Ownership of enslaved people remained legal in the District. It was not until the departure of the legislators from the seceding states that Congress could pass in 1862 the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act. The Act provided partial compensation, up to $300 per slave, to slave owners.[1] It was paid from general federal funds. Even though the compensation was small, as before the war a productive slave was worth much more than $300,[2][3] it is the only place in the United States where slave owners received any compensation at all for freeing their slaves. Some slave owners, rather than manumitting (freeing) their enslaved workers for this small compensation, took them to Virginia and more profitably sold them there, which was completely legal.
Abolitionists, led by Massachusetts Representative and former President John Quincy Adams, focused on eliminating slavery in the District. They argued that the Constitution gave Congress full control over the laws of the District, including laws regarding slavery. States' rights was not a factor because the District was not a state. As Southern legislators realized, it was the first step toward outlawing slavery everywhere. The Emancipation Proclamation came five months after slavery ended in the District.
Celebration by "the colored people in Washington" of the fourth anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, April 19, 1866
The drive to eliminate slavery in the District of Columbia was a major component in the anti-slavery campaign that led to the Civil War. Congress, under the leadership of former president John Quincy Adams, now Representative from strongly anti-slavery Massachusetts, was flooded with many petitions for action on the subject. They passed the gag rules, automatically tabling the petitions and preventing them from being read, discussed, or printed. Rather than resolving anything, these rules outraged Northerners and contributed to the growing polarization of the country over slavery.
Census
According to the census, the number of enslaved people in the District grew from 1800 to 1820, and then began a decline in raw numbers and an even faster decline in percentage. In the U.S. Census of 1820, the population of the District (33,039) was 67% white (22,614), 12% "free colored" (4,038), and 19% enslaved (6,377). In that of 1850, Alexandria no longer being in the District, 73% were white (37,941), 19% "free colored" (10,059), and 7% enslaved (3,687).[5] In that of 1860 the percentages are 81% white (75,080), 15% "free colored" (11,131), and 4% enslaved (3,185).[6]
Beginnings
When the District of Columbia was created in 1801, slavery was legal in the two states from whose territory the District was created, Maryland and Virginia.[7] Slavery remained legal in the District, as no steps were taken to ban it. Enslaved workers helped to build the White House, the U.S. Capitol, and other Washington buildings, in addition to clearing land and grading streets. Except under Presidents John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams, slaves served in the White House.
The campaign to ban slavery in the District
It was part of the American political wisdom of the Antebellum period, believed in by Abraham Lincoln along with many others, that, according to the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, slavery in the United States was a state matter. Each state could determine whether slavery was permitted, and make such laws to govern the enslaved and the slave trade as it saw fit. According to the Constitution, Article 1, Section 9, they could "import...such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit", but only until 1808, in the only restriction on slavery the framers of the Constitution could agree on. While the federal government could have regulated the extensive interstate commerce in enslaved people that emerged after 1808, there was not support for this in Congress, controlled by Southerners until 1861. Abolitionists wanted to abolish slavery altogether, not just the interstate trade.
Discussion focused on two questions. The first was whether new states made out of the western territories of the Louisiana Purchase and the formerly Mexican Southwest would be free or slave. This question was never resolved until 1861. It produced the guerrilla warfare of the Bleeding Kansas period, when Kansas had simultaneously two governments, in two cities, with two proposed constitutions, one slave and the other free, each claiming to be the only legitimate government of the entire Territory. This was the dress rehearsal, the Tragic Prelude, led by "old" John Brown, to the Civil War. Although the Free Soil partisans opposing slavery in Kansas succeeded, after much bloodshed and commotion and a federal investigation, in making it clear that the vast majority of Kansans wanted the state to be free, the Southern bloc that controlled Congress did not allow this. Kansas entered the Union as a free state within days after enough seceding Southern legislators withdrew for it to pass.
