery as seen through the success of the Landmarks workshop Crafting Freedom: Elizabeth Keckly and Thomas Day, 19th Century Black Artisans and Entrepreneurs in the Making of America.
Institutions of Reconstruction: The
Freedman’s Bureau and the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company
Two of the most important institutions of the Reconstruction era were
headquartered in Washington, DC. From 1865-1868, the Bureau of Refugees,
Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, more popularly known as the Freedman’s
Bureau, served a variety of functions, including issuing relief to the
destitute former slaves, operating and supporting hospitals, homes, and
schools for freedmen; witnessing contracts between freedmen and their
employers; issuing marriage certificates; and filing claims on behalf
of African-American soldiers and sailors. Accessible today at the National
Archives, the Freedman’s Bureau records, which bring a human dimension
to the regulatory history of emancipation and Reconstruction, include
the marriage certificates of people denied the right to marry while enslaved;
reports of the distribution of food and clothing to freed slaves with
few resources of their own; and hospital records that chronicle the death
and disease that accompanied the poverty of the newly emancipated. (9)
The Freedman's Savings and Trust Company, incorporated in 1865 by an act signed by President Lincoln, to provide an institution where former slaves and their dependents could place and save their money. The original bank, first headquartered in New York, later moved to Washington, DC, where it constructed a grand headquarters building across from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue. Shortly thereafter branch offices opened nationally, primarily in Southern cities with large populations of African Americans. Eventually there were 37 branch offices in 17 states with approximately 70,000 depositors (over the bank’s lifetime) and deposits totaling more than $57 million. In 1874, as a result of mismanagement and fraud, the Freedman's Bank closed. Records of twenty-nine branches of the bank survived, including those of the Washington DC office, and are searchable at the National Archives and online. They contain a wealth of information about the bank's customers, including their name, employer, physical description, occupation or profession, and the names of their children and/or siblings.
Frederick Douglass and the Politics of Reconstruction
The Reconstruction era was an important period of governmental influence
for Frederick Douglass, who moved to Washington in 1872. As Congress established
the constitutionality of emancipation and debated the civil rights of
freed slaves, Douglass was one of the few African-Americans with the standing
to take part in these conversations. Even prior to moving to the city,
he and his sons published the New National Era newspaper in Washington,
DC. In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed Douglass US Marshal
for the District of Columbia. That same year, he moved into his home,
Cedar Hill (a workshop site, today the Frederick Douglass National
Historic Site), at 1411 W Street, SE in the Anacostia section
of the city, becoming the first black family to own a house in this white,
wealthy neighborhood. Douglass’ purchase of the home was a victory
over the city’s restrictive housing covenants, which he circumvented
by buying the property when its owner went bankrupt. (10)
Douglass went on to hold a succession of offices, including Recorder of
Deeds for the District of Columbia, President of the Freedman’s
Savings and Trust Company, Minister-Resident and Consul-General to the
Republic of Haiti, and Charge d'Affaires to Santo Domingo. He died at
Cedar Hill, on February 20, 1895. (11)
Community, Activism, and Desegregation:
1900-1954
By 1900, Washington, DC had the largest population of African Americans
of any city in the country. In the era of segregation, this community
supported its own thriving businesses, neighborhoods, educational and
cultural institutions, and churches. Along U Street, called the “Black
Broadway” by jazz great Pearl Bailey, venues such as the Howard
Theater hosted some of the best performers in vaudeville and early 20th
century jazz. Black-owned businesses at the turn of the century included
Adams Oil and Gas Development Company, Capital Savings Bank, and two insurance
companies, Douglas Life and the National Benefit Company. (12)
The city’s LeDroit Park neighborhood (a workshop
site, today a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places),
developed originally as an exclusively white residential area, became
home to some of the most prominent and influential African Americans in
the country by the beginning of World War I. LeDroit Park residents included
poet Paul Laurence Dunbar; Senator Edward Brooke, the first African American
elected to the US Senate by popular vote; and General Benjamin Davis,
the first African American general.
During this time, Washington also became home to organizations, such as the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), which campaigned against discrimination and segregation on the national level. Founded in 1935 by educator Mary McLeod Bethune, the NCNW worked to overturn discriminatory poll taxes, promote anti-lynching legislation, and end discrimination in the U.S. armed forces and government housing. Beginning in 1943, Mrs. Bethune’s home on Vermont Avenue, NW (a workshop site, today the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House National Historic Site) functioned as the organization’s headquarters. In addition to serving as president of the organization she founded, while living in Washington, Mrs. Bethune was appointed a Special Advisor on Minority Affairs to President Franklin Roosevelt, was a member of the Committee of Twelve for National Defense, and served as Vice President of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
By the 1930s, Washington’s Howard University (a workshop site) served as a center for lawyers battling segregation and, following World War II, the city as a whole became the point of origin for a series of desegregation cases that would have broad national impact. In 1948, in the case of Hurd v. Hodge, white property owners filed suit against James M. Hodge, an African American who attempted to purchase a house in the 100 block of Bryant Street in the Northwest part of the city. This case was eventually joined to Shelley v. Kraemer and McGhee v. Sipes, and the Supreme Court declared racially restrictive housing covenants unconstitutional. (13) In 1953, in District of Columbia v. John R. Thomason Co., the Supreme Court declared that segregation in the District of Columbia was unconstitutional. In 1954, Spotswood T. Bolling, Jr. was the main plaintiff of eleven Washington students who sued the Board of Education, led by its president Melvin Sharp, for admittance to the newly constructed, all-white John Phillip Sousa Junior High School. The case, Bolling v. Sharp, would eventually be adjoined to Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in which the Supreme Court outlawed the doctrine of “separate but equal” educational facilities.
Notes
1) Franklin, John Hope. From Slavery to Freedom,
130
2) Bordewich, Fergus M. Bound for Canaan, p.304.
3) Bordewich, Fergus M. Bound for Canaan, p.304
4) Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick
Douglass, p. 342.
5) Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The
End of Slavery in America, by Allen C. Guelzo (Simon & Schuster,
2004)
6) Browstein, Elizabeth Smith. Lincoln’s Other
White House. John Wiley and Sons, Inc. Hoboken, New Jersey. 2005,
p. 119.
7) Keckly, Elizabeth Hobbs. Behind the Scenes: Thirty
Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House. P.111-112,140.
8) Fleischner, Jennifer. Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly.
Broadway Books New York 2003 P.282
9) Everly, Elaine C. “Freedmen’s Bureau Records:
An Overview.” Prologue: Special Issue on Federal Records and African
American History, Summer 1997, vol.29, no. 2
www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1997/summer/freedmen-bureau-records.html.
10) "Douglass Residence is Still a Symbol of Achievement
and Potential” by David Johnson
11) http://www.africawithin.com/bios/frederick_douglass.htm
12) Carlso, Tucker. “Washington’s Lost Black
Aristocracty.” City Journal. Autumn 1996. http://www.city-journal.org/html/6_4_urbanities-washingtons_los.html
13) http://www.historyofsupremecourt.org/scripts/supremecourt/glossary.cgi?
