Black life in the capital

American Visions, Feb-March, 1995 by Henry Chase

At year after George Washington first swore the oath of office as president of the United States, the country's first census was undertaken. It revealed that the infant nation's new capital, soon to arise on the border between Virginia and Maryland, would be squarely situated in slavery's heartland. More than half of the republic's enslaved population then lived in those two states.

A decade later, as the White House welcomed its first occupant President John Adams, more than one-third of the city's population was black. Only 123 of these African Americans were free, though within a generation this would change: By 1830, the 3,129 free African Americans outnumbered their enslaved brethren in the capital; a decade later, they were nearly three times greater in number than their bound brothers and sisters; and by the eve of the Civil War, Washington's 9,209 free blacks outnumbered five to one the city's slaves, whom that war would soon liberate.

Although slave residents were soon outnumbered by free blacks in the nation's capital, auction blocks, slave pens and advertisements for slave sales continued to be common sights, for Washington became a thriving center of the trade in slaves bound for the new lands opened up by the Louisiana Purchase. Declining yields on the depleted land of the tidewater tobacco plantations that had given birth to North American slavery, coupled with the prohibition from 1809 of any further importation of slaves, saw a steady black tide drift south and west across early 19th-century America.

The lamentations of the bound, the cries of the auctioneer and the riffle of cash could be heard in the nation's capital from the slave pens in what is now Potomac Park and Lafayette Square (the latter within sight of the White House) to the offices of America's leading firm of slave traders, Franklin & Armfield, at what is now 1315 Duke Street in Alexandria, Va., but was then part of the District of Columbia.

For free blacks, life in Washington, D.C., was less restricted than elsewhere below the Mason-Dixon line. The presence in the city of Northern congressmen, the desire by many of the white population to present the republic in its best light and the fact that many of the freed enjoyed the support of prominent white individuals (who otherwise would not have manumitted them) somewhat expanded the possibilities of free black life in what was, after all, still the South. From today's vantage point, however, the life of pre-Civil War non-slave blacks in the capital hardly merits the adjective "free." For, from 1808 they were legally barred from the streets after 10 p.m.; from 1812 they were required to register and carry a certificate of freedom; from 1827 they were required to post a $500 bond guaranteed by two white men; from 1828 they were barred from the Capitol grounds unless present there on business; and briefly from 1836 they were barred from owning most types of small businesses. Despite these limitations, Washington's "free" black population was less constrained than its counterparts in, say, Charleston, Natchez, Mobile and Savannah.

Indeed, from its early days, the free black community of Washington diverged from the pattern common to the South. Formal education was easier to acquire, whether in black-established schools (the first of which dated back to 1807) or those set up by philanthropic whites; most churches enrolled black children in Sunday school classes (initially in integrated ones, then--as the black population grew--in segregated sessions); property-ownership was little hindered; and some salaried government positions (usually messengers and doorkeepers) were open to free blacks. Of course, as elsewhere in the South, most free African Americans found work as laborers, servants, washerwomen, groundskeepers, draymen, barbers and the like. Significantly, however, the competition of skilled white workers--many of them recent immigrants from Ireland and Germany--restricted the growth of a "middle class" of free black craftsmen, who were--however rare--a much more common sight elsewhere in the South.

Although it was a hard road they traveled, Washington's free African Americans persevered--indeed, flowered. And by the advent of the Civil War, they were well placed to provide desperately needed black leadership for the mass of freed folk suddenly pitched headlong into a new world.