The other question, less known today (2020), was how to get rid of slavery in the places where it still existed. Aside from the remote Utah Territory, the only place in the country where slavery existed, but was not a state, was the District of Columbia. The federal government had full control over the District of Columbia. States' rights had nothing to do with it. Thus abolitionists focused on it. Slavery was most vulnerable there.
First attempts
"In 1805 Mr. Sloan of New Jersey offered [in the House of Representatives] a resolution moving the emancipation of slaves in the District at a certain age. The motion to refer it to a committee was voted down by sixty-five to forty-seven. Without any discussion, the resolution was voted on and lost by seventy-seven to thirty-one."[8]:58
In 1828, citizens of the District petitioned unsuccessfully for gradual emancipation.[9]
On the front page of the first issue of The Liberator
William Lloyd Garrison began, on January 1, 1831, what would be the principal organ and community bulletin board of the American abolitionist movement, The Liberator. The first article on the front page was his complaint that the
District is rotten with the plague, and stinks in the nostrils of the world. Though it is the Seat of our National Government, open to the daily inspection of foreign ambassadors, and ostensibly opulent with the congregated wisdom, virtue, and intelligence of the land, yet 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.[10]
He followed with the text of a petition to Congress, and gave readers the address of the Boston bookstore where a copy could be signed.
The second article in the new newspaper examined "The Slave Trade in the Capital".[11]
Dr. Reuben Crandall, after a jury trial, was acquitted of the charge of distributing abolitionist literature in the District, which was a crime under federal law. The trial was the biggest criminal trial in the District up to that date, attended by multiple reporters and congressmen. The testimony was quickly published, and reveals much about slave life in the District at that moment. From it we learn, for example, that police doubled as slave catchers; regardless of any support slave owners were legally entitled to receive, as a practical matter they hired slave-catchers to apprehend fugitives, offering rewards for their return.
Francis Scott Key, author of The Star-Spangled Banner, was a slave owner and a defender of slavery. In his position as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, he was in charge of criminal prosecutions in the District, all of which prosecutions were for violations of federal law, as no state law was relevant. Shortly after Crandall's opening an office in Georgetown, slave catchers reported him for possession of abolitionist literature, and Key wrote a lengthy indictment, charging him with "seditious libel and inciting slaves and free blacks to revolt".
Key thought he would gain politically by "finally doing something about the abolitionists". Reuben's sister, Prudence Crandall, had set up the first school for Black girls in the country, the Canterbury Female Boarding School, which aroused such violent opposition from white townspeople that she was forced to close it out of concern for the students' safety. However, the defense produced evidence that Reuben had quite different opinions from his sister, and had been confused with an abolitionist of similar name. A jury found him "not guilty" on all counts. Key was publicly humiliated, and it hurt his career.
Bail had been set so high for Reuben that he could not met it, and he remained in the dank Washington jail for over six months. He contracted tuberculosis there, and died not long after his release.
One day I went to see the "slaves' pen"—a wretched hovel, "right against" the Capitol, from which it is distant about half a mile, with no house intervening. The outside alone is accessible to the eye of a visitor; what passes within being reserved for the exclusive observation of its owner (a man of the name of Robey) and his unfortunate victims. It is surrounded by a wooden paling fourteen or fifteen feet [3 to 4 meters] in height, with the posts outside to prevent escape and separated from the building by a space too narrow to admit of a free circulation of air. At a small window above, which was unglazed and exposed alike to the heat of summer and the cold of winter, so trying to the constitution, two or three sable faces appeared, looking out wistfully to while away the time and catch a refreshing breeze; the weather being extremely hot. In this wretched hovel, all colors, except white--the only guilty one—both sexes, and all ages, are confined, exposed indiscriminately to all the contamination which may be expected in such society and under such seclusion. The inmates of the gaol, of this class I mean, are even worse treated; some of them, if my informants are to be believed, having been actually frozen to death, during the inclement winters which often prevail in the country.[12]
Washington was, at that time [1843], the greatest slave-mart in the United States. Within sight of the Capitol, not far from the lower gate, and near, if not upon, the land where the public garden now is, was a building with a large yard around it, enclosed with a high fence. Thither slaves were brought from all the slave-holding regions, like cattle to the Chicago stock-yards, and locked up until sold. There were regular auction days for those not disposed of at private sale. The Chicago Fire destroyed a hard cracker which I had preserved as a specimen by which purchasers tested the age of slaves. And to this day, if there is anything that the average Southern negro does not know, it is his own age. The slaves were placed upon a block, and, when a question arose as to age, the auctioneer requested them to bite from a cracker, which all slave auctioneers kept for such occasions. The theory was that while a slave could masticate well he could work. Nearly all the labor of Washington was performed by slaves, many of whom were hired from the neighboring States. The slaves were expected to collect their wages monthly and take them home on some Saturday night.[13]
Petition campaign
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Overwhelmed with the number of petitions arriving, the House of Representatives set up a Select Committee to consider what to do, headed by Rep. Henry L. Pinckney of South Carolina. The Committee endorsed the House's existing position that Congress had no authority to interfere in any way with slavery in the District of Columbia, or in any state. So that "the agitation of this subject should be finally arrested", it recommended that "all petitions, memorials, resolutions, propositions, or papers, relating in any way, or to any extent whatever, to the subject of slavery, or the abolition of slavery, shall, without being either printed or referred, be laid upon the table, and that no further action whatever shall be had thereon".[14] It passed by a vote of 117 to 68.[15] This and subsequent, related gag orders were repealed in 1844.
Massachusetts and Vermont call for Congress to act
In March 1840, both houses of the Legislature of Massachusetts passed a group of "Resolves" (Resolutions) calling for Congress to use its Constitutional authority and immediately end slavery and the slave trade in the District, and prohibit interstate commerce in enslaved persons. This was then the official position of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The Commonwealth also went on record as opposing the admission of any new slave states.[16]
Garrison, who reproduced the now-rare pamphlet on the front page of his newspaper The Liberator,[17] described this as a victory, the first time any government anywhere in the United States had taken an official position calling for the immediate abolition of slavery.[18] Vermont promptly followed Massachusetts' example.[19]
Cover of Speech of Hon. Horace Mann, of Massachusetts, on slavery and the slave-trade in the District of Columbia, delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, February 23, 1849, printed by Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society
As part of the Compromise of 1850, slave trading was prohibited in Washington DC, but slave ownership was not. The residents of the capitol could still own slaves and trade for them in the nearby states of Virginia.
District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act (1862)
Slave owners complained that emancipation of their enslaved workers would deprive them of their property; "property rights" are a euphemism for slavery in speeches of the period. Compensated emancipation, in which owners were to be compensated by a government for the loss of their "property", had been discussed at length in the 1840s and 1850s and part of England's liberation of its Caribbean slaves. This changed from an idea to a real possibility after Southern senators and representatives abandoned the U.S. Congress in 1861, and Lincoln became president. With Congress's support, he proposed it to the Union slave states, also called border states, of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware. These states did not agree to any emancipation proposal, compensated or not. Maryland freed its enslaved in 1864, and Missouri early in 1865, but those in Delaware and Kentucky were not liberated until the national ratification of the 13th Amendment in December 1865, seven months after the end of the Civil War. Delaware symbolically ratified the 13th Amendment in 1901, and Kentucky in 1975.
The only place compensated emancipation was put into practice in the United States was in the District of Columbia. Under the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, passed by Congress and signed by Lincoln in 1862, slavery was prohibited in the District, the federal government compensated owners up to $300 (equivalent to $9,156in 2023) per freed person, and detailed records exist for each claim and payment. This maximum amount was much less than an able male slave could have been sold for before the war, if taken to Maryland or Virginia and sold there, as many were.[20] However, the value of an enslaved person declined after the beginning of the Civil War, when transport of enslaved people from northern slave "producers" (Maryland and Virginia) to Southern plantation owners became impossible. The looming possibility of uncompensated abolition also depressed the value of slaves.
The day Lincoln signed the bill, April 16, 1862, is celebrated in the District as Emancipation Day, a legal holiday since 2005.
The Emancipation Proclamation, officially Proclamation 95, was a presidential proclamation and executive order issued by United States President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, during the American Civil War. The Proclamation had the effect of changing the legal status of more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in the secessionist Confederate states from enslaved to free. As soon as slaves escaped the control of their enslavers, either by fleeing to Union lines or through the advance of federal troops, they were permanently free. In addition, the Proclamation allowed for former slaves to "be received into the armed service of the United States". The Emancipation Proclamation played a significant part in the end of slavery in the United States.
Abolitionism, or the abolitionist movement, is the movement to end slavery and liberate enslaved individuals around the world.
In United States history, the gag rule was a series of rules that forbade the raising, consideration, or discussion of slavery in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1836 to 1844. They played a key role in rousing support for ending slavery.
William Lloyd Garrison was an American abolitionist, journalist, and social reformer. He is best known for his widely read anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator, which Garrison founded in 1831 and published in Boston until slavery in the United States was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.
The American Colonization Society (ACS), initially the Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, was an American organization founded in 1816 by Robert Finley to encourage and support the repatriation of freeborn people of color and emancipated slaves to the continent of Africa. It was modeled on an earlier British Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor's colonization in Africa, which had sought to resettle London's "black poor". Until the organization's dissolution in 1964, the society was headquartered in Room 516 of the Colorado Building in Washington, D.C.
The Pearl incident was the largest recorded nonviolent escape attempt by enslaved people in United States history. On April 15, 1848, seventy-seven slaves attempted to escape Washington D.C. by sailing away on a schooner called The Pearl. Their plan was to sail south on the Potomac River, then north up the Chesapeake Bay and Delaware River to the free state of New Jersey, a distance of nearly 225 miles (362 km). The attempt was organized by both abolitionist whites and free blacks, who expanded the plan to include many more enslaved people. Paul Jennings, a former slave who had served President James Madison, helped plan the escape.
In the United States before 1865, a slave state was a state in which slavery and the internal or domestic slave trade were legal, while a free state was one in which they were prohibited. Between 1812 and 1850, it was considered by the slave states to be politically imperative that the number of free states not exceed the number of slave states, so new states were admitted in slave–free pairs. There were, nonetheless, some slaves in most free states up to the 1840 census, and the Fugitive Slave Clause of the U.S. Constitution, as implemented by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, provided that a slave did not become free by entering a free state and must be returned to their owner. Enforcement of these laws became one of the controversies which arose between slave and free states.
Emancipation Day is observed in many former European colonies in the Caribbean and areas of the United States on various dates to commemorate the emancipation of slaves of African descent.
Abraham Lincoln's position on slavery in the United States is one of the most discussed aspects of his life. Lincoln frequently expressed his moral opposition to slavery in public and private. "I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," he stated. "I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel." However, the question of what to do about it and how to end it, given that it was so firmly embedded in the nation's constitutional framework and in the economy of much of the country, even though concentrated in only the Southern United States, was complex and politically challenging. In addition, there was the unanswered question, which Lincoln had to deal with, of what would become of the four million slaves if liberated: how they would earn a living in a society that had almost always rejected them or looked down on their very presence.
Compensated emancipation was a method of ending slavery, under which the enslaved person's owner received compensation from the government in exchange for manumitting the slave. This could be monetary, and it could allow the owner to retain the slave for a period of labor as an indentured servant. In practice, cash compensation rarely was equal to the slave's market value.
Freedom suits were lawsuits in the Thirteen Colonies and the United States filed by slaves against slaveholders to assert claims to freedom, often based on descent from a free maternal ancestor, or time held as a resident in a free state or territory.
An Act for the Release of certain Persons held to Service or Labor in the District of Columbia, 37th Cong., Sess. 2, ch. 54, 12 Stat. 376, known colloquially as the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act or simply Compensated Emancipation Act, was a law that ended slavery in the District of Columbia, while providing slave owners who remained loyal to the United States in the then-ongoing Civil War to petition for compensation. Although not written by him, the act was signed by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln on April 16, 1862. April 16 is now celebrated in the city as Emancipation Day.
Like most contemporaries, John Quincy Adams's views on slavery evolved over time. He never joined the movement called "abolitionist" by historians—the one led by William Lloyd Garrison—because it demanded the immediate abolition of slavery and insisted it was a sin to enslave people. Further, abolitionism meant disunion and Adams was a staunch champion of American nationalism and union.
In the United States, abolitionism, the movement that sought to end slavery in the country, was active from the colonial era until the American Civil War, the end of which brought about the abolition of American slavery, except as punishment for a crime, through the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The District of Columbia was created in 1801 as the federal district of the United States, with territory previously held by the states of Maryland and Virginia ceded to the federal government of the United States for the purpose of creating its federal district, which would encompass the new national capital of the United States, the City of Washington. The district came into existence, with its own judges and marshals, through the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1801; previously it was the Territory of Columbia. According to specific language in the U.S. Constitution, it was 100 square miles (259 km2).
From the late 18th to the mid-19th century, various states of the United States allowed the enslavement of human beings, most of whom had been transported from Africa during the Atlantic slave trade or were their descendants. The institution of chattel slavery was established in North America in the 16th century under Spanish colonization, British colonization, French colonization, and Dutch colonization.
George Kephart was a 19th-century American slave trader, land owner, farmer, and philanthropist. A native of Maryland, he was an agent of the interstate trading firm Franklin & Armfield early in his career, and later occupied, owned, and finally leased out that company's infamous slave jail in Alexandria. In 1862, Henry Wilson of Massachusetts mentioned Kephart by name in a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate as one of the traders who had "polluted the capital of the nation with this brutalizing traffic" of selling people.
References
↑ "When Congress passed the DC Emancipation Act in April 1862, giving compensation to 'loyal' owners, Coakley [Gabriel Coakley, a leader of the black Catholic community in Washington] successfully petitioned for his wife and children, since he had purchased their freedom in earlier years. He was one of only a handful of black Washingtonians to make a claim like this. The federal government paid him $1489.20 for eight slaves that he 'owned' (he had claimed their value at $3,300)." White, Jonathan W., A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House, Rowman & Littlefield, 2022, p. 106.
This listing does not include publications already cited in references.
1827
Free Negroes – District of Columbia. Report No. 43. Deals with the sale of free Black men as slaves, to settle jail fees. 19th Congress, 2nd session. House of Representatives. Committee on the District of Columbia. January 11, 1827.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
Cox, John; Georgetown, D.C., Board of Common Council (February 1, 1827). Representation and resolution of the mayor and Council of Georgetown, in the District of Columbia, upon the subject of a bill reported to the House of Representatives, entitled a bill concerning free people of color, in the county of Washington, in the District of Columbia.: February 1, 1827. Read, and referred to the committee of the whole House to which the above bill is committed. Report No. 71. Washington, D.C.: 19th United States Congress, 2nd session. House of Representatives. OCLC8957771.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
Proceedings of the N.H. anti-slavery convention, held in Concord, on the 11th & 12th of November, 1834. Concord, New Hampshire. 1834. Petitions to Congress for Abolishing Slavery in the District of Columbia (pp.10–12). Reproduces (p.17) District advertisements offering to buy or sell slaves, and (pp.18–23) surveys the slave jails or warehouses in the District. Discusses forced family separations, and the sale of free Blacks to pay jail fees. Letters of Wm. Lloyd Garrison and others. The last page is a petition to be torn out, signed, and sent to Congress, asking for the elimination of Slavery in the District.
Hammond, James Henry (1836). Remarks of Mr. Hammond, of South Carolina: on the question of receiving petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia: delivered in the House of Representatives, February 1, 1836. Washington, D.C. I know it has been said by a distinguished Virginian, and quoted on this floor, "that the fire bell in Richmond never rings at night,but the mother presses her infant more closely to her breast in dread of servile insurrection" (p. 10). Also in Register of debates in Congress, comprising the leading debates and incidents of the second session of the Eighteenth Congress: [Dec. 6, 1824, to the first session of the Twenty-fifth Congress, Oct. 16, 1837] together with an appendix, containing the most important state papers and public documents to which the session has given birth: to which are added, the laws enacted during the session, with a copious index to the whole.
Slavery and the slave trade at the nation's capital. Liberty Tract, 1. New York: American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. 1846. View of the Capital at Washington–Slavery and the Slave Trade No Right at the Nation's Capital–Slavery and the Slave Trade at the Nation's Capital by Federal Legislation–Slave Law at the Nation's Capital–Slavery and Slave Law as they are at the Nation's Capital–American Freemen, uncharged with Crime, Sold as Slaves–The Man-Trade at the Nation's Capital–Man-Auctioneering at the Nation's Capital–Shame of the National Man-Trade–Horrors of the National Man-Trade–Help for the Nation's Pauper–Auxiliary Guard to Catch Slaves Liberty Party–Demand for the Liberty Party–How the Liberty Party can effect its Object
As reported in The North Star of May 12, 1848, Senator John P. Hale wished to introduce a bill, making "any city, town, or corporate place" in the District liable for damages done by mobs.[3]
According to Wendell Phillips, if Abe Lincoln is elected president, "those four years will be wasted. He will waste them in trying to make up his mind on the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia."[5]
"The second Section, the old Maryland laws in regard to Slavery, in force in the District of Columbia at the time of its cession by Maryland to the Federal Government, and by Congress continued in force by Act 27th the said district, shall ever be construed so as to prohibit the owers of slaves to hire them within, or remove them to the said district, in the same way as was practiced prior to the February, 1801, section 1.–(2 Statutes, 103.)" p.2
pp.3–4 No part of the laws of Virginia or Maryland declared by an act of Congress passed the 27th day of February, 1801, “concerning the District of Columbia,” to be in force within
Wilson, Henry (1864). "Chapter 3. Slavery in the District of Columbia". History of the antislavery measures of the Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth United-States Congresses, 1861–64. Boston: Walker, Wise and Company. Slaves used for insurrectionary purposes made free – Fugitive slaves not to be returned by persons in the Army – The abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia – The President's proposition to aid states in the abolishment of slavery – The prohibition of slavery in the territories – Certain slaves to be made free – Haiti and Liberia – Education of colored youth in the District of Columbia – The African slave-trade – Additional act to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia – Colored soldiers – Aid to the states to emancipate their slaves – Amendment to the Constitution – Repeal of fugitive-slave laws – Pay of colored soldiers – To make free the wives and children of colored soldiers – A Bureau of Freedmen – Reconstruction of rebel states – Confinement of colored persons in the Washington jail – Negro testimony – The coastwise slave-trade – Color no disqualification for carrying the mails – No exclusion from the cars on account of color
Williams, George W. (April 16, 1884). The Negro as Political Problem. An oration on Emancipation Day. Boston. In 1827 William Lloyd Garrison began his career as an anti-slavery agitator by addressing a petition to Congress for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. p. 5{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) mention Reuben Crandall trial
The District of Columbia to the people of the United States, or, To such Americans as value their rights, and dare to maintain them. American Anti-Slavery Society.
Pohl, Robert S.; Wennersten, John R., eds. (2009). Abraham Lincoln and the end of slavery in the District of Columbia. A Capitol Hill tribute to the Lincoln Bicentennial from Friends of Southeast Library. Lulu.com. ISBN9780578016887.
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